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Ghosts of the Ocean

By: Martin Stelfox, Olive Ridley Project 

A growing human population combined with an insatiable appetite for seafood has dramatically increased pressure on fishing communities worldwide. To keep up with the demand for seafood products, fishers around the world are replacing nets made with natural fibers like cotton and coconut to cheaper and stronger materials like plastics. While synthetic materials help fishers meet higher demands, they pose many new threats to marine habitats.
The FAO estimates that 640,000 tons of fishing gear is abandoned, lost, and discarded in our oceans annually and has been given the term ‘ghost gear’. The majority of ghost hear is composed of plastic which does not biodegrade and has a much longer lifespan.
Fishers are the first to feel the brunt of losing their nets since they are costly to replace.…

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Taking the Pledge for One Less Straw

Mission Blue is proud to partner with One More Generation!

Did you know that in America, we are using an estimated 500,000,000 plastic straws every single day?  That is like 1.6 straws for every man, woman and child living in this country… every single day.  If you were to take an entire day’s worth of plastic straws we use in one day, it would fill up over 127 school busses.  That is like over 46,400 school buses full of one-time use plastic straws that are ending up in our landfills and waterways.  Sick isn’t it?
This inspired 13-year-old Olivia and her 15-year-old brother Carter to  launch the global “OneLessStraw Pledge Campaign” this fall.  Olivia and Carter realized reducing our plastic footprint could be very easy to do; we just need to say ‘NO‘ to single-use plastics such as straws.  …

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Hong Kong Kids’ Aerial Art Encourages the Public to Respect Sharks

Each year, up to 73 million sharks are killed for their fins. Most end up in shark fin soup, a delicacy in both Hong Kong and Mainland China.  However, the last few years have seen a sea change in Hong Kong’s attitude toward shark finning—and an event early this month demonstrated how far the island territory has come.
On November 8th, nearly a thousand children, their teachers and ocean community leaders gathered on Repulse Bay Beach on the south side of Hong Kong Island. They were there as the culmination of Kids Ocean Day, an educational program that links students to the ocean environment, and raises awareness of human impact on the ecosystem.
Directed by aerial artist John Quigley, the kids lined up to form a shark with a severed fin, accompanied by the words “Save Me” in Chinese.…

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Ghost Gear – A Scary Matter

Having removed tons of abandoned fishing gear throughout southern California over the last 11 years, Ocean Defenders Alliance (ODA) recently launched Operation Deep Sweep, which represents an exciting new phase for us.
In late August of this year, we moved our two boats from our homeport in Los Angeles County up to Channel Islands Harbor in Oxnard, CA.  As a part of this operation, we are now removing ghost gear from the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuaries (CINMS!)
Plans in place to protect and preserve
The Channel Islands are a chain of eight islands located off the coast of Ventura, California that received National Marine Sanctuary (NMS) status in 1980.  ODA applied for, and was granted, a permit that allows us to go into this protected area and remove any hazardous man-made debris we find.…

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Carl Safina Reports from the Gyre

No Refuge: Tons of Trash Covers The Remote Shores of Alaska
A marine biologist traveled to southwestern Alaska in search of ocean trash that had washed up along a magnificent coast rich in fish, birds, and other wildlife. He and his colleagues found plenty of trash – as much as a ton of garbage per mile on some beaches.
by Carl Safina
I am back ashore after an unusual expedition that brought scientists and artists to witness and respond to beach trash on the shores of southern Alaska. I have good and bad news.
The expedition was called GYRE, partly because much of the trash spins out of the North Pacific Ocean gyre, and partly because of the trip’s message: what goes around comes around.…

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Ghost Nets, among the greatest killers in our oceans…

Ghost Fishing is what fishing gear does when it has been lost, dumped or abandoned. Imagine a fishing net that gets snagged on a reef of a wreck and gets detached from the fishing vessel. Nets, long lines, fish traps or any man made contraptions designed to catch fish or marine organisms are considered capable of ghost fishing when unattended. And without anyone profiting from the catches, affecting already depleted commercial fish stocks. Caught fish die and in turn attract scavengers which will get caught in that same net, thus creating a vicious circle.
Ghost nets are among the greatest killers in our oceans, and not only because of their numbers. Literally hundreds of kilometers of nets get lost every year and due to the nature of the materials used to produce these nets they can and will keep fishing for multiple decades, possibly even for several centuries.…

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Swedish Filmmakers expose unseen threats in Baltic Sea

Today we’d like to introduce and welcome our new Mission Blue partner, Leofilm. It’s headed up by award winning Swedish filmmakers Joakim Odelberg and Emma Watson, who are dedicated to educating others about ocean health issues, especially the issue of ghost nets. In this, our third story featuring Mission Blue partners involved in the ghost net issue, we’ll learn that not only do Joakim and Emma make the films, but they are also committed to working with fishermen and stakeholders towards a solution to the problem – called the second worst crisis in the largely landlocked Baltic Sea next to chemical dumping.
“From the late 50’s when we began to use synthetic material in nets and other fishing gear, 62,000 miles of nets have been put out to sea in the Baltic – and many of them have been lost. …

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Photorealist painter uses humor to highlight dilemma of marine debris

Above: “Mighty Migration” oil on canvas, 30″ x 40″ © Karen Hackenberg 2011
“I am walking on the Discovery Bay beach outside of Port Townsend WA where I live, swim, and kayak. Collecting colorful plastic cone-shaped tips of washed-up fireworks’ rockets for use in my sculpture, I examine the live pulpy bodies of moon snails in their white shells and the purple velvet “fur” on sand dollars, as well as the stranded plastic bags, the crab shell molts, the squid egg cases, the running shoes, logs, plastic water bottles, shot gun shells, disposable lighters, ropes of bull kelp, nylon ropes, eel grasses, striated stones and glowing agates. I struggle to make sense of this diverse and incongruous debris, and to somehow make peace with its implications.”…

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The Deadliest Ghosts

Kurt Lieber, Founder and President of Ocean Defenders Alliance kicks off our series on ‘Ghost Nets,’ featuring Mission Blue partners who are leading the charge to publicize – and remedy this growing and very dangerous problem for sea life. We’ve also embedded the just-released video from Jamie Thalman on ODA’s work, ‘Catalina Wrecked.’
We are proud to welcome Ocean Defenders Alliance to the Mission Blue family of Partners! ~ Ed.
There is a long-neglected issue affecting our planets oceans.  It is not that people don’t care; it is more a classic example of “out of sight, out of mind.”  Most people are outraged when they see images of garbage or clear-cuts in national forests—but too few people understand that our oceans face similarly devastating circumstances in the form of “ghost” fishing gear. …

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