A pile of fish lies at a harbour in the southern Indian city of Chennai. (REUTERS/Babu)
Where did all the fish go?
The sea was not so vast, once we deployed an industrial armada against it.
By Moises Velasquez-Manoff| Staff Writer of The Christian Science Monitor/ June 10, 2008 edition
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Early European explorers to the Americas encountered an astounding abundance of marine life. White beluga whales, now limited to the arctic, swam as far south as Boston Bay. Cod off Newfoundland were so plentiful that fishermen could catch them with nothing more than a weighted basket lowered into the water. As late as the mid-19th century, river herring ran so thick in the eastern United States that wading across certain waterways meant treading on fish. And everywhere sharks were so numerous that, after hauling in their catches, fishers often found them stripped to the bone.
“It completely bowled me over when I started reading some of these early accounts,” says Callum Roberts, a professor of marine conservation at the University of York, England, and author of “The Unnatural History of the Sea,” which tells much of this tale. “The picture painted is one of an abundance of life which is very hard for us to grasp today.”
Hundreds of years of fishing – and especially the last half century of industrialized fishing – have drastically altered the oceans. Measured by weight, only 1/10th of the large predators that once swam the seas – the big fish and sharks that shape the entire ecosystem – is estimated to remain. And many of these changes have occurred relatively recently. Any middle-aged fisherman will wax nostalgic about the catches of just 20 years ago. Any marine scientist will glumly check off reefs they once studied that are now bleached and overgrown with algae as a result of overfishing and pollution, and the marine life that’s simply disappeared.
“Today’s oceans have got far less in the way of biomass than they used to,” says Professor Roberts. “We’re altering ecosystems in a way that reduces the level of productivity they can support.”
After millenniums of a free-for-all, many foresee the era of open access to the ocean formally coming to a close.
World catches have steadily declined since peaking in the late 1980s. Everyone, from scientists to fishermen, is alarmed. And in the US, all quarters are pushing to develop solutions before the problem becomes unfixable. Fishermen and fishery managers are rethinking management to encourage stewardship. Scientists now say that fish stocks can’t be viewed in isolation; they must be managed in the context of the greater ecosystem. Many, even some fishermen begrudgingly, realize the importance of having some areas completely off-limits to fishing in order to keep ecosystems healthy. And increasingly, a new argument is heard in the debate over fisheries: Marine ecosystems should be preserved not just for their economic value, but also because, like the wilderness preserved in the national forest system, they are part of humankind’s natural heritage.
The debate comes at a time when, driven by both health trends and increasing prosperity in countries like China, demand for fish is rising. In industrialized countries, fish consumption doubled, to 27 million metric tons, between 1961 and 2003, according to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Per capita, that’s an increase of one-third, to 29.7 kg (65.5 lbs.) per person yearly. (Much of the increased demand is being met by a growing aquaculture industry.) In developing countries, fish continue to provide an important source of protein. The average African gets 17 percent of his protein from fish; for Asians, it’s 26 percent. The typical North American gets only 7 percent of his protein from fish.
Fishery managers have a name for what can be removed without causing stocks to fall: the maximum sustainable yield. In theory, a well-managed fishery should provide free food – save for the cost of catching it – year after year.
And yet, even in the US where stocks are on balance in better condition than in other places, 41 of the 244 stocks for which the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) has information are being fished at unsustainable levels, or overfished. Worldwide, one-quarter of fish stocks are overfished, says the FAO. Another 50 percent are fished to full capacity; they can sustain no more. According to one somewhat controversial analysis, if current fishing trends continue, all the world’s fisheries will have collapsed by mid-century.
What happened? Daniel Pauly, director of the Fisheries Centre at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, calls the combined cultural, technological, and economic factors “the march of folly.”
It began with a long-held notion of the sea’s endless bounty.
Until relatively recently, fishermen, fishery managers, and scientists alike thought the sea was so vast, so teeming with life, that human activity simply couldn’t diminish it, Mr. Pauly says.
Until the advent of modern fishing technology in the 20th century, it couldn’t.
“The sea was very large compared to the means we had to exploit it,” Pauly says. But beginning with steam-powered trawlers more than 100 years ago, and ending with today’s global-positioning navigational systems, technology has improved fishermen’s reach and efficiency. “We essentially deployed our industrial armada against fish, and obviously we would win: It’s a war against fish,” says Pauly.
Technology made inaccessible fish accessible. Pristine areas used to constantly replenish adjacent areas that were fished, scientists hypothesize. But as technology let fleets fish in areas previously unfished due to remoteness or difficult undersea topography, this replenishment failed. Fish numbers fell, but better fishing technology concealed the trend. World catches remained stable or increased, suggesting healthy stocks.
Then, when local stocks began to collapse, fleets moved ever farther offshore, leading to what Robert Steneck, a professor of marine biology at the University of Maine, Orono, calls “roving banditry”: High-seas fleets fishing stocks to collapse, then moving on. Many countries also subsidized their fleets, increasing capacity far beyond what the seas could absorb. Worldwide, the FAO estimates that by the 1990s, subsidies had pushed fishing capacity some 30 to 50 percent above what the oceans could sustain. (It has since fallen.)
