The Sea Around Us Project returns to West Africa

by Duncan Copeland and Dyhia Belhabib

Healthy and well-managed marine environments are essential for ensuring food security, reducing poverty and promoting marine conservation in West Africa. Yet the region faces enormous challenges in achieving these goals, not least of which are poor or even non-existent data relating to fisheries, biodiversity and the impact of human activities.

The Sea Around Us Project is increasingly focusing on data-deficient regions of the oceans, particularly in the developing world. West Africa has been highlighted as a priority region, and in the past few months, the “Sea Around Us Project and PRCM: Marine Conservation Research, Collaboration and Support in West Africa” has been launched. Funded by the MAVA Foundation, the project will address the serious deficiency of adequate data in areas such as capture fisheries and biodiversity at the local, national and Large Marine Ecosystem levels in West Africa.

The Regional Marine and Coastal Conservation Programme for West Africa (PRCM) brings together an important coalition of non-governmental organizations to work with local and regional stakeholders and coordinate efforts to preserve the littoral zone of coastal countries in the region, which includes Mauritania, Senegal, The Gambia, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea and Sierra Leone. Crucially, the PRCM has promoted cooperation with public sector and civil society organisations to achieve marine conservation, fisheries and integrated management support goals.

However, the challenges facing the success of these initiatives are significant. Limited government capacity and poor regulation; illegal, destructive and over-fishing by industrial fleets; high local dependence on marine resources for livelihoods and food security; and the limited number of marine protected areas in the region all contribute to a difficult environment for achieving effective fisheries and marine conservation. Yet perhaps the greatest impediment to sustainable fisheries management and marine conservation in West Africa is the current deficiency, accessibility and usage of adequate data.

The region has seen limited national and international resources put towards adequate assessments of marine capture fisheries and biodiversity. As a result, decision-making in fisheries management at the local, national and regional levels, as well as in a variety of conservation projects, is often based on limited science. The imperative is to improve the data upon which fisheries management and conservation depends, and ensure that PRCM stakeholders receive support in the utilisation of data within specific marine conservation and fisheries management initiatives.

The Sea Around Us West Africa programme aims to accomplish three complementary objectives, all directly contributing to regional marine conservation, fisheries management and integrated management support objectives. These are to:

• Increase the quality of available data relating to existing and new initiatives promoting marine conservation and fisheries management in West Africa through the development of catch and effort reconstructions.

• Develop strong collaborative relationships between the Sea Around Us Project and proposed project partners; engagement of a wider number of government, research and non-governmental partners will be achieved.

• Raise broader international awareness and support for marine conservation in the region via the publication of peer-reviewed articles and engagement of media.

To achieve these aims, the project is supporting targeted research on catch, effort and catch values, biodiversity, marine protected areas, and other related issues. Crucially, this information will be developed within a partner support framework, ensuring that PRCM member and partner initiatives benefit not only from the generated data, but also have improved organisational expertise to integrate the data into existing and future initiatives. These partners include the Sub-Regional Fisheries Commission (SRFC), local research institutions and the members of the PRCM (WWF, IUCN, Wetlands International and International Foundation for the Banc d’Arguin). Data analysis and visualisation models will be used to achieve these goals in collaboration with PRCM members and other relevant stakeholders.

Through these partnerships, the Sea Around Us Project and PRCM project provides an innovative and supportive approach that will directly contribute to strengthened national, regional and international cooperation in the short and longer term. The programme is specifically designed to offer potential extension beyond the initial proposed two-year period and a model for replication in other regions of the developing world with data-deficient fisheries. In addition, the project will work as much as possible with individuals that are nationals of the target countries, improving expertise in the region.

Marine habitats in West Africa are considered among the most data-deficient globally. With an increased focus on the developing world and growing experience working in the West African region, the Sea Around Us Project is uniquely placed to collaborate with project partners to generate strategic data and support that will directly benefit conservation, fisheries and management goals.

