Spanish Fishing boat

The most widely accepted method of being able to determine the health of the world’s oceans and fisheries led to inaccurate conclusions in almost fifty percent of the ecosystems where it was utlilized.

This new analysis was done by an international group of fisheries researchers, and has been published in this week’s issue of the journal Nature.

“Applied to individual ecosystems it’s like flipping a coin; half the time you get the right answer and half the time you get the wrong answer,” explained a University of Washington aquatic and fisheries researcher, Trevor Branch.

“Monitoring all the fish in the sea would be an enormous, and impossible, task,” explains a program director in the National Science Foundation’s Division of Environmental Biology, Henry Gholz, whose department helped to fund the research with NSF’s Division of Ocean Sciences.

“This study makes clear that the most common indicator, average catch trophic level, is a woefully inadequate measure of the status of marine fisheries.”

Back in 1998, the journal Science released a groundbreaking report that was the first to utilize trends in the trophic levels of fish which were reeled in to help figure out the health of world fisheries.

The trophic level of an organism indicates where it falls in the different food chains, with microscopic algae at a trophic level of one and large predatory creatures – such as sharks, halibut and tuna – at a trophic level of about four.

This 1998 report relied on forty years of catch data, and took the average of the trophic levels of those specimens which were caught.

I thought I would report on a few good news in the world of marine conservation. First of we are going to look at tuna fishing and the endangered Mediterranean Blue fin Tuna. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) an organization consisting of NGOs and governments surprisingly voted to cut tuna quotas in half (almost) in the Mediterranean as well as instituting a complete fishing ban during the spawning season in May and June when they meet at the World Conservation Congress in Barcelona. The surprising result came after Spain (an important fishing nation) and Japan (the key blue fin market) supported the restricted fishing to prevent the tuna population from collapsing. The IUCN Decision is not legally binding but puts a considerable amount of pressure on the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) which will decide the future of tuna fishing for the coming years at a meeting in December. The effects of diminished quotas remain to be seen as a rapport from the WWF earlier this month showed that half all tuna caught in Italy was caught illegally and that illegal fishing was rampant in Italy.

I am going to leave tuna and talk about something completely different, Beluga whales. The US government this week listed the Beluga whales of Alaska’s Cook Inlet as an endangered species / population. The decision means much stricter rules about what can and can’t be done in the area and local authorities need to get the permission of the National Marine Fisheries Service before they can approve a number of activities in the area. Governor and GOP vice president candidate Sara Palin is worried that the decision will prevent economic growth in the area. She fears that the decision among other things will prevent the expansion of the harbor. The population declined nearly 50 percent between 1994 and 1998 and has not yet recovered. This is believed to be due to developments in the area, predation from killer whales and frequent whale strandings. Environmentalists hope that the new found protection will help increase the population again.

Beluga whale