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Live updates from fishing boats could reduce waste
THIS WEEK
Could live fishing updates cut waste? WHEN customers of the fisheries company Sanriku Toretate Ichiba want to shop for fish, they connect to the net. The firm, based in Sanriku town in Japan’s Iwate prefecture, posts details of its catches online in real time, offering consumers the chance to buy fish almost as soon as it is hauled from the sea. This could help make fishing more sustainable by matching supply and demand, says the entrepreneur behind the firm – though others are unconvinced. Kenichiro Yagi set up his online fisheries company in 2010. Events since then have made the move seem prescient. Sanriku was devastated by last year’s tsunami. Iwate lost 108 of its 111 ports and over 9000 fishing vessels, leaving fishermen without the tools to catch fish or a place to sell it. Within a month of the disaster, though, Yagi’s company was trading again. His team managed to salvage four boats and equipped them with webcams and laptop computers, for the
‘Vegetarian’ apes feast on fellow primate WHEN fruit is scarce, try chomping on a slow loris. That seems to be the strategy adopted by the normally vegetarian orang-utans, which have been spotted knocking the small primates out of trees and killing them with a bite to the head. Sumatran orang-utans (Pongo abelii) get almost all their nutrients from fruit and other plant products, but there are a few isolated reports of them eating meat. Madeleine Hardus 12 | NewScientist | 21 January 2012
purpose of putting details of catches online. The approach has helped Yagi restart operations and enabled fishermen to get around the lack of a physical marketplace. Beyond that, Yagi says it could allow his crews to better match what they
in the nets.” Most of what is thrown back is thus dead, he says. Other industry observers believe that the convenience of an online market could result in more demand for fish – bad news for already dwindling fish stocks. “More harm than good could result without an effort on the fishermen’s behalf to improve consumer awareness,” says Jun Morikawa at Rakuno Gakuen University in Sapporo. Yagi, however, believes that providing a live feed from the boats will, in fact, boost consumer awareness. “Our objective is to form a connection between fishermen and consumers.” Japan is home to 2 per cent of the world’s population but consumes around 10 per cent of the world’s catch. As in other wealthy countries, sustainability of supply is not necessarily a focus for shoppers. Only three of the top 10 supermarket chains in Japan sell sustainably caught produce, and the range is limited. The live fishing feeds may help buck the trend. “It is precisely because of the anonymity of fisheries workers that the world’s oceans are overfished,” says Yagi. “By placing them centre stage we have the opportunity to relay the need to protect marine resources – and at the same time –Online orders could set the quota– create a new kind of market.” n MIXA Co. Ltd./Getty
Robert Gilhooly
catch to consumers’ needs, reducing waste. The system could also allow unwanted fish to be identified quickly enough to be returned to the sea alive, benefiting marine ecosystems. Whether the fishing industry in general could adopt similar practices is less clear. Blake LeeHarwood of the Sustainable Fisheries Partnership, a non-profit body, has his doubts about the benefits. “In the case of trawlers, there is a lethal process where caught fish get squashed together
of the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands and colleagues have now observed three more cases, bringing the total of documented cases to nine. In 2007 Hardus was tracking two orangs in the canopy above her – a female called Yet and her infant Yeni – when Yet abruptly changed direction and approached a slow loris (Nycticebus coucang). She knocked it out of the tree, crashed down to the ground, bit the stunned loris’s head, then carried the body back into the tree to eat it. Yeni got some when she begged (see video at newscientist. com/article/dn21358). Hardus found detailed studies
of six orang-utan hunts. All used the same methods. The orang-utans may stun the loris first to avoid its toxic bite, unique among primates. The hunts all occurred when there was little fruit available, which may push the apes to meat-eating, says Hardus (International Journal of Primatology, DOI: 10.1007/s10764011-9574-z). By contrast, chimpanzees hunt more when fruit is abundant, perhaps because it doesn’t matter if they
“The orang-utan knocked the slow loris out of the tree, crashed to ground level and bit it on the head”
waste energy on a failed hunt. The sample is unavoidably small, but the data have been thoughtfully analysed, says Richard Wrangham of Harvard University. Only five individual orang-utans have been observed hunting. In other accounts, the apes stumbled upon their prey, but Yet changed direction and headed straight for it three times. Hardus says she may have learned to smell them. Because a few cases have been documented within a 40-kilometre range, all using the same killing method, she thinks it may be a cultural behaviour, passed from orang-utan to orangutan. Michael Marshall n
