“Dolphin!” the driver of the fishing boat said to me excitedly, as he shook me awake from my slumber in the cabin. It was pitch dark outside. I looked at the time – it was ten past one in the morning. We were far from shore, almost eighty kilometres off the middle of the Karnataka coast, and on the crystal clear, inky blue waters of the continental shelf, just over two-hundred feet deep at our location.
Out on these seemingly … Read More
Although over four million people worldwide are dependent on wild-caught fish as a source of protein, marine fish are not at the top of the conservation radar. Although fish are among the most important components of marine ecosystems after plankton, they are most seriously threatened by human activities in the sea. In recognition of this fact, fisheries across the world are being managed based on estimates of sustainable harvest rates for each population of fish. However this requires intensive data … Read More
Authors Nachiket Kelkar, Jagdish Krishnaswamy, Sunil Choudhary, and Dipani Sutaria have investigated the distribution of the Gangetic River Dolphin (Platanista gangetica gangetica) and correlated their abundance with fishing activity to find if there can be successful coexistence of fisheries and conservation of the dolphins. These are the highlights of a paper that was published in Conservation Biology in 2009.
The present state of rivers in India is dismal. Pollution and intensive fishing pose a serious threat to most river and … Read More
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, fish output in India doubled between 1990 and 2010. The populations of many marine species are threatened as a direct consequence of over-fishing to meet the increasing global demand (Myers et al., 2007). Many of these species have no local demand and are exported to China, USA, South-east asia etc. Two such species are shown in the image above – Bowmouth Guitarfish (Rhina ancylostoma) and Manta … Read More
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