Seafood lobby’s fury at ‘Stinky Fish’ ads

Stinky Fish, star of a campaign launched last month by the WWF (formerly the World Wildlife Fund) and the Marine Stewardship Council, has been tossed straight back into the ocean following a furious reaction from the fishing industry.

Stinky Fish’s short but spectacular career as an internet campaigner is now confined to obscure corners of Facebook and YouTube, where videos still linger of the blue-green hand puppet trying to wake up a pile of dead crabs: ‘C’mon guys, this is no time to rest – we’ve got a seafood crisis!’, and lecturing chip shop customers – ‘What part of extinction don’t they understand?’

‘I seem to have stirred up quite a stink!’ says Stinky Fish on the revised WWF website yesterday. ‘Why don’t you help smarten me up?’

According to one WWF source, if Stinky is reborn it may be without the smell, as ‘Super Fish’. ‘Which doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.’

Stinky’s name was his biggest problem. ‘The one thing you don’t do when marketing fish is talk about smell or slime. Consumers are nervous of fish, and one of the major issues is odour,’ said Jim Gilmore, a Washington-based lobbyist who represents much of the Alaskan pollack fishery. Tesco’s Peter Hajipieris, group policy manager for seafood, personally rang the Marine Stewardship Council’s chief executive, Rupert Howes, to tell him to pull the campaign. He told The Observer that the Stinky Fish campaign was ‘misguided and unfortunate: it damages the industry’.

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Fishermen ‘beat dolphin to death’

Fishermen in Bangladesh beat a rare river dolphin to death because they had not seen “this kind of creature before,” according to local news accounts.

The fishermen then tried to sell the body of the Ganges River dolphin as a rare fish. When they failed, the men gave up and dumped it outside a museum — where a large crowd tried to catch a peek, the national Bangladesh Sangbad Sangstha news organization reported Tuesday…

…The Ganges River dolphin inhabits the murky waters of the Ganges River and can be spotted only when it surfaces to breathe. Thus, they are very rarely seen, according to the World Wildlife Fund Web site.

Unlike its marine counterpart, these fresh-water dolphins have a pudgy body and an extra-long and sharp-toothed snout. They are almost completely blind probably because of the poor visibility of the waters in the Ganges River, the WWF said.

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Polar Bears Need Urgent Protection, WWF and Conservation Groups Testify

Margaret Williams, WWF’s Director of the Bering Sea ecoregion program, called for urgent action to save polar bears at the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works hearing entitled “Examining Threats and Protections for the Polar Bear” on Wednesday, January 30, 2008. The hearing was convened to examine the status of and legal protections for the polar bear, including the Endangered Species Act (ESA), and the status of listing the species under the act.

“Listing polar bears under the ESA is a last resort, and in essence, signifies a failure of policy and management to date,” said Williams. “We have known for some time of the dangers of global warming, and should have acted more expeditiously to address them. We need to closely scrutinize and prevent all actions that may add further stress to the polar bear, including conducting oil and gas leasing in prime polar bear habitat.”

While WWF and Alaska Wilderness League applaud congressional interest in the plight of the polar bears, we join the conservation community in urging for the immediate listing of the polar bear and calling for a dramatic decrease in green house gases, the source of global warming that is melting polar bear habitat and transforming the Arctic…

…Analyses recently published by the US Geological Survey show that by mid-21st century, two-thirds of the world’s polar bear population could be lost, mainly due to loss of sea ice. As this sea ice habitat decreases, the entire food chain will be affected – from the tiniest plankton to the forage fish, the ringed seal, and the king of the north, the polar bear.

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The World Wildlife Fund makes you think twice.

The spot shows a young woman uncertain and frightened of what the future holds. She speaks about the lost things of her life. She is actually the wombat that does not know if she will survive.

Click here to watch the video.

Virtual Penguins Helping Real Penguins

…In Club Penguin, a popular online game club for the elementary school set, more than 2.5 million kids gave their virtual earnings to charities in a contest this month. In response, the site’s founders are giving $1 million to charities based on the children’s preferences…

…At Club Penguin, children’s penguins have virtual jobs, earn virtual coins and can buy things for their virtual igloo homes. The site held a 10-day “Coins for Change” campaign ending on Christmas Eve in which 2.5 million users donated in some cases as many as 1,500 coins – enough to furnish an igloo – to charities. In turn, the site, owned by Walt Disney Co., divided 1 million real dollars among the charities: the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, the World Wildlife Fund and Free the Children.

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Check out Club Penguin on Wikipedia, or visit the Club Penguin official site.