Times & Tails

In celebration of World Oceans Day, Publix has continued its longstanding commitment to sustainable seafood practices and ocean wildlife protection by donating $130,000 to the Sustainable Fisheries Partnership (SFP). This contribution marks the latest in a 14-year partnership dedicated to responsible seafood harvesting and ocean conservation.

Minister of Fisheries, Oceans and the Canadian Coast Guard, announced that Canada will host the 2nd International Fishing Gear Innovation Summit in February 2025.

The snow crab quota in Newfoundland and Labrador is over half caught just over a month into the season, despite potential strikes looming at some processing plants.

By analyzing 17 years of visual survey data and acoustic recordings, they created a statistical model to estimate whale populations and predict their distribution over time. This mapping aims to prevent harmful encounters with commercial fishing and vessel strikes.

A two-year-old whale calf, it's trapped in and into the vast ocean, the young whale opted to retreat to the far end of the lagoon and hide in the shallows...Despite this setback, Mr. Cottrell and his team, comprising over 40 experts ranging from veterinarians to drone specialists, are exploring alternative strategies. Their efforts over the past two weeks to entice the calf out of the lagoon near the remote village of Zaballos, on the west coast of Vancouver Island, have been unsuccessful so far.

Fishermen in Canada's largest lobster fishing district are gearing up to make a crucial decision this spring: whether to increase the minimum legal size of lobster they catch. Lobster harvesters in southwestern Nova Scotia, along with others across Atlantic Canada, must weigh the implications of matching an impending increase in the United States.

The California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) will close most of the state’s commercial Dungeness crab fishery on Monday, April 8th. Zones 3, 4, 5, and 6, covering from Sonoma-Mendocino county to the U.S.-Mexico border, will be shut down at 6 p.m. due to the presence of humpback whales, with a 30-fathom depth limit on traps in zones 1 and 2, which span the rest of the coastline north to the Oregon border.

If the whales and sea turtles off our California coast could express gratitude, they would be applauding the efforts of our state's Ocean Protection Council (OPC). Recently, the OPC allocated over $1.8 million in state funding to mitigate the risk of whale and sea turtle entanglement in fishing gear used by California's fisheries.

Despite the species' remarkable recovery from the brink of extinction, findings published in the Royal Society Open Science journal indicate a roughly 20% decline in their numbers over the past decade.