http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A57139-2003May14.html
Key Ocean Fish
Species Ravaged, Study Finds
By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 15, 2003; Page A01
[ Click
here to see photograph from original article... ]
Caption of large fish on ground:
About 800 tuna lie on the ground in Japan, where "longline
fishing"
is used to increase catches. The lines, some as long as 60 miles,
bear thousands of hooks. (AFP)
Industrial fishing practices have decimated every one of the world's
biggest and most economically important species of fish, according
to a new and detailed global analysis that challenges current
fisheries protection policies.
Fully 90 percent of
each of the world's large ocean species,
including cod, halibut, tuna, swordfish and marlin, has disappeared
from the world's oceans in recent decades, according to the
Canadian analysis -- the first to use historical data dating
to the beginning of large-scale fishing, in the 1950s.
The
new research found that fishing has become so efficient
that it typically takes just 15 years to remove 80 percent
or more of any species that becomes the focus of a fleet's
attention. Some populations have disappeared within just a
few years, belying the oceans' reputation as a refuge and
resource of nearly infinite proportions.
"You'd
think the ocean is so large, these things would have
someplace to hide," said Ransom Myers, who conducted the
new study with fellow marine ecologist Boris Worm of Dalhousie
University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. "But it doesn't matter
where you look, the story is the same. We are really too good
at killing these things."
If current practices
continue, Myers said, the world can expect
serious economic disruptions, food shortages in seafood-dependent
developing nations and lasting damage to marine ecosystems.
But shortsighted environmental policies and pressure from
industrial fishing interests have largely stymied domestic
and international efforts to rebuild failing populations,
Myers and others said.
Even where recovery
efforts are underway, the new work suggests
that targets are much lower than they ought to be -- reflecting
a global memory loss about just how many fish once roamed the
sea and how large they once were.
"It's an incredibly
important paper," said Jeremy Jackson,
a professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla,
Calif., who has decried the problem of "shifting baselines,"
in which people keep redefining "normal" as they become
accustomed
to increasingly degraded environments. "The science is unassailable.
And the industry knows damn well it's getting harder and harder
to keep up."
The new work, published
in today's issue of the journal Nature,
used data collected by governments and the fishing industry
going back 50 years and more. The team uncovered many
long-forgotten records, including survey data compiled in advance
of major fishing expeditions and initial catch data from early
forays into new areas.
It took a decade just
to gather all the numbers. But as they worked
through the statistics, Myers and Worm saw a pattern emerging
in all 13 continental shelf and oceanic systems they studied:
The sea was a much more bountiful place a few decades ago than
they had imagined, and fishing's impact on ocean ecosystems
has been vastly underestimated.
Much of the decline
can be attributed to the advent of "longline
fishing," perfected by the Japanese, in which fishing lines
as long as 60 miles, bearing thousands of hooks, are trailed
behind a single boat. On the open ocean, the study found,
those catches typically declined tenfold -- from about
10 fish per hundred hooks to just one -- in the first
decade of fishing.
Sometimes the declines
were even steeper. In the Gulf of Thailand,
for example, 60 percent of the large finfish, sharks and skates
disappeared during the first five years of industrialized trawl
fishing in the 1960s. Along the narrow continental shelf near
South Georgia island in the South Atlantic, where large predatory
fish once were plentiful, virtually all disappeared after just
two years of intensive fishing in the 1970s.
"The chronic problem
we have in evaluating fisheries is we don't
have good data on the size of a population until the fishing
is well underway, so we didn't really have a way of evaluating
how severe the problem is," said Jane Lubchenco, a professor
of zoology at Oregon State University in Corvallis. "What
Myers
and Worm have done is a laborious, painstaking, comprehensive
and careful analysis to try to rectify that situation."
Some experts warned
against reading too much into the latest
figures, saying it is unreasonable to expect pristine population
levels when an increasing share of the world's growing population
is turning to fish.
"The expected
outcome of fishing is that stocks will decline,"
said Michael Sissenwine, director of scientific programs with
the National Marine Fisheries Service, which this week released
a relatively upbeat annual assessment of U.S. fish populations.
"Even with very efficient sustainability plans in place you
have to expect declines, sometimes of 50 percent or more.
The issue is how much of a decline is reasonable and sustainable."
According to the U.S.
figures released this week, American
fisheries have been experiencing "steady, incremental improvement,"
with some species once in trouble now "fully rebuilt"
and scores
of other species "recovering." But the Canadian report
calls
into question the meaning of those terms. Is it fair, some
experts asked, to call a population "rebuilt" when it
has
been restored to the level of a decade ago -- a level already
90 percent below what it was before the trawlers came?
"The issue of
shifting baselines is critical," said Lee Crockett,
executive director of the Marine Fish Conservation Network,
a national coalition of more than 150 commercial and recreational
fishing interests and environmental groups, which has criticized
the U.S. reporting system as a politicized overstatement
of ecosystem health.
Zeke Grader, executive
director of the Pacific Coast Federation
of Fishermen's Associations -- the West Coast's largest
organization of commercial fishermen -- pointed to Alaska's
recent successes in achieving sustainable fishing practices
as evidence that there are "glimmers of hope." Nonetheless,
he acknowledged, "we need to do much better."
The Canadian report
does not focus on solutions -- two major
U.S.-based fisheries commissions are expected to release
recommendations soon -- but Myers said the key is to reduce,
at least temporarily, catches in many areas.
"If stocks were
restored to higher abundance, we could get
just as much fish out of the ocean by putting in only
one-third to one-tenth of the effort," he said. "It
would
be difficult for fishermen initially, but they will see the
gains in the long run."
Others have called
for the creation of a network of undersea
reserves; a reduction in fishing industry subsidies; and
improved technology to reduce the unintended "bycatch,"
which accounts for as much as 25 percent of each haul and
is typically killed and tossed back to sea.
© 2003 The Washington
Post Company