“When the biomass goes down because of fishing, in a sense the stock has a message…. ‘Leave me alone,’ ” says Pauly. “But subsidies, which contribute to the harvesting of fish, enable the fisher to ignore the signal of the stock.”
In the US, which actively developed its domestic fleet throughout the late 1970s and ’80s with low-interest loans and other programs, many thought that fishing overcapacity would self-correct. If fishermen were just another predator, once fish numbers dropped, fishers would, too. Equilibrium would be restored.
But the laws of economics led to a different outcome: “As stocks get rarer and rarer, their prices go up – the so-called ‘ratchet effect,’ ” says Steve Murawski, chief scientist at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries in Silver Spring, Md. The incentive to catch the few remaining fish increases rather than decreases. “That wasn’t well understood,” he says.
Empty Oceans, a series on the state of the world’s fisheries, will be appearing in the Monitor’s environment section. For the full series, click here.
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Comments
2. Narelle Hall | 06.10.08
This is another example of ‘the Tragedy of the Commons’ - a theory put forward by Garrett Hardin published several decades ago.
The state of the world’s fisheries certainly bears out the veracity of his thesis.
If nobody ‘owns’ a commodity, then ‘everyone’ owns it, and proceeds from that premise to exploit it - to the hilt.
The oceans, alas, are owned by no-one and even extending the boundaries around continents to the continental shelf does little to protect them since no government patrols these boundaries to apprehend the cowboys.
Fish stocks are not recovering and so one more resource will be used until it becomes extinct.
Bravo humanity!
3. Jim Strong | 06.11.08
Two thirds of the seas bounty is used for dog and cat food. It is not the intention of ‘responsible’ govt. and international institutions to actually feed people, or, in fact, conserve ocean resources.
4. James Hamilton | 06.11.08
Solutions need to be proposed as well as the sack cloff and ashes.
In this era of oil as well as fish running out, maybe the speed of fishing boats should be limited, perhaps reverting to sail. This way only local boats would prove economic, they would also be cheaper/smaller giving a livelihood from a smaller catch. Bottom trawling is also very damaging to the environment, maybe this should be completley banned. The equpment is easy to spot so enforcement might not be too difficult.
5. bulgarian solicitors | 06.11.08
There was a landmark study on this in 2003. [A summary with some comments](http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/5/16/94538/3264).
6. Tom Jefferson | 06.11.08
Without marine sanctuaries and a viable way to enforce these no fishing areas, world wide demand for fish protein along with human population growth (where do the majority of people live on this planet? - the coasts) will destroy a great deal of this ocean planet.
7. Rafal Zielinski | 06.13.08
It seems that humanity is rapidly changing the planet beyond recognition. One point seems to be completely lost on majority of us: Ultimately we the humans will become an endangered species. We seem to be moving towards this ever more rapidly, changing our little planet, a completely closed ecosystem, into a place that cannot sustain human life. The Sun, Earth, the oceans and continents will remain, but if we are not more careful, people might be gone in a few hundred years…or much sooner.
8. Lynn Ehrhart | 06.13.08
We continue to be informed by ideology that is 200+ years old in thinking about economics and resources, one which focuses on private enterprise and government alone and fails to include nature and society in the equation. There are other schools of thought and other methodologies but they require a mental shift a degree of trust in other groups, nations, etc.
I don’t think people as a whole and individually truly grasp how close we are to disaster. I doubt they are going to like what may be required to create a sustainable future; it’s always fine theoretically, for someone else to be limited or called to action, but not so amusing when it is “me”.
9. Susanne Walker | 06.13.08
There’s a very common thread in “modern” society that seems to be rampant, and that is greed. The world has fallen asleep and has let itself become corporatized; as long as society allows itself to cherish money above all, “more more more” and the extraordinarily tiring drumbeat “shareholder value”, we are doomed. Thank goodness there is a silent but huge grassroots movement of conscientious objectors to this mass materialism, a movement that gets little media attention, but that is working to rebuild some common sense into our current societal values, which are pitifully poor and obsessively focusing on “luxury” and “the rich”–very tiresome topics after a while! At what price will it be found that life’s richest pleasures are the simplest, such as time, silence, a glass of fresh water, or the flutter of a butterfly’s wing? If we focused on “the best things in life are free”–as in what God created for us–we might gain a little humility and allow the earth to heal as we do too.
10. albert hadjihil | 06.13.08
we must back to the teachings of our Almigthy that human being are merely steward in this world.What happen if everyone of us teke to much desire and greed among other creatures? That is why Islam is in moderate status that everyone of us had a blessings and appropriate budget to live in this world.Everything that is too much is harmful to us,the equilibrium of the earth is always there but the greediness of man distruct and devastated it.Thanks for those who spend their lives moderately because they contributed to the balance of the earth and don’t take charge everything to God because He command us to multiply goodness and not evil.
