Orange Roughy

Orange roughy – a ‘sustainable’ fish certification too far.

Posted by Willie — 21 June 2016 at 2:55pm - Comments
All rights reserved. Credit: Lizzie Barber / Greenpeace
orange roughy illustration

Orange roughy are easy to over fish. So, humans do. But that doesn't seem to be stopping moves to re-define them as 'sustainable' by the Marine Stewardship Council.

True, when we started fishing orange roughy we didn’t know that this slow-growing, long-lived, deep water fish was particularly susceptible. But now we definitely do. Orange roughy can live to a staggering 150 years old, and are at least 30 years old before they are mature enough to breed. To put that into context: there are probably orange roughy alive today that were born when Queen Victoria was on the throne, and they take about 10 times longer to mature than Atlantic cod.

Article tagged as: albatross, bottom trawling, bycatch, certfication, coral, DSCC, fish, fish names, fur seals, krill, Marine Stewardship Council, msc, new zealand, oceans, orange roughy, seamount, sharks, sustainabile fishing, sustainable, WWF

Trader Joe’s gets a little greener

Posted by jossc — 31 March 2010 at 5:12pm - Comments

Why is an old (sea) dog unlike an old pirate? Well, apparently, you really can teach an old pirate new tricks.

Following the success of the sustainable seafood campaign pioneered here in the UK a few years back, other Greenpeace offices have been publicly pressuring their own supermarkets to sell only sustainably sourced fish in order to help save the oceans.

Article tagged as: orange roughy, sustainable seafood

Never mind the pollack

Posted by Willie — 7 April 2009 at 9:49am - Comments

Pollack - creative commons (copyright leibatiheim)
A pollack called Colin... what's in a name?

Sticks and stones will break your bones, but names will never hurt you. Unless you're at the fish counter it seems, where the retailers Sainsbury's have 'renamed' pollack as 'colin'.

No, it's not April Fools' Day - apparently customers had a bit of an issue asking for pollack. I guess in much the same way as Uranus started being pronounced 'Yoo-ran-uss' at some point in the last couple of decades to avoid embarrassment and puerile jokes.

Article tagged as: colin, orange roughy, overfishing, pollack, pollock, sainsburys

Save the fish, save the world!

Posted by Willie — 23 January 2009 at 4:41pm - Comments

Orange roughy - live ones can make an unusual contribution to stemming climate change

Orange roughy: live ones can make an unusual contribution to stemming climate change  © Greenpeace / MacKenzie

Dramatic title perhaps, but maybe not quite so far-fetched. Here in sunny Sundance, one of the questions that has been coming up repeatedly at showings of the End Of The Line movie is, "What about climate change?", assuming rightly that a warming planet will have implications for our fish populations too. Well my practised response to this before I got here was simply that the effects of climate change make all of the issues of rapacious overfishing all the more important. They make the need for precaution when it comes to fishing, and the need for fully protected areas essential.

Article tagged as: bycatch, destructive fishing, end of the line, oceans, orange roughy, overfishing, sundance
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