Fish & Fisheries

"DAUPHIN ISLAND, Alabama -- More than half the fish caught Monday by Press-Register reporters in the surf off Dauphin Island had bloody red lesions on their bodies.

Fishing along an uninhabited portion of the barrier island during a trip to survey beaches for tarballs, the newspaper caught 21 fish, 14 of them with lesions. Of those fish, eight had lesions a quarter of an inch across or smaller, while 6 had much larger blemishes.

Most of the fish were whiting, a small species common to the surf zone throughout the Gulf of Mexico. ...

"In an effort to sustain commercial and recreational fishing for the next several decades, the United States this year will become the first country to impose catch limits for every species it manages, from Alaskan pollock to Caribbean queen conch."

Can southwest Alaska make money from its rich mineral deposits without destroying the Bristol Bay fishery that is currently an economic mainstay?

"State and federal wildlife officials have a rare opportunity to stem the decline of American shad on the Susquehanna River, a Chesapeake Bay tributary crucial to annual spawning runs."

"Concerned that overfishing is destroying the ability of menhaden to reproduce, the commission that manages the Atlantic coast fishery voted Wednesday to sharply reduce the catch of the fish."

"A federal judge [Monday] upheld new rules designed to protect West Coast salmon and steelhead from three widely used farm pesticides."

"The Fukushima Plate is tableware with its own built-in safety mechanism. Underneath the plate is a radiation meter that logs whether your sushi has absorbed too much seaborne radiation from the Fukushima disaster earlier this year."

"Two popular Southern California fisheries have collapsed right under the noses of management agencies that had inadequate data, a new study suggests."

"Countries around the world are selling more than twice as much Atlantic and Mediterranean bluefin tuna than international standards allow, according to a new report from the Pew Environment Group. The report, released earlier this week, compares the recorded volume of Atlantic bluefin tuna caught and traded in the Mediterranean Sea and northeastern Atlantic Ocean with catch quotas set by the intergovernmental body responsible for regulating the fish's trade."