An estimated 25% of all commercial fish caught for human consumption may be killed and dumped overboard as “by- catch”. By-catch makes up all the fish caught that are the wrong size, sex or species, not to mention countless sea birds, marine animals and other precious sea life that gets caught and killed in mile after mile of multinational commercial fish nets.
Up to 70% of the Earth’s commercial fishing stock may be depleted, exploited and overfished. “Fish wars” may escalate as overcapitalized fishing fleets chase fewer and fewer fish. The buying public should expect more deceptive public relations ploys and false advertising created to make us feel there are plenty of fish left to kill.
Commercial fishing fleets are catching the fish you eat faster than the fish can reproduce. About 70% of the planet’s commercial marine fish population is currently being fully fished-out, overexploited, depleted, or in certain areas is only slowly recovering. Hundreds of marine biologists and scientists, worldwide, agree that there has been a rapid and unprecedented decline in fishing populations, devastating and causing the collapse of many fisheries worldwide, possibly even leading to more shark attacks on humans since the sharks’ food supply may be dwindling fast.
The problem seems to be too much commercial fishing “firepower” hunting down fewer and fewer fish. International government fishing fleets use 80 mile wide, baited fishing lines with thousands of hooks called “longlines”, known for their maximum fish-catching efficiency.
There are many destructive fishing methods like “bottom trawling” which crushes and buries any bottom-dwelling species as it is scooping them up for harvest. This occurs when they scour large areas of seabeds by dragging heavily weighted nets across the bottom of the sea to scoop up bottom feeders like shrimp, scallops and cod. However, in the process the heavy nets bury lobsters, clams, corals and other sea creatures.
The effects of trawling are similar to clearcutting forests yet cover an underwater territory 15 times greater than the area of forests that are clear cut yearly. Trawling accounts for most of the fish caught commercially but this type of indiscriminate rape of the planet’s resources takes a grisly toll. Moreover, it also slaughters countless sea turtles, dolphin, whales and other sea creatures which accidentally get caught in the netting. This is called “bycatch”.
Dolphin, turtle, whale bycatch and so on is simply tossed back into the sea dead and dying and is considered to be waste! Ninety nine per cent of the planet’s 30 million species live in the oceans with less than 1% of them living on land or in fresh water. Overfishing, industrial pollution and the agricultural run-off of pesticides has left “dead zones” in too many parts of the world and contributed to new diseases in fish as well as possibly contributed to global warming too. Too much is taken from the sea and too many pollutants are put back into the sea. In the long run it may be very unfortunate that more taxpayer dollars are spent studying the oceans of Mars than studying the oceans on Earth.
SUPPLEMENTAL SOURCES: NUTRITION ACTION HEALTH LETTER JUNE 1998 and FT. LAUDERDALE SUN SENTINEL NEWSPAPER 1/7/98 and ADBUSTERS MAGAZINE SPRING 1997