Aquaculture: Greening the Blue Revolution
By Dr. Jason Clay
The world's resources are limited. Nowhere is this clearer than with seafood, where an estimated 76 percent of global fisheries are already fished at or beyond capacity. The global seafood catch has been flat for nearly a decade. Yet, per capita demand is increasing each year. Scientists warn that some important fish populations - tuna, swordfish and Chilean sea bass among them - could collapse before the year 2050, threatening one of the world's major food sources and the livelihoods of more than a billion people. The problem appears insurmountable. It is not. Read here

Conservation in Context - Voices from the Mesoamerican Reef
Conservation is most successful when people can manage their own natural resources, within their own social, cultural and economic contexts. Over generations, the residents of local communities have amassed direct knowledge of their environment, and they have a vested interest in protecting it. WWF's commitment to these communities is to strengthen their role as environmental decision makers. Read here

The Coral Triangle - Where Man is Not the Measure of all Things by Kate Newman
Sometimes the size of a solution needs to be equal to the size of the problem. In the Coral Triangle, it needs to be even bigger - in measures that go way beyond human scale. The numbers speak for themselves: 1.6 billion acres, equal to half the size of the United States; natural habitats valued at more than US$2.4 billion annually; 75 percent of the world's coral species and 53 percent of its reefs; more than 3,000 reef fish species including commercially vital yellowfin, skipjack and bigeye tuna; and some 120 million people deriving socioeconomic benefits from the Sulu, Sulawesi and other seas. Read here

A Short History of Fishing by Callum Roberts
"But of all [the land and wildlife in Newfoundland], the most admirable is the Sea, so diversified with severall sorts of Fishes abounding therein, the consideration of which is readie to swallow up and drowne my senses not being able to comprehend or expresse the riches thereof...Cods [are] so thicke by the shoare that we heardlie have been able to row a Boate through them, I have killed of them with a Pike." John Mason penned these words in 1620. Mason was governor of Cuper's Cove, one of the first colonies in Newfoundland. For this reason, people have often dismissed his descriptions of the land and wildlife, and those by people like him, as exaggerated propaganda to encourage settlement. But a trawl through the writings of other authors of the time - letters, personal diaries, travelogues, port receipts - suggests Mason's words were far from empty hyperbole. The seas of the New World really did teem with fish. Read here

The Seas around Us by Carter Roberts 
Forty feet long and 36 tons soaking wet, California gray whales defy expectations. One would not predict grace from a creature of such size, but a recent trip to Baja and the Gulf of California defied all my expectations about Eschrichtius robustus. In a secluded pocket of Magdalena Bay surrounded by 40-foot-tall sand dunes, a dozen females and their calves breached and cavorted within a few feet of our skiffs. I was here to visit this WWF priority site at the perfect time. New mothers and their offspring make this lagoon their home for six weeks each winter, until all are strong enough to make the journey back north to their summer feeding grounds in Arctic seas. Read here