Feasting on Ecocide!

Over the past decade, countries across the world have been discussing the profound damage that has been occurring through deep-sea fishing. The Pew Environmental Group has been tracking the situation:

Since 2004, the international community, through the United Nations (U.N.) General Assembly, has called on fishing countries and regional fisheries management organizations (RFMOs) to urgently act to protect deep-sea life. Beginning in 2006, U.N. resolutions that outlined a plan to safeguard this fragile biodiversity passed. Many governments supported an outright moratorium on high-seas bottom trawling, but countries operating deep-sea vessels instead promised to take action to make fisheries more sustainable and protect vulnerable marine ecosystems. Ultimately, they agreed to conduct a formal assessment after a few years to determine how well the resolutions had been implemented.

Preliminary findings released in June 2011 by the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition (DSCC), "highlight serious failures by countries and Regional Fisheries Management Organizations (RFMOs) in efforts to protect vulnerable deep-sea biodiversity and high seas fish species."

Research conducted by scientists and published in the journal Marine Policy are recommending a complete halt to all deep sea fishing.  Instead of permitting industrial fleets from disrupting these extremely delicate aquatic ecosystems, scientists are further recommending that fishing be confined to more productive coastal fisheries nearer to consumers.

The following summary from Eurekalert outlines the problem:

Life is mostly sparse in the oceans' cold depths, far from the sunlight that fuels photosynthesis. Food is scarce and life processes happen at a slower pace than near the sea surface. Some deep-sea fishes live more than a century; some deep-sea corals can live more than 4,000 years. When bottom trawlers rip life from the depths, animals adapted to life in deep-sea time can't repopulate on human time scales. Powerful fishing technologies are overwhelming them. 

"The deep sea is the world's worst place to catch fish" says marine ecologist Dr. Elliott Norse, the study's lead author and President of the Marine Conservation Institute in Bellevue, Washington USA. "Deep-sea fishes are especially vulnerable because they can't repopulate quickly after being overfished." 

The deep sea provides less than 1% of the world's seafood. But fishing there, especially bottom trawling, causes profound, lasting damage to fishes and life on the seafloor, such as deep-sea corals, these experts say. 

Since the 1970s, when coastal fisheries were overexploited, commercial fishing fleets have moved further offshore and into deeper waters. Some now fish more than a mile deep. 

"Because these fish grow slowly and live a long time, they can only sustain a very low rate of fishing," says author Dr. Selina Heppell, a marine fisheries ecologist at Oregon State University. "On the high seas, it is impossible to control or even monitor the amount of fishing that is occurring. The effects on local populations can be devastating."

The Washington Post has a good article discussing the topic and revealing the moral cowardice of the Europeans in reigning in their colleagues in Portugal, Spain, France, and Denmark from destroying these ecosystems.

Screw the Pandas! It's Insects, Fungi, & Phytoplankton we Should Care About

Last week an important article relating to the profound decline in phytoplankton levels across the planet's oceans was released in Nature and briefly discussed on this blog.

The implication that marine ecosystems across the globe may be on the verge of collapse has elicited little public antipathy or official governmental concern.  Instead, the world continues to lumber onwards toward environmental armageddon, with the same willful ignorance that has dominated our species for millennia.  Few people wish to see the great pandas of China to go extinct, yet the Panda's overall necessity to the survival of humanity on the planet is zero.  That however, cannot be said of scores of plants, animals, and microscopic microorganisms that are essential to the maintenance and survivability of ecosystems everywhere. 

For the past two decades, biologists have been sending warnings to the rest of humanity that anthropogenic activities are precipitating a sixth massive extinction of life across the planet.  E.O. Wilson, for example, estimated in 1993 that the Earth is losing approximately thirty thousand species per year.   Human population expansion through the growth of civilization and industrialization, have reduced global biodiversity and species fitness to levels where our own existence has become imperilled.

In addition to marine phytoplankton, there are numerous species that are in decline, which are necessary for our civilization.  Pollinators, such as honeybees, have been in rapid decline over the past decade.  A third of everything humans consume and 90% of commercial crops are dependant upon honeybee pollination.  No single causative agent has been found to explain the dramatic and unsustainable decreases of these essential insects.  Although, pollution, pesticides, invasive foreign parasites and pathogens, and natural habitat decline, have all been cited as potential sources.

In the oceans, coral reefs are also being destroyed by pollution, ocean acidification, and habitat destruction.  Large ocean fish -like tuna, salmon, and swordfish- populations have either collapsed are on the verge of doing so.  Whales, dolphins, ocean faring birds like albatrosses, and other predatory fish are found to be emaciated and dying from starvation across the globe.  Entire swaths of the ocean are no longer capable of sustaining any life and have become dead zones, which are spreading rapidly.

