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Hear That?! Ocean Allison Podcast Highlights Ocean Changemakers

Mission Blue is proud to partner with Ocean Allison!
By: Allison Randolph

There are currently more than seven billion individuals on this planet – this blue planet that we all call home. Inextricably connected to planet health is ocean health, and while human beings are at the root of most pressures facing our watery planet, they are also at the root of the solutions.
As a child growing up in South Florida, it seemed as though I spent more time below the water’s surface than above, cultivating a profound connection with the underwater world. Combining that ocean connection with a formal education in marine science and an informal education in digital communications, I found myself in a position to be a voice for the ocean.…

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Fate of Small Species Has Huge Implications for Our Ocean

The Pacific Fishery Management Council should use science to set catch limits on anchovy.  
By: Dr. Sylvia Earle

When most of us think of the ocean, we think big: It covers 71 percent of our planet, dictates our weather, and is home to the tallest mountain and deepest canyon on the planet, as well as the largest animal, the blue whale.
And yet the ocean relies on its smallest inhabitants, from the phytoplankton and zooplankton that underpin the food web to forage fish, species like sardines, herring, and anchovy that are often referred to as baitfish.
In recent years, numbers of some forage fish species have declined dramatically, causing a food shortage for a vast array of marine animals. The Pacific marine ecosystem, including right here in the San Francisco Bay, is already suffering the consequences, with well-publicized accounts of starving sea lion pups and brown pelican breeding failures among the most visible evidence.…

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Politics and Porpoises

Mission Blue is proud to partner with Ocean Champions, #VoteTheOcean on November 8th!
Everyday we work to safeguard the health of our ocean and its wildlife – from sustainable fisheries and clean beaches to pods of dolphins and porpoises. We need members of Congress to make strong federal policies and laws that preserve our nation’s marine and coastal resources. At Ocean Champions, we work to get the right officials elected to Congress who will lead the charge to protect and manage the ocean. As we say at Ocean Champions: “Great ocean policies begin with great ocean champions.”
What We Do
During the past 10 years we’ve helped elect over 100 ocean champions in Congress — Republicans, Democrats, and Independents who have made the oceans a priority. …

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NGO’s Unite Against Shark Fin Trade!

Mission Blue is proud to stand with 80 other NGO’s in support of the Shark Fin Trade Elimination Act. On September 22, 2016, the letter below was sent to Congress urging support and passage of this important Act.

Dear Senator/Representative:
We, the undersigned organizations, representing over one million Americans, submit this letter urging Congress to support and pass the Shark Fin Trade Elimination Act (SFTEA) of 2016 (S. 3095/H.R. 5584). Sharks have been swimming in our oceans since before dinosaurs walked the earth. For over 400 million years, they have played a vital role in maintaining healthy oceans, but today, sharks are disappearing as a result of bycatch and overfishing, largely fueled by the shark fin trade. The demand for shark fins has led to the practice of finning – the act of cutting the fins off a shark and discarding its body at sea to drown, bleed to death, or be eaten alive by other fish.…

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Hope for Southeast Florida’s Marine Ecosystems

By: Angela Smith, Founder and President of Shark Team One

The Story of the Coastal Southeast Florida Hope Spot!
North of the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary exists a critical area of coral reef habitat and other associated marine ecosystems that have been in decline for decades due to overuse and their proximity to the heavily populated cities of Southeast Florida. Although in 1990 the Florida Keys were declared a sanctuary, the reef areas extending from Key Biscayne in the south up to St. Lucie Inlet in the north still remain unprotected.
Southeast Florida marine habitats hold populations of critically endangered species like staghorn and elkhorn coral, and smalltooth sawfish. They are also an important migration route for sperm and humpback whales; a migratory stopover for pelagic shark species such as great white, great hammerhead, tiger, lemon, dusky, bull sharks; a nesting habitat for three species of sea turtles; and a spawning ground for vulnerable fish species such as snook, grouper and snapper.…

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Hope in the Coral Triangle

By: Liz Cunningham

“We need to take care of the ocean, because we have no land,” Arman said. “The sea is our home.” Those were the last words the Bajau sea nomad in Sulawesi told me before we parted.
When I researched my book Ocean Country, I asked, “Who more than any other cultural group in the world calls the ocean home?” The answer was the Austronesia sea nomads of Southeast Asia. Nowhere on earth are there a people whose lives are more deeply intertwined with the sea. While they now primarily live in stilt villages, they live in the wake of a 10,000 year old tradition of nomadic life at sea—their ancestors ate, cooked, hunted, slept, and gave birth at sea.…

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Ascension: Halfway to the Atlantic’s largest marine reserve

 

 
By Charles Clover, Executive Director, Blue Marine Foundation
 
 

On the morning of Sunday 3 January 2016, the world woke to the news that the British government was proposing to create a “marine reserve nearly the size of the United Kingdom” in the tropical Atlantic around the island of Ascension. It was a moment of triumph for all those who had campaigned so hard for this outcome. The proposed designation of half the waters around Ascension Island would be the largest fully protected marine reserve in the Atlantic Ocean. Yet it is important to understand that what has happened is, for now, just a closure of some but not all of Ascension’s waters to commercial fishing and that a great deal more remains to be done by both British and the US governments if the formal protection of this marine treasure is to succeed and, crucially, to be supported by the local people.…

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Protecting Sharks and Marine Ecosystems

From our new partners at Shark Team One:

Shark Team One is proud to partner with Mission Blue!
For millions of years sharks have inhabited our planet’s oceans. However today, due to factors such as overfishing, finning, bycatch in commercial fisheries and habitat loss over a third of all shark, skate and ray species are threatened with extinction. In response to the rapid decline of elasmobranchs around the world, Shark Team One has mobilized to create a team of scientists, conservationists, divers, filmmakers, photographers, partner organizations, ocean ambassadors and concerned citizens who are fighting to help save sharks and our oceans.
Headquartered in South Florida, Shark Team One brings shark conservation awareness to local, national and global stakeholders, schools, colleges and government institutions via conservation initiatives, partner programs, educational seminars and outreach events.…

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Healthy Oceans Require Healthy Policy

Our country has been making serious strides in rebuilding some of our most threatened fish species, but key members of Congress are now threatening to undo that progress and take us in the other direction. Luckily, we all have the opportunity to fight back.
Over the last several decades, our understanding of the ocean has deepened tremendously, although sometimes we have had to learn the hard way that the ocean is not inexhaustible. Decades of intense overfishing have led to severe declines in populations of fish, including Atlantic cod, Gulf of Mexico red snapper, and many Pacific coast rockfishes. Thankfully, we have learned a fair amount about how to restore the health of the ocean, and some of that knowledge has been reflected in updates to our nation’s primary fishing law, the Magnuson-Stevens Act, originally passed in 1976.…

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Sea Lion Pups Starving Along California Coast

By Courtney Mattison
Sea lion pups are starving and washing up on California beaches for the third consecutive year. Every winter since January 2013, throngs of sickly young sea lions have stranded themselves on beaches and in seaside backyards and parking lots in California coastal communities, often weighing less than half of their ideal body weight. “They’re extremely emaciated, basically starving to death,” says veterinarian Shawn Johnson of the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito.
Over 2,000 emaciated, dehydrated and diseased sea lion pups have washed up on California’s shores from San Diego to San Francisco since the beginning of 2015. For the two-month period of January and February this year, California sea lion strandings were almost 20 times the average stranding rate.[i]…

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