Toward Improvement In Rebuilding Fisheries: Lessons from the United States

This report seeks to describe the process and pitfalls through the experience of the United States in enacting and amending legislation to manage its fisheries resources. Why the U.S. experience? The American legislation, known as the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (MSA), sought to rebuild and then stabilise the country's fishery resources. This experience of devising legislation and negotiating the many stakeholder interests—in particular, the adoption of maximum sustainable yield (MSY) as a limit rather than a target—makes it a valuable example for the present reform of the European Union's Common Fisheries Policy (CFP)

Reber’s caterpillar offers no help

Reber’s target article “Caterpillars, consciousness and the origins of mind” seems only to shift but not to address the question of where the mind is and how minds occur

Reber’s caterpillar offers no help

Reber’s target article “Caterpillars, consciousness and the origins of mind” seems only to shift but not to address the question of where the mind is and how minds occur

Animals think and feel: Précis of \u3cem\u3eBeyond words: What animals think and feel\u3c/em\u3e (Safina 2015)

Abstract: Evolution, brain science, and the logic of behavior in free-living animals all converge to show that to varying degrees many animals have conscious experience, thoughts, and emotions

Fish pain: A painful topic

If fish cannot feel pain, why do stingrays have purely defensive tail spines that deliver venom? Stingrays’ ancestral predators are fish. And why do many fishes possess defensive fin spines, some also with venom that produces pain in humans? These things did not evolve just in case sentient humans would evolve millions of years later and then invent scuba. If fish react purely unconsciously to “noxious” stimuli, why aren’t sharp jabbing spines enough? Why also stinging venom

Chuckles and Wacky Ideas

Another big group of dolphins had just surfaced alongside our moving vessel —leaping and splashing and calling mysteriously back and forth in their squeally, whistly way, with many babies swift alongside their mothers. And this time, confined to just the surface of such deep and lovely lives, I was becoming unsatisfied. I wanted to know what they were experiencing, and why to us they feel so compelling and so—close. This time I allowed myself to ask them the question that for a scientist is forbidden fruit: Who are you? Scientists usually steer firmly from questions about the inner lives of animals. Surely they have inner lives of some sort. But like a child who is admonished that what they really want to ask is impolite, a young scientist is taught that the animal mind—if there is such—is unknowable. Permissible questions are “it” questions: about where it lives, what it eats, what it does when danger threatens, how it breeds. But always forbidden—always forbidden—is the one question that might open the door to the interior: Who? There are good reasons to avoid so fraught an inquiry and the cans of worms such a door could open. But the barrier between humans and animals is artificial, because humans are animals. And now, watching these dolphins, I was tired of being so artificially polite; I wanted more intimacy. I felt time slipping for both of us, and I did not want to risk having to say good-bye and realizing that I’d never really said hello. During the cruise I’d been reading about elephants, and elephant minds were on my own mind as I wondered about the dolphins and watched them pacing fluidly and freely in their ocean realm. When a poacher kills an elephant, he doesn’t just kill the elephant who dies. The family may lose the crucial memory of their elder matriarch, who knew where to travel during the very toughest years of drought to reach the food and water that would allow them to continue living. Thus one bullet may, years later, bring more deaths. Watching dolphins while thinking of elephants, what I realized is: when others recognize and depend on certain individuals, when a death makes the difference for individuals who survive, when relationships define us, we have traveled across a certain blurry boundary in the history of life on Earth—“it” has become “who.” “Who” animals know who they are; they know who their family and friends are. They know their enemies. They make strategic alliances and cope with chronic rivalries. They aspire to higher rank and wait for their chance to challenge the existing order. Their status affects their offspring’s prospects. Their life follows the arc of a career. Personal relationships define them. Sound familiar? Of course. “They” includes us. But a vivid, familiar life is not the domain of humans alone. We look at the world through our own eyes, naturally. But by looking from the inside out, we see an inside-out world. This book takes the perspective of the world outside us—a world in which humans are not the measure of all things, a human race among other races. To understand anything, really, one must go deep, to the roots. In our estrangement from nature we have severed our sense of the community of life and lost touch with the experience of other animals. So while I went in search of particular “who” animals, I delved into new findings about thought, emotion, and consciousness that apply to many animals. And because everything about life occurs along a sliding scale, understanding the human animal becomes easier in context, seeing our human thread woven into the living web among the strands of so many others. This project differs from other “animal thinking” books in one fundamental way. I’d intended to take a bit of a break from my usual writing about conservation issues, to circle back to my first love: simply seeing what animals do, and asking why they do it. I traveled to observe some of the most protected creatures in the world—elephants of Amboseli in Kenya, wolves of Yellowstone in the United States, and killer whales in the waters of the Pacific Northwest—yet in each place I found the animals feeling human pressures that directly affect what they do, where they go, how long they live, and how their families fare. So in this book we encounter the minds of other animals and we listen—to what they need us to hear. The story that tells itself is not just what’s at stake but who is at stake. The greatest realization is that all life is one. I was seven years old when my father and I fixed up a small shed in our Brooklyn yard and got some homing pigeons. Watching how they built nests in their cubbyholes, seeing them courting, arguing, caring for their babies, flying off and faithfully returning, how they needed food, water, a home, and one another, I realized that they lived in their apartments just as we lived in ours. Just like us, but in a different way. Over my lifetime, living with, studying, and working with many other animals in their world and ours has only broadened and deepened —and reaffirmed—my impression of our shared life. That’s the impression I’ll endeavor to share with you in the pages that follow

