Canada and the World
Current Events with a Canadian Perspective
Last update
18 April 2011
Marine Life is Disappearing
The coming of industrial scale fishing about 150 years
ago has brought havoc to the world’s marine stocks
John Cabot sailed across the Atlantic Ocean in 1497 to what he called “New Founde Lande.” He reported that the cod were so numerous in the water off the island’s coast that “they sometimes stayed his shippes.”
Fishing itself was a poor test of skill because, as Cabot said, cod could be caught by dropping a basket in the water and hauling up the catch. Within a few years, Portuguese, Spanish, French, and English fishers were crossing the Atlantic to harvest this rich resource.
By 1550, more than 400 ships a season were crossing the Atlantic to take cod from the Grand Banks fishing grounds. In European Fisheries History, Carolyn Scearce writes (August 2009) that a victim of the cod fishery were the Great Auks “which were frequently caught, quartered, and used as cod fish bait. This practice, along with egg harvesting, drove the species to extinction by the 19th century.”
A foretaste of what was to come?
And, it wasn’t just off Newfoundland where the bounty of the sea was so rich.
An ancient document from Sicily in 1153 tells of the North Atlantic as having “animals of such great size that the inhabitants of the islands use their bones and vertebrae in place of wood to build houses.”
British documents from the 17th and 18th centuries speak of huge pods of blue whales, orcas, and sharks turning the waters off Cornwall dark with their mass.
A dump of oyster shells near Poole on England’s south coast, dating from the 10th through to the 14th centuries, contains the remains of between 3.8 million and 7.6 million shellfish.
The story of abundance was the same along the Atlantic seaboard. Captain John Smith wrote in his diary in the 1600s about teeming masses of striped bass. The first President of the United States, George Washington, described the “prodigious mass of fish” in the Atlantic. He noted sturgeon that were four metres long and oysters as big across as dinner plates.
Technology Changes Fishing
But, it wasn’t long before technology started to improve the size of catches and reduce populations of the fish.
In the 1860s, British drift net herring fishers were claiming that longliners using baited hooks were taking too many fish. The government struck a commission in 1862 to look into the problem under Thomas Huxley.
Carolyn Scearce writes that the commission dismissed the concerns of the drift net fishers and “declared the complaints to be unscientific. Huxley held the view that nature was almost infinitely resilient and would adapt to any pressure that humans could exert on the environment. This belief was shared by many not only through the nineteenth century but well into the twentieth.”
Steam-
stay at sea longer, and use bigger nets that could go deeper. All this added up to landing more fish. So, more alarm bells were going off and the U.K. government launched another enquiry in 1885 into the damage trawling might be causing to fish stocks. The enquiry was inconclusive because there were no statistics by which to measure decline.
Officials started to collect data on the fish landed and, by the start of the 20th century, there were more signs of trouble in the Atlantic fisheries and elsewhere in the world.
Until the second half of the 20th century, fishers had been nothing more than hunters. They knew where the fish were likely to be, but their nets could still come up filled with nothing but seaweed. Then, the equipment started to get more sophisticated; echo sounders, radar, even satellite tracking helped captains locate schools of fish.
Huge factory ships took to the waves; trawlers could now unload their catches without returning to port. That meant more time fishing, and the electronic locating equipment took much of the guesswork out of the job.
Catches Go up while the Stock Declines
In the United States, Atlantic halibut were so depleted that the commercial catch had to be stopped in the early 1900s. On the West Coast in the 1930s, the legendary sardine fishery collapsed. Other countries also began to suffer the consequences of overfishing.
Here’s a bit of history from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO): “For the two decades following 1950, world marine and inland capture fisheries production increased on average by as much as six percent per year, trebling from 18 million tonnes in 1950 to 56 million tonnes in 1969.
“During the 1970s and 1980s, the average rate of increase declined to two percent per year, falling to almost zero in the 1990s. This levelling off of the total catch follows the general trend of most of the world’s fishing areas, which have apparently reached their maximum potential for capture fisheries production, with the majority of stocks being fully exploited. It is therefore very unlikely that substantial increases in total catch will be obtained.”
Peruvian Anchovy Disaster
In the 1970s in Peru, the anchovy fishery, one of the largest in the world, hit a disaster. In part, the collapse was blamed on the El Nino warm water ocean current, but overfishing was a major cause.
Beached Peruvian fishing boats.
It’s a classic story that has been repeated over and over again in fisheries worldwide. According to a U.S. Library of Congress paper, there were signs the Peruvian anchovy stocks were being overfished in the 1960s and that the catch should be nine million tonnes a year, maximum.
“In 1965 the government attempted to limit the annual fish catch to seven million tonnes but without success, partly because investments in ships and processing facilities greatly exceeded that level. By the late 1960s, a finite resource was being depleted. In 1970, the anchovy catch peaked at over 12 million tonnes.”
By 1973, the catch was just four million tonnes and much of Peru’s fishing fleet was beached. Since, then there has been some recovery.
Most Stocks now Overfished
More recently, (May 4, 2010), Ruth Thurston and her colleagues wrote in Nature Communications that “In 2009, the European Commission estimated that 88 percent of monitored marine fish stocks were overfished, on the basis of data that go back 20 to 40 years and depending on the species investigated.”
