This is a bit long, but I hope you will have a few minutes to read it and take action ( Read more... )

In March I went back to Cocos Island National Park, Costa Rica. Cocos is well-known in the scuba diving community for sharks, sharks, and more sharks, and it really is a special place. Yes, most of the diving is deep (~100 ft) and can be challenging, but in return you are rewarded with thousands of schooling fish of all sizes. While Cocos ( Read more... )

Support Bill AB376 Banning the Sale of Shark Fins in California
(From the Wild Aid press release February 14, 2011:)
California Assembly Members Paul Fong and Jared Huffman today introduced a bill to prohibit the sale of shark fins in California to the State Assembly. California is one of the largest sources of demand for shark fin outside Asia ( Read more... )

We recently got back from a dive trip to Cocos Island, 300+ miles west of Costa Rica, where we participated in a shark and turtle tagging expedition. I took photos and posted them with the journal I kept during the trip. Take a look: http://www.g-na.org/cocos.html

Anyone who knows me knows I love sharks. A lot. I will dive with sharks whenever possible, but unfortunately that is not as often as you might expect; there aren't many sharks left in the oceans (they are being killed at the rate of about 100,000,000 per year!) and the ones that are left are quite shy and scared of people. So it usually takes ( Read more... )

By now I think we've all heard various stories of impending environmental doom. Stories like "Humans are causing mass extinctions," "Coral reefs are dying," and "All the world's fisheries will collapse by 2050" are commonplace in the news, but at the same time it is quite easy to shrug those things off as something that will happen in the future ( Read more... )

Righteous Porkchop - Nicolette Hahn Niman - Righteous Porkchop is very similar to The Face on Your Plate, which I just finished reading, but it is also an entirely different book. The similarity lies in that R.P. really does tell you the truth about food; you learn about the major types of animal foods--milk, eggs, beef, pork, chicken, and fish-- ( Read more... )

If you've ever paid attention to any of the information relating to sustainable seafood then you've probably heard the word "bycatch." It refers to the unwanted or unintentional species caught, and often killed, in the course of collecting your target species. One example would be if you're fishing for trout and you catch a bass, then the bass ( Read more... )

The NOVA special featuring the Marine Mammal Center aired for the first time last night and it was exciting to watch! Sometimes when you're mired in day-to-day workings you don't realize the far-reaching effects of your work, and this just brought it all home for me ( Read more... )

I often hear about big news events via LJ, but here's one big item I haven't seen anyone talk about - the West Coast salmon fisheries have been all but shut down. Have people not heard about this?

Last week the Pacific Fishery Management Council ruled that all commercial salmon fishing in California and Oregon will be cancelled for the 2008 ( Read more... )