Category: Contact

VIDEO: How much is fished in your country’s waters?

Photo by Alper Çuğun, Flickr.

Trawl nets, drift nets, longlines, etc. have allowed fleets across the world to turn their fishing operations into massive extractive activities.

In several countries’ Exclusive Economic Zones, such expansion has led to depleted fish stocks. Some of those countries, however, have enough capital to buy access to other countries’ waters, extract their resources and sell them across continents. “They are just exporting the problem,” the Sea Around Us Senior Scientist Dirk Zeller has said.

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Developing love for fishery data

Ar’ash Tavakolie

Ar’ash Tavakolie

At some point in his life after having been in Vancouver for a few years and being done with his Ph.D. at UBC, Ar’ash Tavakolie really wanted to join an organization working to make the world a better place.

He wanted, of course, to put his engineering and machine-learning skills to good use, so he was looking for a place where data processing and knowledge creation were the focal points. That is how he landed, a decade ago, at the Sea Around Us. “The fact that it was in marine conservation also encouraged me. I felt I could pay my dues to the environment,” he says with a smile.

Ar’ash loves that, through the collaborative work he was doing with the Sea Around Us team, he was able to help spread the word about how much countries are (over)fishing and the dangerous situation in which fisheries are putting the world’s fish stocks.

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Can Brexit save the UK’s seas?

Photo by Chris Allen for Geograph, licenced under CC.

Photo by Chris Allen for Geograph, licensed under CC.

The British press was all over them.

The day after they received the Ocean Award in the Science category, the Sea Around Us leaders, Daniel Pauly and Dirk Zeller, were bombarded with questions regarding their findings on declining fish stocks and their catch reconstruction research method.

Talking to the BBC, Pauly explained that the decline is due to overfishing. He also said that, in most countries, real catch numbers are 50 per cent higher than what is actually reported by official bodies, while in Europe the figure shrinks to about 30 per cent. “What is not counted (in Europe) is the fish that is discarded -and quite a big amount of fish is being discarded-, and about 10 per cent that is caught illegally and is not counted,” he said.

The next question was expected: Can the UK design and implement better fishery policies once it leaves the European Union?

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Daniel Pauly named “Scientist of the Year” by Radio Canada

“C’est un honneur,” the Sea Around Us Principal Investigator and UBC Killam Professor with the Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, Dr. Daniel Pauly said after Radio Canada’s Les Années-lumière named him “Scientist of the Year.”

Pauly is being recognized for his lifelong research efforts on the human impacts on global fisheries, which hit a high note in 2016 with two major publications, both co-authored with Dirk Zeller: The Nature Communications paper “Catch reconstructions reveal that global marine fisheries catches are higher than reported and declining” and the Global Atlas of Marine Fisheries, released by Island Press.

Yanick Villedieu, host of Les Années-lumière, explained that the award aims at highlighting the work of a French-speaking scientist who, throughout his/her career but particularly in the past year, had a major discovery, achievement, or publication of national and international significance.

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