NATURE
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1. Tuna and Dolphins
Vocabulary
Trapped – 1. Caught or captured physically in a trap (n.), a device that keeps you from moving or running away. 2. Caught in a difficult situation so that you don’t have a choice: The tiger was trapped in the cage. Poor Imelda was trapped in a loveless marriage.
Net – what fishermen and fishing boats use to catch fish.
Canning company – a company that cans foods (puts food in cans) in a factory.
1. The ______had a hole in it, and all of the smaller fish escaped.
2. The work at the ______was a hard and dirty job, but it paid good money.
3. The bank robber was ______in the bank, surrounded by the police.
Sentence Scramble
Tuna over sandwiches popular are all the world. fish
communicate are intelligent Dolphins that can with other. mammals each
many Dolphins are sea parks. trained to tasks and do popular in can be shows at
Script & Fill-in
Dolphins swim with other fish. Many are found trapped and killed in ______. A company that cans tuna will not use any tuna captured with dolphins.
Finding tuna is hard to do. They hide in the ______. For years, fishermen would find them by looking for dolphins. Then they would ______their nets and pull in any fish caught in the net.
Some people are very mad that all those dolphins are being killed. They are not buying the ______at the store.The company who sells the tuna will make sure no dolphins are killed when they get the tuna.
Fishermen will get help from the ______. They will help change the way they catch the tuna. A person on ______will check to see if any dolphins were killed.
About 26 ______will have to change the way they fish for tuna. People buying the new cans of tuna will have to pay more money. But this change will save the lives of many dolphins.
Reading Exercise - Advanced
WASHINGTON. D.C. — When President Barack Obama dined with Mexico's President Enrique Peña Nieto this month at the Mexican leader's official residence, the meal started with "láminas de atún," thin slices of tuna.
The appetizer was not a surprising choice. Mexico has tried to get its yellowfin tuna on U.S. dinner plates for decades. Its fishermen are essentially frozen out of the lucrative U.S. market because they catch tuna with a method that has led to the demise of millions of dolphins, and falls below a standard U.S. officials set as "dolphin safe."
But in recent months, Mexico has made progress in convincing the world that it is being treated unfairly because the U.S. tuna fishing regulation is not applied uniformly.
Mexico's challenge is an attempt to increase its $7.5 million share of a U.S. tuna import market worth more than a half-billion dollars. But it also raises questions for U.S. consumers about whether the tuna they eat is truly "dolphin safe" — not sold at the expense of a mammal Americans cherish.
There is no sure way to catch tuna without harming other marine life. Dolphins, as well as sharks, turtles and other animals, are unintentionally killed as bycatch in the quest for tuna.
The central question facing governments, corporations, environmentalists and consumers is how much is too much, and whether using a huge net to catch tuna in one part of the ocean is any worse than using them to catch it in other parts.
The World Trade Organization recently agreed with Mexico's claim that U.S. regulations in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean, where the Mexican fleet fishes, are far more restrictive than they are for the western and central Pacific where the U.S. fleet fishes.
In response to the WTO ruling, the United States proposed a new rule to strengthen protections for dolphins wherever tuna is fished.
The proposal, drafted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, has one change that irks Mexico — allowing captains in the western and central Pacific to self-certify they are not taking dolphins as bycatch.
"The objective ... was to assure no dolphins were injured, and you're not doing that," said Mark Robertson, president of Potomac Global Advisors, which advises companies and governments in international disputes. "How practical is it to trust captains to say how many dolphins they harmed?"
Robertson said the solution is simple: require independent, trained observers on the largest ships that fish tuna, as Mexico does, to confirm dolphins are not being harmed anywhere in the ocean and assure that the dolphin-safe label on tuna sold in the United States is valid.
No place in the ocean is like the eastern tropical Pacific, where for reasons that marine biologists don't fully understand, tuna and dolphins swim together.
"Marine mammals interact with most fishing gear only incidentally, but in the ETP tuna fishery, the dolphins are an intrinsic part of the fishing operation," according to NOAA's Southwest Fisheries Science Center.
"The fishermen intentionally capture both tuna and dolphins together, then release the dolphins from the net," the center explained in a statement. "The bycatch of dolphins in the eastern tropical Pacific (ETP) tuna fishery stands apart from marine mammal bycatch in other fisheries, not only in scale but in the way the dolphins interact with the fishery."
For several decades starting in the 1950s, an estimated 150,000 dolphins were killed each year by the world's fleets, including those of the United States — "estimated to be over 6 million animals, the highest known for any fishery," NOAA said.
Ship captains have used explosives and sonic noises to round up dolphins and tuna, then circle them with purse seine nets – huge nets that fold around the prey and are drawn shut. The majority of the dolphins are released alive, NOAA said.
In 1988, however, a biologist filmed hundreds of dolphins dying in a net from a Panamanian boat, touching off a worldwide boycott of tuna. Two years later, Starkist, Bumble Bee and Chicken of the Sea, the world's largest tuna-canning companies, agreed to stop buying and selling tuna caught in purse-seine nets. The U.S. Congress blocked tuna fished with purse-seine nets from the U.S. market.
