Fish discards could end under EU proposals

From BBCNews

The European Commission is to set out its ideas for ending fish discards.

Currently, EU boats in the North Sea have to throw away up to half of what they catch to stay within their quotas.

Fisheries Commissioner Maria Damanaki proposes instead to regulate fleets through limits on fishing time and greater use of measures such as CCTV.

She will discuss the ideas with delegates from EU member states in Brussels on Tuesday, with the aim of finalizing plans later in the year.

She hopes to introduce a discard ban as part of a reformed Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) in 2013.

With attendance at the Brussels meeting limited to one representative per country, the Scottish government will not be sending anyone, which Fisheries Minister Richard Lochhead described as "disappointing".

"Even though Scotland is home to the EU's largest whitefish fleet, the UK government is not willing to allow Scotland the opportunity to attend on behalf of the UK," he said.
"Incredibly, landlocked countries such as Austria and the Czech Republic have been invited to take part - despite their lack of a coastline, never mind a fishing fleet."

UK Fisheries Minister Richard Benyon, who will be there, is backing the broad thrust of Ms Damanaki's proposals.

"Everybody wants to see an end to the disgraceful waste of huge amounts of fish having to be dumped back overboard, and the UK is leading the way in efforts to tackle the problem," he said.
"I'm determined to keep pushing for reforms in Europe that prevent this waste, while fighting to protect our fishermen's livelihoods."

A petition started by UK "celebrity chef" Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall asking EU leaders to "stop this unacceptable and shameful practice" claims to have gathered more than 650,000 signatures.

Controlling effort

The commission's ideas are sketched out in a four-page document - obtained by BBC News - that explores ways of constraining fishing if discards are banned.

UK fishermen have been trialling schemes aimed at curbing catches of cod
"The reasons for discarding are EU and national legislation, which are not well suited for EU waters, where the majority of catches are from mixed fisheries, as well as financial interests of the fishing industry to keep only more valuable fish on board," it says.

Currently, fishermen have to discard fish when they exceed their quota for that species, or when they net fish that are too young or too small.

However, simply allowing them to land and sell everything they catch could open up a free-for-all.

Ms Damanaki suggests:

• controlling "fishing effort", by limiting the amount of time boats can spend at sea and the places where they can fish
• counting all fish landed against quotas
• closing "mixed fisheries" when the maximum quota of one species in it has been caught
• expanding the use of CCTV, observers, electronic logbooks and monitoring of ports

Even though discarding is acknowledged almost universally to be a wasteful practice, there are concerns that stopping it without enough thought could either harm sea life or the livelihoods of fishermen.

"Banning discarding would be a very good step forward in the quest to stop overfishing in EU waters and by the EU fleet," said Uta Bellion, director of the Pew Environment Group's European Marine Programme.

Ms Damanaki aims to finalise plans in a few months
"However, this needs to be coupled with catch limits that follow scientific advice based on the precautionary principle, and effective monitoring and control," she told BBC News.

And Bertie Armstrong, chief executive of the Scottish Fishermen's Federation, said a blanket ban was not merited.
"The proposal from Maria Damanaki for a discards ban amounts to a draconian step too far," he said.
"It is a knee-jerk response to populist TV coverage which has accurately described the problem, but which offers no solutions."

Both the UK and Scottish governments want the commission to look at projects in British waters that have succeeded in reducing the volume of discards.

Scotland's Conservation Credits Scheme restricts fishing gear and obliges skippers to call a closure if they find they are catching juveniles or spawning fish.
In return, they gain additional fishing days.

The two governments have also been trialling a Catch Quota Scheme for cod, under which all fish landed count towards a quota.
Boats have to use Remote Electronic Monitoring (REM) equipment.

Mr Benyon's Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) wants the revamped CFP to be less prescriptive, encouraging each government to adopt measures appropriate to its own fleet and fishery.

Links :

• YouTube : Hugh's Fish Fight, seagull trawler discards
• TheGuardian : Government attacks EU fishing rules
  

Maersk claims new 'mega containers' could cut shipping emissions

Danish firm signs a deal for 10 of the world's biggest ships

that it says will save fuel and lower emissions

From TheGuardian

Think of a 400m-long row of 20-storey high office blocks cruising the ocean at the speed of Usain Bolt.
Or a container ship as long as the Empire State building and as wide as an eight-lane motorway that is able to carry more than 860m bananas or 18m flat-screen televisions in 18,000 containers.

The sheer scale and capacity of what will be the largest vessels afloat – the first 10 of which were ordered on Monday by Danish shipping firm Maersk – is likely to change international shipping in the same way that the super-jumbo is revolutionizing air transport or high-speed rail has changed the way people travel across continents.

