Photo by Paul Joseph.
The Sea Around Us Principal Investigator, Dr Daniel Pauly, together with marine biologists Carlos Duarte and Terence Hughes, has been awarded the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Ecology and Conservation Biology.
Pauly, Duarte and Hughes are being recognized for “their seminal contributions to our understanding of the world’s oceans, and their efforts to protect and conserve marine biodiversity and oceanic ecosystem services in a rapidly changing world.”
Humpback red snapper. Photo by Julien Bidet for MDC Seamarc, Wikimedia Commons.
Warming waters, king tides and storm surges are not the only things affecting the availability of seafood in the Marshall Islands. Incomplete reporting of fisheries catches and, therefore, of how much is being taken out of the oceans also is.
The Sea Around Us research assistant, Jessika Woroniak, joined forces with classmate Claudia Kobetitch and created a poster that highlights the links between subsidies that enhance the fishing capacity of industrial vessels and modern slavery at sea.
The poster was presented during an internal competition at the Microeconomics class at UBC’s Master of Public Policy and Global Affairs. In a graphic manner, the piece shows how overfishing leads to dwindling fish stocks which, in turn, produce less catch and profits, a situation that prompts many operators to cut costs. The latter, can only typically be done by reducing worker pay and conditions.
Previous work by the Sea Around Us has also explored the connections between overfishing and labour and human rights abuses.
Click on the image to see the PDF of the poster.
Largehead hairtail. Public domain photo.
Fish that are highly valued by Chinese consumers, such as largehead hairtail, would grow in value and in the amounts that are caught if industrial fisheries increased the mesh size of their nets.
New research by the Sea Around Us initiative at UBC’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries found that trawlers operating in China’s coastal waters are overfishing 21 economically important species because the mesh size is so small that, together with large, desirable fish, undersized fish are also getting caught. This means that fish are being taken out before they are able to reproduce.
