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By Demian Chapman, Debra Abercrombie, and Carl Safina “Shark Week” came early in 2013, but it was not on TV. It occurred in early March in Bangkok, Thailand, at the world conference of the nearly 200 member nations to CITES—the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. After years of work, vigorous debate on the…
By Carl Safina and Elizabeth Brown In the 1990’s many U.S. fisheries found themselves in crisis. The fish they relied on were deeply depleted from decades of getting caught faster than they could reproduce. After years of bitter argument and concerted conservation-group efforts, Congress in 1996 passed a sweeping set of amendments to the federal…
By Carl Safina and Elizabeth Brown In the early 1990’s many New England groundfish species (e.g. cod, haddock, and flounders) collapsed from decades of overfishing. To help rebuild these populations, managers closed several areas to groundfish fishing. These areas were designed to provide protection for groundfish species and their habitats, protecting them from destructive fishing…
Recently, the owner of several sushi restaurants in Japan paid nearly $1.8 million U.S. dollars for a single bluefin tuna. Last year this same individual paid what was then a record price—about $ 740,000. With this year’s fish the man outdid—not to say outbid—himself. But presumably other bidders were pushing the price into orbit before…
By Carl Safina and Elizabeth Brown Over the past several months, conservationists, fishermen, and the public have been writing to fishery managers about how to save Atlantic menhaden (also called bunker) – arguably one of the most important fish in the sea. And this week, they scored a victory. For decades, fishermen on the U.S.…
By Elizabeth Brown and Carl Safina A few years ago, some scientists at the University of British Columbia were thinking about how climate change would affect fish. Climate change results from the collection of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from our burning of fossil fuels (oil, coal, gas), which causes the earth to warm. The…
By Carl Safina and Andrew Read Every twelve hours in the Gulf of Maine, a porpoise swims into a net it cannot see, struggles until it runs out of breath, and drowns. That’s because New England gill-net fishermen simply refuse to use a proven solution that they helped develop, a solution fishermen on the West…
