How to Choose Sustainable Seafood

0:00 Eating seafood the right way is a journey. I'm gonna tell you that. It is not easy to be able to choose seafood that is sustainable in an easy fashion, especially with a lot of confusion that's been put out in the world these days. You have documentaries like Seaspiracy, which is, full of misinformation, and extreme kinda looks at saying we have to stop eating fish altogether. And so it's very difficult to kinda, like, go to the grocery store or the supermarket and be like, "Hey, like, what fish should I eat?" When the person behind the counter doesn't even know, or sometimes often doesn't know, 'cause they're just, like, maybe a teenager working behind the counter earning minimum wage just trying to get through their day and, earn some extra cash, to, be able to buy stuff that they want.

0:41 So it becomes a difficult process and a very confusing process. And it's confusing because there are so many different takes on, what you should eat, what you shouldn't eat, and then what you should follow. Because there are systems in place. There are apps that make things easier. There are certification programs which make things easier. The solutions are out there, but then it gets kinda cluttered with, this certification does this, and this certification takes payments, And it's very confusing to say what's right and what's wrong, especially if all you're trying to do is eat seafood the right way. It's very easy to say, "You know what? Screw all this. I'm just gonna eat it the way I wanna eat it," and that's what I, do, and I get it. I totally get it. But there hasn't really been, like, a consistent, information that's come out that said, "Hey, you know what?

1:24 Here's the issue, and here's the solution for this issue," until now. there is a book called "Why Sustainable Seafood Matters" that's coming out in November. it's up for presale. It's by my good friend, Dr. David Shiffman. he's decided to put out a book on this based of his, last book tour of "Why Sharks Matter," because people kept talking about, "Hey, you know what? Like, if sharks are being overfished, how do we know? How can we help in terms of overfishing?" And that question just kept coming up and coming up and coming up, and this book is essentially the answers to those questions, not only for sharks, but also for other different types of fisheries. He goes into history. He goes into the politics. He goes into, looking at a specific issue and what's right, what's wrong, and also, like, the nuances about it, because it's never a simple answer when it comes to fisheries.

2:10 There's always more that you can talk about. And today, I have David on the podcast to talk about this subject, sustainable seafood, why you should get it, how you can get it, and what to look out for when you're getting it and what to believe and what not to believe. He backs it up with data. So he has his opinions. He has his statements. They're backed by evidence, and he tells you where you can get that evidence if you wanna take a look for yourself. And I just think it's the manual that you need to get. I just purchased my own book just before this interview. it's pre-ordered, so you can get that pre-order. The link is in the show notes. Here's the interview with Dr. David Shiffman talking about why sustainable seafood matters. Enjoy, and I'll talk to you after. Welcome to the How to Protect the Ocean podcast, David.

2:52 I am so excited to have you on. Are you ready to talk about sustainable seafood? I am always ready to talk about sustainable seafood, Andrew, and thanks for having me. Excited to be back. It's so much fun to have you on, Dave. It's always fun, like, you have a new book out. This is what we're gonna be talking about. Yeah. It's all about sustainable seafood. And, when you texted me, like, "Hey, do you wanna talk about sustainable seafood?" I'm like- Yeah … "I've been waiting for this." Perfect. I've been waiting for you to be ready to do this, 'cause I know you've been writing this, for quite some time. This is your second book. And the first one was called Why Sharks Matter, and this is called Why Sustainable Seafood Matters. And this conversation's gonna be really on, the basics of what people should know about sustainable seafood. 'Cause I'll be honest, Dave, it's confusing, right? It gets confusing. When you go to the supermarket.

3:32 Yes. So confusing. So I'm super excited. before we get started with all this, I would just like you to remind… You've been on a number of times. Mm-hmm. Uh, but some people are new to the podcast, they might be new to, who you are. So why don't you just let us know who you are and what you do? Sure. So I'm Dr. David Shiffman. I am an interdisciplinary marine conservation biologist and policy specialist. I live and work in the Washington, D.C. area. I'm probably best known for my work with sharks and my first book, Why Sharks Matter. Folks can also follow me on social media @why sharksmatter, where I'm always happy to answer questions. And yeah, as you said, this new book is called Why Sustainable Seafood Matters. I love this.

4:12 So the first book was about, your first love, sharks. Mm-hmm. Right? And it was all about, you've grown up, wanting to be a shark scientist and shark ecologist, through that time, you've been a part of the shark ecosystem for quite some time. you've talked about sustainable seafood through sharks, but also, elsewhere, and you've worked in the sustainable seafood area as well. Mm-hmm. But where did this idea come from for this book? that's what I'm curious when you started to say, "This is gonna be about seafood." Yeah. So the idea for my second book actually came from the book tour for the first book, and I have traveled all around the world, talking about sharks and ocean conservation and marine biology as part of the book tour for Why Sharks Matter, which I organized, by myself.

4:56 It's been to seven countries so far. I gave a talk in Antarctica. I got to do a dramatic reading for penguins, as well as to talk to some of the scientists and tourists there. but I always include in my talks plenty of time for audience Q&A. Mmm. And one of the most common questions that came up was, "You said that the biggest threat to sharks is unsustainable fishing practices. what do I do about that as a consumer?" And I started talking about sustainable seafood and Seafood Watch and the Marine Stewardship Council and all of that, and this question just kept happening over and over and over and over again, and people kept saying, "Can you recommend an easy-to-understand source that will explain more of the complicated world of sustainable seafood to me?

5:40 Because I would like to know more." And the answer was there really isn't one. There's some very, very, very basic stuff that doesn't really tell you that much, and then there's some very, very complicated stuff that requires a PhD in fishery science to understand, and there was sort of nothing in the middle. So I thought that I would try to fill that space, and that is the goal of Why Sustainable Seafood Matters, is it's to take the complicated world of, science-based fisheries management and bycatch reduction technology and where does a marine protected area go and stock assessment and all of that stuff, and turn it into, a way that someone who cares about the ocean but is a little confused by all the 15 syllable words, to be able to make informed choices when they're trying to figure out what's for dinner for their family.

6:24 First of all, thank you for doing that and here's why I'm saying this. This is not just to kind of pander because we're promoting your book. I'm having you on because I trust the information that's in the book. I've read parts of the book. I've watched you talk about this for a long time. and you bring a very, not only scientific approach to it in your regular dealings, but you also bring a very, pragmatic approach to it. and I think there's a lot of material out there, whether it be in books, but also in documentaries, who are, taking one side or another, and the extremes can really flip-flop back and forth, which makes people question, is this actually working? Or it gives them like a false sense of what they need to do- to move forward.

7:06 Like I, you know, thinking Seaspiracy, uh, we're not- Oh, my God. Yes … I don't wanna talk about it because we've talked about it so many times, both you and I, on social media and on podcasts and stuff like that. But, you know, that's like- I do, I do rant about Seaspiracy in the book several times. Right. Um. Uh, deservingly so. But yeah, there's, this is a confusing topic even without extremists promoting, in misinformation, like what happened- Right … in Seaspiracy. Right. Um, so I tried to cut through the noise and give people, not only explain to people, what the data says, but also how do we know, and how you can find out for yourself, and how you can use these tools that are out there. Yeah, no, completely agree. And even like, going from that to watching sort of like a documentary that it has a lot of misinformation, but then you go to the store and you try and do something, you're like, "I wanna buy something sustainable.

