It’s that time of year, when the gray whale migration peaks as they leave their northern Pacific feeding grounds for their breeding grounds in the warm lagoons of Baja California, Mexico. In December, I visited Granite Canyon Research Center, south of Monterey, CA, where the Southwest Fisheries Science Center conducts shore-based surveys of southbound gray whales.
By Theresa Labriola The Pacific Fishery Management Council recently took steps to clean up one of our nation’s dirtiest fisheries, the California drift gillnet fishery. The fleet deploys mile-long nets at night and retrieves them at dawn to sort through the catch of ocean fish, marine mammals and turtles. More than sixty percent of what the…
“Scoping Reveals Emerging Forage Fisheries” By Pam Lyons Gromen At the October 7th meeting of the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council, we heard disturbing word from the region’s fishermen that a handful of unmanaged forage species are already the target of commercial fisheries, including round herring, Spanish sardine and chub mackerel, making real the threat of…
“There are still threats to big fish that need our attention” By Ken Hinman In this summer’s edition of the Wild Oceans Horizon, I wrote about the tremendous progress we’ve made securing measures to save big fish from indiscriminate fishing and aid in the recovery of billfish, bluefin tuna and oceanic sharks. Today, large areas…
“We Need Wisdom and Time to Understand the Best Way to Improve the Magnuson Act” By Ken Hinman “Nothing fails like success, because we don’t learn from it. We learn only from failure.” – Kenneth Boulding, economist The Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act of 1976 has been a success. The number of overfished stocks…
WILL THE ASMFC SNATCH DEFEAT FROM THE JAWS OF VICTORY?” By Ken Hinman On Tuesday, May 5, a 15-state ASMFC Menhaden Management Board will decide the next steps in conserving “the most important fish in the sea,” based on the latest stock assessment; that is, whether to continue toward an ecosystems approach that protects menhaden’s…
New Menhaden Stock Assessment Highlights, Yet Again, the Need for Ecosystem Goals By Ken Hinman “We have all been here before.” – David Crosby, Déjà Vu The just-published 2015 Atlantic menhaden stock assessment says the species is not overfished and overfishing is not occurring. Okay, we’ve heard that before. But what does it mean, really? Well,…
by Pam Lyons Gromen In the Summer 2014 issue of the Wild Oceans Horizon, we reported on recent discoveries of coral communities in the cold, dark waters of the Atlantic’s offshore canyons, and the efforts of the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council to protect these unique and important habitats. Packaged as Amendment 16 to the…
STEPHANIE CHOATE CELEBRATES HER INDEPENDENCE BY WINNING THE WORLD BLUE MARLIN CHAMPIONSHIP By Stephanie Choate I came to Kona, Hawaii with the understanding that it had fish – and big fish at that. I had previously fished the World Cup in Cape Verde and Madeira, but I never saw a fish over 500 pounds when…