Grading ocean health: 60/100

The Ocean Health Index is the first global quantitative assessment of ocean health (Map credit: Halpern, et al, Nature)

The health of the world’s oceans received a score of 60 out of 100 from a team of international scientists, including researchers with the Sea Around Us Project. Kristin Kleisner, Dirk Zeller, Rashid Sumailaand Daniel Pauly were part of the team that undertook the first global quantitative assessment of ocean health and created the Ocean Health Index by evaluating ecological, social, economic and political conditions for every coastal nation in the world.

The Sea Around Us Project in particular was responsible for measuring the amount of seafood that is sustainably generated by fisheries and marine aquaculture for human consumption, which contributed to calculating the score for ocean health.

The article, published in Nature, is available here and the press release is here.

Of leatherbacks and lion’s manes

by Lucas Brotz

Lucas Brotz (right) helps DFO crew aboard the CCGS W.E. Ricker sort the catch of the day: juvenile salmon and lion’s mane jellyfish.

I study jellyfish, so you can imagine my surprise when I received an e-mail last year from a recovery planner for the Canadian Species at Risk Act (SARA). I am certainly not aware of any jellyfish in the world that is classified as threatened or endangered, let alone in Canadian waters where we know very little about our gelatinous fauna! On the contrary to being at risk, many jellyfish are in fact increasing in coastal ecosystems around the world. However, the subject of the recovery plan in question was not jellyfish at all, but rather the leatherback sea turtle (Dermochelys coriacea). What did I know about reptiles? Well, not much, but I was aware of one fact about leatherbacks: they are known to eat jellyfish. The reasons behind the e-mail were starting to materialize, and I was intrigued.

As their name suggests, leatherbacks do not have a hard shell like the other six species of sea turtles alive today. Rather, their shell consists of smooth, leathery skin with seven ridges running its length. Such reptiles first appeared in the fossil record about 100 million years ago when their family branched off from other hard-shelled turtles, underlining the fact that these are truly ancient mariners. Leatherbacks are massive creatures. They frequently grow to hundreds of kilograms and can potentially surpass a tonne. From tip to tail the largest exceed three meters, with their flippers spanning more than four meters.

The leatherback’s list of superlatives is nearly as large as the animals themselves! Among reptiles they are the fastest growing, fastest moving, and except for a few crocodiles, the heaviest. They are also among the most widely distributed animals in the world, mainly due to migrations that put all but a few marine mammals and bird species to shame. Surprisingly, they are also warm-blooded, and are therefore able to survive in environments far beyond the reach of their cold-blooded relatives. Believe it or not, leatherbacks have been sighted north of the Arctic Circle! To top this off, leatherbacks have been recorded diving deeper than a kilometer, plunging further into the abyss than almost all other air-breathers.

But perhaps the most astounding fact about this fascinating species (although I will admit, I am biased) is that leatherbacks can grow so large, travel so far and dive so deep on a diet consisting almost exclusively of jellyfish!

Why is this surprising? Jellyfish are roughly 95% water, therefore obtaining sufficient nutrition from them requires some serious feasting. A leatherback can consume hundreds of kilograms of jellyfish in a single day, which not only appears to supply all of their energetic demands, but also allows them to fatten up for return migrations to breeding areas. Part of the success of such a strategy relies on the fact that jellyfish often occur in dense aggregations known as blooms. In addition, jellyfish have virtually no escape response, especially from an animal as fast and maneuverable as a sea turtle. Therefore, locating dense blooms of jellies is likely key for leatherback feeding success and appears to be the sole reason why they embark on vast migrations from breeding areas in the tropics to more temperate areas, including Canadian waters.

So now you can understand why someone who studies jellyfish would receive an e-mail about endangered sea turtles. And endangered they are. While there are a number of reasons for optimism regarding leatherbacks in the Atlantic, the Pacific populations appear to be on an alarming trajectory. Their numbers are uncertain, but it is estimated that there are fewer than 3,000 nesting females left – a precipitous crash of more than 97% in only a few decades. Numbers continue to decline, and Pacific leatherbacks appear dangerously close to extinction.

