Blogs & Ecology

Luckily, Christmas dinner is already over in Scandinavia (celebrated most often on the 24th) so those of us required to take a portion of stinky, slimy lutefisk, a dried and soaked cod, are safely past our obligations at the buffet-like Christmas table.

The lutefisk ritual is just one of many cod-based traditions. In Sweden torsk, as cod is called, is one of the most popular white fishes, and it shows up in a multitude of traditional dishes, stews and soups (and the ever popular fish stick). It is also nearly ...

A mini-documentary on the Humboldt Squid

Humbolt Squid May Become Easy Calamari Thanks to Climate Change
Just last year we talked about the invasion of Humboldt squid off the California coasts. Over the past 17 years, the aggressive predator has expanded its happy hunting ground and is munching up sea life foun...

Sea lice photo: Watershed Watch

A couple months ago we ran a short animation on how sea lice from fish farms can reduce wild salmon populations. Now a new study in shows, in a broader context, why and how ocean fish farms can hurt wild fish populations.

Done by Prof. Neil Frazer of the University of Hawaii at Manoa, the basic premise is that the higher density of fish in the farms promotes infection, and that infection lowers the fitness of surrounding fish. For the wild fish this means:...

Photo adactio @ flickr.

San Francisco-based Carrotmob's great idea to organize consumer spending to really work for the environment is leaping and growing all over the globe.

Photo credit: Foodhoe

Three renowned Hong Kong chefs have been named WWF Ocean Friendly Chefs and will design menus featuring sustainable seafood species recommended by WWF's Seafood Guide. The chefs are Lau Chun from Yellow Door Kitchen, Margaret Xu from Yin Yang Fresh HK Cuisine and Jacky Yu from Xiyan.

What to do when your corner of the world consumes 5 million liters of diesel fuel a day and you have a fish processing industry which can produce 120,000 kilograms of processed fish waste daily from just one factory? Turn that waste into biodiesel, obviously.

That’s just what Finland’s VTT Technical Research Center and Vietnamese seafood producer Hiep Thanh Seafood JSC are doing under a three-year project:...

American and Canadian covers

Taras Grescoe is the ultimate ecotarian; he stopped eating meat a decade ago out of concerns about growth hormones, factory farms etc in a time when organic happy meat was expensive and hard to find. But he loves seafood, with its thousands of varieties, and is convinced that the Omega 3 oils are critical to our brain development and maintenance. He writes in the introduction:

photo: NOAA

You may have read how a bit over a week ago a number of environmental groups were calling on the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (Iccat) to cut quota levels for bluefin tuna to protect that species from overfishing and collapse.

Groups’ Recommendations Ignored

Image source: Getty Images

As reported in the Otago Daily Times, the noticeable impacts of climate change on area coral reefs and a recent starfish outbreak are not as bad as previously thought due to noticeable changes in the Fijian lifestyle. From 2000-20006 the size of the reefs around the Lau Islands reduced by 50% but changes in dietary and industry around the island have actually given the reefs a chance to recover, a little. ...

from great graphic in the ">New York Times

It isn't just bluefin Tuna that is under threat; The New York Times' food writer Mark Bittman writes that " if current fishing practices continue, the world’s major commercial stocks will collapse by 2048."

But it is not just the trophy fish that North Americans like to eat, but also forage fish like herring, anchovies and sardines that are under siege.

This week is Carnival of the Green #154 and it's being hosted by Fake Plastic Fish, a blog tackling our addiction to plastic because if we don't solve the problem, plastic fish could be the only kind of fish we have left.

So head on over to this week's Carnival to find a round up of green news and events from the past week, submitted by other bloggers and green sites.

Mariana trench- NOAA/National Geographic

A few months back, environmentalists cheered President Bush's proposed creation of a vast Pacific marine preserve that included the area of the Mariana Trench, the Rose Atoll in American Samoa and parts of a long, sprawling collection of reefs and atolls known as the Line Islands, designed to preserve "some of the world's most diverse underwater ecosystems." His memorandum described the area as

What a clever name for a collection of two to four minute long "microdocs" that each feature one aspect of sustainability.

The first Short Attention Span Science notebook demystifies ecological sustainability—the basis for the green movement around the world, (Marine Science professor Steve Palumbi) said: "What is sustainability? What promotes it? What threatens it? What are the tipping points that push an ecosystem into ruin or keep it functioning forever? The ecological sustainability notebook shows the elements of sustainability and explains how they apply to one of the most important and beautiful ecosystems on earth—coral reefs."

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photo: lizardwisdom

The plight of world tuna fisheries continues. According to statements made by WWF, as the Mediterranean bluefin tuna gets places off limits so as to avoid total collapse of the fishery, more ships will be heading in the so-called Coral Triangle (the seas bounded by the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Indonesia and Malaysia). As this area is spawning and nursing grounds for 89% of the world’s tuna, unless collective action is taken in this area as well, tuna stocks there face collapse.

WWF researcher Lida Pet Soede:
...

Now, to be fair to Arnie, he has proven himself quite capable of living up to the lofty billing of "Green Governor" in the past -- if not always by deed, then certainly by sheer force of will. Yet it often seems as though every time I start to warm up to the Governator's green bona fides, he has to go and make a few bone-headed moves, dashing what little enthusiasm I had built up.