Articles by Andrew Sharpless

There’s a large human cost to subsidizing European fishing fleets in West Africa

Today's front page New York Times story -- "Europe Takes Africa's Fish, and Boatloads of Migrants Follow" -- chronicles the human cost of overfishing. Fueled by billions in government subsidies, European fleets empty out West African waters, leaving nothing for subsistence fishermen. I wrote about this in an earlier post, but it's an important enough issue to warrant reiteration.

Manatee deaths down, lonely penguin count up by one

... a Hong Kong sushi restaurant owner paid a record $55,700 for a bluefin tuna at a Tokyo market, a rate of $92 per pound ...

... a judge ordered the U.S. Navy to cease use of sonar within 12 nautical miles of the California coastline and whenever a marine mammal was sighted within 2,200 yards ...

... fish from a Canadian salmon farm tested positive for malachite green, a carcinogenic substance. "We have no explanation as to what has happened," said the company manager ...

... a study of Caribbean coral reefs found a correlation between high human population and coral loss. "It's like a cascade," said one of the researchers ...

New fishing quotas and Japanese whaling ships on notice

The European Union set quotas for 2008, with an 18 percent decrease for cod in most trawling areas except the North Sea, where quotas were raised by 11 percent. Scientists had pushed for cuts to less than half of 2006 levels ...

... the Swedish Board of Fisheries found that no cod had spawned in the waters between Sweden and Denmark this year ...

... two New Zealand fishing companies aimed to earn the Marine Stewardship Council's environmental standard for their Patagonian toothfish (Chilean sea bass) catch ...

...Australia announced plans to send planes and a ship to surveil Japanese whaling ships, and will use the photographs and video gathered in potential future legal action to force Japan to recognize a ban on hunting whales in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary ...

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 ...