During the seismic surveys, ships fire blasts of air to the bottom of the sea every 10 to 12 seconds for weeks or months at a time to map the contours of the ocean floor. The loud, continuous and far-reaching noise can damage the hearing and potentially disorientate and kill marine life, displace fish, devastate zooplankton and cause whales to beach. Blasting can also impact commercial and recreational fishing by decreasing catch rates.
Seismic Testing Is Torturing Marine Life www.youtube.com
The permitting also comes at the heels of the National Climate Assessment, which warned that human activities, predominantly the burning of fossil fuels, is causing rapid climate change.
Rep. Frank Pallone, Jr. (NJ-06), who is poised to assume the chairmanship of the House Energy & Commerce Committee in January, blasted the Trump administration's approval of the permits.
"Seismic testing risks injuring and killing critically endangered species, severely disrupting economically important fisheries, and threatening the Jersey shore," Pallone said on his website. "An environmentally sound coast is critical to New Jersey's economy and it is very possible that seismic testing could lead to oil and gas drilling off our coast—threatening public health, coastal communities, and hundreds of thousands of jobs. Members from both sides of the aisle will work tirelessly to fight this reckless decision by the Trump administration."
BREAKING: Trump administration approves seismic testing permits for the Atlantic Coast. Seismic testing is both dan… https://t.co/mU4UjazW5k— Rep. Frank Pallone (@Rep. Frank Pallone)1543590070.0
Environmental organizations were outraged at the news and vowed to fight the action.
"Just one week after issuing dire warnings on the catastrophic fallout of climate change to come, the Trump Administration is opening our coastlines to for-profit companies to prospect for oil and gas—and is willing to sacrifice marine life, our coastal communities and fisheries in the process," said Michael Jasny, director of the Marine Mammal Protection Project at the Natural Resources Defense Council, in a statement provided to EcoWatch.
"This is the first step towards drilling and scientists warn that seismic activity alone could drive the endangered North Atlantic right whale to extinction. We'll stand with citizens, coastal businesses, scientists, lawmakers, and commercial and recreational fishermen who oppose seismic blasting, and we will fight this illegal action," Jasny added.
North Atlantic Right Whale Population Dips Below 450 After 'Deadliest Year' Since Whaling Era https://t.co/2XFXL2yu0z @environmentca— EcoWatch (@EcoWatch)1507338049.0
Seismic airgun blasting has been proposed within the same main range of imperiled North Atlantic right whales. According to Bloomberg, the IHAs will block surveys during the calving season for the critically endangered species.
The companies that won the permits are: TGS-NOPEC Geophysical Co. Asa; Schlumberger Ltd. subsidiary; WesternGeco Ltd., CGG Services US Inc.; Spectrum Geo Inc.; and a unit of ION Geophysical Corp.
The five companies still must secure permits from the Interior Department's Bureau of Ocean Energy Management before they can start, but those are expected under President Donald Trump's plans for "energy dominance," Bloomberg reported.
Seismic data has not been gathered in the mid- and south-Atlantic regions, from northern Florida to Delaware, for at least 30 years. In January 2017, the Obama administration denied six permits to conduct seismic surveys, concluding that airgun blasting was too risky.
But Trump signed an executive order in April 2017 to aggressively expand offshore drilling in America's publicly-held coastal waters. The order also called for a "streamlined permitting approach for privately funded seismic data research and collection."
Greenpeace USA climate director Janet Redman condemned the Trump administration's anticipated approval of seismic blasting in the Atlantic.
"This is exactly how you push climate change past the point of no return," Redman said in a press release. "The Interior Department can still stop this madness, but they need to hear from every single person who is worried about climate change and every leader in Congress who claims to care about the future. Seismic testing is the first step toward economically devastating oil spills and climate disasters like flooding up and down the Atlantic coast. Stopping seismic testing is a must."
The U.S. government released a report that warned climate change could kill thousands of Americans each year and sl… https://t.co/hV9Me7Imgu— EcoWatch (@EcoWatch)1543333511.0
Lawyers with the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) were similarly outraged by the news, noting that more than 200 local governments along the Eastern Seaboard have passed resolutions against offshore drilling and seismic testing. At least a dozen states have voiced opposition to offshore drilling.
"Permitting seismic blasting in the South Atlantic is completely out of touch with Southeast communities, business leaders, and elected officials who have consistently and overwhelmingly rejected offshore drilling and the seismic blasting that precedes it," said Catherine Wannamaker, an SELC senior attorney, in a press release. "Seismic surveys not only pave the way for offshore drilling that no one wants here, but they also endanger whales, dolphins, and fisheries, and threaten coastal economies. Communities up and down the coast have made clear they do not support seismic blasting in the Atlantic, and they will continue to fight the Trump administration turning its back on them."
Following today's announcement, Oceana launched a new interactive map that displays near real-time activity of apparent seismic vessels in the so-called "Blast Zone." Anyone can use the "We're Watching" map, which uses the technology of Global Fishing Watch, to track the vessels.
"If these companies are allowed to begin seismic airgun blasting, our map gives the public near real-time access to the precise locations of vessels so that they know when, where and if these activities begin off our coast," Diane Hoskins, campaign director at Oceana, said in a provided statement. "This interactive map is a powerful tool in the fight to protect Atlantic communities from offshore drilling."
Note: This post has been updated to include Oceana's map and statement.
- Seismic Blasting Devastates Ocean's Most Vital Organisms ›
- Watchdog Accuses Trump's NOAA of 'Choosing Extinction' for Right Whales by Hiding Scientific Evidence - EcoWatch ›
Eye-Catching Designs Made from Recycled Plastic Bottles
The company sells a range of eco-friendly items like leggings, rash guards, and board shorts that are made using recycled post-consumer plastic bottles. There are currently 16 causes represented by distinct marine-life patterns, from whale shark research and invasive lionfish removal to sockeye salmon monitoring and abalone restoration.
