Findings

Pass by the fish counter of your local high-end supermarket, and you might see fillets of organic salmon on display. It’s still a bit of a fuzzy concept, but the label may give off planet-friendly vibes. But exactly how much greener is “organic” salmon? That’s a job for what’s called life cycle analysis, a technique often used to figure out how much energy and pollution it takes to make a particular product. Now it’s being applied to fish.

Nathan Pelletier of Dalhousie University, in Halifax, Canada, took a hard look at organic and conventionally farmed salmon in a session called “Sustainable Seafood: Cradle-to-Grave Assessments of Alternative Technologies.” ...

It sounds like madness: Fleets of trawlers dragging huge nets across the seafloor are driving deep-sea fish to extinction. But from a purely economic point of view, it makes perfect sense, said Elliott Norse of the Marine Conservation Biology Institute in Bellevue, Washington. “It’s not that people are stupid; they’re smart.” But while individual economic decisions make sense, another talk showed how government policies can distort the fisheries markets at the expense of these vulnerable species...

Never mind long showers, leaky toilets, or even sprawling golf courses. Agriculture is the biggest user of water in the world. Every year, the U.S. government spends millions and millions of dollars to help farmers make their irrigation more efficient. In many cases, the goal is to reduce the amount of water diverted from rivers so that more remains for other users, including nature. But the subsidy can backfire in the long run.

“This policy is a real problem,” said Ray Huffaker, an economist at Washington State University in Pullman on Friday at a session called, “Water Crisis in Agriculture: How to Produce More with Less.” Attempts at conservation sometimes leave less water behind, Huffaker says...

(Photo: Jeff Vanuga/USDA)

If you worry about how much energy it takes to bring food to your dinner plate, then beware the Norway lobster (Nephrops norvegicus). It takes some 300 megajoules of energy to bring 1 kilogram of this crustacean from a trawler in the North Sea to consumers in Sweden, Friederika Ziegler of the Swedish Institute for Food and Biotechnology in Göteborg said at a session this morning. (A kilogram of bread takes 18 megajoules, by comparison.) The bulk of this energy is fuel, some nine liters of diesel per kilogram of lobster caught. “This is something of a world record for food production,” Ziegler said. Lobster caught with cages are more energy efficient, she says, but the practice is more dangerous for the fishers. Read more in a report. 

(Photo: Hans Hillewaert)

The AAAS annual meeting is really the only big general science conference in the business. This year's theme is sustainability, which covers a lot of the sessions at the meeting. Science (which is published by AAAS) has several reporters covering the meeting, and here's where we'll be posting on-the-spot coverage of sessions and fascinating tidbits, Q and As with the top scientists and policy makers. Check back frequently!