oceana

By Allison Guy When Hugo Arancibia Farías was a child, his mother, like most mothers in central Chile, visited the weekly market to buy common hake, a white-fleshed relative of cod. She usually served it fried, Arancibia recalled with relish. “It was very cheap,” he said, “and very popular.” Nowadays, hake is more expensive than […]

On World Animal Day, we celebrate all the furry, scaly, winged and finned creatures that inhabit our planet. On this international day of action, participants aim to “raise the status of animals in order to improve welfare standards around the globe,” according to organizers at the UK-based charity Naturewatch Foundation. The occasion was first celebrated […]

By Amy McDermott At the height of the Alaskan summer, a troupe of students hiked up the middle of a shallow creek. Undergraduates and grads from the University of Washington, the University of Alaska Fairbanks and Kamchatka State Technical University in eastern Russia carried handheld clickers to count the multitudes of salmon thrashing upstream to […]

By Amy McDermott Picture someone fishing, and a woman probably doesn’t come to mind. Men are the face of fisheries work, even though women are its backbone in much of the world. Half of seafood workers are female. Women net fish, spear octopus, dig clams, dive for abalone and pack and process seafood, yet are […]

By Amy Mcdermott Wars are coming. They will begin with fish. Or so it would seem, as swirling schools of little bass and other seafood species dart across political lines this century. Fish will cross unprecedented political boundaries by 2100 because of climate change, according to a recent study in the journal Science. Seventy or […]

By Allison Guy There are two ways to leave La Tortuga, a fishing town of 7,000 on the northern coast of Peru. One, a pitted gravel road, winds through a landscape of desert canyons and sun-scalded hills. The other way out of La Tortuga takes longer, but it’s more reliable. That’s the town’s secondary schools—the […]

At least 65 California cities and counties have taken action opposing new fossil fuel leasing in the Pacific Ocean since President Trump proposed a massive expansion of drilling in federal waters last year. That ongoing campaign now represents communities with 21.3 million Californians—more than half the state’s population. These actions, combined with recent public opinion […]

By Amy McDermott Hawaii’s knobby finger coral careened toward extinction in 2015. The species was so rare that scientists could only find a few fragments in the wild, scattered across the seabed of Oahu’s Kaneohe Bay. It might have been a familiar story. Vanishing species like Southern Resident orcas and North Atlantic right whales pile […]