7:52 Like, I don't wanna buy something where I'm contributing, so if I'm trying to make that effort, let's go do that." But then, you kinda mention in your book, like, you go to say a, supermarket or wherever you get your seafood, in the sign it says, like, " We support," "sustainable fishing practices." But then if you know more- And they have horrific products for sale. Like- Right the, the equivalent of, like, baby white rhino is for sale there right under a sign that says, uh- … "We support sustainable practices." So yeah, you gotta be careful. Unlike in the US, the word organic has a legal definition, and there's regulatory processes behind it, but the word sustainable does not. Yeah. Um, so you can say a lot of things, and it may not correspond to anything on the water.

8:34 If you say it's wild caught and it's not, then you're breaking rules. But if you say- Yeah … it's sustainable and leading sources disagree with you, you can just say, "Well, I think it's sustainable." So I wanted to empower people to make informed choices and to introduce them to some of the key players in this space and some of the key issues in this space. and throughout, it's, not just my own rants, but there's plenty of those if you'd like that in Why Sharks Matter. but also, I interview, some of the leading players, including a celebrity chef, who works on sustainable seafood issues, Chef Gregory Gourdet, if any of you are Top Chef super fans like we are- Right in my family. I quote reports and show you how to find them.

9:16 I quote nonprofits and show you how to learn more. My goal is to convince you not only that you can trust me, but here's how we know that- Yeah … and here's how you can find out the same information for yourself and come to the same conclusion. and I like that not only did you do interviews, but you've also worked for one of those certification- the, nonprofits, which is the Marine Stewardship Council. You spent two years there. What did you learn from, like, kind of working inside that? 'Cause, like, MSC's a great program. I think it's something that people can trust in, in terms, like, when I go to Costco, I look for that, blue sticker, Or that blue label. They have had some controversies in some of the things that they've supported in the past. What did you learn about working in a place like that? 'Cause I find that sometimes when I'll be like, "Oh yeah, I like Marine Stewardship Council," but, like, somebody will bring up, "Oh, but then they support this, so how could you…" Again, it get, becomes complicated, but what did you learn about working at MSC in those- Yeah … two years?

10:07 So for those of you who don't know what this is, it is one of the leading players in the sustainable seafood space. It is an eco label, that can go on products. It's a little blue check mark that looks like a fish that says, "MSC certified sustainable." You have almost certainly seen this, even if you didn't recognize it. Costco almost exclusively sells MSC certified products or Seafood Watch green, or yellow products. the McDonald's Filet-O-Fish sandwich, the most commonly sold seafood item in the world, is MSC certified and has that on the packaging. Walmart has a lot of MSC things. you've almost certainly seen this. Yeah. Um, and they have this very rigorous science-based process that was co-generated with hundreds of experts from around the world, that is the fishery standard.

10:52 And if a fishery is assessed against that standard and found that it meets the criteria, then that fishery gets to put the label on its product and sell it as sustainable. When I worked there, I worked for part of the research team, my project was specifically looking at what they call ETP bycatch, which is endangered, threatened, and protected species. So a fisherman are trying to catch a tuna, and they accidentally catch a sea turtle or a shark or an albatross that was near the tuna. And they were looking at what have fisheries that used to have a problem with this done to reduce it, and what can we learn from that? and that was really cool because What I learned is it's a very practical and data-driven place.

11:35 They know that not everything will work for everyone, but they also are very big on, sharing successes that, "Hey, this was a problem and we fixed it. Everyone should know about this. You should try some version of this. Here's what we did. Here's how we did it." they are not trying to gatekeep information. Every single Marine Stewardship Council certified fishery has a public certification report that anyone can download and read for free. I walk you through in the book how to interpret those, 'cause they can be a little technical. But a typical one is hundreds of pages, and it includes background about the biology of the species, about how the fishery is managed, about local conservation issues, about local laws. as well as the specific criteria, scores for how that fishery did.

12:17 So it's even more rigorous and data-driven than I thought. there's a lot of misunderstanding about how MSC works, that it's just some people's opinion, and if you don't, like your certification score, you can just hire someone else and they'll give you a better score. that's not how it works. It can't work that way. There are safeguards in place to stop that I'm glad you mentioned that. I think people make it complicated when they just put out an opinion and just be like, "Well, this isn't right, and they just did this." And, you and I know there's always safeguards in place. All these certifications, Seafood Watch, MSC, they take the Ocean Wise, they take these certifications very, very seriously. the, the amount of detail and how meticulous, the research is, the people working on it, they have to be… It's almost like working with a government entity in terms of the messaging, in terms of things, 'cause everybody has to be so careful because they don't want anything to be out of place.

13:05 And when they take a stance- Yeah … on a fishery, when they say avoid, or, yes, this is good, or even, like, here's an alternative, they have to mean it. They have to have the data to back it up, and I think that's really important. and we don't need to have the data. We just wanna be able to trust as consumers- Yeah just to be able to trust in it because of all the amount of information and processing and everything, it's kinda crazy with the… Like, I'm always f- so surprised and surprised and not surprised- Oh, it gets overwhelming really fast … but, it's like… Oh, yeah. Yeah. it's insane. Now, I wanna kinda get to a little bit more of, like, your first part of the book is talking about, like, the harms of overfishing and what's happened. And So this is something that a lot of my students are surprised about, that the biggest threat to marine biodiversity, not only to sharks, but to fish, to seabirds, to sea turtles, to marine mammals, it's not climate change, it's not plastic pollution, it's not oil spills.

13:56 Those things are all bad, but the biggest threat by far is harms caused by unsustainable fishing practices, and that includes overfishing, habitat destruction, bycatch, things like that. Before I get into the how do we fix it in the book, I really tried to hammer home this is a real problem that we really do need to fix. It is bad. If you care about the environment and you care about the environmental impacts of your day-to-day choices, you have to care about this. but I also stress- And, and- … that that doesn't mean we all have to be, give up seafood and become vegan, 'cause there are solutions. Yeah, no, for sure. And I think there's one story too that you talk about, which is the collapse of the Grand Banks cod, population, which, is still in recovery mode now.

14:38 And I mean, this is, a special story for me as a Canadian because that's where it happened- Yeah in Newfoundland. I was actually just speaking to somebody who's from Newfoundland just this past week, and she mentioned that story, and it wasn't just the fact that the cod collapsed. It was the fact that the entire industry collapsed. Like, people were out of work for generations, and they're still not back to fishing cod because we're still never gonna be at the levels, well, maybe not in my lifetime. Hopefully we will one day. But, they're just starting to kinda think about it, and they're starting to put a little more pressure on fishing 'cause we're starting to see a little bit more recovery, but it's not even close to where it's being. Mm-hmm. So I guess, like, you covered this story in the book, please feel free to kinda elaborate on this story. I've talked a lot about it, but I'd love to hear, you say it.

15:21 But one question is, like, what lessons that we learned from the collapse that maybe people are still ignoring today, with this whole story? Oh, yeah. So if you can just kinda, like, let people know what happened, and then just, like, talk about, have we really learned our lesson? Yeah. So people don't usually think of it in these terms, but the cod stocks off the Canadian Grand Banks are actually one of the big reasons why European powers colonized North America. it was seen as evidence of wealth of the New World. and for centuries of Western colonization, as well as for time immemorial before that for indigenous communities and First Nations, those stocks provided a ton of food. and then ev-even not only food for local communities, but jobs for those communities as they would export the cod elsewhere.

16:07 and there were so many cod back in the day that people said you didn't even need bait and a hook. You could just lower a basket with rocks in it into the water and lift it up, and it would be full of cod. And no fish stocks are like that anymore. I don't know if those were really that big back in the day, but This was one of the first examples of a famous and fishery collapsing due to overharvest. And that was because of new technologies that made it easier to catch more and more and more of them. People used to think that the ocean was so vast that we could take whatever we wanted out of it and dump whatever we wanted into it without really making an impact. And sadly, now we know that that's not really true.

