Article quotes:
"Skyrocketing pressure on small wild fishes may be putting entire marine food webs at great risk."
"The use of forage fish for animal husbandry competes directly with human consumption in some areas of the world," the authors write. Excessive removal of forage fish could also hurt populations of seabirds and marine mammals that rely upon them as food."
"Whatever people take out of the sea needs to be carefully calibrated to ensure that sufficient fish are left to sustain populations of other fish, seabirds and marine mammals which all play a major role in the healthy functioning of the world's oceans."
About menhaden:
Old Professer noted: The problem as these alarmists see it is that there are simply too many humans or humans themselves are harmful to the planet and its pristine waters.
There is no doubt that the large human population and our capability for altering the environment in numerous ways to serve the needs of humanity has an impact on the environment. Resources which serve the needs of humanity have limits beyond which they will become either uneconomic to utilize or insufficient to serve the need which they once served. There are numerous examples of "wild" resources (this does not necessarily mean a biological resource; "wild" is used to indicate a resource which is either not renewable, such as mineral ores, or not acquired in a manner that enables it to resist depletion) that have been substantially depleted by human activity. (Simple example: U.S. East Coast and upper Midwest hardwood forests. Paul Bunyan's out of business in Minnesota, dontcha know.)
In order for humanity to maintain the lifestyle to which it has become accustomed with an increasing population and increasing pressures on natural resources, inefficiencies and waste will have to be reduced and some traditional "time-honored" ways of doing things will have to change.
But I suspect you already knew that.
The menhaden reduction fishery has been controlled at sustainable levls for quite some time. They are a very prolific fish, and their numbers rebound very rapidly after even very extensive fishing pressure. Other species, not forage fish, are not as prolific. Atlantic cod and the other heavily fished groundfish are not returning in numbers people would like. Those are of far greater concern, IMO.
If they’re being over fished then that’s a problem. But that’s a problem with the over fishing not with the use. When captured fish becomes food for ANYTHING it’s not wasted, the headline and core of the article are wrong, harvesting food and making it food is fine. If we’re harvesting too much well then we need to deal with that, but how it’s being used doesn’t determine if it’s too much, the existence of a breeding population of the creature and things that naturally feed on the thing determines if it’s too much.
Sorry, this is alarmist baloney. But then, Cogitator, you've shown that you swallow alarmism hook, line and sinker. (Yes, I did read your 'about' page. It told me all I needed to know.)
The concept of sustainability assumes a static nature system. There is no such principle in nature as sustainability. All creatures seek to exterminate other creatures. When that food supply drops below harvestable levels it is abandoned for another or the predator dies out.
The extermination rate is nearly 99% as a function of natural selection. Why are these dummies trying to fool with Mother Nature?
The assumption that humans as arguably the dominant species should act in ways that contradict natural law is based on anxiety laden psychology, not science. It is our duty to wipe out every species possible. Only then will they be replaced with a rainbow of new species. You gotta love nature.