While at 400m long and 73m tall the new "Triple-E" container ships will be only marginally longer and taller than the current biggest class of vessel, the 160,000-tonne ships will be able to carry nearly 20% more containers than previously because of their width.
Maersk has signed a $1.9bn (£1.17bn) contract with Korean shipbuilders Daewoo for the first 10, with an option for 20 more.
The first order will be completed in two to four years.

The company hopes to be able to cut the cost of transporting a container from China to Europe by 26%.
"These are probably the largest ships you will see built for some years. We could have made them longer but ports would have had to be enlarged. We could not make them wider because port cranes can only reach across 23 or 24 containers," said Maersk chief executive officer Eivind Kolding in London.

But the ships, which are nearly twice as large as the majority of the world's 9,000 container ships, were designed solely for the China-Europe route.
Only Felixstowe in Britain, and Rotterdam and Bremerhaven in mainland Europe will have the facilities to handle them, along with Port Said in Egypt and just four ports in the east, including Shanghai and Hong Kong.

"They will definitely stimulate further trade between China and Europe, but they are too big for any ports in north or south America.
Eventually we would like to be able to take them to the US but for the moment they would take four or five days to be unloaded there," said Kolding.

Maersk admitted it had been stung by criticisms in the past few years that the global shipping industry, which it dominates, had failed to reduce its carbon emissions.

Shipping is responsible for 3-4% of global emissions, largely because it traditionally burns cheap but heavily polluting "bunker" fuel.

Yesterday Maersk sought to position itself as environmentally responsible, saying that $30m (£18.45m), or one-sixth of the total cost of each vessel, would go towards fuel-saving and emissions reduction.
The vessels' twin engines have been designed to run slower, waste heat will be recovered and instead of using nearly 200 tonnes of fuel a day, the new ships should be able to run on around 100 tonnes.

"We have rethought the whole ship. We are setting a new bar, or standard.
These ships will operate at fuel consumption of 50% less than the industry average and 20% better than the existing best.
They will travel at 19 knots (21.8mph) rather than 23 knots (26.5mph) and the emissions will be 50% less [per container]. The ships could travel even slower but you reach a point when transit time becomes an issue," said Kolding.

The improvement was cautiously welcomed by environment and development groups.
"Shipping is the lifeblood of international trade, but it is also a source of carbon emissions bigger than many industrialized countries, and set to treble by 2050.
Efficiency improvements to engines are part of the solution, but only by setting a cap can governments really get a grip," said Tim Gore, Oxfam's climate change policy adviser.

But the company could not say how much less air pollution the ships would emit.
In international waters, sulphur and nitrogen emissions are barely regulated and the largest container ships have been found to emit as much sulphur and nitrogen pollutants as 50m cars.
New laws will force reduction in some areas but the technology has not been developed yet to fully "scrub" the diesel emissions of mega ships like those planned by Maersk.
In addition, European air quality standards are far more lax for shopping than those of the US.

"We are working hard on the technology but we do not know yet how it will have developed by the time these ships are delivered," said a Maersk spokesman.

Links :

• YouTube : Maersk Line Triple-E, the largest, most efficient ship in the world (photos)
  
• Maersk : Tripe-E vessels
• FT : Maersk Line orders world’s biggest ships
  

Science investigates freak waves

BBC documentary first aired on November 14, 2002 called “Freak Waves”
YouTube : I / II / III / IV /V

From BBC

Freak waves up to 30 metres high (100 feet) that rise up from calm seas to destroy ships do exist, researchers argue (list).
For centuries sailors have blamed mysterious surges of water for unexplainable sinkings but the claims have always attracted plenty of scepticism.

However, there is now growing evidence, including satellite imagery, which suggests the massive waves may be more than just maritime myth.

New data on the phenomenon, featured by the BBC Science programme Horizon, have led to calls for improved ship designs that will withstand huge water surges.

Walls of water

Every week, a ship sinks to the bottom of the sea, and often there seems no obvious explanation.

These disappearances are usually blamed on human error or the poor maintenance of a vessel.

But in many cases, sailors have their own theory: a single massive wave that appears out of the blue and sinks the ship with one blow.

Evidence presented by Horizon suggests a 43,000-tonne cargo ship, the Munchen - which sank with all hands in 1978 - was struck with huge force.

Several researchers who have studied the event now think a giant wave was responsible.

Although the official inquiry found that "something extraordinary" had destroyed the vessel, it concluded only that the Munchen's loss was a highly unusual event that had no implications for other forms of shipping.

Wave instability

Freak waves are not the same as tidal waves, or tsunamis, and they are not caused by earthquakes or landslides.

They are single, massive walls of water that rise up from apparently calm seas. Several theories compete to explain them.

Some scientists think that waves and winds heading straight into powerful ocean currents may cause a surge of water to rise up out of the deep.