Could live fishing updates cut waste? WHEN customers of the fisheries company Sanriku Toretate Ichiba want to shop for fish, they connect to the net. The firm, based in Sanriku town in Japan’s Iwate prefecture, posts details of its catches online in real time, offering consumers the chance to buy fish almost as soon as it is hauled from the sea. This could help make fishing more sustainable by matching supply and demand, says the entrepreneur behind the firm – though others are unconvinced. Kenichiro Yagi set up his online fisheries company in 2010. Events since then have made the move seem prescient. Sanriku was devastated by last year’s tsunami. Iwate lost 108 of its 111 ports and over 9000 fishing vessels, leaving fishermen without the tools to catch fish or a place to sell it. Within a month of the disaster, though, Yagi’s company was trading again. His team managed to salvage four boats and equipped them with webcams and laptop computers, for the
‘Vegetarian’ apes feast on fellow primate WHEN fruit is scarce, try chomping on a slow loris. That seems to be the strategy adopted by the normally vegetarian orang-utans, which have been spotted knocking the small primates out of trees and killing them with a bite to the head. Sumatran orang-utans (Pongo abelii) get almost all their nutrients from fruit and other plant products, but there are a few isolated reports of them eating meat. Madeleine Hardus 12 | NewScientist | 21 January 2012
purpose of putting details of catches online. The approach has helped Yagi restart operations and enabled fishermen to get around the lack of a physical marketplace. Beyond that, Yagi says it could allow his crews to better match what they
in the nets.” Most of what is thrown back is thus dead, he says. Other industry observers believe that the convenience of an online market could result in more demand for fish – bad news for already dwindling fish stocks. “More harm than good could result without an effort on the fishermen’s behalf to improve consumer awareness,” says Jun Morikawa at Rakuno Gakuen University in Sapporo. Yagi, however, believes that providing a live feed from the boats will, in fact, boost consumer awareness. “Our objective is to form a connection between fishermen and consumers.” Japan is home to 2 per cent of the world’s population but consumes around 10 per cent of the world’s catch. As in other wealthy countries, sustainability of supply is not necessarily a focus for shoppers. Only three of the top 10 supermarket chains in Japan sell sustainably caught produce, and the range is limited. The live fishing feeds may help buck the trend. “It is precisely because of the anonymity of fisheries workers that the world’s oceans are overfished,” says Yagi. “By placing them centre stage we have the opportunity to relay the need to protect marine resources – and at the same time –Online orders could set the quota– create a new kind of market.” n MIXA Co. Ltd./Getty
Robert Gilhooly
catch to consumers’ needs, reducing waste. The system could also allow unwanted fish to be identified quickly enough to be returned to the sea alive, benefiting marine ecosystems. Whether the fishing industry in general could adopt similar practices is less clear. Blake LeeHarwood of the Sustainable Fisheries Partnership, a non-profit body, has his doubts about the benefits. “In the case of trawlers, there is a lethal process where caught fish get squashed together
of the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands and colleagues have now observed three more cases, bringing the total of documented cases to nine. In 2007 Hardus was tracking two orangs in the canopy above her – a female called Yet and her infant Yeni – when Yet abruptly changed direction and approached a slow loris (Nycticebus coucang). She knocked it out of the tree, crashed down to the ground, bit the stunned loris’s head, then carried the body back into the tree to eat it. Yeni got some when she begged (see video at newscientist. com/article/dn21358). Hardus found detailed studies
of six orang-utan hunts. All used the same methods. The orang-utans may stun the loris first to avoid its toxic bite, unique among primates. The hunts all occurred when there was little fruit available, which may push the apes to meat-eating, says Hardus (International Journal of Primatology, DOI: 10.1007/s10764011-9574-z). By contrast, chimpanzees hunt more when fruit is abundant, perhaps because it doesn’t matter if they
“The orang-utan knocked the slow loris out of the tree, crashed to ground level and bit it on the head”
waste energy on a failed hunt. The sample is unavoidably small, but the data have been thoughtfully analysed, says Richard Wrangham of Harvard University. Only five individual orang-utans have been observed hunting. In other accounts, the apes stumbled upon their prey, but Yet changed direction and headed straight for it three times. Hardus says she may have learned to smell them. Because a few cases have been documented within a 40-kilometre range, all using the same killing method, she thinks it may be a cultural behaviour, passed from orang-utan to orangutan. Michael Marshall n