16:49 And this is one of the reasons why we know it's not true. When the Canadian cod fishery was shut down in the 1990s, there was disbelief, that, this was an iconic industry. This was who we were as a people. there were warning signs that were ignored. It's not like no one knew that anything bad was happening, but people thought that sort of this was something that only environmentalists worried about, and everything would be fine, and maybe we'll take slightly too much, and it'll recover eventually. The population collapsed. There were so many cod taken out that there weren't enough left that their babies would replenish the population. And it's been, 30 years, and we're only starting to see initial signs of recovery, like this year. Mm-hmm.

17:30 And it's really bad. So there's a few lessons from this. One is listen to the data and listen to the experts and don't let emotions get in the way. One is things that hurt the ocean don't just hurt whales, they also hurt people who depend on them it can take a really long time to recover if we screw this up. So let's be careful and do it right the first time. Yeah. completely agree. And I think you kinda mentioned something in that that is a difficult thing to kinda sift through as we, learn and see things on… We get so much information from social media and so many opinions. Sometimes it's difficult to understand, what's considered, like, overfished, what's considered depleted, and what's, like, maximum fished.

18:14 There's a lot of, nuance in the language that maybe scientists use and that different media outlets use that can confuse people to understand, like, should I be eating this stock? Should I not? can you talk about, like, the difference between overfishing, overfished, and depleted to start off? Yes. So part of the reason why this gets so complicated is there's a lot of math and law that goes into a lot of this. Mm-hmm. Uh, so I try to explain in sort of plain language what those terms mean. A key thing here is that overfishing is an action and overfished is a state. So- Gotcha … a fishery can be experiencing overfishing, but not overfished. That means we are taking too many fish, but the population is still relatively strong, so if we stop, it'll recover quickly.

18:57 A population can be overfished without overfishing occurring. That means things are pretty bad, but the threat has been removed, so it's probably starting to recover. A stock can be overfished with overfishing occurring. That's really bad, that there's a bad problem in place and the problem is continuing. Or it can be neither, and that's sort of the goal. depleted is a term that means different things in different contexts, but generally pretty similar to overfished or well on your way to overfished. One of the things that I talk about in the book is the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization's, State of Fisheries and Aquaculture Report, which is sort of the bible of global fishery statistics.

19:37 And I see, sometimes well-intentioned people and sometimes extremists like the Seaspiracy people intentionally misstate statistics from this report. So as of the most recent numbers, about a third of all global fish stocks are overfished. That's bad. But more than half, less than two-thirds are not overfished. They are fully fished, which means we are fishing them at appropriate levels. Fully fished is the goal. Right. That means that a fishery is doing well. It is not hurting the environment, and it's providing as much food and protein and jobs as it can. But you see some of these extremists combine those two statistics and say that 95% of all fisheries are overfished or fully fished.

20:21 Well, fully fished is the goal, and overfished is bad. So combining those two is at the very least a little bit misleading I can see where it comes from 'cause fully fished sounds like, yeah- It sounds- … we're fully, like, taking advantage- Yep … of this. But it's almost like, it almost should be, like, appropriately fished. Yes. You know what I mean? Like, we're following- Yep, we are reaching- … the rules We are following the rules and reaching goals that are set by both sides. Yeah. Uh, so there's a lot of those statistics and how to- Yeah … interpret them, and those sort of reports and databases, and how to access them yourself that I talk about in the book. You can trust me, you can trust the many experts I talk about in the book, but I also show you how to independently find that data for yourself and convince yourself that it's true. And this is what I love about what you've done and, to be honest, this is what I expected, the fact that, like, here is what's happening, like, here could be, like, a point of confusion for the reader or for the person who wants to get sustainable seafood.

21:13 And then here's what's the reality of it, and then not only am I, " don't just trust me, but you can go look at the data which is freely available, which could take a little bit more time to come to the same conclusion. So if you wanna trust me, that's fine. If you wanna go through the data, go through the data." But identifying the issue that could be confusing, where someone's taken something and, misused the stats, is very important. It's why you and I have gone through so many statistical courses during our training as scientists, and why we continue to read up on literature to understand what it means to misuse science, Or to misuse- Yeah … data. And it's so easy to do so, whether you wanna do it on purpose or not, it really truly matters whether you know what you're talking about in this kind of state, yes.

21:57 it is easier to be persuaded of harmful nonsense if you don't understand how anything works. Yeah. so it is, you are empowering yourself and your family if you learn some basic facts about science and the environment and relevant laws. Because if you do not do those things, you are, more likely to be taken advantage of by extremists who are peddling an agenda that does not benefit you or, frankly, the ocean. Right. Yeah. No, 100%. Now, one thing you mentioned in the book, you kinda covered the, right whale and Maine lobster. Yep. I'm not gonna say a controversy, but, like, it was, it was- No, controversy is fair. Yeah. you could say controversy. can you explain what happened, and what ensued after this happened?

22:40 Yeah, so this is very much an ongoing issue, with some news even a couple weeks ago. but this is a bycatch issue. This is you're trying to catch something and you accidentally catch something else that's swimming near it. And in this case, you're trying to catch lobster, which is the most valuable fishery in the United States and one of the most valuable fisheries in Canada, and you're accidentally catching critically endangered North Atlantic right whales, of which there are only a few hundred left in the world And people say, "That doesn't make any sense. The lobsters are caught in traps. how can a giant whale be caught in a little trap?" Well, it's not the trap, it's the line that connects the trap to the surface. And in a place like the Gulf of Maine, which is a huge lobster fishing area, there's over a million of those lines, which means it is a minefield for these whales, which don't have great eyesight, can't turn super quick.

23:28 they get tangled, and then they will either drown or badly injured, or they'll drag the heavy chain of traps behind them. this is really bad. This is why lobster is on Seafood Watch's no-no list, the red list. It is why MSC has removed their certifications from lobster fisheries in the area We're not worrying about overfishing of lobster. That part's well-managed. But the way the gear is used kills North Atlantic right whales, and that's a critically endangered species. They are circling the conservation drain. And they're- 70 breeding females left. They've had a good year this year, but it's the first good year in a long time, and we'll talk about it in a second, of what's kinda upcoming that could, harm that even further.

24:08 Yes. so there are some solutions to this, and, most bycatch issues have solutions often in the form of required gear modifications. So in this case, there are two main ways that you can make lobster traps not kill whales. One is the- have the lines that are connected to a float on the surface not as strong. So if you, are trying to haul in your line, it's not gonna break. It's strong enough for that. But if a huge whale swims into it, it will snap. that is, to me, a no-brainer because either way, if a whale hits your gear, you're not getting that gear back. So, if the line snaps, those traps are just down there and you can't get them, but that's already happened. They're already lost.

24:49 Yeah. Another is, a little more high-tech of a solution, and that is called on-demand ropeless gear. So the lobster trap, instead of being connected to a buoy float on the surface, has a little compressed air cartridge and little gas bag with a radio receiver. And when the boat goes over its trap, it sends a radio signal that said, I am this boat. I am here. Come to the surface." The compressed air cartridge goes off, the bag inflates, and the trap floats to the surface with no possibility of encountering whales. And fishermen hate this, despise this. It's different. It's different than how they've done it for centuries. I get that, but it works fine. It's not that expensive.

