Deep Sea Mining Exposed: Inside the Fight to Save the Ocean's Last Frontier
Release Date: 08/21/2026
The Fish That Feed Your Fish: What Farmed Salmon Really Eat
How To Protect The Ocean
The family behind the world’s largest salmon farming company built a global industry. Now one of its members is asking how it can be sustainable to grind up fish from poorer countries, ship them across the world, and feed them to salmon sold to wealthier shoppers. In episode 2048, Andrew Lewin follows farmed fish from your plate back to the fishmeal boat to answer him. More than half the seafood eaten worldwide now comes from farms, and most of it is fed. Andrew breaks down what fishmeal and fish oil are made of, why roughly a fifth of the global wild catch ends up as feed, and how forage...
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What Your Farmed Salmon Ate: Inside a Five-Year Fishmeal Investigation
How To Protect The Ocean
More than half the seafood eaten on Earth now comes from fish farms, and most of those farmed fish are raised on fishmeal made from wild-caught fish. Maya Martin, deputy editor at The Outlaw Ocean Project, joins Andrew Lewin to unpack Food for Feed, a five-year investigation that traced fishmeal from the ships that catch it, through the plants that grind it, to the farmed fish on your plate. Maya explains how forage fish like sardinella and anchoveta are pulled from waters off West Africa, Peru and Southeast Asia, often from stocks that are already overexploited and from communities that...
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How to Read the Seafood Counter Like a Marine Biologist
How To Protect The Ocean
Picture a big sign over the seafood counter promising sustainable fishing, with a fish every independent guide says to avoid sitting on ice right below it. In most countries nobody broke a rule, because the word "sustainable" on seafood has no legal definition. In this final episode of our sustainable seafood week, Andrew Lewin walks you through how to see past that sign and choose seafood you can feel good about. You'll learn how to use the eco-labels and seafood guides that have already done the research for you, including the Marine Stewardship Council's blue tick for wild seafood, the...
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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...
info_outlineDeep sea mining is no longer theoretical. In this episode, Andrew sits down with Matthew Gianni, co-founder and Political and Policy Advisor of the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, for an in-depth look at what's actually happening on the seafloor and in the negotiating rooms deciding its fate. Matthew spent years as a commercial fisherman, including five years as a deep sea trawlerman off the Central California coast, before moving into ocean conservation with Greenpeace International and eventually co-founding the DSCC to fight destructive bottom trawling on seamounts. That history shapes everything he has to say about what's coming next.
The conversation covers the science and the politics in equal measure: what seamount trawling studies off Tasmania revealed about how quickly deep coral ecosystems can be destroyed, why the deep sea is far from the "biological desert" some mining proponents describe, and the 2024 discovery of "dark oxygen" being produced by the very polymetallic nodules that mining companies want to extract. Matthew also walks through the current state of play at the International Seabed Authority, including a fresh update from the July 2026 meetings in Kingston, Jamaica, the leadership change from Michael Lodge to Leticia Carvalho, the legal fight over The Metals Company's push for a US mining license outside ISA authority, and why the economics of nodule mining may not add up even on the industry's own numbers.
Whether deep sea mining moves forward is still being decided right now, and Matthew makes the case for why the decisions being made in 2026 will shape the deep ocean for generations. This is a dense, detailed update for anyone trying to understand where deep sea mining policy actually stands, straight from someone who has been in the room for over a decade.
Takeaways:
- Matthew Gianni co-founded the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition after years as a commercial fisherman and deep sea trawlerman, then a career at Greenpeace International running its ocean program.
- Seamount trawling studies off Tasmania showed how fast deep coral ecosystems can be wiped out once bottom trawling begins.
- The 2024 discovery of "dark oxygen" production from polymetallic nodules raises new questions about what deep seabed mining could disrupt before science even understands it.
- The International Seabed Authority is legally obligated to act "for the benefit of humankind as a whole," which is central to the current fight over mining regulations.
- The Metals Company is pursuing a US mining license through NOAA to bypass ISA authority entirely, a move Matthew calls "unilateral mining" that risks undermining the Law of the Sea Convention.
- The economics of nodule mining are being challenged even within the ISA's own analysis, with mined metals representing a small fraction of global terrestrial supply.
- A leadership change at the ISA, from Michael Lodge to Leticia Carvalho, has shifted the tone of negotiations, though Matthew says the fundamental disagreements remain unresolved.
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