One such organization is Get Inspired, a nonprofit that specializes in ocean restoration and environmental education. Get Inspired founder, marine biologist Nancy Caruso, says supporting on-the-ground efforts is one thing that sets Waterlust apart, like their apparel line that supports Get Inspired abalone restoration programs.
"All of us [conservation partners] are doing something," Caruso said. "We're not putting up exhibits and talking about it — although that is important — we're in the field."
Waterlust not only helps its conservation partners financially so they can continue their important work. It also helps them get the word out about what they're doing, whether that's through social media spotlights, photo and video projects, or the informative note card that comes with each piece of apparel.
"They're doing their part for sure, pushing the information out across all of their channels, and I think that's what makes them so interesting," Caruso said.
And then there are the clothes, which speak for themselves.
Advocate Apparel to Start Conversations About Conservation
Waterlust's concept of "advocate apparel" encourages people to see getting dressed every day as an opportunity to not only express their individuality and style, but also to advance the conversation around marine science. By infusing science into clothing, people can visually represent species and ecosystems in need of advocacy — something that, more often than not, leads to a teaching moment.
"When people wear Waterlust gear, it's just a matter of time before somebody asks them about the bright, funky designs," said Waterlust's CEO, Patrick Rynne. "That moment is incredibly special, because it creates an intimate opportunity for the wearer to share what they've learned with another."
The idea for the company came to Rynne when he was a Ph.D. student in marine science.
"I was surrounded by incredible people that were discovering fascinating things but noticed that often their work wasn't reaching the general public in creative and engaging ways," he said. "That seemed like a missed opportunity with big implications."
Waterlust initially focused on conventional media, like film and photography, to promote ocean science, but the team quickly realized engagement on social media didn't translate to action or even knowledge sharing offscreen.
Rynne also saw the "in one ear, out the other" issue in the classroom — if students didn't repeatedly engage with the topics they learned, they'd quickly forget them.
"We decided that if we truly wanted to achieve our goal of bringing science into people's lives and have it stick, it would need to be through a process that is frequently repeated, fun, and functional," Rynne said. "That's when we thought about clothing."
Support Marine Research and Sustainability in Style
To date, Waterlust has sold tens of thousands of pieces of apparel in over 100 countries, and the interactions its products have sparked have had clear implications for furthering science communication.
For Caruso alone, it's led to opportunities to share her abalone restoration methods with communities far and wide.
"It moves my small little world of what I'm doing here in Orange County, California, across the entire globe," she said. "That's one of the beautiful things about our partnership."
Check out all of the different eco-conscious apparel options available from Waterlust to help promote ocean conservation.
Melissa Smith is an avid writer, scuba diver, backpacker, and all-around outdoor enthusiast. She graduated from the University of Florida with degrees in journalism and sustainable studies. Before joining EcoWatch, Melissa worked as the managing editor of Scuba Diving magazine and the communications manager of The Ocean Agency, a non-profit that's featured in the Emmy award-winning documentary Chasing Coral.
Related fish species—like eels and anchovies—have similar nutritional value, according to a new study in Nature Communications. Two fish can be wildly different on the outside but surprisingly similar on the inside, if they're close on the tree of life.
"There's a shared evolutionary history in the ocean," said food security scientist Bapu Vaitla, who co-led the new study at Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, with evolutionary biologist David Collar at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia.
Turns out, shared evolutionary history is a road map to the patterns of vitamins and minerals fanned through the tissues of fish worldwide. That's a juicy tidbit for researchers studying the links between fish and human health. The specific blend of nutrients in a fish determines how people are nourished when they eat that species.
Making Connections
More than 3 billion people depend on fish for about one-fifth of the animal protein they eat. It's a staple food in dozens of countries, that offers calories, protein, fats and essential micronutrients like iron, zinc, calcium and vitamin A.
Not all fish are the same, though. Cod is much lower in zinc than anchovies, while salmon and trout are fattier than flatfishes, and higher in vitamin D than mackerels. Each species has its characteristic mix of nutrients.
Knowing that mix tells scientists how fish nourish people. It's valuable information, but not cheap or easy work.
Analyzing the nutrient content of one tissue sample costs several hundred to several thousand dollars, said Oceana science adviser Chris Golden, who heads the Harvard research group responsible for the new study. It takes multiple samples, sometimes collected around the world, to build a complete nutrient profile for a species.
Nutrient profiles do exist for hundreds of fish species, but thousands are nutritionally important, Vaitla said. "We couldn't collect samples all over the world, so we needed to predict nutrient content somehow."
A Living Mosaic
The oceans are a patchwork of unevenly distributed nutrients. Vaitla and his research partners expected that fish with similar lifestyles, that develop in similar conditions and habitats, would probably be exposed to similar challenges and opportunities, and so be nutritionally alike.
But when the scientists looked across 371 food fish species, they found that body size, preferred habitat and other lifestyle characteristics were not good predictors of nutritional similarity. Instead, genetic relatedness turned out to be key.
"It's not totally unsurprising," said marine ecologist William Cheung of the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, who was not involved in the new study. Evolutionary relationships click as predictors of nutrition, he said. "Sometimes in science, when someone tells you the answer, you think, ah yes, that's true, that makes sense."
Yet, Cheung said, if he had undertaken the same research, he would've tested lifestyle characteristics first, too. He and Vaitla were both surprised that body size, habitat and other lifestyle characteristics didn't seem to play a role. Vaitla hasn't ruled them out. Repeating the study with more species of fish, he said, could reveal a pattern between lifestyle characteristics and nutrition in the future.
