PRESS-NEWS.org - Press Release Distribution
PRESS RELEASES DISTRIBUTION

'No fish left behind' approach leaves Earth with nowhere left to fish: UBC researchers

2010-12-04
(Press-News.org) The Earth has run out of room to expand fisheries, according to a new study led by University of British Columbia researchers that charts the systematic expansion of industrialized fisheries.

In collaboration with the National Geographic Society and published today in the online journal PLoS ONE, the study is the first to measure the spatial expansion of global fisheries. It reveals that fisheries expanded at a rate of one million sq. kilometres per year from the 1950s to the end of the 1970s. The rate of expansion more than tripled in the 1980s and early 1990s – to roughly the size of Brazil's Amazon rain forest every year.

NB: View the study at http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0015143.

Between 1950 and 2005, the spatial expansion of fisheries started from the coastal waters off the North Atlantic and Northwest Pacific, reached into the high seas and southward into the Southern Hemisphere at a rate of almost one degree latitude per year. It was accompanied by a nearly five-fold increase in catch, from 19 million tonnes in 1950, to a peak of 90 million tonnes in the late 1980s, and dropping to 87 million tonnes in 2005, according to the study.

"The decline of spatial expansion since the mid-1990s is not a reflection of successful conservation efforts but rather an indication that we've simply run out of room to expand fisheries," says Wilf Swartz, a PhD student at UBC Fisheries Centre and lead author of the study.

Meanwhile, less than 0.1 per cent of the world's oceans are designated as marine reserves that are closed to fishing.

"If people in Japan, Europe, and North America find themselves wondering how the markets are still filled with seafood, it's in part because spatial expansion and trade makes up for overfishing and 'fishing down the food chain' in local waters," says Swartz.

"While many people still view fisheries as a romantic, localized activity pursued by rugged individuals, the reality is that for decades now, numerous fisheries are corporate operations that take a mostly no-fish-left-behind approach to our oceans until there's nowhere left to go," says Daniel Pauly, co-author and principal investigator of the Sea Around Us Project at UBC Fisheries Centre.

The researchers used a newly created measurement for the ecological footprint of fisheries that allows them to determine the combined impact of all marine fisheries and their rate of expansion. Known as SeafoodPrint, it quantifies the amount of "primary production" – the microscopic organisms and plants at the bottom of the marine food chain – required to produce any given amount of fish.

"This method allows us to truly gauge the impact of catching all types of fish, from large predators such as bluefin tuna to small fish such as sardines and anchovies," says Pauly. "Because not all fish are created equal and neither is their impact on the sustainability of our ocean."

"The era of great expansion has come to an end, and maintaining the current supply of wild fish sustainably is not possible," says co-author and National Geographic Ocean Fellow Enric Sala. "The sooner we come to grips with it – similar to how society has recognized the effects of climate change – the sooner we can stop the downward spiral by creating stricter fisheries regulations and more marine reserves."

INFORMATION: The University of British Columbia Fisheries Centre, in the College for Interdisciplinary Studies, undertakes research to restore fisheries, conserve aquatic life and rebuild ecosystems. It promotes multidisciplinary study of aquatic ecosystems and broad-based collaboration with maritime communities, government, NGOs and other partners. The UBC Fisheries Centre is recognized globally for its innovative and enterprising research, with its academics winning many accolades and awards. The Sea Around Us Project is funded in part by the Pew Environment Group. For more information, visit www.fisheries.ubc.ca and www.cfis.ubc.ca.

The National Geographic Society, the Waitt Foundation, the SEAlliance along with strategic government, private, academic and conservation partners including the TEDPrize, Google and IUCN, are beginning an action-oriented marine conservation initiative under the banner of "Mission Blue" that will increase global awareness of the urgent ocean crisis and help to reverse the decline in ocean health by inspiring people to care and act; reducing the impact of fishing; and promoting the creation of marine protected areas. For more information, go to www.iamtheocean.org.



ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

UCLA scientists discover mechanism that turns healthy cells into prostate cancer cells

2010-12-04
A protein that is crucial for regulating the self-renewal of normal prostate stem cells, needed to repair injured cells or restore normal cells killed by hormone withdrawal therapy for cancer, also aids the transformation of healthy cells into prostate cancer cells, researchers at UCLA have found. The findings, by researchers with the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCLA, may have important implications for controlling cancer growth and progression. Done in primary cells and in animal models, the findings from the three-year ...

JACS paper demonstrates continuous and controlled translocation of DNA polymer through a nanopore

JACS paper demonstrates continuous and controlled translocation of DNA polymer through a nanopore
2010-12-04
Santa Cruz, CA, USA and Oxford, UK, 2 December 2010: Research published this week in JACS shows continuous and controlled translocation of a single stranded DNA (ssDNA) polymer through a protein nanopore by a DNA polymerase enzyme. The paper by researchers at the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC) provides the foundation for a molecular motor, an essential component of Strand Sequencing using nanopores. Researchers at UCSC are collaborating with the UK-based company Oxford Nanopore Technologies, developers of a nanopore DNA sequencing technology. The new research ...

Rewarding eco-friendly farmers can help combat climate change

Rewarding eco-friendly farmers can help combat climate change
2010-12-04
COLLEGE PARK, Md. – Financially rewarding farmers for using the best fertilizer management practices can simultaneously benefit water quality and help combat climate change, finds a new study by the University of Maryland's Center for Integrative Environmental Research (CIER). The researchers conclude that setting up a "trading market," where farmers earn financial incentives for investing in eco-friendly techniques, would result in a double environmental benefit – reducing fertilizer run-off destined for the Chesapeake Bay, while at the same time capturing carbon dioxide ...

Comparison of dark energy models: A perspective from the latest observational data

2010-12-04
Physicists at the Institute of Theoretical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Department of Physics at Northeastern University have made a comparison of a number of competing dark energy models. They have tested and compared nine popular dark energy models using the latest observational data. The study is reported in Issue 9 (Volume 53) of SCIENCE CHINA Physics, Mechanics & Astronomy because of its significant research value. Over the past decade, cosmologists around the world have accumulated conclusive evidence for the fact that the cosmic expansion is accelerating. ...

Study of the high spin states in stable nucleus 84Sr

2010-12-04
The School of Nuclear Engineering and Technology at the East China Institute of Technology cooperated with the China Institute of Atomic Energy to investigate the high spin states of 84Sr. The study is reported in Issue 53 (October, 2010) of the Chinese Science Bulletin because of its significant research value. Nuclei with Z ≈ 40 and N ≈ 45 lie in a transitional region between deformed nuclei and spherical nuclei. There are collective bands in some isotopes of nuclei of such elements as Sr, Zr and Mo, where the structures have single-particle features. 84Sr, ...

Evanescent wave imaging of adsorbed protein layers

Evanescent wave imaging of adsorbed protein layers
2010-12-04
An evanescent wave arises at the interface of two media when light propagates from a more to a less-dense medium under total internal reflection. The wave is distributed over a superficial area because its amplitude decays exponentially with distance from the interface. The evanescent wave intensity at the interface can be larger than that of the incident beam. Evanescent waves have widespread current use in the imaging of chemical, bio-chemical and biological phenomenon. For example, an evanescent wave is responsible for fluorophore excitation in total internal reflection ...

Proposal for the establishment of a new branch within the discipline of aerothermodynamics

2010-12-04
Researchers from the College of Physical Sciences, GUCAS, have proposed to establish a new branch, unsteady aerothermodynamics, within the discipline of aerothermodynamics. The principal objectives of this new branch, to treat by theoretical means the study of physical phenomena relating to attached boundary layer flows, have been outlined in a preliminary investigation. A report based on a feasibility study has appeared in Vol. 54 No. 8 of Science China Physics, Mechanics & Astronomy. Aerothermodynamics, a cross-discipline based mainly on aerodynamics and thermodynamics, ...