Others believe that some waves can become unstable and start to suck in energy from nearby waves, growing quickly and to huge heights.

Commons question

Jim Gunson, the UK Met Office's expert on ocean waves, said: "Rogue waves in the past have been ignored and regarded as rare events.

"Now we are finally getting a handle on them and finding out how common they are."

Eddie O'Hara, MP, the chairman of the parliamentary committee on maritime safety, is to table a Commons motion into ship safety in freak weather.

He told the BBC: "Ships are going down all the time. If you read the maritime press, there is a boat going down at least once a month, with the loss of crew usually measured in dozens of lives."

Remodelling ships to include, for example, new hatch designs to withstand extraordinary waves could cost merchant fleet owners billions of dollars.

Links :

• BBCNews : Freak waves spotted from space / Freak wave 'hot spots' identified
• ESA : Ship-sinking monster waves revealed by ESA satellites
  
• Ifremer : Rogue Waves 2000 / 2004
  

World's coral reefs facing serious threats

Coral reefs are classified by estimated present threat from local human activities, according to the Reefs at Risk Revisited integrated local threat index.
The index combines the threat from the following activities: overfishing and destructive fishing, coastal development, watershed-based pollution, and marine-based pollution and damage.

-> download as KML (3.1 Mb) for use in Google Earth

From NPR

A major new survey of the world's coral reefs finds that they are in trouble. Big trouble.

Overfishing and local pollution continue to grow as threats, and the reefs' long-term existence is in doubt because the world's oceans are gradually getting warmer and more acidic because of human activity.

There's a lot at stake: Coral reefs are spectacular ecosystems, overflowing with diverse and colorful marine life.
They're also the source of food and economic sustenance to half a billion people around the world.

"Currently, we find 75 percent of the world's reefs are threatened by a combination of local and global threats," says Lauretta Burke, a senior author of the new report.
"By 2030, the percentage will rise to 90 percent. By 2050, virtually all reefs will be threatened," she says.

Many of the risks are familiar and long-standing.
At a news conference Wednesday, Lauretta Burke, of the World Resources Institute, talked about overfishing, and runoff of sewage and sediments from the shore.

"But perhaps the most shortsighted threat to reefs is the use of destructive fishing practices: the use of poisons to stun and capture fish, the use of explosives to kill fish," she says.

Abundant sea life with hard and soft corals grows on a coral reef in the Indonesia-Pacific region.
The report also folds in global threats.
Greenhouse gases pouring into the atmosphere from our tailpipes and chimneys warm the oceans, causing heat stress to corals.
Lots of that carbon dioxide also dissolves in the ocean, creating carbonic acid, which can eventually corrode coral and other shell-building animals.
Add it all together, and one-third of all coral species are at risk of extinction, says Nancy Knowlton of the Smithsonian Institution's Marine Biology Research Institution.

"This makes corals the most endangered animal on the planet," she says, "even more endangered than frogs, which have gotten a lot of press because of the diseases that have wiped out a lot of frog populations. And of course this is just the corals — it doesn't count all the things that depend on corals."

Dealing with the threats

"These are dire projections," Burke says.
But it doesn't have to be that way: "These results assume no improvement in management, no reduction in local threats, and that we continue on our current trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions."

And that current emissions trajectory gives us a small grace period.

"The tipping point comes sometime between 2040 and 2050, which is not that far away," Knowlton says.

Local threats are potentially easier to deal with, and there has been some progress in that regard.
For example, President George W. Bush created vast marine protected areas in the Pacific to preserve reefs in U.S. territorial waters.

"We obviously need more marine protected areas," Knowlton says.
"Not just big ones like these, but small ones, local ones in the developing world, where major marine protected areas aren't financially possible, but small protected areas can do a lot of good."

In releasing this report today, the World Resources Institute got help from one of the premiere marine biologists in this country — Jane Lubchenco, who now runs the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

"It will take a Herculean effort to reverse the current trajectory and leave healthy ocean ecosystems to our children and our grandchildren," she said.

And nobody sounded too optimistic about that task.

Links :

• WRI : Reefs at risk revisited: threats and response
  
• TheGuardian : Coral reefs report warns of mass loss threat
• BBCNews : Coral reefs heading for fishing and climate crisis
• EnvironmentNewsService : Warming, polluted oceans imperil 75 percent of all coral reefs
• Treehugger : New method for predicting extinctions could help save coral reefs
• Care2 : 75% of Earth’s coral reefs threatened
  

Turtles use the Earth’s magnetic field as a global GPS

From DiscoverMagazine

In 1996, a loggerhead turtle called Adelita swam across 9,000 miles from Mexico to Japan, crossing the entire Pacific on her way.
Wallace J. Nichols tracked this epic journey with a satellite tag.
But Adelita herself had no such technology at her disposal.
How did she steer a route across two oceans to find her destination?

