IN THIS ISSUE

Lessons from the Spill

Fish Forever

Where have all the Salmon Gone?

Wildlife Spotlight: Black-footed Albatross

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Great Holiday Gifts!

 

Join FMSA today and receive one of our eco-friendly gifts!**

$50 membership receives a reusable travel mug*, eliminating your need for disposable cups

$75 membership receives a hard copy of Paul Johnson’s sustainable seafood cookbook, Fish Forever*

$100 membership receives a whale watching trip to the Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary

$200 membership receives a private, behind-the-scenes tour of the Farallones Marine Sanctuary Visitor Center

Become a member online or send a check to:
FMSA
991 Marine Dr.
San Francisco, CA 94122
Please note that you would like to receive a gift with your membership.

To ensure that you receive your gift in time to put it under your holiday tree, we must receive your order by midnight on Wednesday, December 19th.

*While supplies last
**Offer good thru 1/15/08

 

Contribute to the Cosco Busan Oil Spill Relief Fund. We still need your help!

 

Double your gift! Ask your employer about matching funds and make your donation stretch even further!

 

December 16 Fish Forever book signing party with author Paul Johnson at Hayes Street Grill in San Francisco from 12 to 3pm.

 

Happy Holidays!

 

 

 

Lessons from the Spill

We can all agree that we never want another oil spill to happen here on the California coast.

But we also know that another spill will eventually happen again. So we owe it to the magnificent marine ecosystems all around us - and to ourselves - to make sure that we do a better job of responding next time.

We can point fingers about what obviously went wrong with the initial response to this spill, or we can look toward the future and diligently improve our spill prevention measures. We must make sure that there is no dithering in the critical first 60 minutes of any spill response, that all agencies with a need to know are notified immediately instead of hours later, and that information provided to responders and the public is accurate and verifiable.

Continued>>

 

Fish Forever

Linda Hunter, Executive Director of the Farallones Marine Sanctuary Association, sat down recently with Paul Johnson, author and seafood purveyor, to talk about his new book, Fish Forever.

LH:  This book is gorgeous, Paul. Not only is it full of delicious recipes and beautiful photographs, but it delivers a sustainable seafood message with compelling prose. Why did you decide to write Fish Forever?

PJ: The book really wrote itself. When I first began to write what I had in mind was a book about “Fish Alley”, that’s San Francisco’s equivalent of Fulton Fish Market. I wanted to write about the history, the characters and my experiences, then pepper it with fish lore and recipes. But the more I wrote, the more the issues of sustainability and health took over.

Continued >>

 

Where Have all the Salmon Gone?

Prior to the Gold Rush, Chinook salmon, the most highly prized and largest of the Pacific salmon, returned to spawn in the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers in California’s Central Valley in almost unimaginable numbers. The unique combination of enormously productive upwelling currents off the California coast and the year round cold but largely ice free tributaries in the Central Valley produced massive Chinook runs.

An estimated historical abundance of around ten to fifteen million fish (from four genetically distinct Chinook runs) returned annually through the San Francisco Bay and delta to their spawning grounds that once stretched past Redding to the north, Auburn to the east and Fresno to the south.

Only the Columbia River on the West Coast surpassed the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers and their tributaries in terms of salmon productivity. Early settlers famously described returning salmon so thick that one could “walk across the backs of salmon” to cross a river and not get wet.

Continued >>

 

Wildlife Spotlight: Black-footed Albatross (Phoebastria nigripes)

One of the most exciting places to visit in the Gulf of the Farallones Marine Sanctuary is its western boundary, past the islands and beyond the continental shelf, where the wildlife of the coastal waters gives way to the deep ocean ecosystem.

The Black-footed albatross is a large brown seabird that comes to this part of the sanctuary, all the way from Hawaii, to take advantage of the abundant food supply generated by the upwelling of plankton from late spring through late fall.

Continued >>

 

Photo Credits: Cosco Busan: San Francisco Chronicle. Albatros & Salmon: NOAA