Bone-eating zombie worms, octopus overlords, old wooden ships and new woes for deep-sea mining. It’s the Monday Morning Salvage! January 1, 2018.

Fog Horn (A Call to Action)

  • Stop. Breathe. Take a step back. This can all be incredibly overwhelming. Pick the fight that matters most to you and take a few days deciding what success looks like, what strategies will work, and what tactics are available to you. And then hoist your flag and get to work.

  • And when you meet someone fighting a different fight, remember to support them. There are already enough fronts to advance without taking friendly fire from our flanks.

Flotsam (what we’re obsessed with right now)

The frilled giant Pacific octopus. Photo Courtesy D. Scheel

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Predation Matters

Today, Pew unleashed a mini-media blitz on the importance of predation in fisheries management.  This got my attention because the interaction between marine predators and fisheries is one of my major research interests.  They do a great (and slickly-designed) job explaining the basics of why paying attention to predation matters in fisheries management, and bonus points for using the most noble of sharks as one of their examples.  Check out the video here:

 

I particularly like that they go into enough detail to lay out options for incorporating predation into fisheries.  Personally, I’m a big fan of the “second fleet” option, in which predators are counted as another source of fishing mortality (and some of my favorite papers are cited in support of it).  It does require the most effort, but provides the most accurate estimations of predation mortality (and justifies funding for diet studies?  Please?).  Multi-species models are ideal, and really the only way to conclusively prove that trophic cascades are actually happening.  Precautionary buffers, in my opinion, should really follow thorough diet studies, but are certainly another important aspect of ecosystem-based management.

It’s neat to finally see this subject getting some attention.  Here’s hoping the word continues to get out about the importance of shark puke.

 

A global shark conservation challenge from Palau and Micronesia

Yesterday afternoon, the Presidents of Honduras and Palau challenged other world leaders to follow their example by protecting sharks. Both nations have banned shark fishing within their territorial waters, and they are encouraging other nations (both rich countries with fishing fleets and poor coastal countries) to do the same. This announcement was timed to coincide with a high-level United Nations meeting to review millennium development and global biodiversity conservation goals.

The two Presidents had this to say:

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