Joining the endangered list are saprophytic organisms, such as beetles, fungi, and bacteria that decompose dead organic matter and facilitate in the cycling of nutrients.  In Europe, for example, research has estimated that 24% saprophilx beetles are under threat.

Thousands of other species, some of which we are not even aware of, are being decimated.  The survival of these species is inexorably linked to our own species.  If we as a collective cannot understand this or demand to advocate selfishness in the face of catastrophe, then there is no need to for further examination or discussion, because we will have succumb to the logic of mass suicide.

Fishing fleet working 17 times harder than in 1880s to make same catch

UK researchers who have analyzed fishing data going back 118 years, have found that current trawl fishing fleets have to work 17 times harder to catch the same amount of fish today as it did when most of its boats were powered by sail. 

As described in EurkeAlert!

They found that trawl fish landings peaked in 1937, 14 times higher than today, and the availability of bottom-living fish to the fleet fell by 94 per cent.

The findings are the result of a study using previously overlooked records and suggest the decline in stocks of popular fish such as cod, haddock and plaice is far more profound than previously thought.

The research is published in Nature Communications, the new online science journal from the publishers of Nature.

Ruth Thurstan, lead author of the study from the University of York's Environment Department, said: "We were astonished to discover that we landed over four times more fish into England and Wales in 1889 than we do today.

"For all its technological sophistication and raw power, today's trawl fishing fleet has far less success than its sail-powered equivalent of the late 19th century because of the sharp declines in fish abundance."

The findings suggest that the damage to fisheries is greater and has taken place over a much longer period than previously acknowledged, pre-dating developments such as the Common Fisheries Policy which are usually blamed for declining stocks.

Simon Brockington, Head of Conservation at the Marine Conservation Society and an author of the study, said: "Over a century of intensive trawl fishing has severely depleted UK seas of bottom living fish like halibut, turbot, haddock and plaice.

"It is vital that governments recognise the changes that have taken place. The reform of the Common Fisheries Policy gives an opportunity to set stock protection and recovery targets that are reflective of the historical productivity of the sea."

The study calculated 'landings of fish per unit of fishing power' (LPUP) from 1889 to 2007 to give an indication of changes in the amount of fish available for capture by the fishing fleet. In that time, LPUP declined 500 times for halibut, more than 100 times for haddock and more than 20 times for plaice, wolffish, hake and ling. Cod has declined by 87 per cent.

Professor Callum Roberts, from the University of York's Environment Department, said: "This research makes clear that the state of UK bottom fisheries – and by implication European fisheries, since the fishing grounds are shared – is far worse than even the most pessimistic of assessments currently in circulation.

"European fish stock assessments, and the management targets based on them, go back only 20 to 40 years. These results should supply an important corrective to the short-termism inherent in fisheries management today."

The Definition of Human Selfishness

Representatives of the human race have voted and decided to liquidate another species in the name of Mammon and short-term economic gain.

Delegates from 175 countries, representing the Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, voted on a series of measures to eliminate international trade on the Bluefin Tuna and a variety of other animals that are posed for extinction.  According to the Washington Post,

The adult population of eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean bluefin tuna has declined 74 percent over the past half-century, much of it in the past decade, and the population has dropped 82 percent in 40 years in the western Atlantic.

The proposal originally initiated by Monaco and agreed upon by the USA and several EU states, failed to achieve a majority position at the Doha, Qatar conference; with 20 nations in favor, 68 against and 30 cowards abstaining. 

Japan the greatest consumer of worldwide Tuna, imports nearly 80 percent of commercially traded Atlantic bluefin.  Similar to its extensive campaign to dissuade any international body from preventing it from harvesting whales, Japan has used its considerable economic clout to prevent limitations on any trade embargo or harvesting constraints in international waters.  Few deny that the motivations behind their stance are purely commercial.  As Susan Lieberman, director of international policy at the Pew Environment Group said, "This was a case of just plain ignoring the science for short-term economic gain."

Japan is not alone in its posturing; however.  Canada, a country that has made itself into an environmental pariah by its fealty to dirty oil-sands production and the persistent refusal by its conservative government to acknowledge and address climate change, has actively sided with the Japanese on the tuna issue.  Canada's Minster of Fisheries, Gail Shea, applauding the defeat of the trade ban and touting Canada's own policies, which have permitted over the decades the devastation of Atlantic fisheries and the current collapse of Pacific Sockeye Salmon.  So when Canadians say they have a plan to manage fishery stocks, you can be certain that that species will be decimated.

