Congratulations FishChoice!

It doesn't matter if you are a seafood buyer trying to find the most sustainable seafood, an innovative, environmentally conscious producer looking for a way to differentiate yourself from the pack or an NGO helping your partners develop a robust seafood sustainability program, there's a new tool available to all of you. FishChoice, founded by Richard Boot and launching today, provides buyers access to the best farmers and fishermen out there who meet clear and defined sustainability criteria and are leaders in their field. It lets buyers filter the producers based on the sustainability program they've committed to (whether its MSC certification, FishWise or any of the other fantastic programs out there).

Congratulations on the launch and congratulations to the whole seafood community for gaining this new, fantastic tool!

Can farmed bluefin tuna claim a sustainability victory?

Another article on the breakthroughs in bluefin tuna farming is claiming that we're one step close to sustainable bluefin, but are hatcheries and farming bluefin really an answer?

Bluefin are wide-ranging top predators, and are one of the most severely overfished fish populations in the world. Given the dire straits of bluefin tuna populations, producing more tuna and farming them seems like a great alternative to continuing the fishery for wild bluefin. But aquaculture is not without impacts, and the impacts of farming large, predatory fish have greater and more significant impacts on the marine environment than farming other species like catfish or mussels.

Perhaps the bigger sustainability question is if farmed fish really relieve pressure on wild fisheries, even if we can eliminate the environmental impacts. To date, farming fish has not led to reduced pressure on their wild counterparts. For example, since salmon farming began, the amount of wild salmon caught has actually increased. This indicates that something happens in the market that causes fishermen to catch more. Prices decline with the advent of aquaculture, requiring fishermen to catch more wild fish to turn a profit. And with the farmed product found everywhere at any time people get used to getting their favorite fish that was once an uncommon luxury at any turn. There was once a time where a shrimp cocktail at a part was extravagant, whereas now all-you-can-eat shrimp buffets are common place. This means that more and more fish are needed to meet demand.

So what would large-scale farming of bluefin tuna really mean for wild bluefin populations? Maybe making bluefin cheap and common place from aquaculture will take away the incentive to fish wild bluefin by taking away the huge prices for bluefin. But then again, what if it doesn't and the result is increasing pressure on ocean ecosystems from poorly planned aquaculture combined with increasing pressure on wild tuna populations.

With those two outcomes as the potential future of farming bluefin tuna, I'm not ready to claim victory just yet.

Shifting baselines back 1000 years

The health of most fish populations is measured by the current population size compared to an estimated "unfished" population size. While fisheries biologist recognize that the estimates of the unfished population size is not exact, what if they're off. Waaaaay off.

Scientists at the Oceans Past meeting in Vancouver, Canada report that

...fish stocks were already depleted before the industrial exploitation of the 20th century made the situation even worse. "We used to think that if we could get fish stocks back up to the levels of the 1970s we would be well on the way to recovery," says Holm. This now seems to be an optimistic idea.

The concept of shifting baselines is not a new one. Scientists Jeremy Jackson and Daniel Pauly were early adopters of a term to describe the way significant changes to a system are measured against previous baselines, which themselves may represent significant changes from the original state of the system. Most of our fisheries baselines are from right before industrialized fishing began, leaving us with only about 50 years of irresponsible fishing to recover from.

If humans have been overfishing the oceans for 1000 years, what does this mean for our perceptions of what makes a healthy ocean ecosystem? How does this affect how conservation groups, seafood buyers and individuals act when they talk about or buy seafood? Should our definition of a fishery's recovery change? And is the need for recovery more urgent if overfishing has been happening for a thousand years instead of 50?

read more New Scientist