We're killing all the fish

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http://www.independent.co.uk/opinio...generation-that-runs-out-of-fish-1697247.html

The whole thing is worth a read. A very scary story that I've seen updates on a few times a year for the last few years, that tends to get drowned out in the sea of terrorism, war, celebrity and scandal stories. It breaks my heart a little very time I'm reminded of it. And makes me feel a little guilty about all the Talapia filets in my freezer.

Does this bother anyone else? What to do about it? Curious about the thoughts on this from our little group.

 

I'm scared of fish

Despite that, it's a really scary fact that we're so greedy as a speicies. We know more about space than about our own oceans but it doesn't stop us killing what's in them

 

It is talked about quite alot here with very stringent quotas and even bans on fishing in much of the Swedish water. The problem is that fish do not acknowladge human borders and happily swim into for example Estonian waters with less stringent quotas. Also the fishermen loudly claim that there is nothing wrong, that there is plenty of fish and that there is no need to regulate the fishing.

 

And therein lies a big problem. On the one hand, who's a better authority than fisherman? After all, they're the ones face to face with fish populations every day. If they say there's nothing to worry about, who better to trust? And they do stand to lose substantially from a total oceanic fish extinction.

But on the other hand, it is their livelihood, so they certainly have a big incentive to halt any form of regulation (much like Oil men who claim that everything is fine, no regulations for me, thanks). I suppose the fishing industry is just as prone to being profit-driven and short-sighted as the oil industry is.

And on yet another hand - 3 hands! Woohoo... - fish-finding and fish-catching technology has improved vastly over the years, making it feasible for fisherman to find and catch every damn fish out there. So while it may seem like there's "plenty of fish" to them, it may just be because they've gotten better at looking under all the rocks, and gotten so used to this level of skill and efficiency that they've long since taken it for granted.

Hmm.

 

We were too short sighted in the 80's and our vision hasn't improved since. Every person is driven by the folly that they know best. Scientists using simplified data to predict population expansion, fishermen thinking 'one more won't hurt', the government prioritising things differently to the people affected, too many people have their own interests and motives and too much damage has been done to reverse previous ignorance.

The human population grows beyond what it can cultivate on land so we turn to the oher 70% of the planet, because after all, it's so huge, it can't run out, right?

 

Ok, Professor Boris Worm is an idiot. Or, to be more accurate, he's a fear-monger.

The reason I say this is this: there are probably more undiscovered fish species out there than there are fished fish species. What the professor almost certainly means is that there is serious risk of collapsing all commonly consumed fish species by 2048 (something I wouldn't argue with), not all fish species.

Ok, to respond to something other than that technicality (it bugs me, it really does), buy from fish-farms. Other than that, look deeply into the case of the Alligator Garr. It's a river-fish here in the US that can grow over 7 feet long, has a truly nasty snout, and in the late 1800s was blamed for massive numbers of attacks on people. The truth is probably that Alligators performed these attacks (they tend to live in similar locations), not the Garr. Nonetheless, the people of the time went on a massive Garr killing spree. Literally millions of tons of rotting Garr flesh covered the lake and river shores (there are news articles from the times). Records at the time put the average Garr well over 6 feet long. Today, the average caught Garr is little more than 2 feet long, and they're incredibly rare catches (not to mention endangered). Recent studies using new techniques, however, have found that the actual population is much larger than previously thought, and a lot more of them are larger than previously fought (average around 5 feet or so), they're just hiding a lot better, avoiding their previous haunts, and being far more cautious about food (they'll mouth the bait and pull it along for 15+ minutes before actually swallowing and getting caught, and even then it's iffy).

The general rule throughout the world is that, when civilization chooses to eliminate an animal (intentionally or not), we usually end up eliminating all the slow, stupid ones and the few fast, intelligent, shy ones remain and reproduce more fast, intelligent, shy ones.

Mind you, we still need to be careful as we can really devastate populations, but we need to be more careful before we say what has happened. I would not be terribly surprised to find large populations of Cod in Newfoundland, just deeper, more cautious, and more hidden then previously. I'm not saying I'm sure they're there, I'm just saying scientists often pass off reasonable assumptions as fact.

 

Farmed fish is not really all that good. Most of the farmed fish is carnivouros and they are fed on fishmeal. I do not have the numbers but it takes many times the amount of fished fish to get farmed fish.

 

Well, that sounds like a problem with application to me. One thing to remember, though, is that most of the fish we eat are carnivores (thus why the farmed fish are carnivores), so they'll be eating those fish whether it's in the wild or in farms. All in all, though, it seems to me that if we can farm the carnivores, we can farm the feed-fish, too.

Basically, what I'm saying is that humanity needs to move from blind conservation to cautious and careful ecological management. We're really good at understanding systems (most of us), and we can use the natural systems to our advantage if we just put our minds (and resources) to it.

 

It's a process I tried to discuss in the Whale Wars thread: We don't need to have caught every last fish to doom the population to extinction. All we need, is to lower population numbers below a certain threshhold - the point of no return. Once the fish are beyond it, their numbers won't bounce back. Perhaps their spawn fields are too small by then, or schools are to small to protect against predation.

Population dynamics can be incredibly complex, but in some cases we have the ability to read the warning signs. Still we ignore scientists' conclusions, not taking the estimations seriously, and creating far-too-lenient quotas for the fishermen.

