Category Archives: Fishing

More than 100 nations take action to save oceans from human harm

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Envoys at Brest summit sign up to measures to tackle fight against illegal fishing and cut pollution

Representatives from more than 100 countries have committed to measures aimed at preserving the ocean from human harm, including stepping up the fight against illegal fishing, cutting plastic pollution and better protecting international waters.

The French president, Emmanuel Macron, hosting the high-level session of the One Ocean summit on Friday, said 2022 was “a decisive year, and we should take here, in Brest, clear and firm commitments.”

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‘Blue diplomacy’: France summit puts world’s spotlight on oceans

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As One Ocean event in Brest aims to deliver action in areas from pollution to overfishing, activists warn against ‘bluewashing’

Up to 40 world leaders are due to make “ambitious and concrete commitments” towards combating illegal fishing, decarbonising shipping and reducing plastic pollution at what is billed as the first high-level summit dedicated to the ocean.

One Ocean summit, which opens on Wednesday in the French port of Brest, aims to mobilise “unprecedented international political engagement” for a wide range of pressing maritime issues, said its chief organiser, Olivier Poivre d’Arvor.

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Shock in France after giant trawler sheds 100,000 dead fish off coast

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Environmentalists spot floating carpet of blue whiting covering thousands of square metres after spill from the FV Margiris

Dutch-owned trawler FV Margiris, the world’s second-biggest fishing vessel, has shed more than 100,000 dead fish into the Atlantic Ocean off France.

France’s maritime minister, Annick Girardin, called the images of the dead fish – which formed a floating carpet of carcasses spotted by environmental campaigners – “shocking” and has asked the national fishing surveillance authority to launch an investigation.

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‘Families are starving’: Chinese trawlers’ overfishing is destroying lives, say Sierra Leoneans

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As illegal industrial-scale fishing by foreign fleets pillages fish populations, despairing coastal communities feel powerless

Along Tombo’s crumbling waterfront, dozens of hand-painted wooden boats are arriving in the blistering midday sun with the day’s catch for the scrum of the market in one of Sierra Leone’s largest fishing ports.

In a scrap of shade at the bustling dock, Joseph Fofana, a 36-year-old fisherman, is repairing a torn net. Fofana says he earns about 50,000 leone (£3.30) for a brutal, 14-hour day at sea, crammed in with 20 men, all paying the owner for use of his vessel. “This is the only job we can do,” he says. “It’s not my choice. God carried me here. But we are suffering.”

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‘It’s mind-boggling’: the hidden cost of our obsession with fish oil pills

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The market in this prized commodity is worth billions – but are the supposed benefits worth the cost to global ecosystems?

• Revealed: many common omega-3 fish oil supplements are ‘rancid’

Scanning the shelves and internet for fish oil is a dizzying task. There are dozens of brands available and, although the typical consideration for the popular supplement is that quality matters most, it is not the only factor.

These prized products travel a long way before being labelled as “pure” and “fresh” – starting with the industrial-scale grinding down of a tiny fish that is crucial for healthy ocean and food systems.

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‘It’s a mystery for us’: the puzzling death at sea of a Tongan fisheries observer

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Arnold Latu was found dead in his berth – one of numerous deaths of monitors who ensure fishing boats follow the rules

On the morning of Monday 27 September, a crew member on board the Hsinlong 1 fishing vessel went to fetch his friend Arnold Latu for breakfast.

Latu, in his mid-30s, was the monitoring officer of the Chinese-owned, Fiji-flagged vessel, employed by the Tongan government to check that the amount of fish caught on its three-week voyage was legal and correctly recorded.

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Plastic beads could make nets more visible to cetaceans, scientists say

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Beads add hardly any extra weight to fishing gear and could save thousands of lives, it is claimed

Simple plastic beads could save the lives of some of the thousands of porpoises and other cetaceans that get caught in fishing nets each year, scientists say.

Harbour porpoises use echolocation to find their prey and for orientation. However, their acoustic signals cannot pick up the mesh of a gillnet, and as a result they often become trapped.

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I spent my house deposit on a boat to reach the Mokohinau Islands – the magic on our doorstep | Clarke Gayford

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It wasn’t a financially astute move but it led to my TV series and helped me discover the truly important things in life

  • Guardian writers and readers describe their favourite place in New Zealand’s wilderness and why it’s special to them

My entire experience of Auckland changed when I got a boat. It was the perfect antidote to a professional DJ lifestyle, where getting up at 5am to be on the water become immeasurably preferable to coming home at 5am from work. On trips out I began sticking my head underwater with such vigour that I somehow turned it into a whole new profession.

