10 unexpected foods on TIME’s 50 Healthiest Foods’ list

Sardines on TIME’s ‘healthiest foods’ list? iStockphoto

Cyclical sardine stock decline sets off efforts by greens to suspend West Coast fishery

GRANTS PASS — Concerned sardine numbers may be starting to collapse, conservation groups are calling on federal fishery managers to halt West Coast commercial sardine fishing to give the species a better chance to rebound.

“If they continue fishing them hard, they will go down a lot faster, and it will take them longer to recover,” said Ben Enticknap, of the conservation group Oceana, that wants a suspension through the first half of 2014.

The fishing industry counters that while there are signs sardines are going into a natural cycle of decline, fishery management has taken precautions to prevent overfishing, which was common in the past.

Stock
“Today’s precautionary management framework cannot be compared to the historic fishery, which harvested as much as 50 percent of the standing stock,” said Diane Pleschner-Steele, executive director of the California Wetfish Producers Association, which represents sardine fishermen and processors. She is also vice chairman of a committee that advises the federal Pacific Fishery Management Council on sardines and related species.

Current harvest rates range from 15 percent to 25 percent, depending on the size of stocks.

The council plans to vote Sunday in Costa Mesa, Calif., on an interim harvest quota for the first half of 2014. The council has no specific proposal before it, council staffer Kerry Griffin said.

The latest sardine assessment prepared for the council says that stocks at the start of 2014 are expected to be 28 percent of their peak in 2006, when they hit 1.4 million metric tons. The current management plan for sardines says a decline of another 60 percent, to 150 metric tons, would require halting fishing off the West Coast.

Landings in Oregon, Washington and California have been valued at $9 million to $15 million a year. Most of the fish are exported to Asia, where some are canned and others used for bait for tuna.

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A convenient truth: 90% of the tunas are gone!

Last week, I had the privilege of presiding over the defense of the Ph.D. dissertation of Maria José Juan-Jordá in La Coruña, Spain. Maria José is a bright young researcher and has already published several chapters of her dissertation in the peer-reviewed literature.

The first chapter in her dissertation(1) is the last in a series of peer-reviewed scientific papers that demonstrate that the combined biomass of large oceanic predators (mostly tunas) has not declined by 90% as stated in another scientific paper ten years ago.

The 90% decline figure came from an analysis published in 2003 which concluded that “large predatory fish biomass today is only about 10% of pre-industrial levels” [Myers and Worm, 2003(2)].  Those analyses relied heavily upon catch rates from a single fishing gear type (longline) and aggregated catch across species to estimate trends in “community biomass”. The paper quickly became high-profile in the tuna world. Many environmental groups embraced it as proof that all tunas, not just the bluefins, were in serious trouble. On the other hand, tuna scientists who were actually conducting stock assessments, especially for tropical tunas knew immediately that the 90% number was totally wrong.

Over the next few years, a number of peer reviewed publications(3,4,5,6,7,8) showed that the conclusions in Myers and Worm (2003) were fundamentally flawed. Two of the most important reasons for this are: The aggregation of data, and the use of data from a single fishing method. The end result is that the 90% decline is an overestimate. This process of rebuttal is a natural part of the way science develops. Sometimes scientists reach conclusions that are wrong, for whatever reason, and other scientists discover flaws and point to them. A paper, once published, is not necessarily immortal.

Nevertheless, the notion of 90% global demise of tuna populations is still out there. It is repeated in many consumer guides published by various environmental groups that want to influence market preferences. It also pops up elsewhere: Earlier this year, I visited the web site of a newly-formed commission that aims to improve governance of ocean resources, and I was surprised to see the 90% number mentioned there. A colleague of mine who also noticed it said he was “disappointed that one of the most rebutted fisheries paper of all time continues to raise its head.”

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Harvard study finds eating tuna, mackerel, swordfish boosts memory

Eating tuna could boost memory and slow age-related mental decline, say researchers from Harvard Medical School.

They looked at the diet of 6,000 women with an average age of 72 and monitored them for nearly ten years, measuring their memory and mental ability at different points.

The women who ate tuna, mackerel or swordfish once a week had significantly better verbal memory compared to women who did not regularly eat the fish. There were no links between memory and consumption of light-meat fish or shellfish. It’s thought the benefits are down to the high omega-3 content in tuna and mackerel — other studies suggest this may help boost memory.

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Eating Fish While Pregnant Halves the Risk of ADHD

The amount of fish a woman eats while pregnant may affect her child’s chances of developing attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

Eating fish twice a week was linked to about a 60 per cent lower risk of a child developing certain ADHD-like symptoms, according to research from the Boston University School of Public Health.

But the type of fish eaten is key.

Elevated mercury levels, which can occur from eating certain types of fish, such as tuna and swordfish, were also tied to a higher risk of developing ADHD symptoms such as a short attention span, restlessness or being easily distracted.

‘The really important message is to eat fish,’ said assistant professor Sharon Sagiv, the study’s lead author.

Read full story here.

PG&E tests bad for sea life and also for fishing industry

Written By Brian Stacy

FOR much of the 20th Century Southern California was a world leader in seafood production. The once-thriving tuna fishing fleet, based at the Port of Los Angeles and in San Diego, plied distant waters for months at a time returning to local canneries that employed thousands of people.

Today, the U.S. tuna industry is a distant memory, the victim of subsidized foreign competition, unfair trade practices, government over-regulation, and in some cases under-regulation.

Historically, California’s commercial fishing industry once employed tens of thousands of people in fishing, fish processing, boat building and boat repair and allied industries. Recreational fishing has been a staple of the coastal tourism. Both have been a vibrant part of the California coastal economy, from Eureka to the Mexican border.

I fish the waters of the central California coast. Those of us who remain, men and women who work at sea and harvest many of the types of fish we find in the supermarkets and in restaurants, have to be creative, nimble, and able to adapt to a sometimes harsh natural and political environment.

It is infuriating when yet another hurdle is erected making it nearly impossible for us to practice our trade. But this time it isn’t Mother Nature, imported farm-raised fish, or some government edict. This time it is a public utility – Pacific Gas & Electric, the energy behemoth whose aged gas lines exploded and ravaged the San Bruno community in 2010.

PG&E also owns the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, on the San Luis Obispo County coast. Diablo Canyon now threatens the central coast fishing industry, the local marine environment, and the livelihood of both commercial and recreational fishers.

Read the rest of the article on Los Angeles Daily News.

Endangered species listing for Atlantic bluefin tuna not warranted