Posted on 04/19/2006 5:44:22 PM PDT by SJackson
It's common knowledge that we are running out of oil. What's not so well known is that we are also running out of big fish.
The harsh realization that catches of big fish marlin, sharks, swordfish and tuna are declining rapidly is beginning to sink in. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization considers about 75 percent of all fish fully exploited, over-exploited or depleted.
The crisis can be seen most extremely across the Pacific, the world's largest source of tuna, where catches are shrinking along with the average size of the fish. Today a 70-pound swordfish which is too young to have even reproduced is considered "a good-sized fish" and can be legally landed in the U.S. Just a few short decades ago the same fish averaged 300-400 pounds and could be caught close to shore with a harpoon.
In the past two years, the Pacific has seen quotas, restrictions on catches, freezes on effort and even moratoriums. The U.S. longline fleet had to shut down for the second half of 2005 in the Eastern Pacific. Japan and China were not far behind.
Just last December, the new international body with the unwieldy name Western and Central Pacific Fishery Commission imposed a freeze on further efforts to catch bigeye and albacore. Throughout the Pacific, it is widely documented that these two species have recently joined the lucrative southern bluefin tuna on the overfished list. In fact, southern bluefin already has a step up on its cousins and is considered an endangered species by the World Conservation Union.
Shameful shark finning has caused numerous shark species to plummet as well, and a few sharks such as the great white to be considered vulnerable to extinction.
All told, recent scientific reports document that the biomass of these large fish has declined by about 90 percent in the Pacific since 1950 about the time that new technologies allowed us to fish further from shore for longer and catch more fish. Since then, technology has eviscerated those last areas of the ocean safe from us only because we were unable to reach them and stay there.
The announcement last month by the U.S. government that yellowfin tuna is also being overfished in the Pacific will undoubtedly send a shock wave throughout the U.S. and the Pacific.
We are now faced with incontrovertible evidence that the lions and tigers of the sea the ones we feed our children for lunch are disappearing fast.
Imagine the day when cans of tuna, a staple food source for millions of Americans, can no longer be found. According to the warning signs, that day may already be here.
That's bad news for the dozens of impoverished Pacific island nations that have leased their national waters for pennies on the dollar to foreign industrial longline vessels to catch and export their fish primarily to the U.S., Japan and the E.U. For some of these nations, these meager licensing fees contribute as much as 70 percent of their GDP. When greed and waste finally lead to the collapse of these fish, millions of people throughout the Pacific will sink even further into poverty. Canneries are already cutting their hours or even shutting down for want of fish. Stories of crews mutinying or being abandoned in foreign countries by captains who couldn't pay them abound.
The days of three cans of tuna for a $1, a vivid memory from my childhood, are long gone.
The way out of this crisis is to catch less and pay more while staying out of critical areas of the ocean. It only seems fair that the countries with the resources should receive a far larger share of their $2 billion-a-year resource and still have some of the big fish around to attract far more lucrative game fishing tourism.
The U.S. has taken the right step by restricting longline fishing for tuna in the Eastern Pacific and banning it on the West Coast. Now it's time to put the pressure on other countries to do the same.
Otherwise we may start having to add these fish to the endangered species list.
For some of these nations, these meager licensing fees contribute as much as 70 percent of their GDP. When greed and waste finally lead to the collapse of these fish, millions of people throughout the Pacific will sink even further into poverty.
Which is whose fault? Would they have been better off if no one had paid licensing fees to them and their GDP had been 30% of what it is now all along?
"I guess eating fish is "exploiting" them."
Why yes, it is... :
exploit verb |ik?sploit| [ trans. ] make full use of and derive benefit from (a resource)
And many of the worlds fisheries HAVE been over-exploited.
How much salt, pepper and tartar sauce do you have?
As a kid growing up in Milwaukee I remember going down to the lake front at night with my parents. It was a festive scene with lots of men woking in pairs with nets. They walked into the dark water and drug back lots of the shiney little smelt. My parents bought a bucket full from one of the men. We stayed up late cleaning fish. I loved em too. I liked smoked chub from Manitowoc a little better though.
I never eat farm raised seafood anymore
was warned a few years ago it is full of chemicals that are harmfull, much more than wild
most of the problem is from their feed
http://www.albany.edu/ihe/salmonstudy/pressrelease.html
How cool. What a vivid image. My brothers did the same thing with the nets. Somehow I got tricked into cleaning the smelt, too.....
Manitowoc!! Hardly ever see that name online. But never heard of chub. Is that like carp?
We will end up with sweat lagoons!!!!!
Pssst. By the way, go short on Star-Kist...
No, we'll just revert back to cannibalism like we did before...
Especially with a side of snail-darter sauce.
Doesn't Mother Nature usually handle this problem? Tsunami's, earthquakes, famines, wars, etc. It's not a pretty picture, but in the past, it seems to have kept things in balance. Perhaps with our new technologies, it may work some other way, which I have no inkling of, but it is sure to surface at the right moment, or there will be no discussing it at that time. That may be one good reason to support the space program. We may need to evacuate to another place at some time in the future or at least have a place for excess humanity to exist on. Just 'what iffing'.
Chub look like a bigger smelt, about a foot long, heads & tails on, came 4-6? in a box, wrapped in plastic, oily, smoked to a rich golden hue. Eat them right out of the box.
Last year while in Milwaukee I couldn't find a decent Friday night fish fry. Smoked chub weren't in the genral market places either.
What goes up, must come down!
Put a bacterium in a sterile petridish with Agar and watch it grow. Lacking any natural limits, it grows exponentially until its own waste, and the lack of clean nutrient causes a precipitous drop in population.
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