Ladies and Gentlemen, please accept our apologies. We have now regained control of this diary, which resumes below.
A new attempt to crack down on illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing as
Pirate Trawlers Face Crackdown on OverfishingPirate trawlers will be tracked by a new database as part of a planned crackdown on illegal fish catches worth $9.5 billion a year that are adding to strains on global stocks, a report said Friday.
The database is to be set up by the High Seas Task Force - consisting of representatives from Britain, Canada, Australia, Chile, Namibia, New Zealand, the World Conservation Union, the WWF, and the Earth Institute - to identify and track pirate trawlers.
Canada, saying it hoped "pressure and embarrassment" would force transgressors to comply with the new recommendations, threatened to take unilateral action against what it said was rampant illegal fishing in the high seas off its east coast.
"Our time frame is short, we are running out of patience ... we have the responsibility to make sure that our stocks are protected," Fisheries Minister Loyola Hearn told reporters from Paris.
Britain's chipping in some cash:
The UK Government has lent its support to an international project aimed at combating `pirate' fishing, with a $1m funding package. The issue currently costs more than $9bn globally in lost fish stocks. The newly published High Seas Task Force report, the result of a collaboration between various governments and conservation NGOs, outlines initiatives to stop the impact of illegal fishermen on threatened fish stocks and the industry at large.
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"Pirate fishermen are freeloaders who are robbing some of the poorest people in the world of their livelihoods. Countries such as Somalia and Sierra Leone are each losing over US$100 million a year from illegal fishing. That is money that could help fund medical centres, schools, clean water or new jobs," added Gareth Thomas, Minister for International Development.
In Queensland, Fish kill fury. There honestly doesn't seem to be anything unusual about this bycatch. Except the fact that it washed up on the beach.
A 16km stretch of Sunshine Coast beaches was turned into a graveyard of rotting fish carcasses yesterday after one of the worst- ever cases of local by-catch wash-up from trawlers operating close to shore.
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The grotesque kills - much more extensive than significant fish wash-ups in late January along a similar stretch of beach - have sparked a call from recreational fishing lobby group Sunfish for three nautical mile exclusion zones.
In the midst of the brouhaha, an "industry insider" claimed that trawlers go through as much as a metric tonne of bycatch per 20-liter bucket of prawns. This is now hotly disputed. Industry spokesmen
call the charge ridiculous, and say the real problem is a licensing system which requires shrimpers to toss whiting overboard. They rather undercut their case however, by asserting that the bycatch problem really isn't that significant. Locals don't seem very impressed.
Turtle update
The Phillipines joins in the Year of the Turtle awareness campaign
So many battles over ocean resources are taking place off the west coast of Africa. Scientist warns of threat to last stronghold of endangered turtle
A major conservation effort, led by Dr Brendan Godley of the University of Exeter, has just got underway to help protect endangered leatherback turtles which nest in Gabon, West Africa. The region is thought to be the animals' last global stronghold, as pacific populations dwindle precariously.
The goal here is to establish Marine Protected Areas for the leathernecks. First, their movements must be tracked to find the appropriate areas.
The tracking data is publicly available online and is creating much interest with more than 100,000 hits from over 150 countries on the site SeaTurtle.org/tracking each month.
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With fishing yields decreasing in European seas the EU has struck up a number of agreements with African nations to fish their waters. Amazingly, most EU fishing concessions don't even incorporate compulsory bycatch monitoring programmes. {I am shocked! Europeans exploiting African resources unfairly? -melvin}
It's a start
Stronger Rules to Govern Dumping of Wastes at Sea
A new and more protective set of international rules governing the dumping of wastes at sea will take effect March 24. Based on the precautionary principle, the new rules also include the principle that the polluter must pay for damages.
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The 1996 Protocol takes effect 30 days after its ratification by Mexico, the 26th country to do so. The Ambassador of Mexico to the United Kingdom Juan José Bremer, deposited his country's instrument of ratification at International Maritime Organization (IMO) Headquarters in London on February 22.
The Protocol is going into effect now, ten years later, because enough countries have finally ratified. Yah, you pretty much know the next sentence, don't you?
Here's the fun part:
The 1996 Protocol prohibits dumping at sea, except for materials on an approved list.
This contrasts with the 1972 Convention which permitted dumping of wastes at sea, except for those materials on a banned list.
So what's on the approved list to still dump without any limitations?
Dredged material
Sewage sludge
Fish waste, or material resulting from industrial fish processing operations
Vessels and platforms or other man-made structures at sea
Inert, inorganic geological material
Organic material of natural origin
Bulky items primarily comprising iron, steel, concrete and similar harmless materials, for which the concern is physical impact, and limited to those circumstances where such wastes are generated at locations, such as small islands with isolated communities, having no practicable access to disposal options other than dumping
Europe's eel population has dropped by more than 95% since the 70's. Everything has been blamed. What is surprising in a new study, PCBs are killing off eels, is the minute amount of PCB's lethal to the young fish. Female eels with less than half the level of PCB's acceptable for human consumption produce young that are doomed by concentration of the chemicals in the female's eggs. PCB's have been banned since the 70's. But they haven't gone away. By the way, there's a fascinating story around somewhere - I'm having computer problems this morning - about ridding the Baltic of PCB's by removing the fish offal, cod livers in particular, from the water instead of dumping it back in.
Due to the aforementioned problems, we're truncating today's Wild News right here.