As one might imagine, sightings of leatherbacks in Canadian Pacific waters are relatively rare, averaging only about one per year. While that is not a lot, members of the population do visit here. And in order to survive unthinkable migrations from remote breeding sites in Indonesia and the Solomon Islands, those turtles visiting Canada’s west coast are likely the largest and heartiest of the population. Therefore helping or saving just a few of these individuals could be crucial for a subpopulation’s survival. The areas used by leatherbacks to feed on jellyfish blooms in British Columbia represent critical habitat, but unfortunately we know relatively little about the jellyfish living in Canadian waters. Migrating leatherbacks are likely feasting on an abundance of large “true jellyfish” (class Scyphozoa), including lion’s mane jellies (Cyanea capillata), sea nettles (Chrysaora fuscescens) and moon jellies (Aurelia labiata). In order to better understand the abundance and distribution of these species, I began working with Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) scientists and technicians.

Interestingly, most of the scientists I worked with are salmon specialists. This is mainly because salmon scientists possess one thing that pretty much all marine biologists and oceanographers covet: ship time. DFO crews conduct integrated ecosystem surveys several times each year in the coastal waters of British Columbia and have implemented consistent sampling methods since 1998. These sustained, year-round surveys along repeat transects are a rarity in an age of funding cuts, and the resultant datasets provide a wealth of valuable information. In addition to collecting oceanographic data, these surveys involve tows using large trawl nets to collect and study juvenile salmon populations. The unwanted by-catch in these trawls can include large jellyfish. Properly identifying and monitoring these jellyfish catches could provide new and valuable insights into these organisms in our coastal waters. This information may also be indispensable, I believe, for understanding the relationship between critically endangered leatherbacks and their gelatinous prey.

All of the scientists I worked with recognized the importance of collecting such information, and together we developed a procedure that we hope will create a permanent record of all future jellyfish catch. While I was eager to convince those I collaborated with to gather as much data as possible, I had to keep in mind that jellyfish were not the focus of the surveys and any procedure too onerous was unlikely to be adopted. Therefore, the protocol was designed to minimize the effort required for jellyfish processing, while at the same time maximizing the amount of useful information collected. In addition, a step-wise approach to jellyfish monitoring was recommended, whereby scientists and technicians can collect a minimum amount of data on jellyfish if they are analysing other catch, or obtain more detailed information if processing time allows. Thanks to this collaboration between DFO, SARA recovery planners and the Fisheries Centre, we should be able to rapidly increase our understanding of jellyfish in coastal waters in the coming years, as well as identify those regions that might be most important for foraging leatherbacks.

While eating jellyfish appears to have been a successful strategy for leatherbacks for millions of years, there are disadvantages to having a gelatinous diet in the contemporary world. Plastic debris, which now litters the oceans, often looks very much like jellyfish. Studies have found more than a third of examined leatherbacks have plastic in their intestines and the proportion for dead leatherbacks is double that. But perhaps the largest threat to leatherbacks is as a result of their trans-oceanic migrations between breeding and feeding areas. These epic journeys bring leatherbacks into repeated contact with the ocean’s most fearsome predator – humans. Leatherbacks are frequently caught as unintended by-catch or become entangled in the miles of fishing gear that crisscross the oceans. Anything that prevents turtles, which are air-breathers, from reaching the surface will cause death in less than an hour. Compound these dangers with poaching for turtle meat and eggs, global warming and an overall lack of awareness about the problems, and you start to read the Pacific leatherback’s epitaph.

An individual leatherback endures what seems like a life of hardship – swimming thousands of miles across oceans of hazards, only to have cold, stinging jellyfish for breakfast, lunch and dinner. As a species, leatherbacks have persevered through unimaginable times, including ice ages and major extinctions. In fact, they are often referred to as Earth’s last dinosaur. But it seems that leatherbacks may have finally met their match during this era dominated by the human species. I find it especially tragic to see such a charismatic animal that has survived for so long pushed to the brink of extinction in only a few decades. I have yet to be lucky enough to look into the eyes of a wild Pacific leatherback, something I long to do. I only hope that such an experience will remain a possibility.

References

Benson SR, Dutton PH, Hitipeuw C, Samber B, Bakarbessy J and Parker D (2007) Post-nesting migrations of leatherback turtles (Dermochelys coriacea) from Jamursba-Medi, Bird’s Head Peninsula, Indonesia. Chelonian Conservation and Biology 6: 150-154.