Food for Thought
That related fish are nutritionally similar may not be surprising, but it is useful. Scientists can now predict the vitamin and mineral content of fish species without tissue samples, based instead on their evolutionary relationships.
Predictions could come in especially handy now, as many marine species relocate in response to global change. As they move, they carry their distinct mix of vitamins and minerals with them, exposing fishermen and coastal people to a new mix of nutrients in the fish they eat. When new species move in, they may have different nutritional value from the old staples, exposing communities to risk of malnutrition.
"When we're worried about things like climate change or pollution or overfishing and how its affecting human health, the question amounts to knowing the nutrient landscape out there and how these environmental changes alter that landscape," Vaitla said. "If we're able to know that, we can say things like climate change will impact the availability of iron to this extent, and for these people."
To avoid anticipated risks, communities might curb commercial fishing or set aside marine protected zones, Vaitla said. But first, they need a way to see what's coming. "Evolutionary history," he said, "gives us a shortcut to paint the nutrient landscape out there."
It's easy to point the finger at humans, either directly or indirectly, for causing the crisis. But each of these species is dealing with a unique set of problems including boat strikes, bycatch where they become unintentionally entangled in fishing gear, low food supply and toxic chemicals.
"They are all anthropogenic issues, but they're all very different issues," said Renee Albertson, a cetacean biologist at the Marine Mammal Institute of Oregon State University in Newport.
One major, and shared, obstacle in their path to possible recovery: a slow reproduction cycle.
"If you can't reproduce effectively or efficiently, that's just going to make the problem worse," Albertson said, adding that slow breeding in these long-lived animals is "hard to overcome" by species also suffering from a variety of challenges to survival.
Long lives and slow breeding mean that, some of these species could go extinct within a decade, though it might take others a couple human generations.
A Bevy of Problems
Many cetaceans face challenges. But for a handful of species or populations, the situation has become particularly dire.
The decline of southern resident killer whales in the inland waters around Washington state and southern British Columbia, is still partly a mystery. The population is now at a 30-year low likely due to a combination of problems, including increased noise and overcrowding from boat traffic, and an influx of toxic chemicals in their aquatic ecosystem.
Another major concern is the drop in the chinook salmon the orcas depend on, prompted in part by overfishing and the damming of fresh waterways that the fish need for spawning, according to Erin Meyer-Gutbrod, a postdoctoral researcher at the Marine Science Institute at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
She said that southern residents are down to around 74 individuals, with the population losing a critical newborn this past summer. "That is the lowest it has been since 1975, following the large capture of killer whales for marine theme parks like Sea World," Meyer-Gutbrod said.
On the East Coast, ship strikes in U.S. and Canadian waters may have been responsible for some of the 17 North Atlantic right whales known to have died in 2017. The population did not breed a single calf over the winter season of 2017 to 2018. Only 451 individuals remained as of late 2016.
17 Critically Endangered Right #Whales Died in 2017—The Time for Systemic Change Is Now @EcoWatch @… https://t.co/K5sUieMFq5— WildAid (@WildAid)1514838060.0
"It's almost a cliche to talk about how tough things are getting," said Sean Brillant, a senior conservation biologist with the Canadian Wildlife Federation who works with North Atlantic right whales. According to the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service, adult females could number less than 35 by 2067.
"We'll certainly be around to watch these things go extinct," he said.
Off the coast of New Zealand's North Island, Maui's dolphins are down to a few dozen individuals, due in part to entanglement with fishing nets and trawling equipment. Vaquita porpoises in the Gulf of California number less than 30 individuals, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and could be as low as 12. Many experts say vaquitas are almost certainly doomed at this point, due to bycatch from illegal fishing. "The vaquita is just something we've ultimately failed at," Albertson said.
Other cetaceans with slow birth rates, like sperm whales and Bryde's whale, also face problems in the world's oceans, Brillant said, but many of them are hard to find and track in the deep oceans.
A Slow Response
Scott Baker, a whale and dolphin researcher and associate director of the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State University, said the problem many cetaceans face began centuries ago, with large-scale whaling. He added that North Atlantic right whales have yet to recover from the decimation of those times, for example.
But some species have managed remarkable recoveries. Meyer-Gutbrod pointed to Eastern Pacific gray whales, which have doubled in numbers in the past 50 years, she said. Albertson said she's seen huge increases in the populations of humpbacks in the western Antarctic Peninsula, partly due to warming waters from climate change.
The major difference is that these whales reproduce relatively quickly, giving birth to a new calf every one to two years, compared to every three to four years, on average, for North Atlantic right whales or southern resident orcas, Albertson said.
Hope on the Horizon
While slow breeding is a significant challenge, the good news is that some of these whales are long-lived, meaning they have more time to reproduce. Brillant said the failure with right whales and southern residents is in managing human activity. Better instituted laws and regulations, he said, could offer a chance at recovery.
Twelve out of the 17 right whale deaths last year were in Canadian waters. In part, Meyer-Gutbrod said this was due to an "unexpected habitat shift" into the Canadian Gulf of St. Lawrence, which lacked protections to protect whales from ship strikes or fishing gear.
But Canada responded very quickly, she added, reducing fishing gear in the water, requiring large ships to slow down in whale areas and rerouting others. "Fishing and shipping regulations are very effective in reducing mortalities and giving the species a chance to recover," she said, but noted that these regulations can also negatively affect fishing and shipping industries. "Therefore, maintaining adequate protections for this species is an ongoing political battle."
Many cetaceans in trouble are slow-breeding and long-lived, but Brillant stresses that their slow reproduction is not the ultimate problem. "I almost wonder if we fall into the danger of trying to find the most convenient excuse for why these animals are having a hard time," he said.
North Atlantic right whales' low reproductive rates, for example, might actually be a secondary effect of the stress of living close to people in the U.S. Northeast and Canada, Brillant said. The whales' southern counterparts in the Mid-Atlantic live off a quieter, less populous coast, and have higher birth rates, he said.
