Blog

  • July 22, 2019

    Ocean View

    Is the menhaden fishery certifiably “sustainable”?  Not yet it isn’t.

  • July 22, 2019

    3. Meeting Resistance

    In the first two parts of this series I described how the 2010 Atlantic menhaden stock assessment was scrapped after it triggered the first-ever catch restrictions on the menhaden fishery and replaced with one that allowed catches to increase.  Now we begin to look at why. In a paper presented to the American Fisheries Society...
  • April 22, 2019

    Mid-Atlantic Council Takes on Management of Emerging Chub Mackerel Fishery

    Mid-Atlantic Council Takes on Management of Emerging Fishery On March 7th, The Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council voted to bring chub mackerel into the existing fishery management plan (FMP) for Atlantic mackerel, longfin squid, shortfin squid and butterfish.  Wild Oceans supported the Council’s decision, emphasizing that chub mackerel, like the other species in the FMP, are...
  • November 30, 2018

    2. Losing Confidence

    I started following and attending Atlantic menhaden stock assessments on a regular basis in 1999.  That same year, as a member of the National Ecosystem Principles Advisory Panel, I’d helped write the panel’s Report to Congress, Ecosystem-Based Fishery Management, in which we’d recommended that a first important step toward EBFM would be considering predator-prey relationships...
  • November 05, 2018

    1. When Everything Changed

    Confirmation bias is a tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions. – Science Daily Up until about eight years ago, the science was considered sound enough to declare Atlantic menhaden “not overfished” and thereby reject repeated calls by anglers and environmentalists to regulate the catch of what many...
  • October 26, 2018

    Fighting Pollution for a Pristine Ocean

    Special to Wild Oceans, November 2018 Scuba diving is perhaps the greatest adventure in the world. Where else can you come face to face with creatures from your most fanciful dreams? As divers, we fly through the water like majestic birds, riding the ocean currents that bring life and beauty to the entire world. One...
  • October 18, 2018

    A Sea of Plastic

    The following story was originally published in the Wild Oceans Horizon newsletter in spring of 2017. (Issue No. 152) A Sea of Plastic About 30 years ago, while I was researching an article for Marlin magazine, “Plastics Plague Ocean Life,” an angler fishing a Texas tournament landed a marlin with a plastic ring from a...
  • October 18, 2018

    Time to Move Forward – FORAGE FIRST

    Below is Ken Hinman’s introduction to the 2004 report, Taking the Bait: Are America’s Fisheries Out-competing Predators for their Prey?  Since publication of that report, researched and written by Executive Director Pam Lyons Gromen, Wild Oceans (then NCMC) has helped put forage fish conservation at the center of today’s national ocean agenda.  We’ve made significant…

  • October 01, 2018

    Victory for Atlantic Herring

    Fed upon by a long list of ocean wildlife from whales to seabirds to tuna, Atlantic herring is the linchpin holding together the food web in New England waters.  On September 25th at its meeting in Plymouth, Massachusetts, the New England Fishery Management Council took groundbreaking action to better manage Atlantic sea herring and to...
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