Brotz L, Cheung WWL, Kleisner K, Pakhomov E and Pauly D (2012) Increasing jellyfish populations: trends in large marine ecosystems. Hydrobiologia 690: 3-20.

Heaslip SG, Iverson SJ, Bowen WD and James MC (2012). Jellyfish support high energy intake of leatherback sea turtles (Dermochelys coriacea): video evidence from animal-borne cameras. PLoS ONE 7: e33259.

Mrosovsky N, Ryan GD and James MC (2009) Leatherback turtles: the menace of plastic. Marine Pollution Bulletin 58: 287-289.

Safina C (2006) Voyage of the Turtle. Holt, New York. 383 pp.

Spotila JR, Reina RD, Steyermark AC, Plotkin PT and Paladino FV (2000) Pacific leatherback turtles face extinction. Nature 405: 529-530.

Down at the World Ocean’s Summit

by Daniel Pauly

The British magazine The Economist hosted a huge “World Ocean Summit” in Singapore earlier this year, designed to find solutions to the ills that beset our oceans. And more precisely, to identify remedies that entrepreneurs could find ways to invest and profit from. It sounded like a reasonable goal, because we tend to live in democratic countries with market economies shaped by private enterprise, so I accepted their invitation. The head of the World Bank attended, as well as ministers from various countries, CEOs of big fishing companies, heads of international environmental NGOs, hedge fund managers, scientists…

It should have worked, but it didn’t really, despite the beautiful resort where the event took place and the flawless organization. I think it was because – mostly subtly, sometimes not so subtly – our very determined hosts, from the Editor-in-Chief to the lowliest of The Economist staffers, were pushing for “market solutions,” insisting that the remedies we identified had to make money for hedge fund managers and other investors.

It sounded all right at first – but how would this work if a health care system, for example, wasdesigned this way? Wouldn’t it leave too many people untreated, because no money can be made off them? Also, are fisheries not a gigantic example of a “market failure,” as economists call the mess we are in? (Although it is a small mess compared with that of our banking system.) But there was no space at the summit to discuss any of these things, and the complementary roles of governments and civil society. Everything that moves had to be turned into a commodity, and even some things that don’t move, like marine protected areas, which were identified as one of the places for profitable investments.

Thus my disappointment and perhaps that of Fisheries Centre Director Dr Rashid Sumaila too, who also attended. I did have the opportunity to address one of the summit’s working groups where I mentioned that the invitation of The Economist, besides being a compliment, also was a challenge, because I am often accused of spreading gloom and doom, in spite of being neither gloomy nor doomy.

The point is that a doctor – and I am one, if not of medicine – must correctly diagnose the disease at hand before being able to propose solutions leading back to health. The disease of industrial fisheries, I suggested, is “expansionitis” and it is caused largely by demand for fish in rich countries. Indeed, industrial fisheries have gone so far that we’re expanding into the world’s oceans at a rate of 1 million km2 and southward by 0.8° of latitude per year. Expansionitis is feeding essentially insatiable markets in Europe, North America and Northeast Asia, from finite fishing grounds in Africa, Latin America and Tropical Asia. Japan and the US import 60% to 70% of their food, the EU 70% to 80%. Industrial fishing is not about feeding the world’s poor.

Then, because we we re supposed to emphasize remedies, I listed those remedies for expansionitis about which there is
widespread agreement:
• Reduce and eventually abolish subsidies to fisheries – they are what feeds expansionitis;
• Rebuild fish stocks in developed countries, so that they need not grab so much of the developing countries’ fish, and export the lessons learned to the developing world;
• Allow developing countries to catch and process their own fish, and export a part of the value-added products to the developed world;
• Create arrangements providing exclusive access (to coastal resources in both developing and developed countries) to small-scale fisheries, which catch far more than industrial fisheries and could catch even more if not exposed to competition from industrial vessels;
• Reduce and eventually ban discards (Norway does it) and consume small fish directly, rather than turning them into fishmeal.
There is a huge reserve there.

But let’s face it: these remedies (all “market solutions,” incidentally) if implemented, would be the result of mostly public policy, which then would benefit the fishing industry in the long-term. In the short term, however, these remedies will be fought against tooth and nail by our friends from the private sector, that is those The Economist wants us not only to work with (which is a good thing), but to put in the driver’s seat. These are the reasons why I felt down at the Ocean Summit.

