Our world is a world of water. The oceans cover 71% of the surface of the Earth and
provide us with the oxygen we need for every two breaths we take. Today, much of this life
is threatened by the actions of the planet’s top predator: man. It may be the case that
much of the marine life we sea today is lost to history. And as the seas continue to change,
we may find that much of the life around us can only be seen through a screen
Hi it's Emily from Bite Size Vegan and welcome to another vegan nugget. The health of our
oceans is absolutely vital to all life on this planet, including those of us on land.
In fact the oceans are the only reason our planet even has life. Earth’s first breath
of oxygen came from cyanobacteria over 2.7 billion years ago.
But now the oceans are facing total destruction from the very beings they brought to life:
humans. The collapse of our oceans will spell disaster for all life on this planet. As marine
life conservationist Captain Paul Watson of Sea Shepherd says, “If the oceans die, we
all die.”
Humans have fished the oceans for thousands of years, but with the rise of commercial
fishing methods, pollution, runoff, and habitat destruction, marine animal populations are
no longer able to replenish themselves fast enough.
This video is going to look into the vital question: is our ocean running out of fish?
And if so, what is the implication for life on this planet?
This issue is incredibly complex and we will barely be touching the surface, much like
our vastly unexplored oceans.
To understand the depletion of marine life in our oceans, me must address the main causes:
overfishing, ocean dead zones, pollution, and habitat destruction. We’re also going
to look into what the main source of this oceanic destruction is and why it’s rarely
or never discussed by those individuals and organizations dedicated to protecting the
oceans and their inhabitants.
Let’s start with the most obvious and oft-discussed reason for the reduction of marine life: overfishing.
90-100 million tonnes of fish are pulled from our oceans each year with some sources even
estimating 150 million tonnes. Between the 1950’s to 2011 worldwide catches increased
5 fold while the amount of fish in sea was reduced by ½. 3/4 of the world’s fisheries
are exploited or depleted and some scientists predict that we’ll see fishless oceans by
2048.
According to the most current report in 2014 from the Food and Agriculture Organization
of the Untied Nations, “the world’s marine fisheries have expanded continuously to a
production peak of 86.4 million tonnes in 1996 but have since exhibited a general declining
trend.”
However, a more recent study published in 2016 challenges these statistics, finding
gross underreporting of catches as well as issues with the FAO’s data entry methods
leading to underrepresentation. The study’s creators, Daniel Pauly and Dirk Zeller, “suggest
that catch actually peaked at 130 million tonnes,” rather than the FAO’s 86.4 million,
“and has been declining much more strongly since.” Their reconstruction of total catches
showed a decline of over three times that of the reported data as presented by the FAO.
With 60% of West Africa’s and a staggering 92% of China’s industrial fishing remaining
unreported, even this corrected figure may not capture the full magnitude of commercial
fishing.
Statistics on ocean life in general remain cloudy, both due to the practical difficulty
of tracking marine life and the terminology used by the organizations. In their 2012 State
of the World Fisheries and Aquaculture Report, the FAO found that 87.3% of fish stocks were
fully exploited or overexploited.
However, comparing this figure to the report before and after is no easy feat. Between
their 2010 and 2012 reports, the FAO had reduced it’s level of exploitation terminology from
6 to 3 terms. Now, in their most recent report from 2014, they’ve further clouded the issue,
replacing “exploited” with “fished” and introducing two vague categories termed
“sustainable” and “unsustainable levels.” This terminology has the dual affect of both
making the situation sound less dire and making comparison between the reports unnecessarily
difficult.
But when you pick through the data and unravel the terminology, the upward trend of fish
stock depletion becomes clear. The bottom line is that as of the most current report
from 2014 using 2011 data, less than 10% of our world’s fisheries remain unexploited.
It’s not just the amount of fish being taken from the ocean for food that is the issue.
