Fish in Japan

The Japan Times Online recently published an interesting article about the future of fish as an integral part of Japan's daily diet. In Japan, people eat more fish than in any other country (nearly 70 KG per capita per year) and Japan's need for seafood has led the people to over fish their own waters and look more and more towards their North American trade partners to provide this culturally important diet staple. A lot of the seafood that we eat in Canada and the United States also has a strong Japanese influence: it seems as though a new sushi restaurant pops up every day in Vancouver. Some of the most coveted types of fish used in sushi are also the species that are most at risk for extinction, such as the bluefin tuna.



Stumbling across the thought-provoking article about the future of seafood in the Japan Times and watching this Washington Post video about bluefin tuna made me curious to learn more about the issue. Are there lessons that we can learn from the Japanese experience? How does the state of Japan's oceans affect the state of our oceans here in Canada?

Oceans to Fuel Auto Addiction

I’m not sure what to think of this. It seems like another excuse to mine the sea. In the frenzy to develop alternative fuels, a group in Korea have learned how to turn algae and seaweed into bio-ethanol.


The pluses: This innovation shifts the bio-fuel pressure from agricultural land to the sea, leaving food production areas to feed a hungry world. They also say that the sea based bio-fuel plants grow 6 times as fast as land based biomass. As well, algae and seaweed do not contain lignin and require no pre-treatment before they can get processed into fuel. They also say sea plants absorb 7 times as much carbon dioxide as wood. (The logic in this statement is perplexing. They are proposing to mine the plants that help mitigate the effects of increasing carbon emissions.)

Detractions: The group – the Korean Institute of Technology suggests treating all sizes of algae, from the large kelp forests to single celled spirulina, using an enzyme to break them into simple sugars which get fermented into ethanol. In other words, every green thing that lives in the sea and provides habitat for creatures becomes a potential fuel to maintain our addiction to cars.


What do you think?

Wanted: Big, Old, Fat, Fecund Females

Alas, my title speaks to big, old, fat, fecund female FISH - humans need not apply. For years, fisheries management techniques have guided fishermen to select the large individuals of targeted stocks, either by using size-selective gear or by releasing the smaller fish back into the ocean. This type of conservation technique was put in place with the understanding that we will sustain the stock by allowing younger, smaller individuals to grow to the reproductive age. So, for years, fishermen have caught the bigger, older, fish.
However, recent research on species evolution has thrown these practices into question: now, it seems, we need those big, old, fat fish to sustain our seas. Research indicates that removing larger, older individuals of a population, especially reproducing females, may actually undermine stock replenishment. Larger, older females often produce significantly more and stronger offspring than the smaller ones. "The larvae of these older females may also be larger, with greater fat reserves that can aid growth and survival [...] Older females can also have earlier and/or longer spawning seasons than younger, smaller females, and the fact of their longer lives may allow them to outlive periods of low larval recruitment." [1] This idea has come to be known as the BOFFFF (Big Old Fat Fecund Female Fish) hypothesis, developed by Steven Berkeley at the University of California at Santa Cruz with his study of Pacific rockfish.

There are now studies that show how removing BOFFFFs and other large adults from our oceans can result in evolutionary changes over time. A recent New York Times article discusses how human acts of selection run counter to the acts of selection found in nature:

Predators typically take “the newly born or the nearly dead,” Dr. Darimont said. For predators, targeting healthy adults can be dangerous, and some predator fish cannot even open their mouths wide enough to eat adult prey. Animals raised as livestock are typically slaughtered relatively young, he said, and farmers and breeders retain the most robust and fertile adults to grow their herds or flocks.

But commercial fishing nets and other gear that comply with conservation regulations typically trap large fish while letting smaller ones escape. Trophy hunters typically seek out the largest animals. And for some fish in some areas, as much as 50, 60 or even 80 percent of the stock may be caught every year.

“Targeting large, reproducing adults and taking so many of them in a population in a given year — that creates this ideal recipe for rapid trait change,” Dr. Darimont said.

