Federal fisheries minister Robert Thibault has announced the approval of $7.5 million worth of projects under the first two rounds of the department’s Aquaculture Collaborative Research and Development Program. DFO approved 29 of the 67 proposals received in the first round and nine of the 17 project proposals received in the second round. Thirteen projects were approved in the Pacific region, one in the Central & Arctic, six in Quebec, 13 in the Maritimes & Gulf of St. Lawrence, and five in Newfoundland & Labrador.

Receipt of the funding requires a 25% contribution from industry towards the total cost of the research. The program and industry funds then remain in the department to support research conducted by DFO researchers. Projects approved in the third round, which ended in mid-January 2002, are expected to be announced soon. The deadline for the fourth round was April 15.

Delegates from the international community are accusing Canada of reneging on a long-standing pledge to help protect the delicate Antarctic environment. The criticism was leveled in St. Petersburg, Russia, at an international meeting of the countries that have signed the Antarctic Treaty. "Canadian delegates received significant formal and informal pressure to ratify the Protocol on Environmental Protection," says a Foreign Affairs report on the meeting, obtained under the Access to Information Act. "Some countries expressed dissatisfaction and impatience with Canada’s position," the report says.

The protocol sets strict limits on pollution and resource extraction to safeguard fragile ecosystems in the south polar regions. All full members of the Antarctic Treaty have ratified the 1991 protocol, which came into force in 1998. But Canada, a non-voting member of the treaty, has yet to enact any of the domestic legislation needed for ratification, despite the passage of more than 10 years since signing the accord. Although primarily an Arctic nation, Canada has broad commercial interests in Antarctica and several Canadian companies, for example, have organized cruises or provided logistic support for scientific expeditions in the region. Enforcing the protocol would require amendments to several pieces of legislation, including the Shipping Act and the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act. A separate Antarctic Act would likely be needed as well. Meanwhile, the Canadian government would also have to ensure that provincial legislation conforms and there have been no discussions with the provinces so far. Source: Xinhua.

On March 21st, Keven Onclin, manager of Pacific National Aquaculture’s fish farm in Clayoquot Sound, confirmed that as many as 100,000 juvenile Atlantic salmon at the Clayoquot site were carrying infectious hematopoietic necrosis (IHN). The disease appeared there just two weeks after 700,000 smolts were moved into nine pens at the farm. Onclin said the smolts tested disease-free before the move and he suspects they picked up the virus from spawning herring which are in the sound in large numbers. The young Atlantic salmon are particularly vulnerable to IHN because their immune systems are not fully developed and crowded pen conditions enable viruses such as IHN to quickly infect entire farms. This is the third outbreak of IHN within the past few months at B.C. salmon farms. In February, Heritage Aquaculture was forced to kill 1.6 million Atlantic smolts after discovering IHN at a farm in the Broughton Archipelago. IHN also turned up at an Omega Salmon Group operation on the North Island. Source: CP.

Lloyd’s List, the British shipping industry newspaper founded in 1734, has announced that it is changing its centuries-old policy and will no longer refer to a ship as ‘she’.

In future, all vessels will be referred to as ‘it’, said the newspaper’s editor Julian Bray, "to bring the paper into line with most other reputable international business titles." Peter van der Merwe, general editor at the historic Greenwich Maritime Museum in London said his institution opposed the decision. "It’s a chip out of the wall of a particular cultural sector," he said. "You actually lose the colour of specialist areas if you destroy the language of them. We will continue to refer to ships as ‘she’ here."

Van der Merwe said the tradition of calling ships ‘she’ grew out of sailors’ affection for their vessels, on which they were totally dependent. A spokesman for the Royal Navy said they would also continue to use the female pronoun. "It’s not just a sentimental thing, but a part of culture." - Paul Avery.

The US National Environmental Trust (NET) has enlisted the support of dozens of high-end restaurants in Chicago, Philadelphia and San Francisco to help launch its "Take a Pass on Chilean Sea Bass" campaign aimed at raising consumer awareness about the endangered Patagonian toothfish, better known in North America under its marketing name: Chilean Sea Bass. NET is focussing its "Take a Pass" campaign on restaurants, because that’s where 70 percent of Chilean Sea Bass is sold in the US and Canada. Chilean Sea Bass is a slow growing species (10 years to sexual maturity) inhabiting Southern Ocean waters around Antarctica. The regional fishery authority in Antarctica, the Commission for Conservation of Antarctic Marine Resources (CCAMLR), has established the sustainable annual TAC for Patagonian toothfish at 19,000 tonnes, however, nearly 49,000 tonnes of Chilean Sea Bass made its way into restaurants and markets last year – more than double the legal catch. CCAMLR scientists say that if the overall take is not drastically reduced the fish will be commercially extinct by 2005. In addition, approximately 200,000 seabirds, primarily Wandering Albatrosses, are killed each year by fleets in search of Chilean Sea Bass, raising serious concerns that this species of birds and others, including Black-Browed Albatrosses and Grey Petrels, could also face extinction around the Antarctic continent.

