Fisheries research overestimates fish stocks

Experts Call for More Realistic Stock Assessments The state of fish stocks in the world’s oceans is worse than previously thought. While overfishing has long been blamed on fisheries policies setting catch limits higher than scientific recommendations, a new study from four Australian research institutions reveals that even those scientific…

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Fish become ‘young’ again after spawning

Herring spawn. Photo by Moosealope, Flickr.

The physical relief that temperate fish like cod and Atlantic herring experience after they  allows them to breathe in more oxygen and develop a voracious appetite, all of which leads to a rapid increase in body weight. New research published in Environmental Biology of Fishes turns on its head the widespread notion that…

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AI-powered data-limited stock assessment method more accurate than ‘gold standard’ in predicting sustainable fisheries catches

Maps showing the locations of the centroids of the over 2000 stock assessments performed with CMSY (~20%) and CMSY ++ (~80%) in all parts of the world. Image Credit: Froese et al.

A recent update introduced to the CMSY methodology used for assessing the status of fish stocks has proven to be more accurate in predicting the catch that a population can support than highly-valued data-intensive models. In a paper published in the journal Acta Ichthyologica et Piscatoria, the international team of researchers that shaped the…

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An integrated ‘ABC’ toolbox for updating European stock assessments

In a five-day workshop organized by the EcoScope project at the Fisheries Research Institute (FRI) in Kavala, Greece from May 1st to May 5th of 2023, members of the Project Executive Board and International Advisory Board of EcoScope were joined by ten partners under Work Package 5: Assessing the Ecosystem…

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Keep Growing – Fish’s growth is not reduced by spawning

Contrary to what is stated in biology textbooks, the growth of fish doesn’t slow down when and because they start spawning. In fact, their growth accelerates after they reproduce, according to a new article published in Science. The paper is a technical comment by Dr. Rainer Froese, senior scientist at the Geomar Helmholtz…

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Climate change disrupts core habitats of marine species

Climate change will bring about significant distributional reorganization of marine life with a net range loss of core habitat for the majority of marine species, a new study led by researchers at the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, Bremerhaven (AWI) and co-authored by the AquaMaps…

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New AquaMaps Coordinator visits Q-quatics in the Philippines

“Can you help us?”–A simple request from FishBase pioneer Dr. Daniel Pauly to UBC Researcher Dr. Gabriel Reygondeau, led to a recent breakthrough for one of the cutting-edge databases of Q-quatics. AquaMaps is the global species distribution modelling component of FishBase and SeaLifeBase. It creates predictive maps of the natural…

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Only ‘good fish’ belongs to the table

Research fishing haul aboard the ALKOR in Eckernförde Bay.

An annual list of marine fish and bivalves that serves as a guide to German consumers on what they can purchase and eat with a clear conscience –those currently with large and healthy population sizes and are fished sustainably, or in short, the ‘good fish‘, was recently published as a…

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Ecosystem-based fisheries management restores western Baltic fish stocks

Marine scientists from GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel (Germany), the German Federal Agency for Nature Conservation (Bundesamt für Naturschutz, BfN, Germany) and the Institute of Biosciences and Bioresources at the National Research Council (CNR) of Italy teamed up to test and predict how different marine life in the…

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The 23rd FishBase-SeaLifeBase Symposium: Various uses of these global information platforms and their contributions to aquatic food systems

FishBase – SeaLifeBase Annual Symposium5-6 September 2022 | WorldFish, Penang, Malaysia   This year’s FishBase-SeaLifeBase Symposium, a hybrid virtual and in-person event, was an opportunity to illustrate the different uses of FishBase and SeaLifeBase in the fields of ecology, biogeography, fisheries, taxonomy and aquariology. An impressive line-up of speakers were…

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