Yellowfin tuna fishing in Seychelles. Photo by Joe Laurence, Seychelles News Agency, Wikimedia Commons.
Researchers at the Sea Around Us – Indian Ocean, based at the University of Western Australia, are urging the European Union to fully support the ban on drifting fish aggregating devices (dFADs) in the Indian Ocean tuna fisheries declared by the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission (IOTC) on February 5th, 2023.
Industrial fisheries that rely on bottom trawling to catch fish threw 437 million tonnes of fish and $560 billion overboard over the past 65 years, finds new research.
The study documents the growth in bottom trawling, a practice that results in nets full of unwanted or unneeded fish that fishers dump overboard.
Maui’s dolphin. Photo by New Zealand Department of Conservation, Flickr
The world’s rarest and smallest known subspecies of dolphin, the Maui dolphin, is about to go extinct. Its population is down to 60 individuals from 2,000 in the 1970s.
Journalist Christopher Pala just launched a series of articles focusing on the reasons behind the disappearance of this subspecies of the Hector’s dolphin and the actions governments are taking (or not) to stop the death toll from rising.
Follow this link to read the first article of the series in Science.