11. frank sears | 06.14.08
I just wanted to take a moment to say how well considered and well written are the comments posted here. It’s good to see there actually are some intelligent, caring and thoughtful people still in this world-unfortunately, though, far too few of them. It’s difficult for me to believe that there are real solutions to the problems of us humans, and as such I see terrible suffering in the coming years for huge swathes of the planet’s peoples. This is something that weighs heavily upon my mind. I think we need to have truly concerned people form a global society that can cooperate with scientists and people of other knowedgeable diciplines, that has real poltical power to enforce policies designed for the good of everyone and the planet as well, with all its living creatures.
Beyond sustainable resource management, wars will erupt over resources when they become depleted to critical levels, and those with the most powerful armies will take what’s left for themselves. The scenarios one can imagine start to seem very much like biblical end time prophesies. Will we humans continue to live by crises or will we finally mature to the point where we can all truly work together to live peacefully and well on our planet? Do we have the ability to do this? I have a number of specific ideas on how we could start and what we must do.
If you would like to respond, please address me at fhsears@gmail.com.
12. Don Heichel | 06.23.08
Alabama and their abundance of fish.
Stephen Szedlmayer, Auburn U.
http://www.ag.auburn.edu/aaes/communications/highlights/summer00/reef.html
The floor of the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Alabama is primarily flat and sandy with no natural reefs or structures to break the terrain . However, in the aquatic environment, almost any material that adds topographical relief will attract fish and increase catch rates. This concept has been applied extensively in coastal Alabama with the placement of more than 14,000 artificial reefs. AAES research is helping define the uses and implications of these reefs and how and why they affect fish populations…all (studies) suggest that the artificial reef system off Alabama has an important production component (as opposed to being just a fish attracting device).
http://www.reason.com/news/show/34781.html
Alabama, which has only 5 percent of the Gulf’s coastline, produces nearly 40 percent of the red snapper that is caught recreationally in the Gulf.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1568/is_5_33/ai_78575543
The Orange Beach Chamber of Commerce estimates that its game-fishing charter fleet of more than 100 boats pumps around $90 million a year into the local economy.
13. Don Heichel | 06.23.08
http://www.coastalconservancy.ca.gov/coast&ocean/summer2002/pages/five.htm
U.S. Coast Guard sent an ROV (remotely operated vehicle) down to explore the wreck of the S.S. Jacob Luckenbach. They…also found that the wreck had become an artificial reef, habitat to a variety of marine species, including octopus, anemone, and rockfish. “We saw schools of hundreds of rockfish,” Evans said. Once, while navigating through a particularly dense concentration of krill in the water column, they turned off all their lamps. A lightshow of bioluminescence was revealed—a billion tiny stars in the surrounding blackness.
This wreck is 17 miles from the Golden Gate and was suspected of leaking oil that was killing birds; there is more than one way to create an abundance of bio-density in the ocean…
http://sdoceans.org/pdfs/S2R%20Artificial%20Reefs.pdf
The practice of using artificial reefs is now employed in over 40 countries and is rapidly growing; indeed, from 1995 - 2000 alone Japan’s expenditure for reef construction was over $51.25 million.
14. Don Heichel | 06.23.08
U.S. Department of the Interior’s Minerals Management Service, Gulf of Mexico Rigs to Reefs program…
Also:
http://www.gomr.mms.gov/homepg/whatsnew/techann/000073.html
Rigs-to-Reefs Policy, Progress, and Perspective: The results, says the report, are encouraging, and not just for obsolete platforms converted into reefs. Researchers report fish densities are 20 to 50 times higher around active platforms, which also serve as de facto reefs, than in nearby open water.
+
http://www.gomr.mms.gov/homepg/whatsnew/stories/940318.html
according to Jack Spey, Reef Coordinator for Florida’s Okaloosa County, “Man doesn’t create artificial reefs — Mother Nature does. Man can only place vertical structures offshore, which are needed in the Gulf of Mexico so that Mother Nature can take over, and organisms can attach and prosper.
“By placing artificial reefs, man is increasing the capacity of nature to create habitat. Nature is then able to procreate at an increased rate,” said Spey.
15. christian | 08.25.08
Let me begin by saying that i really like your site browser.grik.net a lot
now.. back on topic haha
I cant say that i agree with what you typed up… care to clear things up for me?
16. Luis | 09.11.08
Fish aggregating devices known as (FADs) can produce effective fish habitats, for SOME species, and can be appropriate in SOME marine environments. Frankly, they are not much good for helping pelagic or benthic fisheries. While Fish Aggregating Devices certainly have their place in terms of restoring some fish habitats, they are not a panacea.
Unfortunately leaky offshore oil rigs and other navigation and environmental hazards (i.e. Rigs to Reefs) are often touted as environmental solutions to avoid the costs and proper mitigation or removal of non functioning marine debris and hazardous material. Caveat emptor, as always.
17. Courtney K | 10.01.08
Eat more deer!
In the U.S., we have an abundance of game species (e.g., deer, rabbits, geese) that thrive in human-disturbed environments. We should be utilizing these cheap and self-propagating protein sources much more often than we do.
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1. Juliet Swannell | 06.10.08
I am so interested in this topic as our son is a crayfisherman in Western Australia and we certainly need to find fresh new thinking on how we can move forward in both giving fishermen a livelihood and at the same time allowing replenishment of our oceans.