| |
 he destruction of life in the oceans
has progressed farther than anyone had suspected, according to a new report
in the February 6, 1998 issue of Science magazine. The causes are
overfishing and pollution, but the focus of the new report is overfishing
alone. Science is the voice of the American Association for the Advancement
of Science (AAAS).
 The world's catch of ocean fish peaked
in 1989 and has been declining since. In the early 1990s, scientists reported
that 13 of the world's 17 major fisheries were depleted or in steep decline.
Typical is the Grand Banks fishery off the shallow coast of Newfoundland
in the north Atlantic. There, after 350 years of commercial exploitation,
the haddock, cod and flounder have all but disappeared and the fishery was
officially closed a few years ago.
The depletion of the world's most
popular fish species has set off three trends, each of which is adding to
the oceans' troubles: (1) fisherman are adopting new technologies that (2)
allow them to fish in deeper waters, and (3) they are fishing lower on the
food chain. |
| |
Don Tyson, the Arkansas chicken magnate
and supporter of Bill Clinton, has gone into the fishing business in a big
way. Commercial fishing can be very profitable if conducted on a grand scale.
In 1992, Tyson bought the Arctic-Alaska Fisheries Company, and three other
fishing companies. They operate a fleet of industrial super-trawlers that
each cost $40 million to build and reach the length of a football field.
These trawlers pull nylon nets thousands of feet long through the water,
capturing everything in their path 400 tons of fish at a single netting.
These super-trawlers stay offshore for months at a time, processing and
freezing their catch as they go, thus giving them a major advantage over
smaller land-based boats.
Approximately 40 percent of what
these super-trawlers catch is considered trash and is ground up and thrown
back into the ocean. They call it "bycatch" and, according to
investigative reporter Jeffrey St. Clair, it can include endangered sea
lions, and seals, as well as unwanted fish. (In the northeast Atlantic alone,
the bycatch in a year's time amounts to 3.7 million tons.)
Trawlers are now using technology
developed by the military to fish waters as deep as a mile, catching species
that few would have considered edible or useful a decade ago. Now that the
shallow fisheries are in serious decline, trawl nets fitted with wheels
and rollers are dragged across the bottom of the deep oceans, removing everything
of any size. Squid, skate, rattails, hoki, blue ling, black scabbard, red
crabs, black oreos, smooth oreos, deep shrimp, chimeras, slackjaw eels,
blue hake, southern blue whiting, sablefish, spiny dogfish, and orange roughy
are now being harvested from the deep ocean and sold in seafood stores,
cooked into "fish sticks" at McDonald's, or processed into fake
"crab meat" for seafood salads.
Part of the problem is consumer ignorance.
For example, orange roughy began to appear in fish stores and on the menus
at fancy restaurants in the United States just a decade ago. Yet in that
short time the species has become threatened with extinction. The orange
roughy lives up to a mile deep in cold waters off New Zealand. Now scientists
have learned that species living in deep, cold waters grow and reproduce
very slowly. The orange roughy, for example, lives to be 150 years old and
only begins to reproduce at age 30. Recently, the principal stocks of orange
roughy around New Zealand collapsed. Still, today in Annapolis, Maryland,
fish stores, orange roughy is available for $8.99 per pound, and there's
no sign telling consumers that the species is threatened. "People wouldn't
eat rhinoceros or any other land creature that they knew was threatened
with extinction. But they're eating fish like orange roughy without a clue
to what's happening," says Greenpeace fisheries expert Mike Hagler
in Auckland, New Zealand.
Radar allows ships to operate in
the fog and the dark; sonar locates the fish precisely; and GPS (geographical
positioning system) satellites pinpoint locations so that ships can return
to productive spots. Formerly-secret military maps reveal hidden deep-sea
features, such as mountains, which are associated with upwelling currents
of nutrient-rich water, where fish thrive. Combined with larger nets made
from new, stronger materials, modern fishing vessels guided electronically
can sweep the oceans clean and that is precisely what is happening. As a
result, the ocean's fish are disappearing, and so are the family-scale fishing
operations that used to dominate the industry.
Because modern fishing equipment
is immensely expensive, the stakes are high. With big money on the line,
the fishing industry has curried political favor. As a result, modern fishing
factories like Tyson's are subsidized by federal and state governments.
Tyson's company has received more than $65 million in low-interest loans
from the federal government, to help build 10 of these super-trawlers. According
to Jeffrey St. Clair, the Seattle-based factory-trawler fleet has received
$200 million in federal subsidies.
