Maine shrimp are small and sweet, and they are usually only available fresh for a few weeks in winter. The catch is traditionally sort of a holdover season for the local fishermen, who would otherwise not be fishing during those weeks. Last year, however, the state Department of Marine Resources decided that the number of shrimp was so abundant that they let the season linger on until May. The fishermen caught 13 million pounds of shrimp last year, but now officials are saying that the catch was waaaaay too big and has resulted in depleted stocks, so they’re limiting the catch to only a third of that – 4.4 million pounds. The regulators are using a couple of schemes to help stretch out the length of the season, but the conventional wisdom says that most of the quota will have been caught by the end of the month.

Lots of people in New England, myself included, eagerly anticipate the arrival of the little Maine shrimp every winter, but they’ll probably find the price pretty steep if the catch is only a third of what it was last year.

This Singularity Hub post from last week looks at a project which donated 1 million LifeStraws to households in Kenya. An additional benefit from the use of LifeStraw in non-disaster situations is that it helps to reduce the amount of firewood people need to collect to make fires to boil and purify drinking water, and thus reduced deforestation AND carbon emissions. Vestergaard-Frandsen wants to try a similar project in Indonesia in 2013. Their hope is that their investments in these projects will pay off in sales to wealthier countries like the U.S. and Canada, where the products would be more likely used in disaster relief than daily use.

Here’s a video about the Kenya project via GOOD Magazine:

The map above shows the parts of the Northeast Atlantic that are the primary bottom-fishing areas (map via NEAFC.org). This Fast Company article reports that in addition to the drastic declines in fish stocks due to overfishing, climate change is having a dramatic effect on stocks as well, although not entirely a negative one. The warming of the ocean has led to an increase in populations of fish species that prefer warmer water, such as hake and dab, even as cold-water species such as cod and haddock have plummeted. The spread of warmer water has also led the warm-water fish into areas where they were not previously found, meaning that Scandinavian fish production might actually increase. Cod and haddock stocks have seen some small improvements in the last few years due to intense regulation of fishing, but the climate changes are likely to mitigate any significant increase.

Via Salon comes this article from Gilt Taste.com about the threat to the menhaden populations along the mid-Atlantic coast due to overfishing. You may recall my post from January 2010 with some other links to articles about the practices of Omega Protein, Inc. and the need to enact stricter protections on menhaden stocks. It’s distressing, if unsurprising, to see that nothing has changed in the last year and a half except the further overfishing of the most critical fish in the Atlantic.

Genetically modified salmon, which grow several times larger than wild salmon and are intended exclusively for aquaculture, have been touted as a commercially viable alternative to wild-caught salmon. The FDA is still considering approval of GM salmon for human consumption based on safety concerns alone, but Fast Company reports that a new study by a Canadian university concluded that if GM salmon were to find their way into the wild, they could destroy wild stocks due to their genetic deficiencies. And environmental groups continue to argue that salmon farming itself is unsustainable and environmentally hazardous.

As if the traditional fish-and-chip shop wasn’t already losing ground due to the disappearance of cod in the North Atlantic, overfishing in European waters is reaching a tipping point. The New Economics Foundation says that July 2 is the point on the calendar they call “Fish Dependence Day”: that’s the date, they say, by which European fishing operations have caught what would be the annual limit for fish to allow fish stocks to remain sustainable. Everything caught after that date is overfishing. This Fast Company article cites the NEF’s assessment that at current rates of fishing, European fisheries will be 100% depleted by 2050 if limits aren’t imposed.