Nathan Putman has the answer.
By testing hatchling turtles in a special tank, he has found that they can use the Earth’s magnetic field as their own Global Positioning System (GPS).
By sensing the field, they can work out both their latitude and longitude and head in the right direction.

Putman works in the lab of Ken Lohmann, who has been studying the magnetic abilities of loggerheads for over 20 years.
In his lab at the University of North Carolina, he places hatchlings in a large water tank surrounded by a large grid of electromagnetic coils.
In 1991, he found that the babies started swimming in the opposite direction if he used the coils to reverse the direction of the magnetic field around them.
They could use the field as a compass to get their bearing.

Later, Lohmann showed that they can also use the magnetic field to work out their position. For them, this is literally a matter of life or death.
Hatchlings born off the coast of Florida spend their early lives in the North Atlantic gyre, a warm current that circles between North America and Africa.
If they’re swept towards the cold waters outside the gyre, they die. Their magnetic sense keeps them safe.

Using his coil-surrounded tank, Lohmann could mimic the magnetic field at different parts of the Earth’s surface.
If he simulated the field at the northern edge of the gyre, the hatchlings swam southwards.
If he simulated the field at the gyre’s southern edge, the turtles swam west-northwest.
These experiments showed that the turtles can use their magnetic sense to work out their latitude – their position on a north-south axis.
Now, Putman has shown that they can also determine their longitude – their position on an east-west axis.

He tweaked his magnetic tanks to simulate the fields in two positions with the same latitude at opposite ends of the Atlantic.
If the field simulated the west Atlantic near Puerto Rico, the turtles swam northeast.
If the field matched that on the east Atlantic near the Cape Verde Islands, the turtles swam southwest.
In the wild, both headings would keep them within the safe, warm embrace of the North Atlantic gyre.


Before now, we knew that that several animal migrants, from loggerheads to reed warblers to sparrows had some way of working out longitude, but no one knew how.
By keeping the turtles in the same conditions, with only the magnetic fields around them changing, Putman clearly showed that they can use these fields to find their way.
In the wild, they might well also use other landmarks like the position of the sea, sun and stars.

Human sailors also worked out how to measure longitude, as described in Dava Sobel’s bestselling book.
They relied on an accurate clock created by the Englishman John Harrison, which allowed them to compare the time of day at a given location with that at a distant place.
Every hour of difference represented fifteen degrees of longitude.

But we know that turtles don’t use a similar time-based method because Putman didn’t test them under different conditions of light or dark.
His hatchlings had no way of telling what time it was. Indeed, to use a time-based map in the wild, the turtles would need to have an internal clock that stayed set at Florida time for their entire 3-15 year migration.

Instead, Putman thinks that the turtles work out their position using two features of the Earth’s magnetic field that change over its surface.
They can sense the field’s inclination, or the angle at which it dips towards the surface.
At the poles, this angle is roughly 90 degrees and at the equator, it’s roughly zero degrees.
They can also sense its intensity, which is strongest near the poles and weakest near the Equator.
Different parts of the world have unique combinations of these two variables.
Neither corresponds directly to either latitude or longitude, but together, they provide a “magnetic signature” that tells the turtle where it is.

Scientists often talk about a magnetic “map”, but the animals aren’t necessarily using any sort of mental chart.
As with all research in magnetic senses, it’s very hard to work out what the animal is actually sensing or thinking.
But that can be a bonus.
“It might be good because I don’t have any preconceived notions about how animals like turtles use magnetic information,” says Putman.” I can let the turtles tell me what they can respond to without imposing any personal expectations on them!”

We do, however, know that they have their super-sense from birth.
Putman’s turtles had never been in the ocean before and their magnetic sense doesn’t depend on experience.
Indeed, Lohmann’s previous experiments showed that even newly hatched loggerheads can react correctly to different magnetic fields.

These studies weren’t easy. Putman says,
“The loggerheads we use are a threatened species, so we have to be extra careful with all of them. We use newly hatched turtles for these studies, so we work with them and release them at night. We try to design really short experiments and house them for no more than a couple of hours before letting them go. [It] makes for rushed data collection!”

For Lohmann, these tribulations are worth it.
After spending graduate school on spiny lobsters and sea slugs (two animals that also have magnetic senses), he had an opportunity to study young loggerheads.
“I thought it was worth a try to see if turtles could detect magnetic fields. I figured that after the two-year project was over, I would get back to the invertebrates,” says Lohmann.
“That was 23 years ago, and I’m still studying turtles. Each time we think we have it all figured out, the turtles show us that we have missed something important.”

Links :

• BBCNews : Sea turtles' migration mystery is 'solved'
• Wired : Navigational 'Magic' of sea turtles explained