Furthermore, because so much is at
stake, deep-water factory trawlers cannot afford to let up. They must keep
fishing until the last fish is gone. |
| |
But it gets worse. The new report
in Science shows that humans are now fishing not only in deeper waters,
but also lower on the food chain. This has ominous implications, because
as the lower levels of the food chain decline, the chances of revival at
the top of the food chain are diminished even further. Scientists are now
discussing the "wholesale collapse" of marine ecosystems. "It
is likely that continuation of present trends will lead to widespread fisheries
collapses...," says Daniel Pauly, the author of the new study. "If
things go unchecked, we might end up with a marine junk yard dominated by
plankton," he says.
Pauly's new study examined the diets
of 220 fish species, then gave each species a numerical ranking in the food
web, between 1 and 5. Those assigned a 1 are plankton tiny floating plants
that photosynthesize, using the energy of sunlight to convert water and
carbon dioxide into carbohydrates, thus forming the bottom of all aquatic
food chains. Level 2 is zooplankton tiny floating animals that eat plankton.
Top predators, such as the snappers inhabiting the continental shelf off
Yucatan, Mexico, receive a ranking of 4.6.
These data were combined with Food
and Agriculture Organization (FAO) data on fish landings worldwide. The
result is an estimate of the average place in the oceanic food web (the
average "trophic level") where humans are harvesting fish. The
new study reveals that the average trophic level has been steadily declining
for 45 years, meaning that humans are progressively taking fish from lower
on the food chain. The steady decline has been about 0.1 trophic levels
per decade. "Present fishing policy is unsustainable," says Pauly.
Of the 220 species studied, at least 60 percent are being overfished, or
fished to the limit.
Pauly believes that the true situation
is somewhat worse than his study indicated, principally because many countries
underreport their fishing harvest.
Even if a fishery does not collapse
completely, fishing down the food chain can have serious consequences. In
the north sea, the cod population has been so depleted that fishermen are
now concentrating on a second-level species called pout, which the cod used
to eat. The pout, in turn, eat tiny organisms called copepods and krill.
Krill also eat copepods. As the pout are removed, the krill population expands
and then the copepod population declines drastically. Because copepods are
the main food of young cod, the cod population cannot recover.
Fish farming might seem like a way
out of this problem, but it is not at least not as presently practiced because
farmed fish are fed fish meal made from unpopular fish such as herring or
menhaden. It would seem to be only a matter of time before the herring and
menhaden too are depleted.
Dr. Pauly believes that in 3 or 4
decades, many oceanic fisheries will "collapse in on themselves."
The result will be a loss of high-quality protein for humans, even before
the fisheries collapse completely. Humans eat somewhere between trophic
levels 2.5 and 4. Lower then that, there isn't much that people eat. "There
is a lower limit for what can be caught and marketed, and zooplankton [at
trophic level 2] is not going to be reaching our dinner plates in the foreseeable
future," Dr. Pauly wrote in Science. |
 |
Government could limit the kinds
of fishing technology that are allowed to give the fish a chance but this
would put "the public interest" up against the likes of Don Tyson.
In today's political climate, with private money dominating our elections,
Don Tyson would win because he's wealthy and he supports all the right politicians.
Dr. Pauly believes there is an urgent need to create protected areas where
fishing is simply not allowed. He sees no-fishing zones as easier to implement
and enforce than fishing quotas, limiting fishing time at sea, restrictions
on allowable fishing gear, and controls on pollution though these steps,
too, are needed, he believes. No-fishing zones can be created quickly and
can be enforced. In Britain, the fishing industry has begun to accept no-fishing
zones as a way to save the industry in the face of declining fish stocks.
The most important idea, proposed
in Science magazine, would be to shift the burden of proof onto the
fishing industry. Those who profit from public resources such as the oceans
should have to demonstrate, before they can begin fishing, that their activities
will not harm the public resource. At present, it is assumed that fishing
will not damage life in the oceans, and the burden is on the general public
to prove otherwise. At this point, abundant evidence has come to light indicating
damage, so it is definitely time to shift the burden of proof onto the fishing
industry. For example, owners of super-trawlers should have to show that
their yield will be sustainable before their ships can put to sea.
Here again, it seems unlikely that
the present Congress snuffling around in a trough of filthy lucre, as it
is will act to protect the public interest. Therefore, it is urgent that
we get private money out of our elections completely. Elected officials
need to be answerable to the people who elected them, not to wealthy benefactors.
Otherwise, our children will inherit
oceans without fish.  |
rachel.clark.net with the single word "HELP" in the message; back issues also available via ftp from ftp.std.com/periodicals/rachel and from gopher.std.com and from