This Magnificent Creature: Salmon

Source: Sea Around Us

DANIEL PAULY – PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR

Born in France and raised in Switzerland, Daniel Pauly studied in Germany, where he acquired a doctorate in fisheries biology in 1979, from the University of Kiel. He did his first intercontinental travel in 1971 (from Germany to Ghana for field work related to his Masters) and has since experienced a multitude of countries, cultures, and modes of exploiting aquatic ecosystems in Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas. This perspective allowed him to develop tools for managing data-sparse fisheries, as prevailed for example in the Philippines, where Dr. Pauly worked through the 1980s and early 1990s.

In 1994, Dr. Pauly became a Professor at the University of British Columbia Fisheries Centre, and was its Director from 2003 to 2008. In 1999, Daniel Pauly founded, and since leads, a large research project devoted to identifying and quantifying global fisheries trends, funded until mid-2014 mainly by the Pew Charitable Trusts and since by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, and called Sea Around Us after Rachel Carson’s 1951 bestselling book. Daniel Pauly is also co-founder of FishBase.org, the online encyclopedia of more than 30,000 fish species, and he has helped develop the widely-used Ecopath modeling software. He is the author or co-author of over 1000 scientific and other articles, books and book chapters on fish, fisheries and related topics. Two books, reflecting his current interests were published in 2010: “Five Easy Pieces: Reporting on the Global Impact of Fisheries” and “Gasping Fish and Panting Squids: Oxygen, Temperature and the Growth of Water-Breathing Animals”. In January 2016, with Dirk Zeller, he published an article titled “Catch reconstruction reveal that global marine fisheries catches are higher than reported and declining” (DOI: 10.1038/ncomms10244), concluding a decade-long activity of the Sea Around Us.

Dr. Pauly is the recipient of multiple international prizes and awards, including seven honorary doctorates from universities in Europe and Canada. Since 2003, he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and since 2016, he is University Killam Professor.

• If Whole Foods ends up adopting USDA rules, many GMO-containing foods will remain unlabeled, as USDA rules only require products created through transgenesis to be labeled as GMO USDA proposed rules for GMO labeling are unsatisfactory at best. It’s not even clear whether “highly refined foods” will be included in the standard, yet a majority of foods sold in grocery stores are highly refined, and are also the most likely to contain GMO ingredients.

• USDA is also not using any of the already familiar phrases such as "genetically modified," "genetically engineered" or GMO on the label. Instead, USDA is using the word "bioengineered" (BE) — a misleading phrase as it sounds far more natural than it is

By Dr. Mercola • July 18, 2018 While Whole Foods Market, founded in 1980, has been a leading retailer of organic produce in the U.S. for decades, the company has faced its share of criticism; in later years being accused of operating more like an industrial organic company rather than a local distributor of high-quality organic food. In 2007, it bought its chief rival Wild Oats — an acquisition initially challenged by the Federal Trade Commission, which said the merger violated federal antitrust laws and provided Whole Foods unilateral market power that could raise prices and lower quality. The issue was eventually settled by selling off the Wild Oats brand and more than 30 physical store locations.1,2 Amazon Now Owns Whole Foods

Last year, Amazon announced its intention to acquire Whole Foods Market and its 465 stores, a $13.7 billion deal that had food manufacturers quaking in their boots, while organic producers worried the deal might compromise and dilute organic food standards even further.3 The acquisition went through on August 28, 2017.4 Within two days of the merger, Whole Foods' store traffic rose by 25 percent. Within the first month, Amazon made $1.6 million off its online sales of Whole Foods private label products. But while the success story of Whole Foods continues, questions about whether it's really socially commendable to shop at Whole Foods have festered well over a decade.5 The company has faced well-deserved criticism for its effects on employees by refusing unionization, the environment due to its limited supply of local produce, and its selling of questionable products such as items containing MSG and rBGH, making label scrutiny a necessity even here. Like most large corporations, it has shareholders to contend with, and the company has been accused of cutting corners to make a profit on more than one occasion. This trend is unlikely to change with Amazon at the rudder. As a matter of fact, while Whole Foods has spent the last five years promoting its promise to implement a comprehensive labeling policy6 for genetically modified organisms (GMOs) — a promise that has been a major selling point to entice customer support — that plan has now been laid aside.

