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Must be a fish theme today or something?
Posted on 10/24/2005 9:25:23 AM PDT by cogitator
Please read note in first comment.
"It may seem strange that so much effort* is being focused on an animal that 25 years ago was known to only a handful of Antarctic scientists and that went by the ungainly name of Patagonian toothfish. But Chilean sea bass today have become the signature species in a battle of global proportions. Put in very blunt terms, the world is running out of fish. According to a study published in July in Science, marine species diversity has declined by 10 to 50 percent in the last half-century, and a 2003 report found that up to 90 percent of the populations of the ocean's major predators are gone. It is the thick-fleshed "major predators" - cod, tuna and Chilean sea bass, to name a few - that humans crave most. And though these collapsed fish stocks are increasingly being replaced on the market by aquacultured product, fish farming is still highly problematic and so far cannot come close to matching what the ocean produces on its own. What we are seeing now are the last desperate calculations over the undomesticated fish that remain. On one side of the equation, fisheries managers in places like the Falklands are trying to wall in their piece of the ocean, building ramparts of regulations to keep enough fish in the water to maintain a sustainable harvest. On the other side, "illegal, unreported and unregulated" - or "I.U.U." - fishing boats like the Elqui are laying siege to those same waters and stealing the fish out from under their protectors."
* "effort" refers to attempts to manage the fishery and catch/prosecute pirate fishing vessels.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
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FReepmail me to be added or removed to the ECO-PING list!
Must be a fish theme today or something?
What exactly does the idiot writer mean by the "last truly wild food on earth"?
I would like to invite the moron over for some nice Mississippi catfish filets(caught in the Mississippi river), Some wild duck stew (shot same location), and some vennison tenderloin harvested on my 14 acres last winter.
Then ask him to explain to me why "marine life" is the last truly wild food on the planet.
Written by an IDIOT.
This was a poorly-turned phrase due to lack of qualifiers. He should have said "the last truly wild food on earth that is available for large-scale consumption" or something similar. When I read that phrase, I thought of venison or pheasant as two examples of "wild food" and of course there are many other kinds. But there is a distinct difference between individuals acquiring wild food* and organized acquisition of wild food (even though fishermen operate individually, the marketing and sale of commercial fishing operations is organized).
* and I note that there is a current penchant for "bush meat" in Africa which is seriously endangering a large variety of animals, including primates like chimpanzees. Most of the consumption of bush meat is enabled by poaching.
It wouldn't have been published by the Times if it didn't have Pinochet to blame. There always has to be some sort of right wing slam in a Times article.
Isn't it funny that we gave up hunting animals for food centuries ago (and are now overpopulated by game animals!) but we still pursue what amounts to a stone age methodolgy of obtaining food when gathering seafood?
Its time we started ranching and herding seafood and give the fish stocks time to recuperate.
Commercial fishing ping. (And it IS an interesting piece, in spite of coming from the Times.)
Yah... it's not very well put. But it is true that the overwhelming amount of fish in the market is caught in the wild rather than farmed. Something that ought to be changed, IMHO. The sheer volume of production seems to call for more efficient and productive high-volume methods.
Compare to the meat industries, if it were to try to satisfy the market by commercially hunting wild game. It just wouldn't be able to keep up.
>>>Its time we started ranching and herding seafood and give the fish stocks time to recuperate.<<<
I agree 100%. Seafood farming is slowly catching on; but it could use more government and institutional support.
When 15-20% of your annual meat/fish supply comes from personally harvesting it, it's easy to forget that most people buy 100% of their food at a store.
So in terms of wide availability, I suppose the term is correct.
I agree there should be much more effort put into farming/ranching sea food. I don't know what I'd eat for lunch if Tuna ever went extinct.
This article is a precursor to the Doha round where the WTO will negotiate away the right of soveriegn nations to regulate their own fisheries.
Most fisheries are claimed to have collapsed since internaional and regional NGOs took over their management. Maybe the WTO and the EU and the rest of the regional bodies of the world should get out of the natural resource management business since they are by their own accounts, failing miserably.
With repsect, but half my family are commercial fishermen on the Oregon Coast and you are ignorant on the fish farming subject. Properly managed, fish are renewable resources, like timber. Most of the fam's boats are under 40 feet long and they actually harvest Salmon with hooks and not giant nets, like the ones used for rock and bottom fishing.
Well the problem is in feeding the fish/seafood farms. It really is a zero net gain in terms of production efficiency when you factor in the production, transportation, and environmental impacts of feed (not to mention keeping the farms parasite and pest free). If its not more profitable and practical I'm all for it but I do not think the government should do any endorsing (especially with any monetary incentives). .
