You know what is so so yummy, sushi.
But I hear the delicious bluefin tuna is almost extinct.
Eh, who cares?
There’s plenty of fish in the sea, right?
Well...
Maybe not.
Hey guys Julia here for Dnews
OCEANS ARE BIG.
I mean according to NOAA, oceans cover 71% of the Earth and 99% of its living space.
So there’s a lot of room in there.
How can humans even make a dent in sea life?
Over the past few decades fishing returns have been shrinking year after year.
It seems we’re overfishing our seas.
Overfishing is when more fish are caught that can be replaced by natural reproduction in
a year.
For most of human history fishing fleets were made of small local boats.
But in the mid 1900s new technology changed the game.
New nets and radar technology allowed for fishing of deeper waters and getting more
fish at once.
Suddenly fishing became a big commercial enterprise.
For a while things we’re going swell.
Yet in the mid-1990s the world got a wake up call.
After 500 years one of the oldest fisheries suddenly collapsed.
In the summer of 1992, the Atlantic Cod stock off the Eastern coast of Canada fell to 1%
of its previous levels.
A moratorium was put in place to allow the cod to recover.
Over 20 years later, some studies suggest the cod are slowly recovering, yet some studies
show the population is declining.
But it’s not just cod, it’s pacific tuna, it’s sardines, it’s Chilean Sea Bass,
even whale populations are decimated.
A recent estimate places the amount of whales killed in the last century at nearly 3 million.
One study in the journal Nature estimated that overfishing reduced large fish populations
to 10% of their pre-industrial size.
It’s kind of a domino effect.
As one source of fish gets used up, fisherman quickly move on to the next.
What’s called “fishing down”, as we deplete the schools of larger fish, we turn
to what they eat, until we deplete those fish and so on and so forth.
We fish down the food chain.
And it’s not just the fish, some fishing practices ruin ecosystems too.
One of the most popular methods of catching fish is trawling.
While it can capture lots of fish, it also does lots of damage.
One study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), found
that it removes a layer of sediment which over time could leave that area barren.
I’m not trying to bad mouth fisherman here.
The UN says that Fishing is central to the livelihood and food security of 200 million
people.
And many people depend on fish as a primary source of protein.
So it’s clear that scientists need to fish for a solution soon.
There are already some regulations in place.
Like fishing quotas, closed seasons, size limits and the protecting certain areas.
Those help, but it’s hard to regulate the open ocean.
According to the World Wildlife Fund Just 1.6% of the world's oceans have been declared
as marine protected areas.
One study published in the Journal of Applied Ecology found that marine protected zones
with a mix of zones that allowed no fishing and zones that allowed just a little bit of
a fishing could be a good compromise for both business and biology.
As for you, maybe check out seafood guides, the Monterey Bay Aquarium has a smartphone
app called Seafood Watch, which is pretty cool.
Alright guys what do you think?
Are fish friends and not food?
Let us know in the comments below