From the Front Lines of the 2012 AAAS Meeting

This post was written by by Claire Hornby, Sarah Harper, Robin Ramdeen, Dyhia Belhabib, Frédéric Le Manach and Aylin Ulman and appeared in the newsletter.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) held its 178th Annual Meeting in Vancouver from February 16-20, 2012. The theme of this year’s conference was “Flattening the world: building a global knowledge society”. Sea Around Us Project members were among the 8,000 attendees, participating and presenting in numerous symposium sessions and volunteering at the Project’s booth in the exhibition hall. Additional notable sessions were presented by other members of the Fisheries Centre.

Highlights from the conference included a symposium titled “Underreported yet overoptimistic: fisheries catch reconstructions and food security”, organized by Sea Around Us Project members Dr Dirk Zeller and Sarah Harper. Dirk gave an informative presentation outlining the methods used in reconstructing countries’ fisheries catches, while Frédéric Le Manach expanded on the importance of this task for tackling issues of human rights and ethics. Frédéric explained that fishing access agreements between the European Union and host countries, citing the example of Madagascar, are perpetuating socio-economic inequalities between most and least-developed countries. The catch reconstruction work for Madagascar made the first step toward revealing some of these inequalities, which suggest that fishing access agreements need to be revised to be more ethical.

In the final part of the session, Nicola Smith, a graduate of the University of British Columbia now working in the Caribbean, described her reconstruction of the catches of the Bahamas. She found that recreational fisheries catches, which account for a large
proportion of the country’s total catches, are entirely missing from official statistics. As is the case for much of the Caribbean, the economy of the Bahamas is dominated by tourism – visitors want to fish and eat seafood as part of their holiday experience. This places intense demand on the local marine environment. The take-home message of this symposium was that proper accounting of all fisheries sectors is a key component of managing fisheries resources in both a sustainable and ethical manner. The examples that Dirk, Frédéric and Nicola presented are just a handful of the 150 or so countries that will be reconstructed by the end of this year. There will definitely be many more interesting stories to tell once the reconstruction of catches for all fishing countries is complete!

Another successful symposium was “Whole-ocean economics” organized by Dr Rashid Sumaila. He revealed the newly developed Eco2 Index, which measures the economic and environmental health of developed and developing countries. Dr William Cheung also presented a conservation risk index that combines economic figures and fisheries population growth rates to reveal the economics/conservation trade-offs of fishing. It was clear from the model that not all developed countries are doing well in terms of conservation. The audience showed a particular interest in the “Whole-ocean economics” session and there was plenty of participation by professors, researchers, non-governmental organization representatives and students. A roundtable session followed the presentations and questions relating to fisheries, marine protected areas and governance generated stimulating discussions. This session succeeded in highlighting the commitment of the Fisheries Centre members to global research and collaboration.

Another symposium organized by the Sea Around Us Project was titled “Leveling the global playing field: global inferences from reliable global samples”. Dr Kristin Kleisner, a postdoctoral fellow with the Sea Around Us Project and organizer of the session, explained how to design sampling methods and why it is important to infer scientifically sound global trends. Dr Thomas Lovejoy, from the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics, and the Environment in Washington DC, then discussed the use of technology to monitor biodiversity trends and species extinction. Closing the symposium, Dr Molly Jahn, from the University of Wisconsin, stressed the need to build a global information system to meet our future needs.

The Sea Around Us Project booth was also a major success. It allowed Project members to share their work with a diverse audience. For Claire Hornby, the AAAS was her first major science conference, and she was excited and nervous to have a chance to interact with scientists of various disciplines from all over the world. It was amazing to see the wide range of people that approached the booth, eager to hear about the Project’s work. Surprisingly, it seemed everyone – no matter if they were a budding scientist of five years old or an established professor – wanted to learn something about fisheries. The majority of attendees that approached the booth knew about the current state of the world’s oceans and the decline of many commercial fisheries. Family day at the AAAS brought many up-andcoming scientists to the booth. Robin Ramdeen, who volunteered that day, described how wonderful it was to see so many primary school children intrigued by the Sea Around Us Project’s display of ocean primary productivity. Their level of understanding of the importance of plankton for producing the energy upon which marine food webs are based was astounding. These inquisitive junior scientists answered their own questions about where energy comes from, both on land and at sea, and about how phytoplankton and zooplankton are essential to the diet of fish via the food web. Importantly, they were able to connect how changes in primary production could affect one of the ocean’s top predators: humans.

