Tag: fishing effort

Jellyfish fisheries research awarded by the Vancouver Aquarium

Tuesday, February 21, 2017 was a great day for the Sea Around Us’ postdoctoral fellow Lucas Brotz.

During the celebration of the 22nd Annual Coastal Ocean Awards, the Vancouver Aquarium presented Lucas with the Michael A. Bigg Award for student research “for his exceptional contributions to the understanding of jellyfish in waters around the world.” Specifically, judges were impressed with his global catch reconstruction of jellyfish as food for humans.

For Lucas, this honour closes with a flourish a decade’s worth of work under Daniel Pauly’s guidance and, at the same time, opens up new opportunities to continue exploring the almost uncharted world of jellyfish.

LISTEN to Lucas explaining the “shocking findings” regarding the amounts of jellyfish people eat worldwide.

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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.

WATCH THE VIDEO TUTORIAL

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“Zero is not a good estimate”: Sea Around Us on global fisheries

Fish sale at the beach. Photo by indiawaterportal.org, Flickr.

The morning after accepting the 2017 Ocean Award in the Science category, the Sea Around Us leading team, Daniel Pauly and Dirk Zeller, met with the British press at the Science Media Centre.

After receiving praise for their Nature Communications paper “Catch reconstructions reveal that global marine fisheries catches are higher than reported and declining” and the Global Atlas of Marine Fisheries, Pauly and Zeller were asked to explain the Sea Around Us’ findings regarding the fact that global fish catch is 50 per cent higher than what is officially reported by the FAO.

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In less than two minutes, learn why fish catches are declining

Photo by Nat Van Egmond, Flickr.

Photo by Nat Van Egmond, Flickr.

As the Sea Around Us team revealed in its 2016 Nature Communications paper, global fish catches have been declining, on average, by 1.2 million metric tons per year since 1996.

This decline has resulted in lower per capita seafood availability and threatens food security in poor, developing countries. In fact, a group of scientists, among them the Sea Around Us Senior Scientist Dirk Zeller, has predicted that 11% of the global population could face micronutrient and fatty-acid deficiencies driven by fish declines over the coming decades.

That is 845 million people living with extremely low levels of iron, zinc or vitamin A.

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Sea Around Us updates real catch numbers

The Sea Around Us team is pleased to announce that the marine fisheries catch data and derived indicators on its website have been updated from 2010 to include information from 2011, 2012, and 2013.

This means that time series with 64 years’ worth of data (1950-2013) are available for free on www.seaaroundus.org, as is our catch mapping tool.

The documentation of data, methods, and assumptions made for this update will be presented for each country and territory in early 2017, after a further update to 2014 has been completed.

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