25:29 There are grants to help you do it, and it removes the problem so that you can be not on the no-no list anymore I am one of the relatively few scientists and conservation professionals who sort of works both in the fisheries space and the ocean conservation space. So for our ocean conservation friends, I'm probably one of the most pro-fisheries people they know. Mm-hmm. And as some people have explicitly told me that, and I think the lobstermen are just making absolute buffoons of themself with how they're handling this, and it's making it real hard to support them. it is. you've spoken to a lot of lobster fishermen over your time. You've spoken to a lot of fishermen over the time. Their goal is to continue to fish over time. There's a lot of stuff that's going against them.

26:10 Obviously, things are happening in the environment that are changing things for them. and now this doesn't help them, but I think the thing is, is like by going in with a collaborative approach and being like, "Look, we wanna help you do this, but we don't want you to like kill whales or do anything harm, but we want you to fish as well." and it's always a difficult thing to line up because everybody's defensive. Everybody wants, to do what they wanna do. but there's other, external circumstances that come into this. and like, there's a lot at play. Like, the certification, sites like MSC and Seafood Watch have their job to do, that they're like, "Look, this is not sustainable because of this. We are fully transparent in terms of why we're doing this." And I think one of the responses that happened after this was there was a congressman, that tried to cut funding to the Monterey Bay, Aquarium- Yes … as like their federal funding, This is a Democrat.

27:00 This is a Democrat- A Democrat … from Maine who tried to- Right … use this scandal to say that the Monterey Bay Aquarium is a eco-terrorist organization, and they shouldn't get any federal funding. no, they use science-based standards to accurately point out that some of his constituents are causing environmental harm. this is Jared Golden, for any US politics nerds, widely regarded as the worst Democrat. but I hated him before you guys did because of this instance. I think this is an important concept because you deal a lot with public policy. when a congressperson comes out and speaks against a program like this that you know full and well, we all know that they do the work. We've talked about it just, in this interview in itself. There's a lot of scientists that listen to this, like science communication and so forth.

27:42 How can we come back out in support of good science to say, "Hey, look, like this is the situation. Yes, we feel bad for the lobster fishermen. We want them to fish. But we also understand what the Seafood Watch and MSC are trying to do." How can we do that without anybody coming out and being like, "Hey, you're biased to this because you're being paid off by whoever pays off people for environment"? And by the way, if anybody does do that, I would love some money from that- Yeah, I'm, I'm so- because we're not getting any … I take PayPal. Um, yeah. it's really hard because people, they see certain keywords, and that immediately triggers for them, "You are the other side. I automatically assume these things about you. One of those things is you're lying." And- Mm-hmm … I am not trying to persuade.

28:26 At this point, most of the time I'm not trying to persuade the lobstermen, because I've tried that, and other groups are in that area and are, have perhaps more productive relationships than I do. But I'm trying to persuade people who maybe didn't know about this issue, that if you care about- Yeah the environment, eat something else for a while until they get their act together. it's really hard to convince someone who has made their entire identity, "I am not going to be convinced or persuaded on this issue." And, One of the reasons I live and work in the Washington, DC area is because I'm a policy and process guy. the US used to have all of these really, rigorous and clear processes explaining how rules and regulations and laws get made, with clear input from the environmental nonprofit sector, clear inputs from academic experts and scientific evidence.

29:11 I'm hopeful we'll go back to that at some point. When someone like Jared Golden says, "This is not based on any science, it's just biased extremist nonsense," he's lying and he knows that. And he has- Yeah … established to me that he is not someone I can trust or work with or support. And I think you have to almost look at some of maybe their motivations, like the politicians' motivations of, like, that's a key supporter for his campaign, and, they don't wanna go against that and they're coming out. Unfortunately, they're not doing it- in the right way. And let's be honest, like there are a lot of fishermen and fisheries communities who are out there, experimenting and using ropeless gear. So it's not as if- Yeah … it's not happening. Like they are trying to- Yeah, people are trying it do their best to change. And it works. Right.

29:52 And it works. Yeah. Yeah. and it's getting better and better every time these studies come out. I remember at the beginning it was very difficult and it was hard, and nobody likes change. like we all hate change. But, unfortunately, like we have to do this when we have a response like this, and that's what science is all about, it's what conservation- Mm-hmm is all about. And I'm glad that there are people out there and communities out there, fishing communities, who are trying to work this. As frustrating as that could be, and working through the kinks for like us to be able to have, sustainable lobster again, and crabs and things like that, and not harm whales, which I think is wonderful. A couple of other things I wanna kinda go on, that you talk about in the book. If I go to the grocery store I want protein, I'm a big guy, I like to work out, I want protein, and people like, "Tuna's the best kind of protein you can get." You look on the label, it says, "Dolphin safe."

30:37 What does it actually mean and what does it leave out? Yes. So dolphin safe does not mean what people think it means, and it does not mean what Seaspiracy claimed it means. Okay. so that is the most tuna is caught via a net called a purse seine, which is a large net that is dragged around a school of tuna, and then the purse strings are drawn and it catches that. That also catches anything that was near the tuna the problem is how do you know when to deploy that net? Mm-hmm. Because you can't see tuna from the surface. So what people used to do is they would look for dolphins and say, "Oh, there are dolphins feeding here. There's probably tuna feeding here underneath them."

31:19 And they would set the net around the dolphins, and that would kill those dolphins. They can jump over the net, but they didn't. And dolphin safe tuna just means we didn't do that. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. You shouldn't do that. That's bad. But it does not mean no dolphins could possibly have been hurt as a result of this fishing. It was never meant to mean that. No one ever said that it means that. And Sea Spear Sea said, like, "Well, we found, a dead dolphin in this dolphin safe tuna fishery, so the whole term is meaningless." No, you not knowing what it means doesn't mean it's meaningless. Yeah. That makes sense. And all, tuna caught in, sold in the US is required to have that label. something that if you want no dolphins were caught at all during this, look for wild pole and line caught.

32:00 Mm-hmm. Um, that is one of the few fisheries in the world where individuals are still caught with a rod and reel rather than some of this giant industrial-sized fishing gear that can be miles long and have thousands of hooks. Mm-hmm. Uh, there's also videos of the how that works, on the Marine Stewardship Council website, which is really cool. it's a bunch of people, with rods and reels standing on the back of the deck all going, "Got one. Bloop." Yeah. "Got one. Bloop." And it's just chaos on the deck. that means they're actually catching just the tuna, and- Yeah … pretty much nothing else means that. Yeah. No, that's great. And I liked having the video 'cause it kinda show what actually rod and reels means. And I remember looking on the Seafood Watch app, and it actually tells you it's caught by line and pole, which I think is really great. So it- it's really easy- Yeah … to do that. it's kind of an interesting, that you ha- like a, I guess a take, but it's, you have reasonings for this take.

32:45 there was a movie, I think it was last two years ago that came out, narrated by Sir David Attenborough called Oceans. Yes. And, or Ocean. And one of the big things there, and it's still happening now, is the call for a ban on trawling. Uh- Yes … so can you explain for those who don't know what trawling is, and then, your position on this global ban is? 'Cause I think it's a really interesting position, and probably not something that I think people would expect from you. Yes. So if you haven't seen that David Attenborough movie, you should. It's great. it's on Disney Plus, at least here in the US. but yet the sort of the big bad guy in that movie was trawl fishing. Mm-hmm. And they had some really amazing footage of what that looks like.

