A rchive Date
[ 22-05-2003 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Ecology ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/CNEWSScience0207/030521_suzuki-can.html
Curtail industrial fishing now
By DAVID SUZUKI -- CNEWS Science
Wednesday, May 21, 2003
One by one, population by population, we are pushing species to extinction. And if we don't take immediate action, the great ones could go the way of the dinosaurs. This, from Dr. Ransom Myers, a scientist with Dalhousie University in Halifax. Dr. Myers is talking about fish - specifically the large, predatory fish like tuna, marlin, swordfish and cod that we prize for food. If we want to protect our ocean ecosystems, he says, we're going to have to catch a lot less of them.
Dr. Myers and Dr. Boris Worm recently completed a 10-year study of the world's fisheries, and the results are shocking. According to their report, which was the cover story recently in the science journal Nature, the amount of large, predatory fish in the world's oceans has plummeted by 90 per cent since 1950. In just 50 years, many populations have completely disappeared and others are just barely hanging on.
Industrialized fishing is the culprit. Dr. Myers' report clearly shows that when large fishing boats arrive in an area, fish populations promptly collapse - usually by about 80 per cent within 10 to 15 years. The rapidity of the collapse shows how brutally effective modern fishing techniques are, and how decimated fish stocks do not necessarily rebound when fishing halts. Indeed, in spite of a decade of closure, Canada's cod stocks - which have been reduced in size by 99 per cent - show no signs of recovery.
The report also indicates that many fisheries management strategies are fundamentally flawed. Most stock analyses were done years after the arrival of large fishing boats - which already may have decimated fish populations. So stock analyses are often based on populations that have already been reduced by 80 per cent or more. This leads managers to set catch quotas as if depleted levels are normal, which means that stocks will never get a chance to recover. In fact, it will keep them at levels uncomfortably close to extinction.
Optimists might point out that at least with the top predators gone, prey species would flourish. They do - at first. According to the report, some flatfish and groundfish populations did initially increase when predators were removed, but those trends quickly reversed. Researchers surmise that prey species also began to decline either because they were being incidentally caught along with the predator species, or because when predatory species started to disappear, fishermen began targeting prey species too. Fisheries scientist Dr. Daniel Pauly at the University of British Columbia calls this process "fishing down the food chain."
How bad things get in our oceans depends on how we react to emerging realities in the coming years. As one might expect, some representatives of the fishing industry have called the report "unnecessarily alarmist," as though a 90 per cent reduction in fish shouldn't be considered alarming.
To their credit, both of Canada's national newspapers ran relatively large stories about the report, despite being centered in Toronto, where fish are hardly a priority. In Seattle, where fish are obviously more important, the story was front-page banner headline news for the Times. Sadly, just up the coast in Vancouver, where I live, the story was pushed much further back in one newspaper and didn't even appear in the other. Frankly, I think that's embarrassing.
Can we restore our once plentiful fisheries? Dr. Myers says it's possible, but we have to act quickly. He recommends reducing fish mortality (through reduced catch quotas or reduced bycatch) by at least 50 per cent. That will be a bitter pill to swallow for those who depend on fishing for a living. But if we don't do something soon, there will be no fish to be had.
 World Fact Book (CIA)]]
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