These were just a some of the highlights of Sea Around Us Project’s and the Fisheries Center’s contributions to the 2012 AAAS meeting. The conference was yet another example of how committed the Sea Around Us Project is not only to doing good research, but also to communicating its work to the world.

TED Talk: Daniel Pauly on Shifting Baselines

Daniel Pauly’s TED talk on Shifting Baselines is finally up! Watch the video, or read the transcript below:

I’m going to speak about a tiny, little idea. And this is about shifting baseline. And because the idea can be explained in one minute, I will tell you three stories before to fill in the time. And the first story is about Charles Darwin, one of my heroes. And he was here, as you well know, in ’35. And you’d think he was chasing finches, but he wasn’t. He was actually collecting fish. And he described one of them as very “common.” This was the sailfin grouper. A big fishery was run on it until the ’80s. Now the fish is on the IUCN Red List. Now this story, we have heard it lots of times on Galapagos and other places, so there is nothing particular about it. But the point is, we still come to Galapagos. We still think it is pristine. The brochures still say it is untouched. So what happens here?

The second story, also to illustrate another concept, is called shifting waistline. (Laughter) Because I was there in ’71, studying a lagoon in West Africa. I was there because I grew up in Europe and I wanted later to work in Africa. And I thought I could blend in. And I got a big sunburn, and I was convinced that I was really not from there. This was my first sunburn.

And the lagoon was surrounded by palm trees, as you can see, and a few mangrove. And it had tilapia about 20 centimeters, a species of tilapia called blackchin tilapia. And the fisheries for this tilapia sustained lots of fish and they had a good time and they earned more than average in Ghana. When I went there 27 years later, the fish had shrunk to half of their size. They were maturing at five centimeters. They had been pushed genetically. There were still fishes. They were still kind of happy. And the fish also were happy to be there. So nothing has changed, but everything has changed.

My third little story is that I was an accomplice in the introduction of trawling in Southeast Asia. In the ’70s — well, beginning in the ’60s — Europe did lots of development projects. Fish development meant imposing on countries that had already 100,000 fishers to impose on them industrial fishing. And this boat, quite ugly, is called the Mutiara 4. And I went sailing on it, and we did surveys throughout the southern South China sea and especially the Java Sea. And what we caught, we didn’t have words for it. What we caught, I know now, is the bottom of the sea. And 90 percent of our catch were sponges, other animals that are fixed on the bottom. And actually most of the fish, they are a little spot on the debris, the piles of debris, were coral reef fish. Essentially the bottom of the sea came onto the deck and then was thrown down.

And these pictures are extraordinary because this transition is very rapid. Within a year, you do a survey and then commercial fishing begins. The bottom is transformed from, in this case, a hard bottom or soft coral into a muddy mess. This is a dead turtle. They were not eaten, they were thrown away because they were dead. And one time we caught a live one. It was not drowned yet. And then they wanted to kill it because it was good to eat. This mountain of debris is actually collected by fishers every time they go into an area that’s never been fished. But it’s not documented.

We transform the world, but we don’t remember it. We adjust our baseline to the new level, and we don’t recall what was there. If you generalize this, something like this happens. You have on the y axis some good thing: biodiversity, numbers of orca, the greenness of your country, the water supply. And over time it changes — it changes because people do things, or naturally. Every generation will use the images that they got at the beginning of their conscious lives as a standard and will extrapolate forward. And the difference then, they perceive as a loss. But they don’t perceive what happened before as a loss. You can have a succession of changes. At the end you want to sustain miserable leftovers. And that, to a large extent, is what we want to do now. We want to sustain things that are gone or things that are not the way they were.

