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China's heavily state subsidized fishing fleet has been trashing South America's ample fishing beds, depleting fish stocks and leaving trash all over the place. According to a report from Breitbart News, citing EFE:The persistent threat of an invasive fleet of illegal Chinese fishing ships in Latin American waters is depleting fish stocks and impacting the regional economy, according to a report published on Sunday by the Spanish news agency EFE.The constant presence of illegal Chinese ships and their consequences to local fauna and economy have generated great concern among regional authorities, who are making efforts to curb the destruction of...

The Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF), a London-based non-governmental organization, this week published a report on the destructive, largely unregulated, and often illegal operations of China’s immense deep-water fishing fleet. An especially disturbing chapter of the report dealt with the harmful impact of Chinese fishing on West African nations, where entire coastal communities tremble on the verge of economic collapse thanks to China’s rapacious practices.The report, titled The Ever-Widening Net: Mapping the Scale, Nature, and Corporate Structures of Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated Fishing by the Chinese Distant-Water Fleet, accused China of creating a huge fleet to fish outside China’s own depleted...

ABOARD THE OCEAN WARRIOR in the eastern Pacific Ocean (AP) — It’s 3 a.m., and after five days plying through the high seas, the Ocean Warrior is surrounded by an atoll of blazing lights that overtakes the nighttime sky. “Welcome to the party!” says third officer Filippo Marini as the spectacle floods the ship’s bridge and interrupts his overnight watch. It’s the conservationists’ first glimpse of the world’s largest fishing fleet: an armada of nearly 300 Chinese vessels that have sailed halfway across the globe to lure the elusive Humboldt squid from the Pacific Ocean’s inky depths.... ...The vigilante patrol...

When you consider the crimes of the People’s Republic of China, you probably don’t think of overfishing as one of them. But this might be one of the most devastating and long-lasting international crises to come out of Beijing. There’s plenty of fish in the sea? Not for much longer if the Chinese government keeps having its way.All told, three billion people rely on fish as their primary source of protein, according to the World Wildlife Fund. Given that this is nearly half of the world’s population, the need to carefully manage the world’s supply of fish is absolutely crucial...

Something strange is happening to the oceans. As coral reefs wither and fisheries collapse, octopuses are multiplying like mad... cephalopods—squids, octopuses, cuttlefish—are booming, and scientists don’t know why. An analysis published today in Current Biology indicates that numerous species across the world’s oceans have increased in numbers since the 1950s. “The consistency was the biggest surprise,” said lead study author Zoë Doubleday of the University of Adelaide. “Cephalopods are notoriously variable, and population abundance can fluctuate wildly, both within and among species.”

These are embarrassing times for the nation's criminal justice system; as the Obama administration executes the nation's largest mass release of federal prisoners, it's sending a Long Island fisherman to jail for reeling in too many... Back in 2010 resident Obama signed a measure that for the first time in decades relaxed drug-crime sentences he claimed discriminated against poor and minority offenders. This severely weakened a decades-old law enacted during the infamous crack cocaine epidemic that ravaged urban communities nationwide in the 1980s. As part of the movement the U.S. Sentencing Commission lowered maximum sentences for drug offenders and made...

Across Northwest Wisconsin there has been much discussion about the decline of the walleye population. In response one of Governor Scott Walker’s initiatives has been stocking lakes with larger “extended walleye” versus small fry in the hopes that the larger fish have better chance of surviving and then reproducing. However, Governor Walker in his proposed biennium budget has also proposed cutting some key Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR) scientists in the Bureau of Science Services, scientist behind the extended walleye initiative and who also created the modeling for the three-bag limit of walleyes using length as the critical factor...

The European Union’s member states supported sanctions against the Faroe Islands, which could be an import ban or closing its ports to its boats, to protest the islands’ decision to treble the limit on herring fishing. … The move follows months of haggling after the Faroe Islands earlier this year unilaterally increased its existing quota by more than three times the allocations it would have got under EU policy, the Commission said. The Faroe Islands, a self-governed territory within the Danish Realm and not part of the European Union, says the EU rules do not give it a sufficient share...

China is massively under-reporting its overseas fishing catch according to a study by Canada’s University of British Columbia. From 2000 to 2011, Beijing reported an average overseas catch of 368,000 tons a year to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization. According to the report, however, the average catch for 2000-11 was actually 4.6 million tons a year – more than 12 times the reported figure. Of that total, 2.9 million tons of fish a year came from West Africa. “The unreported catch is crippling the artisanal fisheries that help to feed West African populations. It shows the extent of the...

Since mid April Chinese naval vessels have been circling a pile of rocks situated 124 miles off the coast of the Philippines that barely qualifies as an “island”. The rocks are called the Scarborough Shoal and save for there position, and rumors of oil and gas under them, they have no value to anyone. Nevertheless it is precisely because they are so far from their own shore that the Chinese are trying to pressure the Filipinos into relinquishing their long held claim (since 1734) to Panatag as they call them. Moreover since the Scarborough Shoal at just 124 miles off...