While long-lived species may have a better chance at recovery down the road, their slow birth rates make success difficult to track. It can take decades to tell if conservation measures are successful. "If we stop killing right whales tomorrow, we won't be able to measure if that had an effect on the population for 10 years," Brillant said.
"The next generation will know whether we made the right choices."
Nowadays, hake is more expensive than beef. "It is too much for a family," said Arancibia, a fisheries biologist at the University of Concepción in central Chile. The reason is simple economics: The scarcer a resource, the more expensive. After a devastating population crash in the mid-2000s, Chile's once-common hake have yet to recover.
After years of blaming the collapse on an influx of predatory squid, Arancibia said, fisheries officials recently wised up to the real culprit: a vast tide of illegal fishing, much of it from artisanal fishers. If the illegal hake catch can't be reined in, experts say, Chile stands to lose its most important artisanal fishery, a cultural touchstone—and a pretty tasty fried fish.
Smaller Fish to Fry
Common hake, called merluza in Spanish, is to Chile what cod was to New England. But unlike hulking cod, hake's not much to look at, at least not anymore.
In the seafood market in Caleta Portales, a fish landing site in the central Chilean city of Valparaiso, hake are the little guys heaped among monstrous cusk eels and seabream as big and flat as dinner plates. The little hake have skinny, tapering bodies, big heads and bugged eyes—the result of gas expansion as the fish were yanked up quickly from ocean depths.
Hake weren't always so runty. They used to be bigger at maturity, by several centimeters. But nowadays, because of overfishing, there aren't many big fish left. Most hake in Chilean waters are juveniles, and the adults are getting smaller as they race to reproduce before they're caught.
The first ripples of overfishing stirred in the 1990s, as Chile poured its national energies into economic growth after the end of a two-decade military dictatorship. Fisheries policies encouraged the rapid expansion of an industrial, export-oriented fleet, with little thought to sustainability. "The attitude was to produce, to exploit, to overexploit," Arancibia said.
The free-for-all didn't last. In 2001, the government reigned in overfishing with a quota system, which set annual catch limits for hake, but unevenly split the number between industrial and artisanal fishing groups.
At first, it seemed like the quotas might work. In 2002, officials estimated that 1.55 million metric tons of hake swam in Chile's seas, a sharp jump from 600,000 metric tons the year before. An optimistic quota was set. But the next survey, in 2004, found just 270,000 tons of hake—20 percent of the fish's historical abundance.
"It was catastrophic," Arancibia said.
The missing million tons of hake, fisheries officials and many scientists said, had been sucked down by burgeoning populations of Humboldt squid, an abundant open-ocean predator that can weigh up to 90 pounds. Arancibia rejects that line of reasoning. The squid's other prey—mackerel, sardines, anchovies—hadn't plummeted along with hake. He places the blame solely on overfishing.
Since then, hake have barely improved, although you wouldn't know it by government catch limits. Fisheries officials upped the fish's quota in 2014, and again in 2017, turning a blind eye to the continued overfishing.
Small Boats, Big Woes
Hake is far from the only fish in trouble in Chile. Of the country's 43 fisheries, around half are struggling, with nine depleted or collapsed. To address this, Chile passed a sweeping fisheries law in 2012, which was implemented the following year.
"Quotas were cut in half from one day to the next, but the number of artisanal fishermen stayed the same," said Liesbeth van der Meer, the head of Oceana in Chile, who worked in the fisheries sector for 6 years. Restrictions on fishing might have been good for the hake if the law hadn't caused widespread resentment among small-scale fishers, or if its rules had been enforced.
Shockwaves from the quota cuts rippled up and down the coast. Politically powerful artisanal unions in places like Caleta Portales historically used strikes and protests to get their quotas upped. But the new fisheries law stipulated that quotas could only be set and changed by a scientific committee. Other fishers from smaller "caletas"—the beaches or docks where fish are offloaded—felt bewildered by seemingly sudden and unfair rules.
The quotas weren't divided evenly, either. Chile's 92,000 artisanal fishermen got 40 percent of the country's total catch. The industrial fleet, which is owned by just seven wealthy families, took the remaining 60 percent.
The law also carved up coastal waters into restricted blocks for each caleta. Fishermen from these beaches or docks had traditionally shared their fishing grounds during times of scarcity, said Eugenia Orgaz, a fisherwoman who's been netting hake and other species since the 1970s.
Orgaz lives in Caleta Horcon, a fishing village an hour north of Valparaiso, where draught horses are still used to haul boats from the water. But with the 2012 restrictions, the traditional spirit of cooperation suffered, Orgaz said. She suspects that big industry is trying to destroy fishers like her.
Take It to the Limit
Orgaz respects hake catch limits and the yearly September closures for hake spawning, but other fishers are less scrupulous. Because hake remains Chile's most important artisanal fishery, many small-scale fishermen face a choice between earning money and breaking the law.
Given weak law enforcement and low fines for breaking the rules, it's not surprising that many choose the latter. While the artisanal fleet is assigned 40 percent of the hake quota, Arancibia estimates that they're landing 75 to 77 percent of the total catch.
"Illegal fishing sinks any recovery plans we have," van der Meer said. "It's gotten out of hand." Oceana is calling for better monitoring of illegal fishing in Chile, extending hake's closed season from one month to three and increasing the fish's minimum legal catch size.
Small-scale fishermen do share some responsibility for hake's sorry state, said Oscar Espinoza, the president of Chile's National Organization of Artisanal Fishers. But he has a different outlook on how to bring back his country's favorite fish.
