Fish are friends not food
There are many threats that face the ocean and the environment in the 21st century, today we are going to discuss one of those threats..
One of the biggest threats to sharks is overfishing. This is a direct threat not only to sharks, but to all marine species. To supply the ever-growing seafood demand around the world, the fishing industry is emptying our oceans. The mid 20th Century, saw the introduction of refrigeration on ships, powered drums to pull in nets and synthetic materials to make stronger nets and lines. The fishing industry suddenly had the ability to stay out at sea for much longer, fish much further out to sea and therefore catch and store many times more fish than they had done before. For a few decades the global catch increased rapidly, quadrupling in just 35 years (as seen in the graph below). Until around 1985, while the capacity of the fishing industry continued to rise, the global catch stopped rising. The oceans could not keep up with the hunt.
Roughly 75% of fisheries were being maximally exploited or over exploited. The fish species could not reproduce quickly enough to maintain numbers in the ocean. The following graphs from a UN report in 2020 assessing the state of world fisheries and agriculture, shows the changes we just covered and the impact of the continued pressure on our oceans, resulting in an increasing number of fish stocks being over exploited in the last 40 years.
There are a number of fishing methods which are both destructive and wasteful in a way that just would not be allowed in any other industry. The scary fact is that in the oceans these methods are legal.
“By the end of the 20th century, up to 90 percent of the sharks, tuna, swordfish, marlins, groupers, turtles, whales, and many other large creatures that prospered in the Gulf for millions of years had been depleted by overfishing.”
Bycatch is one of the biggest problems associated with industrial fishing. This is the capture of non-target species, which are either discarded (thrown back into the sea) dead or alive or kept as commercially valuable species. Although there are efforts to reduce the amount of bycatch caught by using new adjusted fishing gear and numerous regulations across many countries trying to avoid such large amounts of waste, bycatch rates of commercial fishing vessels are still high. The bycatch rates vary according to which method is being used but on average, industrial fishing has a bycatch rate of 40%! According to a report by Oceana in 2014, global bycatch is still as high as 30 billion kilograms a year.
There are a number of different methods of fishing, two of the most destructive and wasteful are Long Lining and Bottom Trawling.
The method of ‘Long Lining’ is one of the main methods to catch large pelagic fish such as tuna and swordfish. It involves letting out a line behind the fishing boat that can be up to 60km long! Along this line there are thousands of baited hooks, which in some cases are left in the water for several days at a time. This method is extremely un-selective and any animal that bites the bait risks being caught on the hook, often resulting in a slow and painful death. This can include dolphins, turtles, albatrosses, sea-lions and of course, sharks.
There are a few methods that fishing boats use to reduce this bycatch which have proved effective for some species but still many animals are killed needlessly to catch fish for our restaurants and supermarkets. This method of fishing has been linked with the worrying decline of the world’s albatross species among others. A study published by the RSPB in 2011 stated that “17 out of 22 albatross species are threatened with extinction, with the main threat coming from mortality in fisheries.”
“If you’re overfishing at the top of the food chain, and acidifying the ocean at the bottom, you’re creating a squeeze that could conceivably collapse the whole system”
Another highly destructive method of fishing is ‘Bottom Trawling’. This method is a commonly used method to catch bottom dwelling animals such as shrimp, cod, haddock, plaice, sole and whiting. To catch these animals a large net is dropped into the ocean, sometimes thousands of metres deep. Once on the seafloor this net is dragged along collecting all marine life in its path and destroying sensitive marine ecosystems under its heavy rollers. Therefore, not only does this fishing method completely destroy ecosystems that may have been developing for thousands of years in just a few minutes, but also catches a huge amount and variety of animals that are not the target species. In order to emphasise the amount of waste that this type of fishing incurs, I will use shrimp fishing as an example. This popular food is caught using one of the most wasteful of all the fishing methods. Shrimp fishing can have a bycatch ratio of up to 20:1, meaning some catches will have 95% bycatch and only 5% shrimp in the net (https://assets.wwf.org.uk/downloads/bycatch_paper.pdf). To put this into perspective, if a waiter was to bring out all of the marine life caught to supply you with your food, they would not only bring a plate of around 200g of shrimp, but they would also bring around 4kg of dead marine life that died in order to get that small amount of shrimp onto your plate.
Imagine if these sorts of methods were used on land. Imagine dragging a huge net through a jungle to catch a few specific species. In the process all the trees, which may have been growing there for thousands of years are toppled. All the wildlife in the way of the net are caught, the large and the small. All that’s left behind is a bare barren landscape that used to be a vibrant ecosystem This would not be deemed an acceptable farming method, let alone be legal. However, this is legal in the ocean and it is exactly what is happening around the world, daily. The only difference is that it is out of sight, under the waves. From the coast to thousands of miles out to sea, no-one sees the damage being done.
““In the end, we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, we will understand only what we are taught””
How can you help?
Be aware of the food you put on your plate. If you do still eat seafood, find out what method is used to catch the fish and therefore the impact of getting it onto your plate has had. Was it caught through destructive methods such as bottom trawling, alongside countless endangered species on a long line? These are the questions we need to be asking ourselves before we buy seafood.
Good fish guides such as the ones produced by WWF and the Marine Conservation Society are great tools to check the sustainability of the seafood you are eating to ensure that you are minimising the effect your choices are having on our oceans
https://www.mcsuk.org/goodfishguide/search
https://wwf.panda.org/get_involved/live_green/out_shopping/seafood_guides/
To have the biggest positive impact on our oceans, the best option would be to completely cut seafood out of your diet. I use bees as an example of why this is so. As we know, bee populations are rapidly declining and need protection, for the health and longevity of all of our food production. Given this, would you still think it is acceptable to kill the bees in your garden? You aren’t necessarily killing the bees that are pollinating our food crops, but it still has a negative impact on a strained population. In other words, when an ecosystem is under massive strain already, sustainably caught fish is an improvement to unsustainably caught fish, but any fish caught is still going to be increasing the strain on an already over-exploited ecosystem.
Please share this message with as many people as you can. I like to think that if more people were aware of the threat that the fishing industry is having on our oceans, they too will make changes. Our biggest problem is that most people aren’t aware of this issue. As a society, we are disconnected about where the food on the supermarket shelves comes from, and the direct impacts this has on ecosystems, both terrestrial and marine.
We must act now if we are to save our oceans.
BE BOLD.
TAKE ACTION.