To highlight the absurdity of the entire trade system, consider how Bluefin Tuna is cultured in Spanish waters; as relayed by the BBC.  The fish are initially kept alive in off-shore pens, where they are fed vast amounts of expensively caught fish (around 10-kg of feed fish serve to make the tuna put on 1-kg of body weight).  They are then harvested by hand using divers, packaged at a purpose-built factory, and flown -on the same day- to Asian markets.  All this so some silly twit can eat sushi with his/her choice of dipping sauce.

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Additional background stories and commentary on this subject can be found here, here, and here.

Update: Tuna & Ocean Conservation

The Christian Science Monitor has a good article updating the continuing crisis that surrounds the demise of large ocean faring fish like Blue Fin Tuna and what is being done about it by individual nation states and multilateral organizations.

I've already written fairly extensively on the decline of the Blue Fin tuna, the state of global fisheries, and even regional situations such as the Pacific Salmon along the coast of British Columbia, Canada.

To review, the bad news is that despite attempts to limit harvesting to preserve tuna and other species through regional fishery management systems, global fisheries on a whole are in severe crisis. The obvious culprits are global fishing fleets that scavenge the world's oceans using modern vessels, satellite tracking, and sophisticated fishing gear to maximize their haul and profits. The United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has estimated that, "Some 80 percent of commercial fish species are either fully exploited, overexploited, or collapsed." No less than nine of the world's 23 tuna species worldwide are “fully fished” and without immediate action all will face collective extinction in the years to come.

Furthermore, rampant exploitation motivated by commercial interests are again threatening the global commons and the viability of life in the open oceans.

Globally, $9 billion is lost to so-called pirate fishing, according to a study last year by the University of British Columbia and Marine Resource Assessment Group. In the Pacific alone, [illegal, unreported, and unregulated] (IUU) fishing takes 36 percent of the total catch, compared with a 19 percent global average.

These pirate fleets who plunder the global commons are a "huge problem in tuna fisheries across the western Pacific, particularly in “doughnut holes,” international waters between [exclusive economic zones] boundaries. In these waters, reflagged ships often use fish aggregating devices (FADs) that attract juvenile yellowfin tuna."

On the other side, there are international and regional compacts that may come to fruition next year that will give some reprieve to the tuna and other threatened species. For example,

The Obama administration... last month unveiled the outline of a comprehensive “ecosystem-based” plan to restore health to US ocean waters, including coastal fisheries. Among several measures, US fisheries would be pushed toward science-based instead of politically based catch limits. If the plan works, the United States could become a global model: It controls more ocean in its 200-mile exclusive economic zones (EEZ) than any other nation.

To improve the situation the following steps will have to be minimally implemented. They include:

• Restricting gear that is too good at catching fish. Nets with larger holes let younger fish escape, for example.
• Closing hard-hit and breeding areas to fishing to let them recover.
• Drastically reducing the number of fishing vessels chasing the fish.
• Reducing the total allowable catch.

Declining Oceans, Declining Life

On the front page of today's Globe and Mail (Canada), it is reported that the BC sockeye salmon population has "mysteriously" collapsed to a record low for the second summer in three, eliciting international concern among scientists that the species’ long-term survival is threatened. An estimated 10.6-13 million sockeye were expected to return to the Fraser Valley this summer. However, the official count according to the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) is that only a paltry 1.7 million have returned.

Causes:

Ocean temperatures have risen substantially over the past years and researchers state that, “Warm water can affect things like food availability for the fish... [whereas] sockeye are plankton feeders, and plankton of the west coast of B.C. tend to thrive when conditions are cold.” On Aug. 10, the Fraser River temperature was 18.8 C at Qualark Creek, BC, 1.1 degrees higher than the average for that date. As such, "water temperatures in this range may stress migrating sockeye and slow their upstream migration" the US-Canada Pacific Salmon Commission said.

Sea lice that flourish near fish farms are another possible source of decline. "The parasites are known to latch onto young wild salmon heading into the sea and are suspected as a factor in the decline of other wild-salmon populations" along the BC coast.

Alexandra Morton, who several years ago correctly predicted a collapse of pink salmon runs in the Broughton Archipelago because of sea lice infestations, in March warned the same thing could happen to Fraser sockeye. She said researchers used genetic analyses to show Fraser sockeye smolts were getting infested with sea lice in Georgia Strait.

It is too early to ascertain if the current sockeye collapse will be repeated with other species that are expected to return this year; notably pink salmon which are projected to number 17 million.