It didn’t happen straight away, of course. My 40-year-old, 14-foot beige fibreglass boat with a semi-reliable two-stroke engine, named Brown Thunder, only had so much range, and my real goal lay much farther offshore, tantalisingly out of reach. A place where tales of clear blue tropical water and huge fish swirled around a group of uninhabited islands, teasing me from the pages of marine magazines or the crusty lips of old salty sea-mates.

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Brexit one year on: so how’s it going?

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Those promised rewards for Britain of leaving the EU should surely be with us by now. What have been the costs and gains of ‘taking our country back’?

• UK and the EU set to remain best of enemies as 2022 dawns

On New Year’s Day the UK will have been fully out of the European Union for a year: out of its political and legal structures, out of its single market, out of its customs union.

This was what Boris Johnson and Michael Gove – who led the Leave campaign – had wanted. No awkward halfway house like Theresa May had negotiated. No Brexit light. Out completely. Gone. Brexit well and truly done.

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Blowing the house down: life on the frontline of extreme weather in the Gambia

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A storm took the roof off Binta Bah’s house before torrential rain destroyed her family’s belongings, as poverty combines with the climate crisis to wreak havoc on Africa’s smallest mainland country

The windstorm arrived in Jalambang late in the evening, when Binta Bah and her family were enjoying the evening cool outside. “But when we first heard the wind, the kids started to run and go in the house,” she says.

First they went in one room but the roof – a sheet of corrugated iron fixed only by a timbere pole – flew off. They ran into another but the roof soon went there too.

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Sales of eco-friendly pet food soar as owners become aware of impact

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Number of products in UK containing MSC-certified sustainable seafood has grown by 57% in last five years

Eco-friendly pet food is on the rise as dog and cat owners become more aware of the impact of their beloved pet’s diet.

New figures released exclusively to the Guardian show that the number of pet food products containing Marine Stewardship Council (MSC)-certified sustainable seafood has grown by 57% in the UK during the last five years, from 49 to 77. In the last year alone consumers bought more than 7m tins, pouches and packs of MSC-certified pet food.

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Latin American countries join reserves to create vast marine protected area

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‘Mega-MPA’ in Pacific will link waters of Ecuador, Colombia, Panama and Costa Rica to protect migratory turtles, whales and sharks from fishing fleets

Four Pacific-facing Latin American nations have committed to joining their marine reserves to form one interconnected area, creating one of the world’s richest pockets of ocean biodiversity.

Panama, Ecuador, Colombia and Costa Rica announced on Tuesday the creation of the Eastern Tropical Pacific Marine Corridor (CMAR) initiative, which would both join and increase the size of their protected territorial waters to create a fishing-free corridor covering more than 500,000 sq km (200,000 sq miles) in one of the world’s most important migratory routes for sea turtles, whales, sharks and rays.

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France and UK told: end dispute or you’ll wreck Cop26 summit

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Scientists and experts in despair over fishing row, as prime minister declares summit will be ‘world’s moment of truth’

Leading scientists and environmentalists called on Boris Johnson and Emmanuel Macron to declare an immediate ceasefire in a bitter Anglo-French row over fishing rights on Saturday as fears grew that the UK’s arguments with its EU neighbours could overshadow the crucial Cop26 summit on climate change.

On the eve of the UK hosting 120 world leaders at the meeting in Glasgow, the prime minister said the summit would be “the world’s moment of truth” and could mark “the beginning of the end of climate change”. Speaking at a meeting of G20 leaders in Rome, he added: “The question everyone is asking is whether we seize this moment or let it slip away.”

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Boom time for Cape Verde’s sea turtles as conservation pays off

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The number of nesting sites on the archipelago has risen dramatically, but global heating sees male population plummet

It’s nearly midnight as Delvis Semedo strolls along an empty beach on the Cape Verdean island of Maio. Overhead, the dense Milky Way pierces the darkness. A sea turtle emerges from the crashing waves and lumbers up the shore. Then another. And another.

Semedo is one of about 100 local people who patrol Maio’s beaches each night during nesting season to collect data on the turtles and protect them from poachers. This year has been busier than usual. Sea turtle nests on the islands of Sal, Maio and Boa Vista – the primary nesting grounds for loggerheads in Cape Verde – have soared in the last five years. Cape Verde’s environment ministry puts nest numbers in 2020 across all 10 islands at almost 200,000, up from 10,725 in 2015.