Last January, I posted about a small grocery store in London called Unpackaged, which was trying to do away with as much product packaging as possible so that customers could user their own reusable containers. Now there’s a similar market about to open in Austin, Texas, called “in.gredients”. This Sustainable Is Good.com article tells you a little bit about them and features a short video they’ve made promoting their idea, but if you visit that link directly to their site, they also maintain a blog that has a number of entries about the issues of waste, local food, sustainability, and other related topics. As the Sustainable Is Good piece says, Austin is also the corporate headquarters for Whole Foods, and it would not be unreasonable to expect that they might incorporate elements of this concept above and beyond the bulk foods they already offer. It would be even better to see some mainstream supermarkets getting on board; the Boston-area chain Stop & Shop has announced plans to pilot an iPhone app that would let shoppers scan and tally their groceries (and also already has in-store scanners that do the same thing), so why not try unpackaging certain categories of products?

Whole Foods has adopted a set of sustainability guidelines for customers purchasing fish, but somehow can’t seem to follow their own recommendations. They also have a buy-one-get-one promotion on fresh whale steak through Thursday.

Good Magazine posted this excellent infographic last week that should help people decide what fish to buy at the market to promote sustainable fishing. (You’ll definitely need to visit the link to see the full-sized chart, which is huge) The data comes from the Monterey Aquarium in California, which tracks fishing stocks nationally.

It breaks down the information according to geographical regions, but there’s not a lot of difference between most of them other than some obvious differences between Pacific and Atlantic species. Even a quick glance will tell you, though, that most of the popular varieties — cod, haddock, flounder — are nowhere to be found, since those are the most overfished species. Oddly, the Northeast chart lists “spiny lobster” but not “Maine lobster”, even though the lobster population here isn’t particularly stressed and is actually on its way to a second year of overabundance, but maybe that’s just a mistake on the part of the infographic makers. I also notice that swordfish is back on the “okay to eat” list after having been the focus of an embargo by some restaurant chefs a couple of years ago.

There has been great concern that overfishing of bluefin tuna has decimated the stock to the brink of extinction. Bluefin tuna is one of the most popular fish used in sushi making; maguro is a standard item on any sushi menu, and the more prized fatty loin part, called toro is sold at a premium price. The profitability of bluefin tuna is so high, in fact, that yesterday the United Nations Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) succumbed to pressure from fishing industry lobbyists and chose not to ban bluefin exports, quite possibly condemning the species to extinction within the next couple of years.

Scott Bowen has a bit of a rant at True/Slant that I have to share more than a little agreement with:

So, who gets to kill the last bluefin tuna? The Japanese? Who will eat the last $5,000 slice — some Japanese billionaire, or some fat sashimi-sucking bastard in LA?

Who gets to shoot the last polar bear? A white Canadian, or a member of a First Nation? What will be the opening price in a bidding war for the pelt — $10 million?

It’s times like this, when I read news like that above, that I react with a sense of the ludicrous — as ludicrous as those delegates at that UN conference on endangered species who acted to endanger those species further — and I start to speculate that there just aren’t enough predators eating people.

The remark about the polar bears? Yeah, CITES chose not to ban the sale of polar bear products (pelts, primarily) either. But at least global warming will kill off all the polar bears before the hunters will, so we don’t have to feel quite so guilty about that.

There are plenty of gross things that you probably wouldn’t eat in the first place, but this website has a list of seven things that you probably eat all the time that some scientists would never consider putting in their mouths for one reason or another: additives, unsanitary production methods, chemical leaching from packaging, etc. You probably won’t be too surprised at the things that made the list, although one of them took me a little by surprise. Also, a couple of them are so ubiquitous in our commoditized food supply that there’s no real alternative except to stop eating those things altogether.

Water footprint calculations are rapidly becoming as critical to understanding the impact of mass production of consumer goods as carbon footprints, since the availability of potable water looms large as a serious global crisis. Whether people want to believe it or not, the day is approaching where we will be forced to make choices about everything we consume because of our willy-nilly approach to resource usage now.

Here’s another one to make your head spin: the carbon footprint of owning a pet in the industrialized nations is DOUBLE the carbon footprint of owning an SUV and driving it 6,200 miles per year. When the day comes, what’s it going to be: Fido or Ford?