No Fish by 2048????

[hornplayer]

This is on Yahoo News this morning! Now, for all my friends who laugh at me when I mention that one fish or another is "endangered," y'all can stop laughing! this is HUGE!
****************

Fish may be off the menu by 2048 if ocean species continue to be lost at the present rate, a study has shown.
A major investigation of marine ecosystems around the world predicts their wholesale collapse in the next 40 years.

If nothing is done to reverse the trend, in a mere four decades, little sustainable fish or seafood will remain.

At this point, commercial fishing will no longer be viable. Cod and chips will become a fondly-remembered British tradition, consigned to history.

The extent of the crisis is revealed in one of the most wide-ranging and thorough studies of marine biodiversity trends ever conducted.

Researchers first analysed the results of 32 experiments that manipulated the fate of marine species on small local scales.

Next they tracked 1,000 years of change in species diversity across 12 coastal areas. In each one they looked at trends affecting between 30 and 80 economically and ecologically important species, drawing information from old archives, fishery records, sediment cores and archaeological data.

Then the team sifted through all the available catch records for 64 ocean-wide regions spanning the years 1950 to 2003. Collectively, these large marine ecosystems (LMEs) produced 83% of global fisheries yields over the past 50 years.

Finally, the scientists investigated the recovery of biodiversity in 48 marine reserves and areas closed to fishing.

Study leader Dr Boris Worm, from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, said: "Species have been disappearing from ocean ecosystems and this trend has recently been accelerating. Now we begin to see some of the consequences. For example, if the long-term trend continues, all fish and seafood species are projected to collapse within my lifetime - by 2048.

[claude]

I saw this on the news this morning. After what has happened to the Cod fishery in Newfoundland, it really isn't much of a stretch to believe that this is possible.

I did have a laugh though about the guy's name: "Dr Boris Worm", great name for a biologist.

[walto]

Take heart, June. Based on all the farms I've seen in Mississippi and Arkansas, there'll still be plenty of catfish.

[Gentle Giant]

The real problem is that too many fish are saving themselves until after marriage. There's nothing more useless than a virgin trout.

[hornplayer]

actuallu, GG one of the big problems is that fish are being caught in large numbers before they ever reproduce, so that the basic stock is dying out.

It's not funny!

[Scott Dolan]

We're all going to die!!!!!!



AGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!

AAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!

[Gentle Giant]

If demand for seafood is high, then that's a good thing and it shows that health experts who've been urging consumers to eat more fish can have an impact. That said, the industry has to devote equal resources to farming and fishing, while fisherfolk have to respect limits (and authorities need to enforce them).

Frankly, I don't think that McD's Filet o Fish has ever been a particularly popular item, except maybe during Lent.


Mmm, doesn't that look appetizing!






I still think fish should fuck more.

[Mike Schwartz]

Originally Posted by Gentle Giant

If demand for seafood is high, then that's a good thing and it shows that health experts who've been urging consumers to eat more fish can have an impact. That said, the industry has to devote equal resources to farming and fishing, while fisherfolk have to respect limits (and authorities need to enforce them).

Frankly, I don't think that McD's Filet o Fish has ever been a particularly popular item, except maybe during Lent.


Mmm, doesn't that look appetizing!

I still think fish should fuck more.

Not if they knew they would turn out like this!

[walto]

Also, after having been intimate with a couple, I can tell you it isn't really all that much fun. Maybe that's part of the problem.

[Gary Sisco]

I'm glad I won't be around for this.

[Scott Dolan]

I'm glad I wasn't around for Walto's fish coupling.

[claude]

Originally Posted by hornplayer

It's not funny!

No, you're right about that. The biggest problem is that once you get into international waters, it's pretty well open season on everything. So, using Newfoundland Cod example, you have freezer-trawlers from Spain (and elsewhere, but Spain is what we most often hear about) wiping out the grand banks while the NF fishing fleet has been grounded by the federal government. Nobody can do a damn thing about it unless some captain screws up his navigation and ends up in Canadian waters. Since these boats bring wealth into communities that are generally not over-flowing in cash the foreign governments sure as hell aren't going to stop them. We did the same thing in our own waters, we subsidized the fisheries until there were no fish left. Now, the foreign fisheries are picking up what little we missed, it's a bloody mess.

[Gentle Giant]

Sounds like a job for Mr. Limpet!

[Dr Dave]

A second opinion:

November 4, 2006
The New York Times
Op-Ed Columnist
Where the Tuna Roam
By JOHN TIERNEY

Contrary to what you may have heard, humanity will not run out of seafood in your lifetime or anyone else’s. But as false alarms go, this is a useful one.

The prospect of a world without sushi bars or Charlie the Tuna comes from the new issue of Science, which contains a graph projecting the collapse of all of the planet’s fisheries by 2048 — a wonderfully precise-sounding prediction that has approximately zero chance of coming true. Yet the researchers are right about fish being in trouble. Charlie is like the buffalo that once roamed the West.

If 19th-century researchers had kept tabs on buffalo hunts, they could have drawn a similar graph of doom. And if they wanted their study to make front-page headlines, they could have warned that overhunting doomed future inhabitants of the Great Plains to live in a world without fresh meat.