Far more devastating are those non-target species unintentionally captured, termed bycatch,
or more accurately, bykill. According to the FAO, for every 1 pound of fish caught, up
to 5 pounds of unintended marine species are caught and discarded as bykill, though figures
can be as high as 20lbs of untargeted species for every pound of targeted animals killed.
A report that just came out a few weeks before this video found that in select US fisheries
alone, bycatch in 2013 totaled approximately 689.1 million pounds.
All of the industrial fishing methods used around the world come with the high cost of
bycatch. One study analyzed bycatch solely from pelagic longline fishing in the Pacific
Ocean. Longlining is a method which uses a main fishing line up to 100 kilometers in
length, with secondary lines branching off it, each set with hundreds of thousands of
barbed, baited hooks. The study found that 4.4 million non-targeted marine animals are
killed as bycatch due to pelagic longline fishing in the Pacific Ocean every year, including,
on average, 3.3 million sharks, 1 million marlins, 59,000 sea turtles, almost 77,000
albatrosses, and almost 20,000 dolphins and whales.
Trawling, the primary method used for shrimp, is often referred to as the ocean equivalent
of clear-cutting rainforest with 80-98% of unintended catches being thrown back into
the sea, dead.
It’s estimated that 650,000 marine mammals, including whales, dolphins and seals, are
killed or seriously injured every year by commercial fisheries outside the United States.
Because of this, almost every foreign fish product sold in the United States enters the
U.S. market in violation of federal law, namely the Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA), which
has remained pitifully unenforced for over 40 years. With 90% of all seafood consumed
in the United States coming from foreign sources, this means that the American seafood industry
has a large hand in devastating marine mammal populations while grossly violating its own
federal law.
The mechanical method used for fishing isn’t the only issue; there is also the method of
species targeting. Humans tend to go after the biggest fish first until they are no longer
available. Then they move on down the chain, a process marine biologist Daniel Pauly termed
“fishing down marine food webs. The removal of apex predators leads to what’s called
“trophic downgrading” where the loss of predators allows other species to grow unimpeded,
upsetting the entire ecosystem.
One study suggests that the removal of sharks may contribute to climate change by leaving
the unchecked numbers of species to feast on the ocean’s vegetation, releasing the
ancient carbon found there in massive quantities. Dr. Peter Macreadie, one of the study’s
authors, cautioned that “If we just lost 1 per cent of the oceans' blue carbon ecosystems,
it would be equivalent to releasing 460 million tonnes of carbon annually, which is about
the equivalent of about 97 million cars. It's about equivalent to Australia's annual greenhouse
gas emissions.”
With 73 million sharks killed every year for the shark fin industry and 40-50 million sharks
dying ever year as by-kill, not to mention the impact of shark culls, the ocean’s most
vital predators are under attack. And the repercussions of their decimation will affect
us all.
Not only do fishers move from species to species, but they will also move from area to area,
decimating one before moving onto the next. For example, 33% of the EU’s seafood comes
from developing nations.
While overfishing is certainly the most obvious drain on the world’s fish, and the most
talked about, it is by no means the only cause. Ocean dead zones are a huge threat to marine
life. Dead zones, or hypoxic zones, are areas of the ocean where there has been such a reduction
in oxygen that animal life suffocates and dies.
While ocean protection organizations will mention dead zones, they by and large ignore
their number one cause: animal agriculture. Animal agriculture is the leading cause of
not only ocean dead zones, but also species extinction, water pollution, and habitat destruction,
all of which severely impact our oceans.
In the documentary Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret, Dr. Richard Oppenlander discuses the
immense impact of land-based animal agriculture on our oceans: “Livestock operations on
land has caused more than – or created more than 500 nitrogen-flooded dead zones around
the world and our oceans. It comprises more than 95,000 square miles of areas completely
devoid of life. So any meaningful discussions of the state of our oceans has to always begin
by frank discussions about land-based animal agriculture, which is not what our conservation
groups, Oceana being the largest on in the world now -- the most influential, as well
as others -- it’s not what is at the apex of their discussions.”