More Fishy Stories

As a follow up to a previous blog entry on the state of Tuna fish in our oceans, Science magazine has an article outlining new quantitative data on the state of fish populations. The number of species continues to dwindle as human consumption increases and deep water extraction techniques are employed to remove slow-growing and reproducing species.

In 5 of 10 well-studied ecosystems, the average exploitation rate has recently declined and is now at or below the rate predicted to achieve maximum sustainable yield for seven systems. Yet 63% of assessed fish stocks worldwide still require rebuilding, and even lower exploitation rates are needed to reverse the collapse of vulnerable species.

Although, the numbers appear grim and political action remains sluggish as usual, there is more news and discussion of this tragedy of the commons in the leading print papers. The Washington Post has an article titled, "Unpopular, Unfamiliar Fish Species Suffer From Become Seafood." It reveals how the marketing people, seeing coastal populations of cod, red snapper, and other popular species decline (if not collapse) decided to start selling fish that were once considered unpalatable by rebranding the fishes name. Ocean fish once known as slimeheads, goosefish, rock crabs, and Patagonian toothfish have been recast with "tasty" sounding monikers. The slimehead, for example, has been transformed into the "Orange Roughy" and as a result seen its population decimated.

That fishermen have turned to them shows what's left in the ocean. Today's seafood is often yesterday's trash fish and monsters..."People never thought they would be eaten," said Jennifer Jacquet, a biologist at the University of British Columbia. "And as we fish out the world's oceans, we're coming across these species and wondering, 'Can we give them a makeover?' "

It is now obvious that regardless of what is done a large and potentially catastrophic loss of ocean fairing species will be lost. The Science article does give the slight hope that with more reasonable minds and practices, "About half of the depleted species might actually have a chance to recover, the scientists found, if given enough protection."

Tuna: you can almost taste the extinction in each bite!

Tuna fish, (not to be confused with actual “chicken” or ‘chicken of the sea’ as in Jessica Simpson’s case) is one of the great marvels of the oceans. It is considered one of the most evolved fish in the world. Bluefin tuna, for example, can reach speeds of up to 88 km per hour. Along with Mako sharks and Great Whites, the bluefin tuna are homoeotherms; animals that are capable of internally regulating their body temperatures. They are capable of elevating their body temperatures by as much as 25 degrees above the water they swim in, thus making them particularly effective as predators. Bluefin Tuna can migrate across the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, then turn around and do it again.

The bluefin tuna, and to a lesser extent, the yellowfin, are among the most sought-after of big-game fishes. Tuna is the most popular food fish in the world. It is eaten raw, cooked, in sandwiches, in salads, and in cat food. The total worldwide tuna harvest is four million tons. Commercial over fishing, almost exclusively to feed the insatiable Japanese sashimi market, has endangered all populations of bluefin tuna.

The WWF (not the wrestlers you idiot) are predicting that Mediterranean Bluefin Tuna will be extinct by 2012. They have stated that, "The population of tunas that are capable of reproducing – fish aged 4 years or over and weighing more than 35kg – is being wiped out." Ransom Myers, a marine biologist from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, has pointed out the fact that industrial fishing took no more than 10-15 years to virtually liquidate and imperil any new fish community it encountered to a tenth of its previous size. "From giant blue marlin to mighty bluefin tuna, and from tropical groupers to Antarctic cod, industrial fishing has scoured the global ocean”. In fact, scientists predict that the collapse of all ocean fish stocks by 2048.

In a 2003, Dr. Myers published an article in the journal Nature and stated,

Most people also don't know how bad it is for us to be eating so much fish, not only because of the destruction of an ecosystem vital to survival but also because the big predatory fish are full of the toxins and other pollutants that we cast into the oceans. It's not as healthy to eat fish as most people believe.

Due to the ferocious demand for bluefin tuna from Japan where bluefin tuna are considered a delicacy and are used in sushi and sashimi, overfishing is posed to drive the species into extinction. The Economist magazine has an article stating that Monaco, with support from European allies France and Britain, along with the USA are pushing forward in 2010 to have an international ban on the sale of bluefin tuna.

As Prince Albert, Monaco’s ruler, wrote in the Wall Street Journal last month, “The forces of selfishness and stupidity that wiped out the great whales and the northern cod in the last century are steaming ahead at full speed... The bluefin tuna is as endangered as the giant panda and the white rhino.”

Once the oceans have been systematically deprived of life and ecosystem after ecosystem begins to fail, terrestrial environs will also collapse and human civilization too will cease due to our own greed.