Everyone in the Tent: How Ocean Treaties Actually Get Made
Release Date: 08/28/2026
Is Bottom Trawling Always Bad? It Depends Where
How To Protect The Ocean
Off the south coast of England, about 100 kilometres out, sits Haig Fras, a granite reef covered in jewel anemones and cup corals. For years it was protected on paper, yet heavy fishing gear could still drag across it. In March 2024, that finally changed. In this episode, Andrew Lewin explains why where we fish matters as much as how much we fish, and what it takes to turn a line on a map into real protection. Andrew breaks down the difference between midwater and bottom trawls and puts the damage shown in the recent Ocean documentary into context. Bottom trawling lands about a quarter of the...
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The Trapdoor That Saves Sea Turtles From Shrimp Nets
How To Protect The Ocean
A Kemp’s ridley sea turtle, the most endangered sea turtle on Earth, gets swept into a shrimp trawl. It hits a metal grid, slides out through a flap in the net, and swims away. That small trapdoor, the turtle excluder device, is one of the biggest success stories in fisheries management, and in late August 2026 a US federal appeals court upheld the rule extending it to skimmer trawl boats 40 feet and longer. In this episode, marine biologist Andrew Lewin walks through the bycatch fixes that are working and the fights still underway. You’ll hear why North Atlantic right whales get tangled...
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The Cod Came Back: What a Fishery Collapse Teaches Us About Overfishing
How To Protect The Ocean
Five centuries ago, explorers off Newfoundland described cod so plentiful that a weighted basket lowered into the sea came back full. By July 2, 1992, so few remained that Canada shut the northern cod fishery overnight. About 30,000 people lost their work in what became the largest single layoff in Canadian history. In this first episode of a week-long sustainable seafood series, Andrew tells the story of how the collapse happened and how slowly the cod came back. Andrew then breaks down the words that cause the most confusion in fisheries headlines: overfishing, overfished, depleted, and...
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How to Choose Sustainable Seafood
How To Protect The Ocean
You want to eat seafood the right way. Then you hit the seafood counter and face a wall of labels, a sign promising “sustainable practices,” and an employee who has no idea where the tuna came from. Add documentaries like Seaspiracy telling you to quit fish entirely, and it’s tempting to give up and buy whatever looks good. Unsustainable fishing is the biggest threat to marine biodiversity, so those choices carry real weight. In this episode, Andrew’s good friend Dr. David Shiffman joins the show to talk about his new book, Why Sustainable Seafood Matters. David spent two years on the...
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Slow Down for Whales: How Global Shipping Learned to Share the Ocean
How To Protect The Ocean
Blue whales can’t dodge ships. When scientists tracked blue whales alongside cargo ships off Southern California, the whales responded in just over half the encounters, and every response was the same: a slow, shallow dive. Not once did a whale move sideways out of the ship’s path. Models suggest ships kill around 18 blue whales a year off the U.S. West Coast, nearly eight times what the population can lose and still recover. The good news is in the data. Most blue whale strike deaths happen in a small slice of ocean, and that’s where ports, air quality agencies, marine sanctuaries, and...
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When Whale Food Moves: Climate Change, Crab Traps, and Pop-Up Gear
How To Protect The Ocean
In 2014, a patch of unusually warm water nicknamed "the blob" settled off the west coast of North America. The cold, food-rich water that normally stretches far offshore shrank into a narrow strip along the coast, and hungry humpback whales followed their food straight into the waters where Dungeness crabbers had set thousands of traps, each tied to a vertical rope. Entanglements jumped from about 10 a year to 53 in 2015 and 55 in 2016. In this episode, Andrew traces the line from warmer water to a specific whale in a specific rope. You'll learn why lunge-feeding whales depend on dense patches...
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The Whale Heart That Beats Twice a Minute
How To Protect The Ocean
Fill your hands with cold water, hold your breath, and press your face in. Your heart slows within seconds. That reflex lives in every whale in the ocean too, and in a blue whale it is pushed so far that the largest heart on Earth can drop to two beats a minute on a deep dive. In this episode, Andrew walks through the first heart rate recording from a wild blue whale, led by Jeremy Goldbogen's team at Stanford, and a study by Terrie Williams of UC Santa Cruz that tracked narwhals fleeing after release from nets in East Greenland. The narwhals swam as hard as they could while their hearts fell...