33:26 They were really showing a specific subset of trawl fishing and using it to interpolate all trawl fishing, and that's where the problem comes in. So they were talking about bottom trawl fishing, which is dragging a net that has a heavy chain in front of it over the seabed that causes things hiding in the sand to jump up, and they get caught in the net. that can be, in the wrong place, that can be extremely destructive. it causes scars on the seafloor that are visible from space. it has been compared to, burning down a whole forest to catch rabbits, because it also destroys the sensitive seafloor habitat. but yeah, we shouldn't do it in places that have sensitive seafloor habitat. I am all for that. But that is not the same thing as we shouldn't trawl at all because, among other things, trawling provides about a quarter of the world's seafood.

34:11 so not doing it anymore would leave a pretty big hole Mm-hmm … in, coastal economies as well as, the dinner table. Right. And so there are places that are, sandy or muddy bottom and don't have sponges or corals or kelp or sensitive habitats. We can trawl there without, damaging sensitive habitat. There's also non-bottom trawling. There's midwater trawls, which is just a big net dragged through the water, that doesn't even touch the seafloor. that's not the same thing there are places we should not do this. Yeah … it can cause very real harms in some places, but I think ban all of it everywhere is not realistic or necessary. Interesting. Yeah. I think also there should be a requirement, wherever this is happening, to prove that the bottom is trawlable.

35:00 'Cause there's a lot of places where we may not know, like deep sea trawling. There may be some place where it could be a seamount that could have a lot of habitat on there, and if you're trawling it, we have no idea what habitat we're destroying. So obviously there's a lot of caveats within that. but I think you're right. I think it can be sustainable certain places and unsustainable other places. I think it's just- Yeah. There, there- … a matter of, like, what they're doing, right? There are Marine Stewardship Council certified bottom trawl fisheries. I explain how that works, with a few examples in the book. There are- Yeah … Seafood Watch rated green bottom trawl fisheries. Interesting. It just depends on where you do it, how you do it, all of that- Yeah … kind of stuff. Yeah. That's- There are places we should not do it. there's been a lot of stuff in the news lately about how particularly European marine protected areas allow bottom trawling, and I don't think we should do that.

35:46 I think there are places we should not bottom trawl, and even if the habitat in those places is not especially sensitive, we should not allow industrial scale fishing in a marine protected area. That's the whole point of them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, no, I completely agree. We found that out, a while ago where I think it was in the UK, they were allowing that to happen. And to be honest, that's not, just a thing in the UK. It's happens in a lot of places- and just becomes a paper park after that because- Mm-hmm … it's not doing what it's supposed to be doing. that's a good point. I wanna talk one more thing about- Mm-hmm … the harms, and we're gonna move to solutions, and that's- Great another part in your book. which it has to do, and I have to talk about this, is, is aquaculture and fish farming. Mm-hmm. And, when I approach people about aquaculture, like, I think there's more aquaculture seafood now than there is, wild fish caught in a lot of places, especially here in Canada, too.

36:32 There's a big, extremes on both sides. There's a big gap of whether people want aquaculture or don't want aquaculture. Yeah. and I think you come out the same way with trawling, I think you come out with a kind of a perspective as like not all aquaculture is the same, and there's some good and there's some bad. So how do people know how to detect what's good and what's bad? Yeah, so this is another place where something like Seafood Watch recommendations can be really helpful, or Ocean Wise recommendations, as well as the Marine Stewardship Council has an aquaculture equivalent called the Aquaculture Stewardship Council, where a fish farm has to follow these rigorous science-based, provided via environmentalist input guidelines in order to be able to use the label. there's also a few competing ones.

37:14 One of the ones that, I just started using, HelloFresh meal kits here, and, I, got a shrimp dish and it had a best aquaculture practices or BAP label on it, which is not quite as rigorous as Aquaculture- Right … Stewardship Council, but it's still, a lot better than nothing. Right. So look for these eco labels, look for these, independent experts who are recommending or not recommending something. And as a general rule that I teach my students for anything related to this, doing this right, doing this in a way that's less environmentally harmful costs more, which means they can sell it for more, which means they will say, "We did this the right way. Please give us more money." And if they're not doing that and it's sort of not clear where it came from, it's probably not the more environmentally friendly one.

37:57 Yeah. no doubt. I'm glad you mentioned that. There are a lot of more harms that I think people should look at in the book to get a good perspective, and Dave's perspective of sort of what's good and what's bad. Because it's not all… And they're all complex you take a very good approach in it in, naming those complexities and then also, like, some of the, takes that people have. It seems like everybody has a take these days, but not grounded in any kind of information. So, that's a great part of the book to kind of put it together. But, like, I love this part. Like, part two is all about solutions. And, a good friend of ours, a mutual friend of ours, Angelo Villagomez, has the line, "If you kill fewer fish, more fish will be alive." Yep. A lot of science really isn't that complicated- if you try to explain it like you're 10.

38:42 Yeah. Uh, and yeah, that's an interesting one that always gets a few chuckles. And people think about it and they went, "Oh, I just- Yeah … I just read a 500-page fishery science textbook, and you just summarized it in one sentence of elementary school vocabulary." the school of Angelo Villagomez is a great school to go to. I, I highly recommend it. Yeah. Not everything needs to be complicated. with that said, like, what does good fisheries management look like in practice? Because yeah, the fewer fish we kill, the, more fish will be alive. But that, fisheries management takes a lot into place. Without going into, like, too much detail- Yeah, this gets- How do we know? … this gets mathy really fast. Yeah. Mathy fast. Yeah. Uh, but, uh, one of the, one of the, the big goals of the book is to convince people that there is data and evidence and expertise that goes into this at, but also make it so you don't need to read a 300-page stock assessment every time you decide what's for dinner.

39:30 But I also show you how to read one of those if you want to. so a well-managed fishery is one that has rules in place to limit the total catch to prevent overfishing, limits bycatch, especially for endangered species, usually via gear requirements or sometimes via you're not allowed to fish during this time of year when these animals are migrating through, has rules in place to limit the impact of the fishing gear on the habitat, and has data that informs all of that. So how do you know how many fish are too many fish? You have to have a sense of the population of the fish. You have to know how long they live, how big they get, how many babies they have, and how often. And once you have all that- It goes into a science-based fisheries management plan.

40:12 And I'll note that not everywhere in the world has the resources to do something like that. Yeah. Uh, Canada, the US, the UK, Australia, these places all have the science-based, data-driven fisheries management plan to varying degrees of success. There's also data-limited and data-zero fisheries, management, which is a newer concept that I introduce very briefly in the book because frankly, I don't know that much about it. but there are ways of doing this even if you don't have a multi-hundred million dollar research infrastructure in place. Right. Yeah. And like when talking about fisheries management, I think one of the most important, and we've, kinda talked about it here and there in this interview, but it really comes down to the people fishing, and that's a complicated relationship, especially when it deals with government and fishers in the first place.

40:58 they are the ones who follow the rules, but there's something that kinda has to happen for them to do that, and that's to have that dialogue with them. So why is it that when, like fishermen will actually follow the rules when they feel that they have that say and they have that empowerment? Yeah. This is a really interesting element of human behavior, that people are more willing to listen to decisions made at a proverbial table if they felt that they had a seat at that table, even if the decisions are not good for them. if you just have the proverbial faraway elitist bureaucrats telling me what to do without understanding anything about what the actual conditions and my way of life, of course it's easy to ignore those people.

41:39 But when we make the process open to the public, when we give the industry a seat at the table, they see how the decisions are made, and they see, "Oh yeah, maybe we should cut back on fishing a little, to help allow the stock to recover so we can continue to fish for years to come." there's crazy examples of this, that we've just let people see. This is why a big, theme of all of my work is not only here's what we found, but how do we know that? convince yourself. here's access to the same information, convince yourself that this is the case. I think that's a really important thing, and it's true of climate change stuff too. a lot of people, think that it's just sort of liberal dogma, but you say, "No, no, here's how we know," and that can help persuade some people.