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Unsafe conditions and low pay for migrants on Irish fishing boats exposed

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Study prompts call for reforms to safeguard conditions of fishers from countries including the Philippines, Egypt, Ghana and Indonesia

Racist insults, verbal abuse, long working hours with few breaks and pay below the legal minimum wage are “common workplace experiences” of migrant workers in the Irish fishing sector, says a new study.

The report, conducted by Maynooth University’s Department of Law, comes four months after a damning assessment by the US state department over Ireland’s failure to combat human trafficking, which stated that undocumented workers on Irish vessels are vulnerable to trafficking and forced labour.

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Huge sunfish weighing up to two tonnes found off coast of Ceuta – video

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A gigantic sunfish found tangled in tuna fishing nets in the Mediterranean could weigh up to 2000kg, according to experts. The fish was  measured at 3.2 metres long and 2.9 metres wide, a record find for Ceuta, a Spanish autonomous city on the north coast of Africa. When the sunfish was weighed it almost broke a 100kg scale. Enrique Ostalé, a marine biologist, said he had heard of sunfish this size only in books 

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Rotting Red Sea oil tanker could leave 8m people without water

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FSO Safer has been abandoned since 2017 and loss of its 1.1m barrels would destroy Yemen’s fishing stocks

The impact of an oil spill in the Red Sea from a tanker that is rotting in the water could be far wider than anticipated, with 8 million people losing access to running water and Yemen’s Red Sea fishing stock destroyed within three weeks.

Negotiations are under way to offload the estimated 1.1m barrels of crude oil that remains onboard the FSO Safer, which has been deteriorating by the month since it was abandoned in 2017. The vessel contains four times the amount of oil released by the Exxon Valdez in the Gulf of Alaska in 1989, and a spill is considered increasingly probable.

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‘The sharks are hiding’: locals claim deep-sea mining off Papua New Guinea has stirred up trouble

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‘Shark calling’, an ancient custom of hunters singing to sharks then catching them by hand, is under threat and locals blame deep-sea disturbances

More in this series
• Race to the bottom: the disastrous, blindfolded rush to mine the deep sea
• ‘False choice’ – is deep sea mining required for an electric vehicle revolution?
• Covid tests and superbug killers: how the deep sea is key to fighting pandemics

To catch a shark in the waters off Papua New Guinea, first the men sing.

They sing the names of their ancestors and their respects to the shark. They shake a coconut rattle into the sea, luring the animals from the deep, and then catch them by hand.

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Deep impact: the underwater photographers bringing the ocean’s silent struggle to life

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Kerim Sabuncuoğlu – just one winner in this year’s Ocean photography awards – tells the story behind his picture of a moray eel that also shows the wider perils of ‘ghost fishing’

In July, off the Turkish port city of Bodrum, Kerim Sabuncuoğlu stepped from the edge of a boat into the azure Aegean Sea and began to descend. A scuba diver with more than 30 years’ experience, he took up underwater photography in 2002 and has since devoted considerable amounts of time and money to his “out-of-control hobby” – capturing the wonders of the ocean on camera so that “the less fortunate people above” can also marvel at them.

Sabuncuoğlu has travelled the world, photographing marine life in Palau, Cuba and the Galápagos islands and winning several awards for his work. Closer to home in Bodrum, he was embarking on a standard dive with a group of friends, equipped with a Nikon D800 camera. The camera had an 85mm micro Nikkor lens and was clad in Nexus underwater housing, with a single Backscatter snoot to train light on the subject.

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Outcry over killing of almost 1,500 dolphins on Faroe Islands

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Many Faroese horrified by what Sea Shepherd group claims was largest such massacre in the islands’ history

• Story contains graphic image that some may find distressing.

Even the staunchest defenders of traditional whaling in the Faroe Islands have condemned the “cruel and unnecessary” massacre on Sunday of a superpod of nearly 1,500 dolphins, which were driven into shallow waters of the Skálabotnur beach on the island of Eysturoy and left writhing for hours before being killed.

The Sea Shepherd group, which has been campaigning to stop the traditional Faroese “Grind” hunt since the 1980s, has claimed Sunday’s hunt was “the largest single killing of dolphins or pilot whales in the islands’ history”, with more animals perishing than in an entire season at the infamous “Cove” at Taiji, Japan.

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