Middlemen buy most artisanal hake, taking a big chunk of fishermen's potential profit, Espinoza said. They should be cut out of the supply chain, so fishermen can sell directly to restaurants, grocers and consumers. Chileans need to demand legal hake too, Espinoza added. Because illegal fish is cheaper, it creates unfair competition between fishermen who follow the rules and those who don't.
Espinoza would also like to see industrial hake fishing eliminated. Artisanal fishers have exclusive access to the zone from the shore out to 5 nautical miles; after that, they must compete with the industrial fleet. Their sophisticated gear and high catch levels are "in no way comparable" to those of their small-scale counterparts, Espinoza said. For him, the industrial fleet is "nearly totally" responsible for the hake crash.
Dying Traditions
After a collapse that's stretched on close to two decades, Arancibia doesn't have much faith in new laws. "We must change the culture of the fishers," he said. He declined to guess how. "It's an issue for the sociologists, the anthropologists," he said.
Arancibia might actually get his wish for a culture change, although not in a way that's likely to make anyone happy. The artisanal fleet is graying. Young people are lured away by better-paid, safer and more stable jobs.
Most fishers are in their 50s and 60s, a recent survey found, and don't want their kids to follow in their footsteps. Orgaz shares this outlook. She's happy that her son, who works in construction, didn't pursue the family business. "Your children don't belong to you," she said.
As for Orgaz, she hopes to keep fishing until she dies. With her, and fishers like her, the traditions around hake and other native seafoods might disappear too.
Every morning, Castro unloads his catch at Caleta Membrillo, a fishing dock in Valparaiso's iconic port. The waterfront there is lined with seafood restaurants and a fish market that buzzes with activity beginning well before dawn. This city may look like a mecca for local, artisanal seafood, but looks can deceive.
In truth, Chileans don't eat much wild fish from Chile anymore. Even in Valparaiso's waterfront restaurants, there's no guarantee that what you're eating was locally caught, let alone within a day's boat trip of the city.
A small but growing locavore movement is changing things little by little, and reviving Chile's long-neglected ties to native seafood. After decades of decline, renewed interest in responsible, boat-to-plate seafood could be a game changer for the country's struggling artisanal fishers.
Three Fish
Up a steep hill overlooking Valparaiso's bay, snapshots of local fishers, including Castro, decorate the walls of the new restaurant Tres Peces, or Three Fish. One warm March evening, curious diners trickled in during the restaurant's soft opening.
Meyling Tang, one of Tres Peces' three owners, spoke over appetizers of sea urchin, octopus and pebre, Chiles' ubiquitous salsa-like condiment, here peppered with diced bull kelp. The inspiration for the restaurant was simple, she said. "There was nowhere good to eat seafood in Valparaiso."
Tres Peces serves fish from 40 artisanal fishing cooperatives across Chile, and guarantees a market for the less-popular species that wholesale buyers often turn down. In turn, the restaurant gets top-quality products that haven't been subject to Chile's notoriously unsanitary and crime-ridden supply chain.
It's risky to open a restaurant that only sells seafood from small-scale Chilean fishers, Tang admitted. For a country that has more sea than land, wild seafood is surprisingly unpopular in Chile.
The country has 4,200 kilometers (approximately 2,610 miles) of coastline, and is the fifth-most productive fishing country in the world. Chileans, however, eat just 13 kilos (approximately 29 pounds) of seafood a year, 7 kilos below the global average. Most fish, wild or farmed, is exported, or is ground up as feed supplements for the country's enormous salmon farms. Imported tilapia has supplanted native hake as a favorite fish for Chileans.
It wasn't always like this. Chileans have rich culinary traditions centered on the hundred-plus edible species in the nation's waters, from seaweed and snow crab to "piure," a bottom-dwelling invertebrate that looks like a cross between a human heart and a moss-covered rock.
Overfishing takes a big share of the blame for the drop-off in wild seafood consumption. As hake and other popular species declined, their prices shot up. Availability is also an issue. Outside of coastal towns and specialized seafood markets, it can be hard to find any fish that didn't come from a farm.
Risky Business
Tang and her colleagues at Tres Peces are longtime advocates for sustainable small-scale fishing in Chile. The foundation they work with, Cocinamar, supports sustainable fishing and seafood consumption. "The restaurant was a chance for us to put our money where our mouth is," she said. It also serves as a community space.
Fishermen like Castro come to give talks about their lives. Events bring free local seafood to Valaparaiso's streets. It's a chance not just to connect diners to the source of their seafood, but to deepen fishermen's pride in their work. Tres Peces is "not only a restaurant," Tang said. "We teach about responsible fishing. We tell stories."
For Gustavo Sandoval, a chef from Puerto Varas in southern Chile, the biggest hurtle to a local seafood movement is public perception. There are plenty of affordable Chilean fish that go ignored. A lack of promotion and education, Sandoval explained, means that people think fish is prohibitively expensive.
Sandoval is no stranger to promoting Chile's fish. He's a mainstay in local and national seafood fairs, and appeared four times on the cooking show Reyes del Mar, or Kings of the Sea, on the Chilean public television station TVN. Next year, Sandoval plans to open a sea-focused sandwich shop, with most of the fish sourced from artisanal Chilean fishers.
All the fish-focused effort from chefs across Chile is having an effect, Sandoval thinks. Things are changing, he said, but slowly.
The Imitation Game
As of late May, things had changed in at least one place. Tres Peces was open full-time and business was brisk. A critic for the prominent newspaper La Tercera called it one of the year's best new restaurants.
Promisingly, other chefs had approached Tres Peces asking for its seafood suppliers—a trade secret Tang was happy to share. "With one restaurant, you can't make a change," she said. "We're just a pilot. We hope others will copy us."
Since Tres Peces opened, Castro has seen an important change too. He used to go home after selling his morning's catch. Now, he has a second shift delivering to Tres Peces and other restaurants in Valparaiso. The extra work means he's earning a better and more stable living.