42:20 Again, not the people whose whole identity is, "I've decided I can't be persuaded." Right. Of course, yeah. Now, another solution that you talk about is marine protected areas, MPAs. Mm-hmm. I did my master's on MPA design. It is complex. It is a tool in the conservation tool belt. But it's not everything. And you kinda talk about that a little bit. And sometimes people oversell them, like in Oceans, in the- Yes, that was- … in the movie, right? That was the other criticism I had of that otherwise wonderful David Attenborough movie, is they present these marine protected areas, which you can think of as a no-fishing zone or an underwater national park, that there are varying degrees of rules, with them, just as there are with parks on land. it was presented as an obvious solution that will always work and always work quickly, and that's not true.

43:03 a well-managed, well-designed, well-implemented marine protected area is going to have more fish, bigger fish, and more species of fish in it than an otherwise ecologically similar unprotected area where fishing is allowed. But lots of marine protected areas are not especially well-designed, well-managed, or well-implemented. like the ones we mentioned earlier, that these European marine protected areas that allow bottom trawling. But also there's sometimes examples that are way dumber than that. Mm-hmm. Uh, that my students are always shocked when I share examples of marine protected areas that got a lot of positive publicity in some small island developing states or some- Australia did this for a while too, that they got a lot of positive publicity because we're making this plan to save this beloved endangered species, we're making a marine protected area, but that species doesn't live there, never did, and never will And like, duh, obviously that's not gonna help that species.

43:58 It's not there. Right. So it also can take a really long time for past environmental damage to recover, especially if there are other stressors. Marine protected areas don't do anything to help against oil spills or climate change or ocean acidification. they're a very powerful tool. They work really well- Yeah … if they're done right. They're often not done right, and they can't do everything. Exactly. There are certain goals. Usually it's protecting biodiversity and helping with fisheries, for spillover effect, and they're usually quite good at that. Like you said, if that's the goal and that's what the reach is, you have to go with that. They're not an all-in-one tool. They can't do everything with imaginary borders, it's just, physically impossible to do everything. So that's a great, explanation of that. there was an interesting, ruling in Louisiana recently in the US where, I believe they're called, skimmer trawlers, who never had a sea turtle exclusion device on, but they're now mandated.

44:50 I think it says- Yeah … ships over 40 feet. That was new. I covered it on our YouTube channel. Mm-hmm. and I think it's interesting when we talk about, turtle excluder devices, like they call them TEDs essentially. can you talk a little bit about them? 'Cause they are a good solution to help with sea turtle bycatch. Can you talk a little- Yes … a little bit about them? So the leading threat to sea turtles in the '70s, '80s, '90s used to be bycatch, that they were caught in these shrimp trawl nets, and then they drowned. Mm-hmm. Uh, because sea turtles are not fish. They need to breathe air at the surface. They don't have gills. And then this solution is, a gear modification that gets sewn into the net itself, and it's basically a weighted trapdoor.

45:30 And a shrimp is not heavy enough to trigger the trapdoor, so it still gets caught. And a sea turtle is heavy enough to trigger the trapdoor, so it gets shunted out of the net and is fine, yet may have minor bruises. And this works unbelievably well because it, not only saves tens of thousands of sea turtles a year, but it also doesn't reduce your shrimp catch that much. Like, if I were to tell you of a solution that would save all the sea turtles, but it would mean you're not gonna catch any shrimp, shrimpers aren't gonna use that This doesn't do that. They are kind of annoying to use. It's a heavy piece of metal that goes in a net. but it's, no, it works. And it's not that expensive, you get used to it, and it, totally solves the problem without reducing shrimp catch.

46:13 this loophole was that relatively small boats were not required to use these. And the reasoning for that is, "Eh, they're small, who cares?" Mm-hmm. "It, it's the big guys we need to worry about." But when there's a lot of small boats, it's still a big problem Yeah. and in that story it was interesting because there was a very big discrepancy between the state collected data and the federally collected data in terms of how many sea turtles were being caught in a order of magnitude or even a couple of orders of magnitude of difference. So it's, kinda interesting to see that court ruling, especially in these days of policymaking in the US. But it was, nice to see that, these sea turtles are being looked out for. The last solution I wanna talk quickly about, as one of the ways that we can monitor what's happening on boats is fisheries observers.

46:55 You know- Yeah … I've worked as a marine mammal observer in the past. I've had friends who work for fisheries observer. It's always a great job when you first come out of university to go out and get experience, learn, the building relationships with fishers and stuff. But it's not always easy, and there have been some very, sad stories of people disappearing, on boats in the past, internationally, feeling threatened, and for a variety of reasons, but especially for, like, we-- as observers, you're reporting. You know, you're- Yes … reporting on what's being caught, how those fish are being treated, all that kind of stuff. can you talk about their role in, like, that conservation or that fisheries management and why it's so important? Yeah. So for any data-driven, evidence-based conservation plan, you need to have the data.

47:37 And how do we know how many sea turtles are being caught in shrimp trawl nets? How do we know how many dolphins are caught in tuna nets? someone needs to check. And relying on the fishermen themselves to check and accurately report it is a problem, because they have the perverse incentive to say, "Nope, we did nothing wrong. We don't need to change anything." So the solution has been these fisheries observers, which are independent third-party observers, whose job it is to just document everything, and it gets sent to a central clearing house and eventually to governments, to just track. Mm-hmm. And as you said, this can be a wonderful job. it's probably the highest paying job that you can get with right out of undergraduate marine biology. Absolutely. and you'll get tons of time on the water.

48:19 You'll get tons of experience. but it can be dangerous, especially for women. Mm-hmm … for anyone. you might be the only human being for miles who does not work for that fishing boat, and some of those people do not want you there. Right. there have been people disappeared, there have been people threatened, there have been people bribed, it's not common in the US or Canada. No. It does happen a lot more in, the Global South. Yeah. There are issues with it. So one emerging solution to this is electronic fisheries monitoring. Mm-hmm. Which is basically, cameras set up on the back deck that are, precise enough and clear enough and HD enough that you can see exactly what's being caught, and then someone gets emailed those files and they- Mm-hmm … sit in an office somewhere where they can't be threatened, and monitor it.

49:02 Yeah … fishermen like these. Right. in my experience, they think that, most fishermen who I've worked with love gadgets, and this is a really cool gadget. They're expensive at first. Mm-hmm. But you don't need to feed them. You don't need to- Yeah provide a bunk for them. Like weirdly this must have happened either a lot of times or, was so annoying that it's become legend in the fishing community. But several of the fishing captains who I've spoken with have said, "Every fishing observer has some sort of goofy dietary restriction." And like, "We've, we've been cooking the same food for years, and now I have to cook this separate meal just for them. It's annoying." You don't have to do that for, a camera. Exactly. Like, just to kinda give, a heads-up, for those of you who are thinking of doing fisheries observers, it's a great opportunity, but also talk to people who have done it before.

