Fishing

VIDEO: Out of the Shadows: Illegal Fishing and Slavery on our Oceans (4 mins)  Seafood shouldn’t come at the expense of the oceans or human rights. But fishing often takes place in the shadows, meaning illegal fishing is widespread, devastating our oceans and driving human trafficking, bonded labour and slavery at sea. These abuses happen on boats carrying fish that could eventually land on your plate.

10/02/15 - Conservationists call for UK to create world's largest marine reserve Three proposed reserves in UK waters around the Pitcairn Islands in the Pacific, and Ascension Island and South Sandwich Islands in the Atlantic, would more than double the size of the world’s existing marine protected areas.

10/06/14 - Trafficked into slavery on Thai trawlers to catch food for prawns The Thai fishing industry is built on slavery, with men often beaten, tortured and sometimes killed - all to catch 'trash fish' to feed the cheap farmed prawns sold in the west

08/06/13 - VIDEO: North Sea cod stocks 'on road to sustainability'Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) research.  The Marine Stewardship Council, which certifies whether fish are being caught sustainably, says it is too soon to tell exactly when the North Sea fishery will be sustainable. But a spokesman said on current trends, it will be ready for certification within years rather than decades. Stocks would still be in recovery then, James Simpson said, but they would have passed an acceptable level.

Hugh's Fish Fight

TV: Channel 4 Hugh's Fish Fight Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall embarks on a brand new battle to Save Our Seas. Two thirds of the planet's fish stocks are overfished and a fifth have collapsed altogether. Hugh wants to persuade governments around the world to set up many more marine protected areas, to redress the balance in our seas, and allow consumers to continue to enjoy the benefits of eating fish. Hugh takes his new campaign to the far corners of the planet, including Antarctica, Thailand and the Philippines, as well as all round the UK. He also sets out to galvanise his massive army of 850,000 fish fighters through the Fish Fight website.

14/02/13: Episode 1: Devastating fishing methods  Hugh goes to the Philippines to witness fishermen dynamiting fish, and discovers how this practice has decimated fish stocks. Off the Isle of Man he goes underwater to see the destructive effects of scallop dredging, and sees how marine protected areas are helping the recovery of the island's waters. Hugh launches his new campaign on the sands at Weston-super-Mare, with a dramatic public display of what is at stake if we don't look after our seas.

21/02/13: Episode 2: High-tech fishing targetting tiny krill in the southern ocean  Hugh travels to Antarctica to one of the last significant patches of sea not already being overrun with fishing boats but finds giant high-tech boats hoovering up the tiny shrimp-like crustacea at the bottom of the food chain.  The krill is fed to farmed salmon and sold as krill oil tablets - part of the increasingly lucrative market for omega 3. While the birds of Antarctica are strictly protected on land, the krill that they feed on is not protected in the seas and the birds could face a dire food shortage. South Georgia, a haven for wildlife, is governed by the British. This means that it is the British Government who decide how much of this sea to protect. But will they listen to Hugh as he pushes them to set up a bigger protected area around this extraordinary patch of sea?

28/02/13: Episode 3: What are your prawns eating? Hugh travels to Thailand to find out what goes in to the feed of our King Prawns. Most of the prawns we eat in the UK are farmed in ponds on land, but they need to be fed protein, and much of that comes from the over-fished seas around Thailand. A lot of this is fish called 'trashfish' - it's too small, bony, or rotten to feed to humans. It's generally unsustainable, often consisting of juvenile fish that could feed more people and replenish fish stocks if given the chance to grow and reproduce. He saw boats fishing with illegally small mesh on their nets, and even saw them fishing inside the marine protected areas that designed to help these seas recover.

Discards

11/02/13 George Monbiot: Will EU discards ban force the hand of our disastrous fisheries minister?

The End of the Line

The End of the Line is a documentary film made in 2009 from the book of the same name written in 2004 by Charles Clover - "We must stop thinking of our oceans as a food factory and realize that they thrive as a huge and complex marine environment".

BBC The Living Planet - The Open Ocean (1984)

This programme concentrates on the marine environment. Attenborough goes underwater himself to observe the ocean's life forms and comment on them at first hand. He states that those that live on the sea bed are even more varied than land inhabitants. Much sea life is microscopic, and such creatures make up part of the marine plankton. Some animals are filter feeders and examples include the manta ray, the basking shark and the largest, the whale shark. Bony fish with their swim bladders and manoeuvrable fins dominate the seas, and the tuna is hailed as the fastest hunter, but the superiority of these types of fish did not go unchallenged: mammals are also an important component of ocean life. Killer Whales, dolphins, narwhals and Humpback Whales are shown, as well as a school of beluga whales, which congregate annually in a bay in the Canadian Arctic — for reasons unknown. Marine habitats can be just as diverse as those on dry land. Attenborough surmises that the coral reef, with its richness of life, is the water equivalent of the jungle. Where the breezes of the Gulf Stream meet those of the Arctic, the resulting currents churn up nutrients, which lead to vegetation, the fish that eat it, and others that eat them. Attenborough remarks that it is man who has been most responsible for changing ocean environments by fishing relentlessly.