There's still a long way to go. Fish populations are slipping, Castro said, and artisanal fishermen feel squeezed by Chile's wealthy industrial fishers, who have larger, more powerful ships and a bigger share of the country's fish quota. Young people by and large have turned away from a life at sea, leaving older fishers worried for the future of their way of life.
But becoming a bit of a local fishing celebrity has given Castro a fresh outlook on his work. He's not a kung fu master, but there are some perks to the job. He loves the sea and the contact with nature, he said. "Every day is an adventure."
Five species—sockeye, coho, pink, chum and chinook salmon—live in the freezing ocean between the U.S. and Russia, and swim up rivers in both countries to reproduce. Even though some fish spawn in Alaska and others in the Far East, they ultimately seed the same stock in the Bering Sea. It sits at the top of the North Pacific, the largest, most valuable and most abundant wild Pacific salmon fishery in the world.
Salmon are enormously economically important to both Russia and the U.S. They contributed $406 million to Alaska in 2016, according to the state's Department of Fish and Game. And in Kamchatka, salmon in the Kol Refuge pull in $981 thousand to $3.7 million annually, with ecosystem services from the fish and their habitat estimated at $784 million to $2.38 billion, according to the Wild Salmon Center in Portland, Oregon.
Despite so much on the line, Russia and the U.S. rarely coordinate management efforts and research is largely siloed, said fisheries ecologist Megan McPhee, an associate professor at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. "Because of the language barrier," she said, "there's a lot of research that goes on without the other side knowing about it."
That's where the students come in. From June through August, budding fisheries scientists from both sides of the Pacific live and study at a rustic field camp near Bristol Bay. It's part of a summer field course, taught jointly by the University of Alaska Fairbanks, the University of Washington and Kamchatka State Technical University, and championed by the World Wildlife Fund in Anchorage. Hiking up creeks to count salmon is one way to learn the ropes, and to lay the foundation for future collaboration.
"The idea is to build greater understanding of the similarities and differences in management on both sides of the Bering Sea," McPhee said. It's "an opportunity to learn from each other."
Mind the Gap
There is plenty to learn on both sides.
"The Russians have a lot to offer," said Milo Adkison, a fisheries professor at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks who teaches the field course. "They're excellent naturalists and do a lot of research on salmon," which is often complimentary to research in the U.S., he said. For instance, Russian scientists were the first to realize that steelhead and rainbow trout can interbreed, even though steelhead spend their adult lives at sea, while rainbow trout live in fresh water.
Russia, too, might learn from Alaska's model of salmon management. Bristol Bay saw the largest sockeye salmon run in its 125-year commercial fishing history this summer. "I'd argue that means our methodology is pretty successful," said biologist Tim Sands, who manages the salmon fishery on the west side of Bristol Bay. "I think a lot of people look to the way we do things here, because it's working."
When students come over from Kamchatka, they also get an education in Alaska's salmon culture, which borders on obsession. Salmon festivals punctuate the summer, and fish motifs feature heavily in local art. "Obviously it's a source of food and income," McPhee said, "but I think it's also tied up in the identity of many Alaskans."
The same is not true across the Bering Sea, she said, where salmon are less of a touchstone, likely because Kamchatka was historically a Soviet military outpost, and even today people tend to keep to the city. Yet, coastal far-eastern Russians and Alaskans face parallel challenges. They both have abundant salmon habitats threatened by mineral and fossil fuel development, and they're both limited by the language barrier. The hope for Russian and North American students is a future that embraces their common ground.
Far Afield
The University of Washington and University of Alaska have offered field courses near Bristol Bay for years. But it's only since 2016, with the help of funding from the World Wildlife Fund, that they've brought in students from Kamchatka. A handful have spent summer weeks living in bunk houses, attending lectures and field trips and working through homework assignments with U.S. peers.
Biologist Sands, who oversees the local salmon fishery, occasionally guest lectures for the field course, but isn't formally affiliated with the program. He sees potential for students to learn from one another, and one day, to build better fisheries. "We do things the way we do things, and we don't necessarily change," Sands said. "But when you interact with professionals from other places … you can get ideas about how maybe we could do something a little different."
Students from both countries can be shy at first, especially with language skills, said John Simeone with the World Wildlife Fund in Anchorage. Walls crumble as they work through homework assignments and shared meals, he said. "Early on the barriers seem hard, and by the end they're hugging each other and sad to see each other go."
The hope is that friendships evolve into professional collaborations, as participants grow into leaders of salmon conservation. McPhee and a professor from Kamchatka are already joining forces on an educational curriculum that includes the most important salmon studies from both sides of the Bering Sea.
For students hiking Alaska's shallow creeks, their pant legs sopping, the summer was an immersive education. Salmon was just one part of it. Knowingly or not, they were also laying the foundation to bridge the divide across the Bering Sea.
That's more than unfair. Excluding women overlooks half the workforce, and all the fish and shellfish they pull out of the water. Ignoring such a sizable chunk of fishing sets communities up to overexploit their resources, according to a 2006 study from the University of British Columbia. It's a recipe for overfishing and ocean depletion.
In the Tuvalu Islands, for example, a government initiative to restore edible sea snails failed because it only consulted men. Women also harvest the snails, and continued collecting them as usual, unknowingly trouncing the restoration effort.
Female fishers have deep knowledge of the seafoods they catch and the rhythms of the beaches where they work, often passed down matriarchal lines. They have strong incentives to manage natural resources sustainably, experts say, but first they need a seat at the table.
Pull Up a Chair
A glut of factors conspire to silence women in fisheries. Overt sexism is part of the problem, but sometimes exclusion is subtler. It can come down to definitions of fishing.