In the western and central Pacific, a majority of ships also use purse-seine nets, but take fewer dolphins because they do not swim with tuna as often as in the eastern Pacific, NOAA said. The ships also have the more relaxed level of regulation that prompted Mexico to call foul, NOAA said.
About 15 percent of tuna fishing in that area is done by another method, longlines trailing ships with hundreds of baited hooks. The Pew Charitable Trust described longlines as "indiscriminate and wasteful gear" that also "catches and kills more than 80 types" of animals fishermen do not target. The bycatch includes endangered sea turtles, blue and white marlin and severely depleted western Atlantic bluefin tuna.
To gain a larger stake of the U.S. market, Mexico works harder than most countries, placing trained observers on larger ships to monitor the dolphin catch.
"We make fishermen do things that no other fishery imposes. Very few fisheries require 100 percent observer coverage," Aguilar said. "It's really frustrating because we have answered everything the agreement has called for."
NOAA acknowledges that. The bycatch of dolphins in the ETP tuna fishery has been reduced by more than 99 percent, the agency said. However, NOAA added, "Even at the present level of about 1,000 dolphins per year, it remains among the largest documented bycatch in the world."
Today the dolphin population in the eastern Pacific is struggling to recover.
"That's the reason why the [eastern Pacific] is the focal point" of strong regulations, said Rodney McInnis, administrator of the southwest region of NOAA Fisheries. "In other oceans marine mammals are occasionally harmed, but it's not the practice to intentionally set gear to capture dolphin. That's why we treated it different from the rest of the world."
© 2013, The Washington Post
2. Timber or Trees
Vocabulary
Mad – 1. Angry ; 2. Crazy
National Forest Service – Agency in USA that manages national forest land
Logging – cutting down trees to make wood products
Overcut – cut too much; too many trees have been cut
1. Are you ______? Nobody can eat 50 hard boiled eggs in one hour!
2. Who is that man over there? From his jacket, he must work for the ______.
3. Where the government allows clear-cutting, the forest is usually ______; where the
Forest Service requires selective cutting, the forest is usually healthy.
4. His dad is a ______who now owns his own small lumber mill.
Sentence Scramble
Ranchers, are jobs loggers, and common farmers jobs USA. western all in the
forest? love you Do If you so, to oppose have clear-cutting.
know mad, I but to try down. are you calm
Environmentalists not think trees down. cut that should be But, do. the loggers
Script & Fill-in
There are many trees in America. The trees have many uses. They provide many things to the area where they grow. Trees are also ______to make many things for people to use.
People who cut down trees are ______. Many of them lost their jobs because they could not cut down any more trees. Some people want all the trees to ______and not be cut down.
Some people get together to make the National Forest Service stop the ______from cutting down trees. The logging companies get together to make the National Forest Service let them cut the trees down. The National Forest Service is trying to let all the American people use the national ______.
The people with the most money can tell the forest service to allow the cutting to be done. Even when scientists say that cutting the trees down would ______the forest and the animals, they still cut the trees down. Anybody who does not like that idea is not ______.
Some parts of the forests have been ______. Too many trees have been taken away. Other parts have been stopped from being cut. When this happens, many people ______. The biggest problem is deciding what should be done with all of the trees.
Reading – from a Newspaper in Seattle
Seattle-Snohomish Mill to close; 50 jobs lost
- After more than 70 years in business, Seattle-Snohomish Mill will close in March.
The mill, which employs 50 people, first opened in Snohomish (name of a small town) in 1941.
"This is a very difficult decision," Megan McMurray, owner of the mill, said in a statement. "We have a dedicated workforce, some who have been with Seattle-Snohomish Mill Co. Inc. for more than three decades."
Mill employees were notified last week that the company would close in 60 days.
The collapse of the housing and construction industry was a major factor in the decision to close the Seattle-Snohomish Mill, McMurray said.
Since the 2008 recession, construction has slowed to a near standstill, reducing the demand for timber. For example, in 2006, roughly 3,907 building permits were issued for Snohomish County. Last year, that number had fallen to 1,189.
Private companies harvested more than 3 million board feet of timber in Washington state in 2005, according to the state Department of Natural Resources. That fell to roughly 1.8 million board feet in 2009.
Many lumber companies have laid off employees and reduced their work schedules in response to the decline in construction. In 2009, Seattle-Snohomish Mill had scaled back to one shift from three, cutting the workforce to 100 from 160.
Since last August, three lumber companies in the state have filed notices with the state of pending employee layoffs or mill closures. Hampton Lumber Mill laid off 76 workers in December, while Woodinville Lumber closed at the end of August. Colville's Stimson Lumber closed in November.
Seattle Snohomish Mill, at 9525 Airport Way in Snohomish, had advertised proximity both to I-5 and to the railroad as an advantage for efficiently transporting products. The mill offered 20-foot to 40-foot Douglas and Hem fir timber, as well as smaller dried products.
Snohomish Mayor Karen Guzak expressed disappointment over the closure of the mill.
"I am always sorry to see any store closing, especially one that is so close to the city," she said.