Today that sounds silly. You can get all the beef — or buffalo meat — you want from Western ranchers. But to the first settlers, the Great Plains posed the same problem as the oceans today: it was a vast, open area where there seemed to be no way to protect animals against relentless human predators. Unlike in the East, the settlers couldn’t build fences around herds of cattle because there wasn’t wood available on the treeless prairies.

But animals thrived in the West once the settlers divvied up the land and ingeniously devised new ways to protect their livestock. They hired cowboys and worked out a system of branding cattle to distinguish their own at roundup time (and also compensate one another when a rancher’s cattle grazed on another’s grass). Then in the 1870s came a technological innovation: barbed wire, which turned the Great Plains from an open range into a patchwork of enclosed ranches.

Today the ocean is still pretty much an open range, and the fish are suffering the consequences.

In theory, governments are supposed to protect fisheries for future generations by limiting the annual catch; in practice, politicians are loath to impose limits that will hurt the fishing industry before the next election.

Like the old buffalo hunters, fishermen have a personal incentive to make as much as they can this year, even if they’re destroying their own profession in the process. They figure any fish they don’t take for themselves will just be taken by someone else. As a result of their short-term thinking, fisheries around the world have been devastated.

But the situation is far from hopeless. Many American fish stocks are thriving, as Cornelia Dean reported in The Times. A quiet revolution has occurred in certain American waters, like the halibut fishery of Alaska, and in countries like Canada, Iceland, New Zealand and Australia. Fishermen have discovered the same tool used by settlers on the Great Plains: property rights.

These fishermen haven’t figured out how to brand their animals or fence the ocean. But they’ve essentially divvied up the animals just as cattlemen once did. They no longer let anyone with a boat rush out to catch as many fish as he can. Each fisherman has to buy what’s called a transferable quota, giving him the right to a certain percentage of the annual catch. The quotas are bought and sold on the open market like shares of stock.

Once they’ve made these investments, the fishermen start thinking long term. They want to make money when they retire and sell their quotas, and they know the selling price will depend on how healthy the fishery is. So instead of competing to overfish, instead of fighting with regulators and scientists, they make sure that sensible limits are set on the overall catch so that there are plenty of fish left to breed.

When fishermen see the results of this system — more fish in the ocean each year, more money in their bank accounts — they become devout stewards of the environment. The problem is persuading them to adopt the system in the first place. In most places they’re so used to the idea of the ocean as a range open to anyone that they resist having to buy their way into it.

If this week’s scare story changes their minds, it’ll do some good. But one way or another, fishermen will be smart enough to avert the Tunageddon of 2048. This range will be fenced off long before then.

-30-

[Vince Kargatis]

Originally Posted by Dr Dave

A second opinion:
...By JOHN TIERNEY

...the new issue of Science, which contains a graph projecting the collapse of all of the planet’s fisheries by 2048 — a wonderfully precise-sounding prediction that has approximately zero chance of coming true.

Coincidentally, he spends zero time justifying his disagreement.

[hornplayer]

I thought the same thing, Vince, but then its not billed as more than an "opinion!"

[Dr Dave]

Originally Posted by Vince Kargatis

Coincidentally, he spends zero time justifying his disagreement.

All Tierney is saying--I think--is that the problem of over-fishing is not unsolvable--and says why he thinks so--and that it is, in his opinion, likely to be solved. It's not as though he's challenging the results of the study.

In that sense, I'm inclined to agree. There is a problem, and it is a big one, but it can--and quite possibly will--be solved through some combination of regulation and market incentives.

[hornplayer]

That's all well and good, except this is a problem that has been decades in the m aking, and there have been lots of warnings sounded, especialy over the last several years, that have been met mostly with the laissez-faire attitude and joking that has characterized this thread.

Im not saying it can't be solved, but just like global warming, I think most folks think we can "keep on waiting."

[Vince Kargatis]

The study authors themselves think the problem is manageable. The projection is conditional, so Tierney presented his "zero chance" statement in a pretty silly way. Otherwise his ideas bear consideration, sure.

[Gary Sisco]

Phish broke up years ago.

[claude]

Originally Posted by Dr Dave

AThe prospect of a world without sushi bars or Charlie the Tuna comes from the new issue of Science, which contains a graph projecting the collapse of all of the planet’s fisheries by 2048 — a wonderfully precise-sounding prediction that has approximately zero chance of coming true. Yet the researchers are right about fish being in trouble. Charlie is like the buffalo that once roamed the West.

If 19th-century researchers had kept tabs on buffalo hunts, they could have drawn a similar graph of doom. And if they wanted their study to make front-page headlines, they could have warned that overhunting doomed future inhabitants of the Great Plains to live in a world without fresh meat.

Wild buffalo are pretty much a thing of the past and I'm guess that regardless of what happens in the sea there will be farmed salmon (& tuna etc.). But those aren't the same thing and if this cat doesn't think that there are any implications for the bio-diversity of the ocean I don't have any interest in his opinion since it's complete bullshit.