Around the world, men and women often catch seafood in gender-specific ways. Men tend to work in deeper water with specialized fishing gears, while women walk the shallows catching fish and shellfish at low tide, according to a 2013 study. Traditionally, men's work was considered fishing, the study said, while women were marginalized as collectors or gatherers.
Reasons for fishing also split along gendered lines. Women often work to feed their families, while men focus on lucrative species to sell, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
In societies where women manage the home and children, they may not have time to come to male-organized meetings, even if they are technically allowed, according to a study by economist Bina Agarwal at the University of Manchester, England. Social norms can also keep women quiet, in deference to men, if they do attend meetings.
In southwest Madagascar, for example, women walk the reef flats at low tide, collecting octopus with spears or rebar, while men dive for larger octopus and more valuable species in deeper water. Eighty-six percent of women harvest octopus, compared to 31 percent of men. Yet men, especially elders, dominate decision-making for the octopus fishery in village meetings, according to a 2013 study by the UK-based marine conservation group Blue Ventures.
"While some women do attend these meetings," authors Kame Westerman and Sophie Benbow of Blue Ventures wrote, "most do not have the time, desire, or support of their husbands and families."
Domestic demands pull women into fishing, and ironically, also lock them out of decision-making.
Those same household responsibilities also make women good stewards of their environment, Agarwal wrote, because they depend on natural resources day-in and day-out. In the rural forests of Gujarat, India, for example, women collect firewood daily for household chores and cooking. Men cut timber more sporadically. They can wait longer for felled trees to grow back.
It's women, villagers told Agarwal in 1995, who can't afford a depleted environment.
Lifting All Voices
Fisheries management is better when women are included. At the most basic level, that's because women are half the population. No decision reflects a community's reality without them.
Empowering projects are underway around the world.
In the Pacific Islands, Fiji's Ministry of Fisheries hosted a national forum last year to recognize and empower female fishers. A second meeting convened this May, where some women said they now raise concerns in village meetings.
In Sri Lanka, a project empowering women to restore badly-damaged mangrove habitats aims to bolster fisheries fringing the island. More than 7,000 women across 1,500 poor coastal villages trained to plant and tend mangrove saplings, in return for small loans at low interest to start their own businesses. The women keep an eye out for illegal clearing, which they report as part of the program. Empowering women as stewards of the mangroves aims to restore the forests, which provide critical nursery habitat for the island's subsistence fisheries, but have been largely cut down for development.
Efforts like these chip away at inequity, though progress toward fairness is slow. Women remain largely voiceless in fisheries in much of the world. Think how the oceans might change, what potential, if women were free to unleash theirs.
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When a keeper approached the tank, the youngsters rushed to the glass, then swam up to the surface, expecting a meal. These fish were living the good life.
They were the lucky ones.
Worldwide, seahorses are in trouble, threatened by habitat loss, and sold in a massive global trade. Scientists say this can't go on, or seahorses will severely decline. But existing conservation efforts may not be enough to save them.
Researchers estimate that 37 million seahorses are taken from shallow, lush coastal waters every year, mostly ensnared by indiscriminate fishing gear. Southeast Asia and West Africa are the main regions exporting them. More than half of captured seahorses end up dead, dried and sold internationally for use in traditional medicines thought to boost virility and even cure impotence. A small percent are plunked into home aquariums, or sold as kitschy souvenirs.
Twelve seahorse species are listed as "vulnerable" by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, one step down from endangered. An additional 17 species are understudied, and listed as "data deficient." Two are endangered.
In 2002, an international treaty called the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, or CITES, responded to mounting concerns by tightening trade restrictions on all 44 species of seahorse. But scientists say that existing measures don't go far enough.
In the decade after the restrictions took effect, tens of millions of seahorses still died worldwide because of nonselective fishing. Millions were still sold around the world. Between 2005 and 2015, the U.S. imported roughly 140,000 live, wild-caught seahorses through Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle alone, according to U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service data obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request.
To make matters worse, many of the fishing methods to catch seahorses also destroy their habitats. Overfishing is just one part of a much larger issue. Despite legal protection, life keeps getting harder for these unusual fish.
A Beastly Problem
Victor Cheng leaned across his office desk, in a small business park, in San Jose, California. He poured over a thick Chinese medical encyclopedia, hunting for "hai ma" or seahorse.
Cheng, a graduate of UC Berkeley and UCLA, practices traditional Chinese medicine in California, and at Shuguang Hospital in Shanghai. When he found "seahorse" in the encyclopedia, he translated the entry. The first records of their medical use appeared about 2,000 years ago, he read, in a Daoist tome, the Baopuzi. They are typically soaked in alcohol, or boiled as a tea, to ostensibly increase sperm count and activity.
While Chinese medicine has a two thousand-year history with seahorses, Cheng said that today, they "are far from commonly used herbs." Seahorses are used recreationally and superstitiously, he said. "I don't even think they stock them in major hospitals in China."
That's not to say that seahorse doesn't work, Cheng added. But they are a folk remedy, like a supplement from a vitamin store. A doctor would prescribe something more potent, like seal's penis, he said.
Despite the seahorse's folk status, traditional medicine still fuels the majority of global demand. To understand why, consider the size of China's population, and its health care system, Cheng said. China is home to more than one billion people. Imagine if just 1 percent bought a single seahorse every year. That would still add up to 14 million animals.
And folk remedies, while sometimes suspect, remain popular because health care is especially unpleasant in China. To make social services affordable, doctors are paid very little. "That doesn't attract top talent to the industry," Cheng said. Rather than visit a doctor they don't trust, rural people head for prestigious (and crowded) urban hospitals, to see a physician with a good reputation, he said. They can wait in long lines for hours, even sleeping on the floor, before being seen. Locally available treatments, like seahorses, are an appealing alternative.
