Blog

  • Sweden steps up the fight against EU-wide discards

     Mark Brown (Volunteer) 27 March 2012

    Sweden has stepped up the fight for an EU-wide ban on discards, as rural affairs minister Eskil Erlandsson arrived in Brussels to outline his vision for an ‘ethical and fair’ fishing programme.

    Discarding refers to the process whereby unwanted fish caught are thrown back into the sea because they aren’t valuable enough or quotas have already been reached. This practice sees around 1.3 million tonnes of perfectly good fish wasted each year in the EU.

  • Baltic Amber

     By: Jocelyn Ruark, Intern 7 December 2011

    Freshmen year at my home university, I took “rocks for jocks” or Geology 101. Over the semester, I had to memorize the appearance and name of 60 different rocks so I could identify a random sample of 20 for the final exam. As December approached, I prayed for a tray holding “easy” stones to recognize like granite, coal, and one of my favorite stones, amber. The beautiful golden-hued amber is actually a resin made from the fossilization of pine sap.

  • Tweeting about tides

     By Jocelyn Ruark; Intern 2 December 2011

    I love Twitter. Not only because I personally love to tweet, but because it’s an innovation that has changed the way we live and react.

  • Curiosity, cod, and the Commission

     By Jocelyn Ruark; Intern 24 November 2011

    As December quickly approaches, every morning when I head into the Baltic Sea office, I pass a new Christmas tree on display in a shop window or welcoming guests just outside the door of a local bar. After passing a particularly tall pine this morning, I thought about how interesting it is that a tree’s age is not measured by its height, but by the number of rings that are laid down each year in its trunk. This got me thinking – how do the researchers at Oceana determine the age of fish?

  • New steps taken in support of a non- discard policy

     Oceana welcomes the initiative by the Scandinavian countries to end discard 23 November 2011

    Today, the Swedish, Danish and Norwegian fisheries ministers met with EU fisheries Commissioner Maria Damanaki at a seminar about the reform of the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) in Stockholm. During this meeting they signed a declaration, announcing their intention to adopt a ban on discards. The prohibition for discards shall apply from 1 January 2013 according to the declaration  that the ministers Eskil Erlandsson from Sweden, Mette Gjerskov from Denmark and Lisbeth Berg-Hansen from Norway have signed.