And it's not just fish. In the late 60s early 70s, I watched an entire, very healthy commercial abalone industry wither up and die, after sea otters had been reintroduced into the area. It took about five years -- this, after abalone had been supporting whole families for generations. Everybody blamed it on overfishing and the big, bad, greedy ab divers for as long as they could, but after awhile it became painfully obvious, even to the fish & game guys, that the otters were behind it.
The otters also decimated the once extraordinarily plentiful Pismo clam populations. A Fish & Game guy explained that the otters go where people do not, in deeper water, and dig out the baby clams. After at least 100 years of farmers literally plowing Pismo beach for clams to feed to their pigs -- my mom remembers those days -- the whole clam population shrunk dramatically in a few years coincidentally timed to the reappearance of sea otters on the coast, and environmentalists want us to believe that greedy, bad, fishermen were the cause? Yeah. Right.
Heya, Experiment, you ever have any delectable Skipjack sashimi there in Pago Pago? I think it's skipjack, anyway ... the meat is as red as beef when raw, and so incredibly delicious. Mmmmmm.
To the extent that is possible, it sure does seem like it.
While that's true in general, most of the salmon in the market is farmed, not wild.
Thanks for the info, Finny. But now ya gots me thinkin' about tasty fresh sashimi - which is NOT something you can get in the mountains of NC. Bother.
Yeah, tht abalone was really good!
If the sea lions, et al are eating the fish, we will have to eat the sea lions. Do they taste like fish, or chicken ?
I think that collapses (notably the Grand Banks cod) illustrated that the management practices, and the method(s) of information gathering that inform management practices, have failed miserably. A couple of years ago there was an article describing the fact that a re-assessment of worldwide fisheries had discovered that many stocks reported as in decent shape in fact weren't, primarily because China had exaggerated catch statistics to make it seem like more fish were being caught than actually were. The effect of this was to allow China to have bigger catch allowances than the fishery could sustain; China wanted this so that they could keep exploiting the fisheries at an unsustainable rate of consumption.
I.e., when the self-reporting of incorrect data is in someone's self-interest, incorrect data will likely be reported.
Odd, that. Tuna USED to be in cans packed solid like crab meat used to be. Throw in mystery juice and, voila, twice as many cases out of the same ton o' fish.
However, with fuel prices and reduced populations, the industry is HURTING in Pago Pago. Two thirds of the purse seiners sold or relocated to South America might have helped the fish stock restore themselves. Maybe not.
I have to wonder what farm-raised salmon fed with vegetable protein (soybean-derived) would taste like. Given the problems of heavy metal concentration up the trophic levels (particularly mercury), it seems like a good idea to take fish meal out of the system, but I don't know how this would affect the resulting product.
Good question, and locally it could contribute to a problem (but not in the open ocean where bluefin tuna, swordfish, toothfish, etc. are found). Reminds me both of the exploding urban whitetail deer problem and the problem of cormorants invading lakes in the northern states, like Minnesota and Wisconsin.
The article highlights the problem of pirate fisheries making big profits on "attractive" fish like bluefin tuna and toothfish that can be fished to levels below recovery, and profits can be made nonetheless because of the high market price that premium species command.
I am curious as well though I do not think it would be more profitable to use vegetable meal to feed the stocks- greater transportation cost, processing costs, etc. I imagine taste is the least of the fish farmers concern. Heck half of our fruit and veggies have been GMed to enhance profitability, not taste!
Figure out how to do that...
in Michael De Alessi's chapter, "Fishing for Solutions." De Alessi, director of the Center for Private Conservation, discusses one of the Worldwatch Institute's bogeymen, overfishing. He discovers that, although it's not the crisis Worldwatch thinks, overfishing is indeed worrisome in some areas. But De Alessi finds that property rights, when allowed to work, have proven the most efficient means of coping with overfishing.Maryland, for example, tries to limit oyster catches by allowing fishermen to use only decades-old sailing ships, making it America's most backward fishing industry. Yet overfishing of oysters continues to the point where harvests are at 1 percent of historic levels. Similarly, Alaska tried to impose limits on halibut catches by progressively shortening the fishing season, all the way down to a mere two days. That didn't stop industrious fishermen from making a season's haul in 48 frantic, dangerous hours.
Conversely, where waters and beds have been allocated to private parties, as in Washington state, harvests have exploded, with the haul doubling since heavy-handed regulations enacted in the 1970s were lifted. New Zealand began using transferable quotas (legal allocations, which can be bought and sold, of certain numbers of fish that can be caught) in 1986 and saw its total marine catch go from fewer than 180,000 metric tons that year to a net-ripping 452,000 by 1995.
Correct. It is our job to show our friend and neighbors that the economy is protected best by protecting private property as mentioned above.
