Articles by Andrew Sharpless

Killer farmed salmon and non-deadly sharks

More than 10,000 people worked to clean up the worst oil spill in South Korean history after a crane punched a hole in an oil tanker, releasing 2.7 million gallons of crude. A 63-year-old shellfish farmer wept as she showed dead tar-coated oysters to a reporter ...

... a study published in Science suggested that leaving more fish in the sea leads to higher profits than the traditional target known as maximum sustainable yield. "We like to say it's a win-win," said one of the study's authors ...

... a detailed new study of salmon farming found that farmed fish spread sea lice, which killed juvenile wild salmon ...

Billions of taxpayer dollars are helping destroy African waters

After exhausting commercial seafood stocks off their own shores decades ago, wealthy nations turned their bows toward the pristine populations off the coast of Africa. In the 1990s, the European Union took more than a million pounds of fish out of African waters annually; the former Soviet states took about 2.5 million pounds. The result has been predictable: a steep decline in biomass along the African coast.

Meanwhile, African nations took a sliver of their own fish. According to a 2002 report in Marine Policy, Guinea Bissau earned just 7 percent of the gross returns on fishing off its coast, while the E.U. got the other 93 percent.

Whales on treadmills and dolphin harassment

New Zealand installed its first acoustic fish fence, designed to herd salmon smolt in the right direction during migration ...

... Polish fishermen who obeyed a ban on cod will receive up to $11,000 in revenue lost, but those who defied the ban will face fines up to $7,500 ...

... salmon returns for the year in Vancouver were called "dismal" ...

... for the first time, scientists were able to estimate how much a fin whale can swallow in one lunge for krill, finding that they engulf 2,900 cubic feet in a single gulp -- the equivalent of the volume of a school bus. Measuring the amount is tricky, said one scientist, because "you can't get whales to run on a treadmill in a laboratory" ...

Better management is needed before closing fisheries is the only option left

About thirty years ago, diners around the world developed a taste for the low-fat white meat of a large pelagic fish known as a slimehead. The name was changed to orange roughy, and a delicacy was born.

Unfortunately for the orange roughy, its long lifespan (a hundred years or more) and its late arrival to sexual maturity (at 20 years or more) has made it vulnerable to overfishing. As its popularity in fine restaurants has grown, orange roughy populations have nosedived. And just this week, Australia and New Zealand (the world's largest producer of orange roughy, while the U.S. is the largest consumer) agreed to close a large orange roughy fishery in the Southern Ocean, with managers saying they're not sure when or if the area may ever reopen to fishing because of the damage done.

It doesn't have to come to this. With responsible fishing techniques and sustainable quotas, rare and increasingly rare commercial fish like the roughy, bluefin tuna, Patagonian toothfish (Chilean sea bass), and more can thrive.