Running out of fish?

Like seafood? So does everyone else, apparently. We're running out of sustainable fishing in our oceans. We essentially have nowhere left to go. According to an article in ScienceDaily, the University of British Columbia in collaboration with the National Geographic Society has conducted a study on the spatial expansion of global fisheries. The study indicated the "no fish left behind" mentality of corporate-run fisheries. That mentality is exactly why sources like bluefin tuna (as per a previous article on this site) are disappearing at an alarming rate and running the risk of becoming an endangered species. See an excerpt below from ScienceDaily.

'No Fish Left Behind' Approach Leaves Earth With Nowhere Left to Fish, Study Finds

ScienceDaily (Dec. 3, 2010) — Earth has run out of room to expand fisheries, according to a new study led by University of British Columbia researchers that charts the systematic expansion of industrialized fisheries.

In collaboration with the National Geographic Society and published in the online journal PLoS ONE, the study is the first to measure the spatial expansion of global fisheries. It reveals that fisheries expanded at a rate of one million sq. kilometres per year from the 1950s to the end of the 1970s. The rate of expansion more than tripled in the 1980s and early 1990s -- to roughly the size of Brazil's Amazon rain forest every year.

Between 1950 and 2005, the spatial expansion of fisheries started from the coastal waters off the North Atlantic and Northwest Pacific, reached into the high seas and southward into the Southern Hemisphere at a rate of almost one degree latitude per year. It was accompanied by a nearly five-fold increase in catch, from 19 million tonnes in 1950, to a peak of 90 million tonnes in the late 1980s, and dropping to 87 million tonnes in 2005, according to the study.

"The decline of spatial expansion since the mid-1990s is not a reflection of successful conservation efforts but rather an indication that we've simply run out of room to expand fisheries," says Wilf Swartz, a PhD student at UBC Fisheries Centre and lead author of the study.

Click here to read more of the article.

Image courtesy of ScienceDaily.

Comments

[all women stalk]

With the rapid population growth plus the global warming that have brought changes especially in the salinity of seawater, fishes are now in its depleting stage. Studies showed that there are now lesser fishing grounds that we can get fish and this means less supply. So what will be the next? Hunger and poverty, this is an alarming issue. We have to do something about it before it is too late.