By the way, Tilapia is freshwater fish from african lakes. The seas are so empty, that we are turning to exotic freshwater fish populations now... Don't eat Tilapia raw on sushi; freshwater fish may contain parasites!

 

This isn't really news, is it? ISTR having heard years ago that 13/14 major global fisheries were super depleted.

 

Maybe we can acquire a taste for jellyfish...they seem to be proliferating at a rapid clip.

 

DR -- the third hand is the "Gripping Hand." Moties use the term 'on the gripping hand' when giving a third option.

 

As far as I know the biggest problem with farmed fish is that fish farms are notorious polluters of the sea and boost the algae which in turn suck oxygen from the water making it unhabitable for many types of fish. Of course the fishmeal also constitutes a major problem. The pollution has been a problem especially in the Baltic Sea but then that lake of water is quickly transforming itself in to a pool of ooze beyond rescue.

 

Fish farms produce less pollution than the traditional run-of-the-mill farming with it's surface runoff problems which have not been nearly adequately addressed yet. Excess nutrient and chemical runoff from erosion of the farmland topsoil, mainly caused by tilling and reaching the farmland too close to waterways which is still (and probably ever will be) the major cause of turbidity.

Turbidity incerases the nutrient levels in lakes and oceans, increases the amount of decomposing organic matter in the water, which decreses the oxygen levels. Add that with the runoff chemichals, hormones and hormone-like compounds, with the bonus of radical changes in water pH levels...

Yeah, we are killing all the fish.

One major problem is the radical decline of estuaries and vital breeding grounds for fishes. The destruction of The Great Barrier Reef for instance is caused by many overlapping factors, but the major contributor to the destruction is most likely due to the runoff of excess nutrients from farmland, which has caused the numbers of Crown Of Thorns starfish larvae and the Crown Of Thorns to proliferate. Other factors such as the changes in the acidity of the water are also major contributors, of course.

And for one related wikipedia link on the condition the oceans and waters of this planet: Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Yeah, it's just non-biodegradable rubbish...who gives a toot? It's not like we dump anything else, like chemicals or heavy metals, in billions of tonnes every year into the ocean.

Oh, wait...we are...whoops.

 

As an engineer who worked in the environmental management field, I do know all about this (including that, at least here in Hampton Roads, farms are about 100X more culpable than civil waste management). The thing is, though, that this is only a problem if the algae mass-spawn, then mass-starve, and then mass-decompose. The algae's natural metabolic process does not consume oxygen, it is the decomposition of the algae that consumes oxygen. If, instead of letting the algae mass-die, we introduced a predator species (maybe open a fish-farm for the herbivorous fish we use to feed our carnivorous fish) to feed on the booming algae, we can control the problem. Of course, the other issue is to actually control where the nutrients go (here, they hit the Chesapeake Bay, which is suffering). Unfortunately, the EPA would rather make the local wastewater management organization spend a few hundred million upgrading facilities that are already performing wonderfully than spend a couple hundred thousand themselves to put up fences on the farms.

Actually, locally at least, the hormones, "chemicals", and pH levels aren't the problem. It's the nitrates causing algae blooms.

Actually, the leading theory I heard was about a warm-water current shifting due to an underwater landslide somewhere and flooding the Reef with warmer temperatures, which apparently the Crown Starfish love, but the Reef hates.

Yeah, that one worries me, but it actually isn't an indication on the ocean's ability to act as a chemical-sink. Chemicals diffuse into the water, which means they spread pretty effectively and evenly given time, while waste like this doesn't. You'd have to take random samples from various locations (deep ocean, surface of open ocean, around islands, etc) and monitor the changes over time to get any sense of that.

 

What! Since when has introducing new species been a good idea? Show us some examples! And they had better be good and there had better be lot of them. Otherwise it's just irresponsible crazy-talk.

Controlling nutrient flows from the farms would be much more cost-efficient, and much easier.

There's been a study about the Crown Of Thorns larvae also loving the the thriving plankton which has gotten a boost from the overflowing nutrients from farmland (not to mention the local poor waste-management on top of that).

But yes, warmer water gives the reefs hard times as welll.

There's multiple overlapping factors at play, all of them need to be tackled, but the runoff from farmland is by far the biggest problem.

 

This is a case where governments need to be strong and really look at the science and then not worry about who it pisses off when they make a policy. They should reduce the number of fish that can legally be harvested in a year, and introduce severe, brutal, and drastic penalties for companies who violate that law. Then they should monitor closely and impartially and see when the fish population comes back up to an acceptable level.

As has been pointed out, it might be too late for some species, but even if there are alternative species out there in the deep ocean, I think it's a really, really bad idea to harvest any species to extinction.

Sadly, governments are rather weak - willed and won't push issues like this. They'll regret it when there's no fish left . . .

 

It isn't government, per se. People in general are complicit in the process. We have a large self-interested group of people telling us there's no need to reign in our fishing who, on their own, wouldn't really be all that persuasive -- even where government is concerned -- if not for the large market of people willing to turn a blind eye to the environmental ramifications of over-fishing and consume those products. This isn't a problem of awareness, either. As has been commented several times in this thread, this is old news. The reason for our over-fishing is simple. Despite the fact that the vast majority of us do know the ramifications of over-fishing, there's still a market for it. This is just another instance of our desire to have what we want, when we want it, trumping our common sense.