Bycatch News
The Consortium for Wildlife Bycatch has been featured in the August 22, 2011 New York Times Science article, "Fishing Gear is Altered to Ease Collateral Costs to Marine Life".
"The seafood on your plate is not the only animal that gave its life to feed you," is one of the messages from Tim Werner, the director of the Consortium for Wildlife Bycatch Reduction. While fishing for tuna, lobster, or other tasty seafood, we catch, injure, and kill other fish, marine mammals, sea turtles, sea birds, and invertebrates.
I sat down to talk about the Consortium for Wildlife Bycatch Reduction's work with Andrew Lewin, who founded Speak Up for Blue, a website dedicated to communicating about ocean conservation.
Do circle hooks reduce bycatch?...It depends.
Last week, NOAA hosted over 160 marine scientists, fisheries managers, gear experts, and commercial and recreational fishermen, from 20 countries, in Coral Gables, FL, for the first international symposium on circle hooks in research, management and conservation. While we all came away more informed about circle hooks, we left with more questions about their effectiveness for catching target species and reducing bycatch.
The technical modifications to fishing gear that the Bycatch Consortium supports were highlighted as important potential solutions to bycatch reduction in this month's Popular Science, "Higher Tech Nets, Hooks Could Stem the Shipload of Fishers' Bycatch."
Jordan, LK, Mandelman, JW and Kajiura, SM. 2011. Behavioral responses to weak electric fields and lanthanide metal in two shark species. Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology 409(1-2): 345-350.
A collection of tweets from #SMM2013 about fisheries bycatch of marine mammals
On Monday, June 27, I took the Casco Bay Ferry in Portland to Long Island Maine with Heather Tetreault and Sarah Paquette from the Maine Lobstermen's Association and Kate Dawson from Maine Sea Grant to meet with local lobstermen and women as part of our project to document lobster fishing practices in Maine. We were lucky to be traveling through the picturesque southern Maine islands on one of the most beautiful days of the summer so far.
The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) determined that the scalloped hammerhead shark (Sphyrna lewini), an Atlantic highly migratory species (HMS), is overfished (NOAA 04/28/2011).
Report documents the range of lobster fishing methods in the Gulf of Maine for the first time