A record number of fish populations have been rebuilt in U.S waters, even as problems continue to threaten the future of the high-profile New England fishing industry, according to a federal report released Monday. Six species that were once considered overfished have rebuilt to optimal population levels in waters from the Bering Sea to the Atlantic Coast, according to the annual report to Congress by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's fisheries arm. The report also said just 45 of 219 fish populations (21 percent) were considered overfished in 2011. Still, 13 of those stocks are in New England. That's...

An alarming new study to be published in November in the Annual Review of Environment and Resources finds that one-third of the world's marine fish catches are ground up and fed to farm-raised fish, pigs, and poultry, squandering a precious food resource for humans and disregarding the serious overfishing crisis in our oceans. Lead author Dr. Jacqueline Alder, senior author Dr. Daniel Pauly, and colleagues urge that other foods be used to feed farmed animals so that these "forage fish" can be brought to market for larger-scale human consumption. "Forage fish" include anchovies, sardines, menhaden, and other small- to medium-sized...

Russia calls for sturgeon fishing ban in CaspianRussia on Thursday proposed that Caspian Sea states impose a five-year ban on fishing for sturgeon, prized for its caviar eggs, to save stocks from collapse, a spokesman for the fisheries agency said. "We are ready to announce a moratorium," said spokesman Alexander Savelyev, adding that Russia would formally propose the ban to the other four Caspian Sea states of Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan soon. "This is because the sturgeon is about to disappear," said Savelyev, adding that Russia was not able to fish its annual quota of 50 tonnes of sturgeon...

Newswise — Fewer big sharks in the oceans led to the destruction of North Carolina’s bay scallop fishery and inhibits the recovery of depressed scallop, oyster and clam populations along the U.S. Atlantic Coast, according to an article in the March 30 issue of the journal Science. A team of Canadian and American ecologists, led by the late world-renowned fisheries biologist Ransom Myers of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, has found that overfishing in the Atlantic of the largest predatory sharks, such as the bull, great white, dusky and hammerhead sharks, has led to an explosion of their ray,...

Environmentalists called Monday for a radical overhaul of fishing practices to prevent a worldwide collapse in tuna stocks as international conservation bodies opened their first joint meeting on the species. The five-day meeting in the western Japanese city of Kobe will look at ways to share information among regions to monitor tuna numbers and control illegal fishing vessels, officials said. Environmentalists called on participants to come up with substantive measures to protect the fish, which are highly prized in Japan. Greenpeace said it was "high time" for governments to recognize the seriousness of the tuna issue. Governments "must acknowledge that...

Bottom trawling destroys deep sea lifeNew York: A long-awaited report by the United Nations shows the need for an international moratorium on bottom-trawling and other destructive fishing practices that damage deep sea life, Conservation International (CI) said. The U.N. Division for Ocean Affairs and Law of the Sea (DOALOS) reviewed measures to protect the vulnerable deep oceans of the high seas -- the 64 percent of ocean that lies beyond the national jurisdictions of any individual nation. Its review, ordered by the U.N. General Assembly in 2004, was based on reports from member states on steps taken to stop destructive...

Search for sushi draining Mediterranean's red tuna stocks by Marie-Noelle Valles Mon May 29, 6:16 PM ET Too much demand for sushi from Japan may finish off stocks of red tuna running dangerously low in the Mediterranean owing to overfishing, say environmentalists from Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). "Japan absorbs between 90 and 95 percent of catches of red tuna and the Mediterranean version is especially appreciated," explains Jose Luis Garcia, head of the WWF oceans section. The price of a prize red tuna can top 50,000 euros (60,000 dollars) on the Japanese market. "In opening new markets,...

Please read note in first comment. "It may seem strange that so much effort* is being focused on an animal that 25 years ago was known to only a handful of Antarctic scientists and that went by the ungainly name of Patagonian toothfish. But Chilean sea bass today have become the signature species in a battle of global proportions. Put in very blunt terms, the world is running out of fish. According to a study published in July in Science, marine species diversity has declined by 10 to 50 percent in the last half-century, and a 2003 report found that...

BIMINI, Bahamas — The bulldozers moved slowly at first. Picking up speed, they pressed forward into a patch of dense mangrove trees that buckled and splintered like twigs. As the machines moved on, the pieces drifted out to sea. Sitting in a small motorboat a few hundred yards offshore on a mid-July afternoon, Samuel H. Gruber — a University of Miami professor who has devoted more than two decades to studying the lemon sharks that breed here — plunged into despondency. The mangroves being ripped up to build a new resort provide food and protection that the sharks can't get...

New research by a Canadian university has brought previously unknown parts of the world's oceans into focus and is raising new concerns about the global decline of big species. The study, released yesterday by the journal Science, found that the ocean contains a small number of "hot spots" where marine life concentrates and where stocks are declining dramatically. But the finding has also opened a new window of hope because it points to a few key areas, in a vast, featureless ocean, where conservation efforts could be targeted for maximum effect. By looking at 50 years of international fishing data...