Facilitates Chromatin Transcription Complex Is an “Accelerator” of Tumor Transformation and Potential Marker and Target of Aggressive Cancers

SummaryThe facilitates chromatin transcription (FACT) complex is involved in chromatin remodeling during transcription, replication, and DNA repair. FACT was previously considered to be ubiquitously expressed and not associated with any disease. However, we discovered that FACT is the target of a class of anticancer compounds and is not expressed in normal cells of adult mammalian tissues, except for undifferentiated and stem-like cells. Here, we show that FACT expression is strongly associated with poorly differentiated aggressive cancers with low overall survival. In addition, FACT was found to be upregulated during in vitro transformation and to be necessary, but not sufficient, for driving transformation. FACT also promoted survival and growth of established tumor cells. Genome-wide mapping of chromatin-bound FACT indicated that FACT’s role in cancer most likely involves selective chromatin remodeling of genes that stimulate proliferation, inhibit cell death and differentiation, and regulate cellular stress responses

Protecting Half the Planet and Transforming Human Systems Are Complementary Goals

The unfolding crises of mass extinction and climate change call for urgent action in response. To limit biodiversity losses and avert the worst effects of climate disruption, we must greatly expand nature protection while simultaneously downsizing and transforming human systems. The conservation initiative Nature Needs Half (or Half Earth), calling for the conservation of half the Earth's land and seas, is commensurate with the enormous challenges we face. Critics have objected to this initiative as harboring hardship for people near protected areas and for failing to confront the growth economy as the main engine of global ecological destruction. In response to the first criticism, we affirm that conservation policies must be designed and implemented in collaboration with Indigenous and local communities. In response to the second criticism, we argue that protecting half the Earth needs to be complemented by downscaling and reforming economic life, humanely and gradually reducing the global population, and changing food production and consumption. By protecting nature generously, and simultaneously contracting and transforming the human enterprise, we can create the conditions for achieving justice and well-being for both people and other species. If we fail to do so, we instead accept a chaotic and impoverished world that will be dangerous for us all

Seabird Bycatch in Pelagic Longline Fisheries Is Grossly Underestimated when Using Only Haul Data

Hundreds of thousands of seabirds are killed each year as bycatch in longline fisheries. Seabirds are predominantly caught during line setting but bycatch is generally recorded during line hauling, many hours after birds are caught. Bird loss during this interval may lead to inaccurate bycatch information. In this 15 year study, seabird bycatch was recorded during both line setting and line hauling from four fishing regions: Indian Ocean, Southern Ocean, Coral Sea and central Pacific Ocean. Over 43,000 albatrosses, petrels and skuas representing over 25 species were counted during line setting of which almost 6,000 seabirds attempted to take the bait. Bait-taking interactions were placed into one of four categories. (i) The majority (57%) of bait-taking attempts were “unsuccessful” involving seabirds that did not take the bait nor get caught or hooked. (ii) One-third of attempts were “successful” with seabirds removing the bait while not getting caught. (iii) One-hundred and seventy-six seabirds (3% of attempts) were observed being “caught” during line setting, with three albatross species – Laysan (Phoebastria immutabilis), black-footed (P. nigripes) and black-browed (Thalassarche melanophrys)– dominating this category. However, of these, only 85 (48%) seabird carcasses were retrieved during line hauling. Most caught seabirds were hooked through the bill. (iv) The remainder of seabird-bait interactions (7%) was not clearly observed, but likely involved more “caught” seabirds. Bait taking attempts and percentage outcome (e.g. successful, caught) varied between seabird species and was not always related to species abundance around fishing vessels. Using only haul data to calculate seabird bycatch grossly underestimates actual bycatch levels, with the level of seabird bycatch from pelagic longline fishing possibly double what was previously thought