The ongoing disputes in the South China Sea are usually portrayed as being centered on China’s brazen attempts to claim artificial islands and the waters surrounding them as extensions of its sovereign territory; rights to the 11 billion estimated barrels of oil beneath the sea; or access to the $5.3 trillion trade that passes through it.

n 1997, large commercial fishing boats based in the coastal town of Beaufort, North Carolina began shifting about 13 miles northward per year. By the end of 2014, they were harvesting off the coast of New Jersey.

The Food and Drug Administration lifted an import restriction that allowed AquaBounty, a biotech company with facilities in Canada and Panama, to start raising genetically engineered (GMO) salmon eggs in America, effectively clearing the way for the country’s first GMO seafood—and first commercially raised GMO animal—to come to market

Almost a quarter of the world’s population has anemia. Iron deficiency is a condition affecting over a billion people and it can have serious consequences.

The global fishing fleet has more than doubled from about 1.7 million boats harvesting fish in 1950 to 3.7 million fishing vessels in 2015.
More fishing vessels have become motorized as well: while only 20 percent of the world’s fishing vessels were powered by motors in 1950, this number rose to 68 percent in 2015.

How close are we to a future in which when we think of meat, we think of cell biology and tissue engineering instead of animals? Last week at MIT, 300 entrepreneurs, biologists, engineers, communicators, and students gathered for New Harvest 2019, to explore that question.

Scientists have now quantified the global decline of big freshwater animals: From 1970 to 2012, global populations of freshwater megafauna declined by 88% - twice the loss of vertebrate populations on land or in the ocean. Large fish species are particularly affected.

Sub-Saharan Africa’s aquaculture production, estimated at 1.7 million metric tons (MT) of the global 76.6 million MT of production in 2015, continues to face fish feed shortages.

The South Africa aquaculture sector’s contribution to the economy is considered minor, but the overall growth of fish farming in the country has been described by its Department of Agriculture as “fast-developing,” raising the expectations of increased demand for aquafeed and associated ingredients, particularly corn, fishmeal, soybeans, fish oil and even wheat.

Plenty of fish suffer from water pollution, which takes a toll on their health and reproductive abilities. Yet there is another often-overlooked form of manmade pollution that also affects them: noise pollution.

As with many other aspects of government policy, overfishing and other fishing-related environmental issues are a real problem, but it’s not clear that government intervention is the solution.

This past week, a new short film from the Empatheatre Collective was released as part of the Green Connection’s Oceans Tribunal held on 21 and 22 September. 

One of the world’s most spectacular marine migrations is the KwaZulu-Natal sardine run.

The Peruvian anchovy is a small fish with a big impact. Only about the size of an index finger, they make up the single largest fish catch in the world—sometimes up to 15% of the global haul.

The large-scale removal of natural resources from South Africa’s seas for sale on global markets may be profitable, but often comes at the expense of small-scale fishers. Members of affected coastal communities gathered in Cape Town on Monday to discuss the challenges and threats they face from extractivism.

Eating fish is becoming more popular in America due to the growing desire to eat healthy and nutritionally beneficial food.

The adage “out of sight, out of mind” has long summed up humans’ attitude to dumping personal and industrial waste. In a 1974 Scientific American article, the oceanographer Willard Bascom wrote that “the ocean is the plausible place for man to dispose of some of his wastes”. If done “thoughtfully”, he continued, “it will do no damage to marine life.”

The African continent produces seven million tonnes of marine fish a year. This capture has increased in recent years thanks to improved catches in west Africa and the end of Somalian piracy in the Indian Ocean.

Traditional wooden fishing boats are docked at the coastal town of Winneba, Ghana.

Following two decades of fierce negotiations, over 60 countries recently signed a UN Ocean Treaty to conserve biodiversity on the high seas.