Please go to Mercola to read the entire article.

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If consumers want to continue eating that farmed salmon shit, by all means, go for it: 

GM-fed salmon are being trialled in GM-free Scotland Chow down peasants. Yummy, all the GMO-laden farmed salmon you can eat:

A mass salmon die-off at a Newfoundland fish farm last month has highlighted environmental risks and transparency issues facing the region’s growing aquaculture industry as some Atlantic provinces pin economic hopes on its development.

Northern Harvest Sea Farms, owned by the Norwegian company Mowi, attributed the deaths to an extended period of high water temperatures, between 17 and 21 degrees Celsius.

Spokesman Jason Card said an undetermined number of salmon suffocated from lack of oxygen as they clustered together in an attempt to reach cooler waters at the operation on Newfoundland’s south coast.

READ MORE: Government-appointed council calls for immediate actions to increase B.C.’s wild salmon population

An exact number of dead salmon will be reported in the company’s annual report, but Card could not say when the count would be complete, given the time-consuming work of gathering the dead fish from the sizable pens.

Escalating public concern over the news last week stemmed from conflicting reports about the number of dead fish and their cause of death. There were also questions about why the deaths were detected Sept. 2, according to the company, but not shared publicly until Sept. 23., after the FFAW-Unifor union issued a statement to its members.

Card said the company intends to disclose such incidents more quickly in the future and added that the company is preparing to upgrade its facilities to cope with the reality of warming waters.

Coffee Point, Alaska—Anna Hoover and I ease up and down in limestone-colored water on a warm, windless afternoon in early July, our backs to the mouth of the Egegik River. She’s distracted, perched in the captain’s seat of her 32-foot drift boat. She glances at her phone, checking the time. The state manages fishing on a tight schedule here, opening the waters to fishermen and then closing them every few hours to let some salmon travel to their spawning grounds. We’ve got five minutes until we unspool our nets.

We sit 300 miles west of Anchorage in Bristol Bay, home to the largest, healthiest red salmon run on earth, where most wild-grown grocery-store fillets caught in the United States come from. Hoover’s parents and grandparents fished here, and she has been hauling reds from this fertile finger of saltwater for most of her 34 years.

This is her first summer as the captain of her own boat. She never doubted the decision to buy it. She’s always seen herself here, her hair pulled back in a bandanna, rubber coveralls flecked with fish scales, eyes gritty from sleep deprivation, adrenaline rising and falling with the tides that carry salmon into the nets.

“We joke how there are two kinds of people—the ones who can’t stand it out here and the ones who can’t live without it,” she says. “Fishing is in my blood.”

Still, no matter how many years you fish, she says, you always get a crackle of anxiety as you slip your nets into the water. So much can go wrong—weather, gear tangling, mechanical problems, bad timing, the catastrophe of the fish failing to show up. The risk, though, is part of the draw. “Fishermen,” she tells me, “have always been gamblers.”

For her generation of fishermen, investing here is more of a gamble than ever. Twin threats hang over this place where many of America’s salmon dinners come from: a rapidly warming climate, which has already scrambled the pattern of the seasons across vast swaths of Alaska, and Pebble Mine, a proposed open pit mine at the bay’s headwaters, which has been given new life by Donald Trump’s administration. Many who live and fish here, including Hoover, worry that once the mine is built, pollution is inevitable and that together these two forces could destroy this rare, pristine ecosystem, threatening salmon, communities, and whole ways of life.

“I think of generations. So many people in the fishery have learned it from their families and want to pass it on,” Hoover says. “Around the world, people have disrespected salmon populations and their environments to the point where they are extinct or they are farmed. This place doesn’t have that—yet.”

Hoover maneuvers us into position. Two crewmen stand ready on the deck. One is a high school English teacher with a toddler at home, the other a high school student—a good kid who never gets tired. There isn’t room to mess this up. They have to make money this summer.

Please go to The Nation to read the entire article.

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