In addition to not acknowledging the main cause of water pollution, habitat destruction,
species extinction and ocean dead zones, Oceana and other major ocean defense organizations
propose that the solution to the decimation of ocean life is to eat sustainable seafood.
Unfortunately, there is no such thing as sustainable seafood. With whales dying from starvation,
and 90% of all large fish species gone, the ocean can’t even sustain itself, let alone
the up to 150 million tonnes of sea life we pull from it every year. Additionally, sustainable
seafood labels also don’t account for the greenhouse gas emissions caused by fishing.
The 2013 State of the Ocean Report from the IPSO stated, “Not only are we already experiencing
severe declines in many species, to the point of commercial extinction in some cases, and
an unparalleled rate of regional extinctions of habitat types … we now face losing marine
species and entire marine ecosystems, such as coral reefs, within a single generation.
Unless action is taken now, the consequences of our activities are at a high risk of causing
– through the combined effects of climate change, overexploitation, pollution and habitat
loss – the next globally significant extinction event in the ocean.”
It’s clear that wild fish and marine animals are in danger. So what about farming fish?
Isn’t that an ideal solution? Wouldn’t it reduce the amount of fish we’re taking
form the sea?
Sadly, the opposite is true. When fish farms, or aquaculture took off in the 1950’s, the
number of wild caught fish also rose dramatically. From 1950 to 2001, fish farming increased
38 fold from 1 million tonnes 38 million tonnes.
Fish farms actually increase the number of wild fish caught because farmed carnivorous
species requires large inputs of wild fish for feed. Aquaculture systems also modify
and destroy wild fish habitats, pollute the water with waste disposal, introduce exotic
species and are breeding grounds for pathogens and pests.
Today, the majority of wild-caught fish go to feed our farmed fish as well as our pigs,
cows and chickens. In an extremely thorough and mathematically challenging article, Harish
Sethu of CountingAnimals.com deduced that the United States alone uses more than 5.6
billion pounds of wild-caught fish to feed the animals we eat, with between 144 and 293
wild sea animals killed annually to feed the farmed fish and shrimp eaten by the average
American consumer.
By the best estimate allowed with hindrance of the FAO’s underreporting and impersonal
quantifying of sea life by the tonne and not the individual, every year we kill over 2.8
trillion fish. That’s 2.7 trillion more every year than the number of humans to have
every existed in the history of our species.
So if fishing is so unsustainable, why is it continuing at a frenzied pace? Well, it’s
no surprise that a huge motivator is money. A 2010 study found that, “global fisheries
subsidies for 2003 are between US$ 25 and 29 billion … These results imply that the
global community is paying the fishing industry billions each year to continue fishing even
when it would not be profitable otherwise—effectively funding the over-exploitation of marine resources.”
Now all of what we’ve covered has not even touched on the ethical side of fishing. You
can see my video on whether fish feel pain to look into that aspect.
The bottom line is that there is no way to fish sustainably. Our oceans, our earth, and
we ourselves, are facing a massive extinction. We have already gone beyond the point of being
able to reverse the damage. As Dr. Oppenlander states, “It has been 300 million years since
the last time our oceans have been this warm and acidic, and at that time, it took over
30 million years to recover.”
We have to stop fishing. And we have to call for the organizations charged with the duty
of protecting our oceans to actually protect them, not have an active hand in their destruction
by pedaling a myth of sustainability.
So what can you do to help? Stop eating seafood and educate others. Send them this video,
and/or the blog post with all of the scientific backing via careful citations. Dig into those
resources if you doubt these claims. But make a change. If the oceans die, we all die.
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If you found this video helpful, please give it a thumbs up and share it with friends,
family, and organizations to educate and inspire action. At this point, we are the only hope
for the ocean. And the ocean is our only hope for survival.