Tag: climate change

Cover of the Journal of Fish Biology. June 2024.

Paper on gigantism makes cover of Journal of Fish Biology

Cover of the Journal of Fish Biology. June 2024.

Cover of the Journal of Fish Biology. June 2024.

A recent paper authored by the Sea Around Us’ PI, Dr. Daniel Pauly, research assistant, Elaine Chu, and Dr. Johannes Müller from Leiden University, has made the cover of the June print issue of the Journal of Fish Biology, where it was introduced by a brief essay in the ‘Between the Covers’ section. The image that illustrates it is that of a large mythical sea creature known as an Aspidochelone, which appeared in a French bestiary around 1270 A.D.

Continue reading →

Forty-year-old concepts around fish respiration regain prominence in light of climate change

Forty-year-old concepts around fish respiration regain prominence in light of climate change

Forty-year-old concepts around fish respiration regain prominence in light of climate change

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.

Continue reading →

Ageeba - Mediterranean coast -Egypt

Egyptian Mediterranean fisheries in urgent need of better management

Ageeba - Mediterranean coast -Egypt

Ageeba beach on Egypt’s Mediterranean coast. Photo by Aya Gallab, Wikimedia Commons.

Egyptian fisheries need to be better managed to secure the overall health of the Mediterranean Sea’s marine living resources, new research has found.

In a recent paper in the journal Ocean and Coastal Management, researchers with the Sea Around Us initiative at the University of British Columbia’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries and the Arab Academy for Science, Technology and Maritime Transport reconstructed Egypt’s marine fisheries catches from the Mediterranean in the last 100 years and found strong evidence of resource overexploitation. Such overexploitation has pushed fishers to go farther and deeper, increasingly resorting to species lower in the food chain.

Continue reading →