49:46 It is not an easy life. You're six months on, six months off a lot of the times, or two months on, two months off. But talk about safety, talk about what to expect, talk about what you need in terms of, safety certifications and things like that, just to make sure that you enjoy your time on there, and you get on the right boat, and you work with the right company. As Dave said, like, US, and Canada they have a lot of regulations around that, and the boats are usually pretty good, and the people on the boats are pretty good. But also just keep an eye out that, there can be some major problems. Now, Dave, we've talked a lot about the labels, which is part three of your book, which I, first of all, I love the way you're going through and doing the parts in the book. Mm-hmm. Going from like, "Here are the harms, here's the solutions- Yeah, so I- … here are the labels" … I like to build a persuasive argument step by step. Yeah. And that's something that I spend a lot of time on social media, a lot of time on social media.

50:29 And I find that people are not good at this important skill anymore. It's just like I say a slogan, and you quibble about it, or you just tell me I'm a fascist 'cause I don't agree with your alternative slogan. And, that's not how you win hearts and minds. Right. Yeah. No, that makes sense. that makes complete sense. And so I love this. Now we're at the part, like we've talked about the labels, and I think there's a lot of guides in there, and there's a lot of stuff- Mm-hmm … that you can look in from worldwide. it seems like every country- Mm-hmm … seems to have their own kind of way. And, um- Yes, to, to varying degrees of, data-drivennes. but yes- Right … there are, there are sustainable seafood guides to a lot of, coastal countries all over the world. the Europe, Canada, the US, and Australia have probably the most rigorous ones, but any of them- Right … you're better off doing that than not following it.

51:14 Than not doing it, for sure. Now, well, I want to talk, to get to the part of at the counter because a lot of us, whether we're scientists or we're non-scientists, conservationists, non-conservationists, just wanna know what's gonna happen. I think a lot of us are at the approach of when we get to the counter, it can kinda get confusing and things move quickly, and the person behind the counter- Yes may not be as informed as maybe- They might not know anything … the consumer, right? 'Cause it could be- Yeah … like a teenager- So- … working for minimum wage just trying to get through their day. You know what I mean? Yeah. So I actually have my students do a lab where they go to a local grocery store, pick seafood items at random, and try to use these tools to determine whether or not, they're sustainable.

51:57 And an instruction that I had to add after the first year that I never would've thought I would have to explicitly say is, "If you ask a grocery store employee for help, please ask nicely." 'Cause people get so frustrated, like if they say, "Wait, is this skipjack or yellowjack tuna? Is this pole-and-line caught or, purse seine caught?" And the person doesn't know, they're not your enemy. That meant- Mm … that what I might recommend in that case is maybe don't get that tuna, but- Right … you don't yell at the grocery store employee. My God. No. Yeah, you still have to be polite. You have to understand everybody's human, everybody's trying to do their thing, and sometimes it could be up to, the employer to kind of inform the people. 'Cause there are certain people that are at grocery stores that know seafood, and they are really into this.

52:41 Yeah. I've, come across them. They're few and far between, but they know their seafood 'cause they care about their job and they care about seafood. But it's not always the case, and I think you're right, you have to be patient with a lot of the people, around that. Can you tell the story of the scuba diver in the Bahamas who loved eating local? Oh, my God. I like this story. Yeah, so this is, like, almost an apocryphal story, but I promise it's a thing that really happened to me. That I go- … on a lot of scuba vacations all over the world, and I remember one time I was going out on the boat in the morning, and we were excited to get out to the reef and go diving, and there was another guy who was staying at the same resort as us, and we were chatting. The whole boat ride out, he was saying, "Oh, I love to come to the islands and eat all the fresh-caught local seafood I can get." And then we went diving, and on the boat ride back, he said, Wow, there's a lot fewer fish on the reef than I remember." Like, yeah, dude, 'cause you ate them- Mm and were just talking about that.

53:33 What do you think local caught means, if not, from this geographic area? Yeah, it's interesting too, especially places where there's a lot of visitors and tourism where people are going and they want locally caught because they want some fresh seafood, and, that could be taxing on a local environment that maybe not get replenished after a while. Yeah, very interesting. a lot of people are now, especially in the US, in the Caribbean, are into eating lionfish. They're an invasive species here in, the Atlantic and the Caribbean. Yeah … is that a good way? Like, there's derbies and stuff like that. Is it a good way to deal with invasive species? Should we be eating more lionfish in the Atlantic? And where I am in the Washington, DC area, blue catfish are the big invasive, And blue catfish, by the way, get way bigger than people think.

54:15 my colleague Dr. Noah Bresman at Salisbury University, the biggest one that they caught, had in its stomach two whole ducks. Like this is a stream fish that is eating ducks. So yeah, from a sustainability perspective, there's really not a better option than killing something that we do not want to be there. So it would actually not be a problem if we were to overfish these species. We want to remove them. Is it effective at keeping their numbers under control? It's a lot better than doing nothing, and I don't know if there's a better- Right … solution other than prevention. Right. Exactly. And that's difficult once they've already established a population in certain spots, especially lionfish. You go diving, you and I dive, we see it probably everywhere in the Caribbean, they're beautiful fish, but they don't belong in where we're going diving.

54:58 If you're in the Southeast Pacific, sure, go ahead. That's always great. But, when they're in the Atlantic Caribbean, yeah, they're kinda wreaking havoc. Wildly destructive fish. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Now, one thing that I've noticed in the book is, like, you leave animal welfare out of your framework, including, like, octopus and fish pain, which some people study and they, bring up every once in a while. How do you explain that to people who, feel strongly about looking at the welfare of how fish and others are treated? Yeah. If you are someone for whom that's a priority, then maybe don't eat some of these things. But from- Mm-hmm … my perspective as a conservation scientist, I am worried about the extinction of whole species.

55:38 I am not worried- Right … about the suffering of a few individuals of those species. Right. It just does not factor into my worldview. I'm not saying it's wrong, I'm not saying it's bad. Right. I'm saying I am agnostic on this issue. and most of the sustainable seafood guides that are out there don't discuss this. it's are we overfishing too many of them? Are we killing things- Right … as bycatch? Is it pleasant for a fish that's caught in a net with a bunch of other fish? Probably not. There are also people who strongly believe that fish obviously don't feel pain because they're lower vertebrates or whatever. I don't really care. It just doesn't factor into my value system. If fish did- Right … feel pain, it doesn't mean that we have to give them up because they're a critical protein source for billions of humans.

56:21 Mm-hmm. If fish did not- Right … feel pain, it doesn't mean we could torture them for no reason. It does not factor into my- Yeah … value system as a evidence-based conservationist. Gotcha. And I think also too, it's like you, kinda mentioned it like, , a really interesting perspective. It's like we're almost at a point where it's like we just wanna make sure they're still there, so obviously at one point, hopefully we can get to the more focused on the welfare at some point, but we gotta make sure that these fish are still there and not overfished, and going the wayside and, continue to be overfished. It's a good, uh, way of putting it. It's not the fact that it's not an issue, it's the fact of like where are the priorities in terms of what we're looking at for, fisheries management and stuff. and obviously certain people care more about it than others, but I like the way you approach that.

57:02 Now last thing I wanna talk about, in terms of just going over through these, like the counter, Greenpeace has a red list. Like it's, not a red list as in the IUCN Red List, but it- Mm-hmm … more of like what you should eat and what you shouldn't. Now, all sharks are on that red list. They don't think you should be- Yep eating any shark. You've talked in the past and I'm sure you continue to talk about this, but that even in the US there are specific, fisheries in, sharks, that are sustainably managed. and I think that's difficult for some people to- Yes … wrap their head around because we keep talking about how, sharks are overfished worldwide. can you talk about like why you don't agree with the Greenpeace red list to avoid all sharks, but also to this sustainably, that shark fisheries could be sustainably managed?