Researchers find mathematical patterns to forecast earthquakes

Researchers find mathematical patterns to forecast earthquakes
2010-12-04
Researchers from the Universidad Pablo de Olavide (UPO) and the Universidad de Sevilla (US) have found patterns of behaviour that occur before an earthquake on the Iberian peninsula. The team used clustering techniques to forecast medium-large seismic movements when certain circumstances coincide. "Using mathematical techniques, we have found patterns when medium-large earthquakes happen, that is, earthquakes greater than 4.4 on the Richter scale," Francisco Martínez Álvarez, co-author of the study and a senior lecturer at the UPO revealed to SINC. The research, which ...

Forget your previous conceptions about memory

2010-12-04
Memory difficulties such as those seen in dementia may arise because the brain forms incomplete memories that are more easily confused, new research from the University of Cambridge has found. The findings are published today in the journal Science. Currently, memory problems are typically perceived to be the result of forgetting previously encountered items or events. The new research (using an animal model of amnesia), however, found that the ability of the brain to maintain complete, detailed memories is disrupted. The remaining, less detailed memories are relatively ...

The initial and final state of SNe Ia from the single degenerate model

2010-12-04
Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) play an important role as cosmological distance indicators and have been used successfully to determine cosmological parameters, which resulted in the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe. However, the exact nature of SN Ia progenitors is still not well understood. There is a popular theory that SNe Ia originate from runaway thermonuclear events in carbon–oxygen white dwarves (CO WD) in binary systems. The CO WD accretes material from its companion. When the CO WD increases its mass above the maximum stable mass, it will explode. Based ...

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:

Testing thousands of RNA enzymes helps find first ‘twister ribozyme’ in mammals

Groundbreaking study provides new evidence of when Earth was slushy

International survey of more than 1600 biomedical researchers on the perceived causes of irreproducibility of research results

Integrating data from different experimental approaches into one model is challenging – this study presents a community-based, full-scale in silico model of the rat hippocampal CA1 region that integra

SwRI awarded grant to characterize Las Moras Springs watershed

Water overuse in MATOPIBA could mean failure to meet up to 40% of local demand for crop irrigation

An extra year of education does not protect against brain aging

Researchers from Uppsala and Magdeburg obtain an ERC Synergy Grant to advance cancer immunotherapy

Deaf male mosquitoes don’t mate

Recognizing traumatic brain injury as a chronic condition fosters better care over the survivor’s lifetime

SwRI’s Dr. James Walker receives Distinguished Scientist Award from Hypervelocity Impact Society

A mother’s health problems pose a risk to her children

Ensuring a bright future for diamond electronics and sensors

The American Pediatric Society selects Dr. Maria Trent as the Recipient of the 2025 David G. Nichols Health Equity Award

The first 3D view of the formation and evolution of globular clusters

Towards a hydrogen-powered future: highly sensitive hydrogen detection system

Scanning synaptic receptors: A game-changer for understanding psychiatric disorders

High-quality nanomechanical resonators with built-in piezoelectricity

ERC Synergy Grants for 57 teams tackling major scientific challenges

Nordic research team receives €13 million to explore medieval book culture 

The origin of writing in Mesopotamia is tied to designs engraved on ancient cylinder seals

Explaining science through dance

Pioneering neuroendocrinologist's century of discovery launches major scientific tribute series

Gendered bilingualism in post-colonial Korea

Structural safety monitoring of buildings with color variations

Bio-based fibers could pose greater threat to the environment than conventional plastics

Bacteria breakthrough could accelerate mosquito control schemes

Argonne to help drive AI revolution in astronomy with new institute led by Northwestern University

Medicaid funding for addiction treatment hasn’t curbed overdose deaths

UVA co-leads $2.9 million NIH investigation into where systems may fail people with disabilities

[Press-News.org] 'No fish left behind' approach leaves Earth with nowhere left to fish: UBC researchers