Likewise, things like "carbon credits" that reward companies for not polluting are great.
The left likes to use a "punish them all" approach but creating a profit incentive for not polluting or for protecting the health of fishing stocks or otherwise bing "green" is clearly the way to go.
Yes. Not to go into too much detail, but there is a system called Individual Tradable Quotas (ITQs) that seems to work pretty well. It doesn't address the problem of piracy and poaching, but if implemented widely (it happens to be against some U.S. law, but that can and should be changed) it would probably help.
I think hatcheries can work to an extent. Some fish just will not cooperate by spawning predictably; other species will require more than just a lot of little juveniles to recover. Bluefin tuna require years, and LOTS of food, to get big; and they are open-ocean, wide-ranging predators, so you can't just drop little bluefins into the ocean and hope, as their survival is a combination of foraging strategy, ocean currents, and available feedstocks.
Hatcheries work better for freshwater fish because you can stock the waters and the fish generally stay in the same place and grow (especially for lakes, to a lesser extent for rivers and streams).
Solving the problem(s) described in the article will require a multi-faceted approach: ITQs for fishermen, better prevention of piracy and poaching, conservation "no-take" preserves that are well-protected, increased aquaculture, hatcheries for stocks that can be successfully cultured, and probably things I haven't thought of.
By the way, hatcheries and nurseries work great for sea turtles, significantly offsetting the problems of wild-hatch juvenile mortality.
btt
I rarely agree with David Suzuki, but this article was the first I found with Google:
Net loss of wild fish to produce farmed salmon
Two highlighted excerpts:
(FCR means "Feed Conversion Ratio")
"The high cost of feed means that the salmon farming industry is constantly trying to reduce their FCR. Since 1980, the FCR has been reduced on average from 2 (6) to the current range of 1.3 to 1.7. They have done this by switching to computer controlled feeding systems that minimize feed waste and also by lowering the ratio of fishmeal to fish oil in the feed. More fish oil makes the feed more concentrated in terms of food energy, so less feed needs to be used. But how does this affect the amount of wild fish used to make the feed?
When FCR is reduced as a result of wasting less feed, clearly less wild fish is consumed. However, this is not the case when the FCR is lowered as a result of increasing fish oil content of the feed. As we saw above, the making of fish oil requires the rendering of much more wild fish than for fishmeal. Technological improvements have allowed the fish oil content of feed to increase from 12 per cent in 1980 (7) to the current 25 per cent, while at the same time, fish meal content has gone from 40 down to 35 per cent.
Although there has been an improvement since 1980 on the amount of wild fish used to make a tonne of farmed salmon, the improvement is not as great as the change in FCR would suggest. This is due to an increased reliance on fish oil content in the dry feed. The amount of wild fish used to make one tonne of dry feed has actually increased by about 11% since 1980."
AND
"Leaders within the salmon aquaculture industry are aware they may soon not be able to secure enough fishmeal and oil for their industry to continue to expand (9). The race has been on for some time now to try and find substitutes for these 2 key ingredients. Most of the research has focused on replacing some of the fishmeal component of farmed salmon feed with vegetable protein sources. Two recent studies have shown that feed composed of between 28 to 32% fishmeal, 12 to14% soy protein and 32 to 39% fish oil could be used with success (10,11). Another study showed some success by replacing 69.4% of the fishmeal with soy protein (12). Although promising, these studies still rely on feed with relatively high amounts of fishmeal and no substitution of the fish oil. As we saw above, the fish oil component of feed is the main reason that farmed fish are not a net contributor to seafood production. One of the main obstacles to increasing the amount of fishmeal and oil that can be substituted by vegetable sources is the presence of antinutritional factors in the plant-derived materials (13)."
Which makes me think that there might be a market for mass-produced feedstocks, i.e., trophic enhancement -- meaning increase the oceanic yield of prey fish. While I can think of ways to try and do this, I don't know what's feasible.
Apparently the issue is much more complicated than I had thought. It's inevitable that we are going to have significant loses of energy (and efficency) as we consumer higher trophic level organisms. In cattle, a good dry FCR ranges from 5.0-6.5 lbs. to 1. So apparently fish feed is more efficent but it doesn't exactly solve the reliance on commerical fishing.
>>>With repsect, but half my family are commercial fishermen on the Oregon Coast and you are ignorant on the fish farming subject.<<<
No offense taken, but I do know a great deal about fishing. Salmon was not on my mind when I posted because Salmon is successfully farmed, supplementing natural sources. We need to develop farmed fish with flavors and textures that will compete with overfished species, such as Cod and Tuna.
FTR, farmed shrimed has taken significant pressure off many inshore species which were killed as fingerlings in shrimp boat nets.
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