We modeled the flow of methyl mercury, a toxic global pollutant, in the Faroe Islands marine ecosystem and compared average human methyl mercury exposure from consumption of pilot whale meat and fish (cod, Gadus morhua) with current tolerable weekly intake (TWI) levels. Under present conditions and climate change scenarios, methyl mercury increased in the ecosystem, translating into increased human exposure over time. However, we saw greater changes as a result of changing fishing mortalities. A large portion of the general human population exceed the TWI levels set by the World Health Organization [WHO; 1.6 μg/kg body weight (bw)], and they all exceed the reference dose (RfD) of 0.1 μg/kg bw/day set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA; equivalent to a TWI of 0.7 μg/kg bw). As a result of an independent study documenting that Faroese children exposed prenatally to methyl mercury had reduced cognitive abilities, pregnant women have decreased their intake of whale meat and were below the TWI levels set by the WHO and the U.S. EPA. Cod had approximately 95% lower methyl mercury concentrations than did pilot whale. Thus, the high and harmful levels of methyl mercury in the diet of Faroe Islanders are driven by whale meat consumption, and the increasing impact of climate change is likely to exacerbate this situation. Significantly, base inflow rates of mercury into the environment would need to be reduced by approximately 50% to ensure levels of intake below the WHO TWI levels, given current levels of whale consumption.

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In developing countries, official statistics, national accounts, and economic development initiatives generally focus on commercial, often exportoriented fisheries, which are often perceived to be the major economic contribution of fisheries. While small-scale, non-commercial fisheries, especially near-shore subsistence fisheries, have been recognized as fundamental for social, cultural, and food security reasons, their catches are seldom accounted for in official statistics. Thus, their contributions to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) are often not taken into consideration. Previously undertaken catch timeseries reconstructions for small-scale coastal fisheries of two US flag island areas in the tropical Pacific (American Samoa and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands [CNMI]) provided estimates of total catches for 1982-2002 (commercial and non-commercial) and suggested considerable discrepancies between reported (commercial) statistics and reconstructed (commercial plus noncommercial) estimates. We applied a valuation approach used by the Manila-based Asian Development Bank to the reconstructed catch data for non-pelagic species to estimate total near-shore fisheries contributions to national GDP using valueadded estimators for each fisheries sector in combination with available price data for the period 1982-2002. This suggested that the contributions of smallscale fisheries to GDP for these two island areas may have been underestimated by a factor of over five, and indicated that the non-commercial sector plays a more significant role in national accounts as contributors to GDP than currently assumed. This analysis should challenge existing perspectives of marginality of non-commercial fisheries sectors to developing countries in general and should give international development agencies, as well as local governments, pause to rethink their prioritization of fisheries development support.

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