The Worldwatch Institute (Worldwatch Paper 120, July 1994) said that all fishing grounds in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, as well as the Mediterranean and Black Seas were in decline. “This is a global problem,” the Institute wrote, “that has already caused armed confrontations between fishing nations, gunfire between fishers, and hunger in the developing world. If current mismanagement continues, we can expect a future in which millions of fishers are out of work, a future in which traditional fishing cultures from Nova Scotia to Malaysia disappear.”
By the mid-
In a 2003 article in Nature, Ransom A. Myers and Boris Worm wrote “…we estimate that
large predatory fish (grouper, cod, sea bass, sole, etc.) biomass today is only about
10 percent of pre-
Dire Predictions for Future
Writing for BBC News in November 2006 Richard Black points out that, “There will be virtually nothing left to fish from the seas by the middle of the century if current trends continue, according to a major scientific study.”
Black based his statement on a 2006 study that was published in Science that predicts
a “global collapse” of ocean biodiversity due to overfishing; all species currently
fished, they said, would be gone by 2048.
The research leader, Boris Worm, from Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia is quoted as saying all segments of the marine biosystem are important to all the others: “if you remove parts, particularly at the bottom, it’s detrimental to everything on top and threatens the whole structure.”
Researchers working on the Census of Marine Life have uncovered disturbing data. Poul Holm is a professor of environmental history at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland and he heads up the History of Marine Animals Populations project. The Globe and Mail (November 2009) quotes Dr. Holm as saying that today there are 85 to 90 percent fewer marine animals in the world’s oceans than there once were. “We can now confirm,” Holm says, “this is a global picture, fairly consistent in the developed and developing world.”
Despite the wealth of information that the world’s capture fisheries are in serious trouble, the plunder of the oceans continues. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) the 2008 haul from the sea measured 89,740,919 tonnes, about 38 percent of which is caught by Chinese fishers.
In its 2008 report, The State of the World’s Fisheries and Aquaculture, the FAO said
“Most of the stocks of the top ten species, which together account for about 30 percent
of world marine capture fisheries production in terms of quantity, are fully exploited
or overexploited. The areas showing the highest proportions of fully-
Sources
“European Fisheries History: Pre-
U.S. Library of Congress Country Studies. Peru.
“The Effects of 118 Years of Industrial Fishing on U.K. Bottom Trawl Fisheries.” Ruth Thurston et al, Nature Communications, May 4, 2010.
“Net Loss: Fish, Jobs, and the Marine Environment.” Peter Weber, Worldwatch Paper, July 1994.
“Rapid Worldwide Depletion of Predatory Fish Communities.” Ransom A. Myers & Boris Worm, Nature, May 15, 2003.
“ ‘Only 50 Years Left’ for Sea Fishery.” Richard Black, BBC News, November 2, 2006.
“Bad News, and Good News in our Emptying Oceans.” Anne McIlroy, Globe and Mail, November 22, 2009.
“The State of the World’s Fisheries and Aquaculture 2008.” FAO.
© Canada and the World, April 2011
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“You and I are probably members of the last generation who will sit down at dinner tables to things as exotic as grouper – or cod, even.”
Jeffrey Graham, fish biologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography
FISHING GONE
Probably the most spectacular case of a mismanaged fishery is the Aral Sea. Because nobody was thinking more than one step ahead, the Aral Sea is an environmental nightmare. It used to have 24 native species of fish, but they’ve vanished. It used to have a fishing industry that landed 48,000 tonnes of fish a year, now all the boats are beached.
The Aral Sea, or what’s left of it, which isn’t much, is in central Asia. The Sea is fed by two rivers, the Amur and the Syr, which rise in the Himalayan Mountains to the south. The region around the Aral Sea receives only a small amount of natural rainfall. So, it’s surprising that bureaucrats in the days of the Soviet Union chose this place to be a showcase for Communist agriculture.
The desert was going to bloom, and the water from Amur and Syr Rivers was going to make this possible. Almost all the water was diverted into ambitious irrigation schemes. By 1960, its water supply cut off, the level of the Aral Sea began to drop. By 1970, the fishing village of Muynak was 10 kilometres inland.
As the Sea shrank it became more salty and slowly began to poison the fish in it. In 1998, Muynak was 75 kilometres from the shoreline and all the fishing had stopped more than a decade earlier.
Says the Huffington Post (April 6, 2010): “Once the world’s fourth-
OUR RESPONSIBILITY
When it comes to oceans and the life they contain, Canada holds one of the world’s biggest responsibilities. Canada has:
- The longest coastline of any country in the world – nearly 244,000 kilometres;
- The world’s second largest continental shelf – 3.7 million square kilometres;
- The largest freshwater lake system on the planet; and,
- About 1,100 fish species in Canadian waters, as well as a wide variety of marine mammals.
The marine environment that Canada is responsible for protecting covers about five million square kilometres, that’s more than half the country’s land area.
About 15 percent of the world’s animal protein comes from fish and other seafood. Worldwide, about one billion people rely on fish as their main source of animal proteins. About 20 percent of the world’s population derives at least 20 percent of its animal protein intake from fish, and some small island states depend on fish almost exclusively.
Worldwide, capture fisheries were worth about $92 billion annually in 2008.