Daniel Pauly receiving the 2024 Sartún Award at the Meeting of the Seas. Photo courtesy of Encuentro de los Mares.
During the 2024 Meeting of the Seas held in Tenerife, Spain, the Sea Around Us principal investigator, Dr. Daniel Pauly, was granted the Sartún Award, in recognition of his +40-year career working for the protection of the global ocean.
Common carp. Photo by Bernard Spragg. NZ, Wikimedia Commons.
Before Dr. Daniel Pauly, now the principal investigator of the Sea Around Us initiative at the University of British Columbia, became a doctoral student, he spent two years doing fisheries work in Indonesia.
Having done his academic studies in Germany, he was surprised to discover a near absence of information on the growth of tropical fish. Thus, upon his return to Kiel University’s Institute of Marine Sciences, he decided to find out how fish grew; the idea was that if general patterns emerged, they could be applied to the many species in Indonesia and elsewhere in the tropics.
His doctoral dissertation was, consequently, built around identifying the factors that govern fish growth.
While pursuing her PhD studies with Sea Around Us, Veronica Relano-Ecija, engaged in an artistic project to raise awareness about climate change and sea-level rise.
Blacktip reef shark. Photo by Ray in Manila, Flickr.
Urea – the main component of human urine – plays an important role in the timing of maturation of sharks, rays and other cartilaginous fish.
A new study by researchers with the Sea Around Us initiative at the University of British Columbia’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries found that high urea concentrations common in cartilaginous fish, particularly oviparous marine species, allow them to mature and begin to reproduce at a larger fraction of their maximal size.
Under the campaign slogan of ‘Planet vs. Plastics,’ Earth Day 2024 is focused on environmental activists’ commitment to end plastics for the sake of human and planetary health, demanding a 60 per cent reduction in the production of all plastics by 2040.
Even though the Sea Around Us research doesn’t focus on ocean pollution, there is an evident connection between fisheries and the littering of our oceans.
To illustrate this connection, the above video presents some of the alarming figures related to gear abandoned at sea, which remains in the oceans and often continues to capture fish and other marine animals in a process commonly referred to as ‘ghost fishing’.