The Biggest Threats To Our Oceans & Fisheries (2018)
- By: Joseph Simonds
- on
- Found In: Conservation, Fishing Tips, Salt Strong Podcast
As fishermen, we have a duty to protect our oceans, waterways, and fisheries.
If we are sloppy and careless, not only do we pay dearly for it, but our kids, grandkids, and great-grandkids are affected by our actions even more.
And we aren’t just talking about plastic in the water and cleaning up after ourselves (although that is a big issue in and of itself).
Since some of our most listened to Fish Strong Podcast episodes are centered around fishing conservation, we decided to have Hunter Miller from Oceana.org on the show to talk about some of the other big threats they are seeing out there.
One of the biggest threats that Hunter really clarified was the damage that oil drilling is doing.
Pretty eye-opening stuff.
It’s also pretty controversial.
Why?
Because there are certainly two sides to the oil drilling story.
One, it provides a ton of jobs – plus, having access to oil helps keep gas prices lower (especially for boats – if gas prices go up, so does the cost of getting fresh fish), oil rigs can provide some amazing structure for fish and marine ecosystems, and others.
But on the other hand, one oil spill can be catastrophic.
Moreover, I had never ever considered the potential damage that seismic airgun blasting does (Hunter does a great job of explaining this on the show).
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this in the comments.
Finally, we also discussed shark finning, overfishing, and seafood fraud (wait until you hear the seafood fraud numbers that he reveals).
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Also, no seals were hurt in the recording of this show.
Click the play button below to listen right here on our site or click either button below to go directly to iTunes or Stitcher to download the episode.
Note: Don’t forget to SUBSCRIBE to the Fish Strong podcast on iTunes or Google Play.
How Seafood Fraud Works
I was blown away by the stats he told me regarding Seafood fraud.
Here’s a quick video explaining a real-life example that happened here in America.
Finally, here are all of the links from the show notes:
For info on the Oceana shark campaign: http://usa.oceana.
Seafood Fraud: http://oceana.org/our-
Offshore Drilling: www.stopthedrill.org
Facebook: https://www.
Twitter: @FloridaOceana
Any questions on this episode?
Let us know in the comments.
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Thank you for being concerned about the health of our oceans. It seems that if something can be screwed up, people will find a way to do it because of their greed and love of money, which as we all know, is the root of all evil, as the saying goes. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was once human life on Mars or Venus but the humans destroyed it. I don’t know how they found their way to Earth.
I did not listen to much of this because, the little i did, talked a lot and said nothing. so let me be short and sweet as i can be. this is 2018 and look at what we have today compared to 1918. now tell me why we will not see the same advancement in the next 100 years? socialism could be a factor, why look for a better way when you have to give it to those who sit around smoking pot and griping about what they don’t have.
The discovery of oil and what it can do has been a big factor in where we are. yes we need to find other ways but why cut off your nose to push others getting rich on new experiments? look at the advancement in solar in just the past few years. you use a PC today that was available 20 years ago but look at the money they made with piece by piece marketing. they are doing the same thing with solar and wind.
So getting back to drilling in the gulf and the affect on fish.
you get many different time frames on when offshore drilling started and how many there now are depending on who wrote it and their agenda. you get the same results when you search for the spills since the beginning. So let me just speak about the last one. the BP oil spill.
could it have been prevented? sure, but it could have been controlled sooner had the inspector insured the shutoff valves been used as designed and not the after market el cheapo ones that failed.
could it have been less devastating? yes. oil floats and still we have no means to remove it quickly should we ever have another major spill. instead they used a chemical to sink it, out of sight out of mind for a short while, it sank causing problem to the bottom and then currents moved it on shore causing more problems.
do we need to drill off shore? not now and within the next 100 years we may not need it. why not now? look at the cost of gas in the last few years. you will see the cost went down when there was the possibility of our drilling our own.
look at the big drop in price in 2015. why? “The unexpected slide in oil prices really exacerbated the offshore drilling industry’s problems because it would make it even harder for oil companies to make money drilling deepwater wells. “–OPEC controls the cost of crude oil, they dropped the price to prevent our drill our own. well obama said there would be no off shore drilling and the cost of crude started back up. the along comes trump who said if elected he would repeal obama’s ban and allow more use of our own oil. OPEC in fear of trump being elected and again the price of crude dropped. then trump changed his mind and is undecided on it so we see the price going up again.
bottom line–we may never need more drilling as long as OPEC thinks we might and in the next 100 years will we even need it id capitalism stays in america.
now that’s all i have to say about this as at my age my concerns are if the fish are biting and where and on what? i do hope my children and grandchildren will do a better job of watching our government than i did.
Great insight, Roy. And I agree that hopefully there is a whole lot LESS government for our kids and grandkids.