There still needs to be much more research done on the topic of fisheries-induced evolution, but as the initial studies show, big adult individuals might be a lot more important to our healthy oceans than we realize.

Mass Migration of Stingrays

All I can say is this is an amazing sight to behold.

Looking like giant leaves floating in the sea, thousands of Golden Rays are seen here gathering off the coast of Mexico. The spectacular scene was captured as the magnificent creatures made one of their biannual mass migrations to more agreeable waters.


Gliding silently beneath the waves, they turned vast areas of blue water to gold off the northern tip of the Yucatan Peninsula. Sandra Critelli, an amateur photographer, stumbled across the phenomenon while looking for whale sharks.

She said: 'It was an unreal image, very difficult to describe. The surface of the water was covered by warm and different shades of gold and looked like a bed of autumn leaves gently moved by the wind. It's hard to say exactly how many there were, but in the range of a few thousand'

'We were surrounded by them without seeing the edge of the school and we could see many under the water surface too. I feel very fortunate I was there in the right place at the right time to experience nature at its best'

Measuring up to 7ft (2.1 meters) from wing-tip to wing-tip, Golden rays are also more prosaically known as cow nose rays.

They have long, pointed pectoral fins that separate into two lobes in front of their high-domed heads and give them a cow-like appearance. Despite having poisonous stingers, they are known to be shy and non-threatening when in large schools.

The population in the Gulf of Mexico migrates, in schools of as many as 10,000, clockwise from western Florida to the Yucatan.

New Study on Ocean Acid Levels

Previously I have posted about the acidification of our oceans, so I thought I would share a new study, published in the academic journal Science and financed by the U.K. Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, The Royal Society, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, United Nations Environmental Program, the Pew Charitable Trust and the U.K. Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

This study finds that calcium carbonate crystals, produced by bony fish to dispose of the excess calcium ingested through seawater, contribute to maintaining ocean alkalinity when these crystals are excreted and dissolved in the ocean.

This study gives us just one more reason to try to keep our oceans full of healthy fish!

Ocean - An Illustrated Atlas

The New York Times recently published an article about Sylvia A Earle, the co-author of National Geographic's "Ocean: An Illustrated Atlas". After reading this article about Earle, I was very intrigued by her book. As an ardent book lover, I always have space on my shelf for more books, and now I can't wait to get my hands on a copy of this one. Amazon promises me "key concepts, points of interest, and little known facts [...] [a]stonishing full-color photographs and diagrams [that] reveal the beauty and complexity of ocean life. Unprecedented new full spread maps of the ocean floor—hand-drawn by expert cartographers—reveal the five major oceans in astonishing details." It sounds like this atlas will serve as a great resource to help me better understand the oceans that I am working to preserve.

Blue is the New Green - Family Film Nights on Haida Gwaii

BBC's Deep Blue Trailer

This weekend, Haida Fisheries and the Haida Oceans Technical Team offered a Family Film Night in Masset on Friday and in Skidegate on Saturday. Living Oceans Society helped to sponsor this event, so I was able to go up to Haida Gwaii to talk about Living Oceans and to watch the videos in both communities.

The first movie shown was "Once Upon a Tide" - a fantastic 10-minute animated film created by the Center for Health and Global Environment at Harvard Medical School. This film tells the story of a young girl's first trip to see the ocean. To watch this video you can visit the Once Upon a Tide website.

The second film that was shown was the BBC's Deep Blue (see above for the video trailer), a 90 minute film comprising of amazing footage of the incredible life found in our oceans around the world.

After watching these two films, it is hard to remain indifferent about our oceans. I hope that the community members who took part in the film night will also plan to attend Gaaysiigang - An Ocean Forum for Haida Gwaii on January 22-24.

On a personal note: I found my weekend up in Haida Gwaii quite valuable as well. Seeing a new place on the PNCIMA coast and being able to talk to the intelligent, invested, and gracious people who live there helped me to (once again) see the value in integrated marine planning. As the movie demonstrated, we all rely on the ocean to provide us with many different vital services. Planning for our oceans needs to incorporate the interests of everyone (and everything) that shares our coast. And what a beautiful coast it is!