The Patagonian toothfish (Dissostichus eleginoides) is not a bass, but a member of a unique family of deep water fish adapted to extreme cold conditions. They mature slowly over 35 years or more and females can grow to more than six feet in length and can weigh 200 lbs (males are somewhat smaller). Chilean Sea Bass have been found thriving at depths of more than one and one quarter miles. In the past three or four years, the average landed weight of Chilean Sea Bass has dropped to near 10 lbs, while the price has sky rocketed to over US$20/lb at retail fish markets in Canada and the US. Those high prices coupled with an increasingly scarce supply have lead increasing numbers of vessels to redirect their efforts to the Chilean Sea Bass’s close relative, the Antarctic toothfish (Dissostichus mawsoni) which now faces a similar threat of extinction.

For more information on the Patagonian toothfish and  the "Take a Pass on Chilean Sea Bass" campaign, contact the National Environmental Trust, 1200 18th St NW, Washington, DC 20036 USA. Tel: 202-887-8800. Fax: 202-887-8889. – Paul Avery

COLUMBIA RIVER JUVENILE SALMON SACRIFICED

The termination by the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) of its spill program has resulted in the worst loss of Columbia River juvenile salmon and steelhead since any of the Columbia stocks have been listed under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). A report by the Save Our Wild Salmon Coalition, titled "Failing Salmon, Failing People", is based on BPA’s own numbers and it concludes that if BPA had kept the spill program going at 100% of required recovery plan levels, the total additional cost to hydro consumers would have only been about 38 cents/month for consumers in Seattle and only about 75 cents/month for consumers in Portland over one year. However, as a result of the BPA’s decision to terminate the spill program, the juvenile survival rates of ESA listed Snake River steelhead plunged to only 16%, compared to 68% in 2000, and chinook juvenile survival rates were only 57%, nearly 20% lower than in 2000, both record lows. In 2001 the US federal government spent hundreds of millions of dollars in efforts to restore the 12 ESA listed salmon and steelhead runs in the Columbia and Snake Rivers, while BPA was simultaneously killing them in large numbers by refusing to permit the use of water in the river as spill to help improve water quality and flush the juveniles out to the sea. Source: FishLink

The government of South Africa is investing 10 million rand ($1.4 million) to set up a coelacanth research project it hopes will become a world model for studies into the unique "four-legged" fish. The coelacanth was once thought to survive only as a prehistoric fossil until the first one was netted live in 1938 off the east coast of South Africa. Until then the fish was known to have existed between 400 million and 70 million years ago, but was considered long extinct. The capture of that first live specimen of this large predatory fish with its set of leg-like fins made international headlines at the time and was hailed as the 20th century’s most important zoological find. A decade and a half later, in the early 1950s, another live coelacanth was found in the waters near the Indian Ocean Island archipelago of the Comores. Coelacanth have subsequently been discovered in the deep Indian Ocean waters off Mozambique, Madagascar, Comores and Kenya as well as Indonesia. Then, in 1999, South African researchers encountered a coelacanth population at a depth of some 108 metres off the northern KwaZulu-Natal coast at Sodwana Bay. The planned South African Coelacanth Conservation and Genome Research Programme will act as a focus for research  into these strange and ancient fish and the government says the it has already attracted partners from Europe, North America and Singapore for its development. Source: DP-A

BIRTH CONTROL A FISH GENDER BENDER

Women who take birth control pills or hormone therapy are flushing enough hormones down the toilet to make male fish downstream produce eggs, a DFO study shows. Synthetic estrogen in the women’s urine goes through sewage treatment plants without being completely broken down. The fish then absorb it and a host of bad effects follow, including: male fish producing eggs in their testes; females stimulated by the extra hormones to produce eggs at the wrong times of year; and unanswered questions about whether these chemically altered fish are capable of reproducing at all. Scientists have seen this "gender-bending" effect in fish downstream from sewage plants, but lacked proof that birth control pills are a cause.

In a controlled study, Karen Kidd of the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans introduced synthetic hormone from birth control pills into a remote 34-hectare lake in northwestern Ontario, west of Dryden. The male lake trout, white suckers, fathead minnows and pearl dace turned up last fall with proteins that females use to manufacture egg cells, and in some cases with the eggs themselves. The lake experiment used the amount of hormone that would come from 6,000 women taking the pill, said Kidd. "The question now is whether this feminization is affecting the population size or sustainability," she said. "Can males with eggs in their testes reproduce effectively? Can they contribute to the population?"

It will take another summer of adding chemicals, and a couple of years of counting fish afterwards, to know the full effects. But Kidd has already found an interested audience when hse visited Vancouver during the first week of January to present her preliminary results to a conference of fisheries scientists.