If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
"Sun and surf" might be the stuff of summer, but that doesn't mean a trip exclusively to the beach is in order. Some of our favorite summer destinatio...
Fisherman Christopher Nicolson is gearing up for salmon season. Each summer he makes the long trek to Alaska with his family, from Brooklyn to Brist...
Make the entire Mediterranean a protected park. Let the ancient sea, the Greeks' wine-dark sea, recover its beauty and wildlife. The people of this basin and all of Europe, and the world, deserve no less.
Commercial fishing is a multi-billion dollar industry. Research suggests that the free-market approach will not only help preserve America's commercial fishing industry but will make it stronger.
In 2004, the Tsunami that hit Sri Lanka killed eight members of this small fishing family. Yet today they still fish, because they have to do it to survive.
This week over one billion people in 192 countries celebrated Earth Day. We planted trees, shared recycling tips, pledged action to combat climate c...
About 40 people in the Western Alaska regional hub city of Bethel took an hour or two out of their day, Monday, to join in a show of resistance to gov...
He taught me to drive his '65 Mustang -- white with red pinstripes. (I was not the legal driving age.) I remember backing into something hard and unforgiving to his bumper.
How do I know what fish is ok to buy? One simple step we can all take is to buy wild domestic seafood.
While lots of seafood does come from those industrial, large-scale vessels, perhaps 99 percent of the world's more than 50 million fishermen operate in artisanal, traditional and subsistence fisheries, mostly in developing countries.
The question will come. Maybe not tomorrow or the next day, but it will come. And it's a question so hurtful, vile and unmerciful that only friends dare ask it: "So, what'd you do this weekend?"
In the weeks and months to come, we at Ocean Conservancy will dive deeper to take a very hard look at carbon pollution. For instance, what impact might the Keystone XL pipeline, if approved, have on the ocean?
It's not every day that fishermen and environmentalists agree. But in a significant move, the American Bluefin Tuna Association and the International ...
Why are cod and many other species of groundfish, or bottom dwellers, struggling to recover? Decades of heavy fishing depleted their numbers and damaged the ocean ecosystem. These fish now face additional challenges from climate change as New England waters hit record high temperatures in 2012.
Here, life moves at a tangibly slower pace than what most visitors are accustomed to back home. ''Once you come over that last bridge from the mainland, you just breath differently on the island,'' says one local.
The Rio Negro, I am told, is a river like any other.
The term "fish" most precisely describes any non-tetrapod craniate (i.e. an animal with a skull and in most cases a backbone) that has gills throughout life and whose limbs, if any, are in the shape of fins. Unlike groupings such as birds or mammals, fish are not a single clade but a paraphyletic collection of taxa, including hagfishes, lampreys, sharks and rays, ray-finned fish, coelacanths, and lungfish. Indeed, lungfish and coelacanths are closer relatives of tetrapods (such as mammals, birds, amphibians, etc.) than of other fish such as ray-finned fish or sharks, so the last common ancestor of all fish is also an ancestor to tetrapods. As paraphyletic groups are no longer recognised in modern systematic biology, the use of the term "fish" as a biological group must be avoided. Many types of aquatic animals commonly referred to as "fish" are not fish in the sense given above; examples include shellfish, cuttlefish, starfish, crayfish and jellyfish. In earlier times, even biologists did not make a distinction – sixteenth century natural historians classified also seals, whales, amphibians, crocodiles, even hippopotamuses, as well as a host of aquatic invertebrates, as fish. However, according the definition above, all mammals, including Cetaceans like Whales and Dolphins, are not fish.
In some contexts, especially in aquaculture, the true fish are referred to as finfish (or fin fish) to distinguish them from these other animals. A typical fish is ectothermic, has a streamlined body for rapid swimming, extracts oxygen from water using gills or uses an accessory breathing organ to breathe atmospheric oxygen, has two sets of paired fins, usually one or two (rarely three) dorsal fins, an anal fin, and a tail fin, has jaws, has skin that is usually covered with scales, and lays eggs.