Now one should think this problem affected people certainly when in predatory societies, they killed animals and they didn’t know they had done so after a few generations. Because, obviously, an animal that is very abundant, before it gets extinct, it becomes rare. So you don’t lose abundant animals. You always lose rare animals. And therefore they’re not perceived as a big loss. Over time, we concentrate on large animals, and in a sea that means the big fish. They become rarer because we fish them. Over time we have a few fish left and we think this is the baseline.

And the question is, why do people accept this? Well because they don’t know that it was different. And in fact, lots of people, scientists, will contest that it was really different. And they will contest this because the evidence presented in an earlier mode is not in the way they would like the evidence presented. For example, the anecdote that some present, as Captain so-and-so observed lots of fish in this area cannot be used or is usually not utilized by fishery scientists, because it’s not “scientific.” So you have a situation where people don’t know the past, even though we live in literate societies, because they don’t trust the sources of the past.

And hence, the enormous role that a marine protected area can play. Because with marine protected areas, we actually recreate the past. We recreate the past that people cannot conceive because the baseline has shifted and is extremely low. That is for people who can see a marine protected area and who can benefit from the insight that it provides, which enables them to reset their baseline.

How about the people who can’t do that because they have no access — the people in the Midwest for example? There I think that the arts and film can perhaps fill the gap, and simulation. This is a simulation of Chesapeake Bay. There were gray whales in Chesapeake Bay a long time ago — 500 years ago. And you will have noticed that the hues and tones are like “Avatar.” (Laughter) And if you think about “Avatar,” if you think of why people were so touched by it — never mind the Pocahontas story — why so touched by the imagery? Because it evokes something that in a sense has been lost. And so my recommendation, it’s the only one I will provide, is for Cameron to do “Avatar II” underwater.

Thank you very much.

Law That Regulates Shark Fishery Is Too Liberal

Shark fins are worth more than other parts of the shark and are often removed from the body, which gets thrown back into the sea. To curtail this wasteful practice, many countries allow the fins to be landed detached from shark bodies, as long as their weight does not exceed five per cent of the total shark catch. New University of British Columbia research shows that this kind of legislation is too liberal.

A study published this week in the journal Fish Biology analyzes the fin to body weight ratios for 50 different shark species.  The authors find the average fin to body mass is three per cent  – considerably lower than the five per cent ratio currently legislated by the EU and other countries.

“The five percent ratio provides an opportunity to harvest extra fins from more sharks without retaining 100 per cent of the corresponding shark carcasses,” says Sea Around Us Project researcher Leah Biery, lead author of the study. “It does not prevent waste or overfishing, as the law intended.”

Currently, the EU and eight other countries use at least a five per cent shark fin to body weight ratio for landed catch. Only 59 countries in the world have any legislation related to sharks.

“Sharks are sensitive to overfishing and it’s embarrassing how little we have done to protect them,” says Daniel Pauly, principal investigator of UBC’s Sea Around UsProject and co-author of the study. “We would like to see more science in the management and protection of sharks in the coming years.”

Researchers estimate about 26 to 73 million sharks are killed each year to feed the growing demand for shark fin.  Sharks are sensitive to overfishing because they often grow slowly, mature later, and have very few offspring.

Canada MP Fin Donnelly introduced a bill last December that would ban the import of shark fin into Canada, but it has not been voted on. The Canadian municipalities of Brantford, Mississauga, Oakville, Pickering, London and Toronto have all banned the sale and possession of shark fin.

Dyhia Belhabib – Post-Doctoral Research Fellow

Dyhia Belhabib is currently a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow with the Sea Around Us (UBC). As the Africa Lead of the Sea Around Us, she reconstructs catch and effort time series for countries of Africa, where quantitative data are severely lacking, using a different range of innovative approaches. She engages directly with different local and regional groups for the use of fisheries data, and the development of policy and management plans. Dyhia is collaborating with several organizations and experts on different research fronts including the impacts of fisheries on local economies, the footprint of armed conflicts and natural disasters on global fisheries, and with NGOs, analyzing the impacts of development projects on fisher’s communities in Senegal, the footprint of illegal fishing and piracy in Somali waters. Dyhia also holds an advisory position on the scientific board of the Research and Development Division of the Ministry of Fisheries and Aquaculture in Algeria.