Oceana | Protecting the World's Oceans

Holidays are here and many people in Europe go out and buy some eel for their Christmas dinners, as they do every year. But what many might not know is that the European eel (Anguilla anguilla) is critically endangered and threatened with extinction. To provide some perspective, this threat level is higher than that given to the polar bear or the giant panda.

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.

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.

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.

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?