Fish & Fisheries

"Illegal fishing is depleting the seas and robbing poor nations in Africa and Asia of resources, but a lack of global cooperation is undermining efforts to track rogue vessels, an environmental group said on Tuesday."

"To prevent ecosystem damage due to commercial harvesting activity, U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke today decided to prohibit the expansion of commercial fishing in federal Arctic waters until researchers gather enough information on fish and the Arctic marine environment to put safeguards in place."

"No fish can escape mercury pollution. That's the take-home message from a federal study of mercury contamination released Wednesday that tested fish from nearly 300 streams across the country."

"Federal regulators voted [Aug. 13] to impose tough new restrictions on the commercial longline fishing fleet in the Gulf of Mexico in an attempt to protect marine turtles."

"Millions of sockeye salmon have disappeared mysteriously from a river on Canada's Pacific Coast that was once known as the world's most fertile spawning ground for sockeye."

"With a deadline looming for approval of a federal plan that would open the Gulf of Mexico to deepwater fish farming, House lawmakers and conservationists are plotting strategies to block such offshore ventures until Congress creates a system to regulate them."

"Scientists say they've created something in a Virginia river that hasn't been seen since the late 1800s: a vast, thriving reef of American oysters, the shellfish that helped create the Chesapeake Bay's ecosystem and then nearly vanished from it."

"There's no question that the world's fish are in trouble. Fishermen are pulling fish out of the seas far faster than these populations can grow back. Some fisheries are heading toward collapse or even extinction. But a major new analysis of this grim picture shows that fisheries aren't doomed. In fact, some are on the mend."

Despite what you see on TV's "The Deadliest Catch," the Rambo-style competition for crab in the Bering Sea has been ended under a new system that permanently divides up the catch among all the boats in the fishery. ---