Bevan lectures to examine world’s fishery resources

Each year we take more than 80 million metric tons of seafood from the world’s oceans. Can we continue to remove this much fish and shellfish, or will we exhaust the supplies and suffer the consequences of overharvesting?

The Bevan Series on Sustainable Fisheries will examine such questions each Thursday this quarter, 4:30-6 p.m., at the Fishery Sciences Building auditorium on Boat Street. The lectures, which are open to the public at no charge, feature 10 experts from the Pacific Northwest, Canada, Chile and Tasmania. The series is not just about setting safe harvest levels. Lecturers also will consider the mounting pressures on the world’s fisheries resources from such things as coastal development, pollution and the invasions of non-native plants and animals.

This Thursday Bill Burke, UW professor of law and marine affairs, presents Politics Trumps Science: The International Regulation of Whaling. The full schedule is at http://www.fish.washington.edu/seminars/.

The series is named for the late Donald Bevan, a UW professor of fisheries and marine affairs whose 49-year career at the UW established him as a leader in fisheries science and policy. Among other things, he was known for trying to bring some order and common sense to the restoration of Columbia River salmon runs.

Funding for the series was contributed by Tanya Bevan and UW’s Program on the Environment, Washington Sea Grant Program and the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences. Julia Parrish, assistant professor of fisheries, organized the series.