But medical demand isn't the whole story. The problem is much bigger, researchers say. Because, it turns out, most seahorses aren't caught on purpose.
The Wrong Catch
Most fishermen don't set out to supply the traditional medicine market. They snare seahorses accidentally, using indiscriminate trawl nets, gill nets and crab traps, while angling for other creatures, said marine scientist Sarah Foster of the conservation group Project Seahorse. Bycatch would be thrown away as trash fish if not for medicinal demand.
"So even if we weren't using seahorses, they would still be caught and killed," Foster said. That makes it unfair to blame traditional medicine for seahorse declines, she added. "It's the overexploitation by non-selective fishing gear that's the problem."
Bycatch hurts seahorses both directly and indirectly: It kills millions a year, while destructive fishing gear damages their habitat by mangling fragile ecosystems, Foster said. The weighted trawl nets that snag these fish also rip up the seabed, along with the grasses, rocks and corals that seahorses cling to.
Perhaps most insidiously, bycatch keeps wild seahorses cheap — at least for now. Fishermen can sell them for very little. They'd otherwise be thrown away, after all. Prices are marked up as seahorses move from local ports to distributors, and into herbal shops worldwide. And as these animals become rarer, demand may drive the cost up further, meaning they'll just get more expensive.
Shifting Tides
Boxes of loose tea, bags of roots and other natural products line the shelves of herbal shops in San Francisco's Chinatown. Bins of animal and plant-based products are filed neatly beneath glass counters. Dried seahorses used to be common. You could buy them by the scoopful.
Nowadays, questions about seahorses are met with hesitation or silence. Seahorses are gone — or at least, less visible — in Bay Area markets.
Importers now need special permits to sell any non-native species, so shop owners have a much harder time stocking their shelves with seahorses legally. The permits, which have been required since seahorses were listed on the treaty CITES in 2002, certify that any species for sale were caught without harming wild populations, meaning herbal shops can't sell bycatch anymore.
Following permitting requirements, most of the major exporting countries banned seahorse trade. Thailand, the biggest producer, voluntarily suspended its exports in 2016. Ninety-six percent of the global trade is now illegal.
"A decline in reported trade looks like a good thing on paper," Foster said. "But that does not reflect what's really happening." Between 20 and 25 million dead, dried seahorses are still moving across borders every year, she estimated, largely from the same countries as before. Trade bans forced the industry underground, but it's still massive.
"Now we're talking about illegal wildlife trade," Foster said. Desiccated seahorses have a long shelf life and are easy to hide in suitcases. They're shipped illegally, so they don't have permits, making the black market much harder to track.
But even if the trade bans had worked, seahorses would still be dying in droves, because most are killed unintentionally by fishing gear. Regardless if seahorses are traded legally or illegally, Foster said, "what matters is how many are coming out of the water."
More selective fishing gear is one broad solution. "They need to stop trawling," Foster said. "We need much more of the ocean set aside, where these gears are not being used."
As conservationists push for long-term international solutions, aquariums, zoos and private businesses are exploring another option: captive breeding. Learning to farm seahorses, breeders say, offers a glimmer of hope for their future in the wild.
Farming the Future
Today, most imported seahorses are wild-caught. But alternatives, like captive breeding, do exist. Farming is especially promising for the pet and aquarium trades, where captive-bred specimens gained popularity after wild ones became harder to buy.
The baby potbellied seahorses that crowded the glass at the California Academy of Sciences, for example, were born and raised in captivity thousands of miles from their native Australia.
Steven Yong sat behind the scenes at the Cal Academy, in a bright conference room framed by sleek, sliding-glass doors. Yong is the Studbook Keeper and Species Survival Program Coordinator for lined seahorses, native to the Eastern Seaboard. It's his job to know the pedigrees kept in every American Association of Zoos and Aquariums facility, and to play matchmaker by recommending which lineages should breed.
Seahorses, he said, are challenging to rear in captivity, because babies, called fry, rarely survive to adulthood. "Tiny fry need tiny food," he said. In lieu of fish flakes, most aquariums feed their seahorses brine shrimp, which are small and relatively inexpensive, but offer limited nutrition. Facilities like the Academy are growing other live food options, to mimic the dietary diversity seahorses get in the wild.
While aquariums "try to limit our wild collections," Yong said, breeding programs are still far behind those for land animals or even freshwater fish. Scientists don't know enough about many wild populations to bring them into an aquarium setting. But some day, aquarists like Yong hope to breed imperiled seahorses, so they aren't taken from the ocean.
Across the Pacific in Hawaii, Australia and Sri Lanka, seahorse farms have already cropped up. Carol Cozzi-Schmarr has raised seahorses in Kona, Hawaii, since 1998. Her farm, Ocean Rider, supplies 30 species to the pet trade and for global conservation.
"We did it to provide an alternative to taking seahorses out of the ocean," she said. "If we weren't preserving the species, no one would ever see them again." Today, Schmarr said Ocean Rider is large enough to supply the pet trade with thousands of seahorses a year.
Even so, captive breeding is unlikely to be widespread or cost-effective enough to supply the much-larger traditional medicine market, Project Seahorse's Foster cautioned. Schmarr, Foster and Yong emphasized the whole picture of bycatch, lingering market demand and habitat loss as a tangled, wicked problem. Yong questioned if captive breeding can ever really put a dent in seahorse woes. "They still have so many pressures that are causing their decline in the wild," he said.
Until fishing changes, farming won't be enough.
The baby potbellied seahorses in San Francisco were a minority—most seahorses aren't so lucky. If global trends continue, some species could disappear from the wild entirely; museums might be the last places to see these charismatic little fish. Captive breeding and farming may help, but imagine, despite the vastness of the oceans, the last of their kind all born behind glass.
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