57:44 Yes. So, the Greenpeace list of if they see a grocery store selling this species at all, that grocery store is therefore bad, I think is oversimplified to the point of being not helpful. There are certainly some species that are problematic, and if I see them, it's gonna give me, raise some doubt for me about that grocery store. But for almost everything on the Greenpeace list, sustainable sources exist according to all the other guides. That there are Marine Stewardship Council, certified fisheries for several of the things that are on there. There are Seafood Watch green or at least yellow recommendations for several of the species that Greenpeace says, "No one should ever eat this. There's not a sustainable source that exists." And I think there is simplifying stuff to make it understandable, and there is simplifying something so much that it's wrong, and it's a fine line to walk.

58:34 With sharks specifically, unsustainable fishing practices are the number one threat to sharks. Among- sharks are some of the most threatened animals in the world, and among threatened species of sharks, 100% of them list overfishing among their top three threats. It's a big problem, but that doesn't mean there's no such thing as a sustainable fishery for sharks, because there is. they exist, again, in primarily in these places that have these well-resourced natural resource management regimes. but Seafood Watch recommends some, MSC has certified some, some of these other guides that I talked about have certified some. It's not just me saying this. sustainable fisheries for sharks are real. That doesn't mean that's what we should do. you can say- Right … "I love sharks and it makes me sad to see a shark hurt, so I won't ever eat shark even if it's sustainable." That's fine, but that's different from- That's, that's their choice … there's no such thing as a sustainable shark fishery.

59:25 Gotcha. Nope, that makes perfect sense. as we kinda close up here, the person listening to this interview, the person who's gonna buy your book, they want to do the best they can. Let's set expectations for them in terms- Mm-hmm … of what they can actually accomplish. Because I think a lot of the times when we talk about conservation, like it comes down to the individual. Like, we need to do this- as an individual. And one of them is buying sustainably caught seafood. Mm-hmm. What can people expect when they go to that supermarket and expect that they can do, and not get disappointed about what they may or may not, or maybe they have a bad experience or something like that. Let's prepare them- Yeah … in terms of what they can do. what is the role of an individual in ocean conservation is actually a question I just asked in my scuba diving magazine column, Ask a Marine Biologist.

1:00:09 And what I said there is, yes, one person making different choices can absolutely make a difference, especially if there's tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of people all making the same choice as part of a coordinated- Mm-hmm campaign. And that's what we're seeing with these sustainable seafood choices. If you are the only person in the world who cares about this, you not eating lobster is not gonna put pressure on the lobster fishery. But if everyone starts following the Seafood Watch guidelines, that will put pressure. We've seen it happen with other fisheries. We've seen fisheries say, "We would like to be able to still operate, and that means we need to improve so that we meet these guidelines." In terms of what to expect, I think you're gonna be surprised at how much detail you need to know about a seafood item in order to be able to assess if it's sustainable.

1:00:52 If you look at the Seafood Watch guide, it doesn't just say, "Tuna good, snapper bad." It has five kinds of tuna that are good and five kinds of tuna that are bad, from certain countries is good, from certain countries is bad. Certain gear is good, certain gear is bad. And you can't always find that information on packaging at a grocery store on a label. So you can always ask, but again, ask nicely. You can always visit- Yeah … the website of the grocery store or of the particular seafood company. I have found with my students doing these labs, that almost everyone is able to find sustainable seafood options at a grocery store near them, but lots of the options are not sustainable. So It may- Mm-hmm … require, giving up a favorite thing.

1:01:33 If everyone did a little better on this, it would buy us time to fix the other problems. Yeah. True. That's a good point. That's a really, really good point. I love that. I love that idea. I kinda wanna end this interview on something that I think is really cool because it, like, this is a, near the end of the book, you kind of mention, a super fan of Costco, your dad, like, he had his proudest moment. can you talk a little bit about that? Because I think it's, it kind of- Yeah … tells, like, what happens when someone's successful in being able to buy sustainable. So, if you've ever been to Costco, and if you haven't, you should go right now, that it's great. they have this sort of internal trade publication called The Costco Connection that you can get for free on your way out of the store.

1:02:14 And the Marine Stewardship Council, when I worked there, was featured in Costco Connection in the context of where Costco is improving how we buy our seafood. here's an interview with the Marine Stewardship Council leadership about how they're helping us to buy sustainably sourced things. I was not in this interview, but my employer was. And my dad reads The Costco Connection because of course he does. And he saw that MSC was in there, and he told, like, everyone he knew, like, "Oh, that's where my son works. Look how cool this is." Um, so he actually, just got at the, Naples, Florida, where they live, Jewish Book Festival, he got to introduce someone who was giving a talk a new book about Costco called The Joy of Costco, which is also a wonderful book.

1:02:58 And my dad was wearing a shirt under it that had the photo of the $1.50 hotdog combo on it. I'm telling you, those $1.50 hot dogs, they hit right- They're great … when you, when you- Yeah … when you get them. Yeah. this has been great, Dave. I really wanna thank you for coming on the podcast, but also for writing the book. I think this is really helpful. it's very informative. It gives people what they need, in a very practical way and transparent way. I- Great … do have to say, like, with all the stuff that's come out, in the past, that we've talked about here today, it makes things more confusing. This kinda lays it all out for that. The book is up for presale. Now, I just- Yes … right before this interview, I bought a book, so I'm expecting it to come once it's printed out.

1:03:38 It's coming out November 17th. It's out in November. Yeah, out November 17th. We're gonna be actually in person, hanging out in person. Yeah, I'm gonna see you- Uh- … see you in person in Scotland on its release date. I'll come back two boxes of books on my front step. It's gonna be awesome. I can't wait, for that to happen. But, I'm gonna put the link, in the show notes that people can go and buy this book. I think it's great. What I would recommend, too, is not only buy one, buy more and give it to your library, so that they can have- Yeah, that'd be great a copy in their book so more people can get access to it. Dave, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and all the work you do to put it, like the effort you put into this book, and all the effort you do for all your other stuff that you do. I can't wait to have you back on and talk more about, marine conservation.

1:04:22 Thank you so much for having me. Again, the book is Why Sustainable Seafood Matters, and you can find me on social media @whysharksmatter. Awesome. Perfect. All right, thanks Dave, appreciate it. There are so many things that David talks about in his book and in this interview that even I got confused about before, and now I'm enlightened. It is great. Thank you, David, for coming on. Thank you for writing this book. As usual, the guy's always welcome to come on here, not only just for promotion, but just to talk about marine science, marine conservation, because he's so good at it. And it's fun to be able to talk to him. We're good friends, and I'm glad, to be able to have this platform just to help support him. So go buy the book if you wanna learn more about sustainable seafood.

1:05:02 you can pre-order it. It's just down, in the show notes. There's a link. You can click on that link, pre-order it. It'll come to your house, when it is ready. It goes right to the publisher, too. So you're supporting that, publisher. You're supporting David in his work, and I think it's really important. I can't wait for, the next book when he writes it, but this is one that I look forward to hearing feedback on. So if you do get the book, and you're reading it, and you wanna let me know what you think, or even David know what you think, you can get ahold of me with my social media following, or links in the show notes as well. But I wanna thank you so much for listening to this, for supporting Dave, for supporting this podcast in what we do, because we are doing it for you to help you understand the ocean a little bit better and understand the work that we do to make that information available.

1:05:45 And I think it's really great that we get to do that, and you get to kinda feel a little bit better about the ocean, knowing a little bit more. So thank you so much for the support for Dave, for myself. we really appreciate it, and thank you so much for listening to this episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Lewin. Have a great day. We'll talk to you next time, and happy conservation.