Richard Harris highlights a report on the hundreds of thousands of sea mammals that die each year because of fishing practices:
[T]he global tally of marine mammal injuries and deaths … is high: Biologists have estimated that 650,000 are killed or injured each year. Of that, 300,000 are dolphins and related cetaceans, and another 350,000 are seals and sea lions. Casualties happen in all sorts of fisheries, ranging from tuna to squid, shrimp, swordfish and bottom-dwelling fish. At the bottom of the ocean, sea mammals can get trapped in trawls. And it’s hard to connect the dots between fish that has been caught using these techniques and those that end up getting imported to the U.S.
Imported seafood is often less ethical:
Most tragic, according to [report author Zak] Smith, is that the U.S. Marine Mammal Protection Act bars the importing of fish caught using methods that don’t include mammal protection measures such as release nets and safer hooks. “But unfortunately this law has never been enforced in its 40 years,” said Smith. …
American shrimp fishers, for example, must use bycatch-excluder devices to help marine mammals escape nets, Cooper said. Those devices cost $400 to $500 each, and a typical shrimp boat has three to four of them. “We also lose some of our catch because of them, so it raises our cost,” said Cooper. “They can catch them for a lot cheaper, put them on our market, and drive our prices down,” he said of foreign shrimp fisheries, which are especially prevalent in Southeast Asia. “We can’t continue on this trend.”
Smith said the U.S. government should require foreign fisheries to prove that they are “moving toward zero bycatch tolerance,” just like domestic fisheries.
Peter Lehner has more on the problem:
North American right whales, which rank among the most endangered whales on the planet, are prone to getting tangled in the long ropes of crab and lobster pots, or stuck in nets meant to trap fish like hake and halibut in the North Atlantic. With an estimated 500 individuals left, the untimely loss of even a single whale threatens the survival of the species. Every year, one or two right whales die from encounters with fishing gear. In Maine, lobstermen use special breakaway ropes that can help an entangled whale free itself. Canadian lobstermen, however, are not required to do so. The same whale that escapes a Maine lobsterpot might perish in a Canadian trap set just a few miles away.
(Photo of an entangled sea lion by Lauren Packard)
The Dish 