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The Biggest Mouthful: How Blue Whales Eat and Why Krill Matters
How To Protect The Ocean
A blue whale can swallow a volume of water bigger than its own body in a single gulp. That move, called lunge feeding, is one of the most extreme feats in the animal kingdom, and it only pays off when krill is packed into thick, dense swarms. In a thin patch, a blue whale gets back about six times the energy it spent. In a dense swarm, it gets back more than 200 times. In this first episode of the Age of Giants series, Andrew breaks down how rorqual whales feed, then follows the krill. In 2025, the Antarctic krill fishery hit its 620,000 tonne precautionary limit for the first time and closed...
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Whales Are Sprinters: What a Blue Whale's Heart Does When It Lunge Feeds
How To Protect The Ocean
What happens to the heart of the largest animal on Earth when it charges into a swarm of krill? Dr. Ashley Blawas, a postdoctoral scholar in Jeremy Goldbogen's lab at Stanford's Hopkins Marine Station, joins Andrew to unpack new research published in PNAS that measured the heart rates of lunge-feeding blue whales and humpback whales using suction-cup ECG tags. Ashley explains the three phases of lunge feeding (accelerate, engulf, filter) and why these giants behave a lot like human sprinters. Their heart rates stay high after each lunge, then gradually recover while they glide and filter,...
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The Pollution That Breeds: How the Great Lakes Stopped Invaders
How To Protect The Ocean
In 1988, someone found a striped mussel the size of a fingernail in Lake St. Clair. Within a few years, zebra mussels coated pipes, boats, and the bottom of the Great Lakes, and they became the poster child for "it's too late." Andrew closes Marine Pollution week with the pollutant that breaks every rule: a living one that reproduces instead of diluting. He follows two invaders. Zebra mussels rode in on ship ballast water, clogged power plant intakes, and stripped plankton from the base of the food web. Lionfish, likely released from home aquariums, spread from Florida across the Caribbean and...
info_outlineHolly Koehler has spent almost thirty years in rooms most people never think about: windowless UN offices in New York, the FAO in Rome, and what she calls "oftentimes very boring hotel ballrooms around the world," where countries hash out how the ocean actually gets managed. She's the Vice President of Policy and Outreach at the International Seafood Sustainability Foundation (ISSF), and before that she spent thirteen years at the U.S. State Department's Office of Marine Conservation, chairing international fisheries negotiations. In this episode, she walks Andrew through how a grad-school internship on sea turtles turned into a career built entirely around one question: how do you manage a species that ignores every border humans have drawn?
Andrew and Holly cover what a Regional Fisheries Management Organization (RFMO) actually is and why nearly the entire ocean is already covered by one, why she says listening, not legal expertise, is the most important skill she's ever used at the negotiating table, and the story behind an all-night Thanksgiving session that produced a landmark UN resolution protecting deep-sea corals and seamounts from bottom trawling. Holly also explains why ISSF treats governance as being just as important as fishing practices, drawing a direct line from her anthropology background to her belief that governance is what civilization itself is built on, and breaks down exactly how ISSF's audits and public compliance data connect to the eco-labels shoppers see on a can of tuna.
This is the episode the whole week has been building toward. If you've been following along with Monday through Thursday's solo episodes, you've already heard the RFMO explainer, the bottom-trawling story, and the High Seas Treaty history. Here, Holly connects all of it, in her own words, including a memorable detail that resolves a question left open earlier in the week: which UN resolution she was actually in the room for.
Takeaways:
- International fisheries governance runs through treaty-based RFMOs that nearly every country with a stake in a fishery has legally bound itself to join and follow.
- The negotiating skill Holly says matters most isn't legal expertise, it's listening for what a country means behind what it says, since "where you stand depends on where you sit."
- The all-night Thanksgiving session that produced UN Resolution 61/105, the landmark bottom-trawling and seamount protections covered in this show's Tuesday companion episode, was chaired by Holly herself.
- Holly measures negotiating success by getting an agreement strong enough to matter while keeping every country that needs to ratify or implement it "inside the tent."
- ISSF doesn't certify fisheries itself. It builds the audited evidence trail, through annual company audits and public vessel compliance data, that feeds into the Marine Stewardship Council certification a shopper actually sees on a label.
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