Complete collapse of North Atlantic fishing predicted

New Scientist ^ | 10:30 18 February 02 | Kurt Kleiner, Boston

[semper_libertas]

Complete collapse of North Atlantic fishing predicted

The entire North Atlantic is being so severely overfished that it may completely collapse by 2010, reveals the first comprehensive survey of the entire ocean's fishery.

"We'll all be eating jellyfish sandwiches," says Reg Watson, a fisheries scientist at the University of British Columbia. Putting new ocean-wide management plans into place is the only way to reverse the trend, Watson and his colleagues say.

Concentrations of biomass of "table" fish have disappeared

North Atlantic catches have fallen by half since 1950, despite a tripling of the effort put into catching them. The total number of fish in the ocean has fallen even further, they say, with just one sixth as many high-quality "table fish" like cod and tuna as there were in 1900. Fish prices have risen six fold in real terms in 50 years.

The shortage of table fish has forced a switch to other species. "The jellyfish sandwich is not a metaphor - jellyfish is being exported from the US," says Daniel Pauly, also at the University of British Columbia. "In the Gulf of Maine people were catching cod a few decades ago. Now they're catching sea cucumber. By earlier standards, these things are repulsive," he says.

Off limits

The only hope for the fishery is to drastically limit fishing, for instance by declaring large portions of the ocean off-limits and at the same time reducing the number of fishing ships. Piecemeal efforts to protect certain fisheries have only caused the fishing fleet to overfish somewhere else, such as west Africa.

"It's like shuffling the deckchairs on the Titanic," says Andrew Rosenberg, at the University of New Hampshire. He says the number of boats must be reduced: "Less is actually more with fisheries. If you fish less you get more fish."

Normally, falling catches would drive some fishers out of business. But government subsidies actually encourage overfishing, Watson says, with subsidies totalling about $2.5 billion a year in the North Atlantic.

However, Rosenberg was sceptical that any international fishing agreements currently on the table will turn the tide in a short enough timescale. The UN's Food and Agriculture Organization and the OECD have initiatives but these are voluntary, he says. A UN-backed monitoring and enforcement plan of action is being discussed but could take 10 years to come into force.

Pauly says only a public reaction like that against whaling in the 1970s would be enough to bring about sufficient change in the way the fish stocks are managed.

The new survey was presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Science's 2002 annual meeting in Boston.

Kurt Kleiner, Boston

10:30 18 February 02

[zog]

--lbs, yes, this is true. Now check pounds versus average size and age of lobster. The records exist, go back some years, talk to lobstermen. You have to go to deeper water and use more pots to catch smaller numbers of smaller and younger lobsters. Eventually, if there was no regulation, the sexually immature lobsters would get 'free marketed" and then poof, no lobsters.

Put it this way, really simple, the more you fish/harvest, the more you get? Yes, up to a point, then the cost/effort ratio starts to rise dramatically. If more and more pressure resulted in more and more fish, that might work as to "more', but that's not reality. We'd still have all those buffalo and passenger pigeons, yes? More pressure and rising demand and the free market made more of them? Where are they? Well, no, it didn't, obviously. same deal with wild fish stocks. If you carried that to it's logical ends, then an unlimited number of boats fishing in an unlimited fashion would just create "more' fish, from market demand? How, magic?

An example, a very easy to understand analogy. I have a garden, if I go out and pick all the carrots today, or most of them, that means there's magically "more" carrots tomorrow than today because of my personal "market demand"? Or am I going to have "less carrots"? My free market harvesting pressure increases, where's my extra carrots? As far as I know, the carrots can't just be harvested to ininity out of a finite spot, they have to be nutured, controlled, and worked as an energy effort in--> to get food <-- out in order to be "more" carrots. If I just harvest-forage, gather, "fish" my carrot stocks "only"- more and more, I get less carrots until there aren't hardly any left.

Just so happens I did this yesterday, got the last dozen or so from last years beds, now there are "no" carrots left in the garden here. I have over fished them to extinction in my finite sized garden. yes, I know someone else could grow them, that's the point-there's a huge difference between harvesting/foraging/fishing/hunting and growing things as a controlled agriculture deal. A really big difference.

I thought this would be a good analogy. Commercial fishing is *not* agriculture, it's just scavenging, or foraging on a large and increasingly technologically sophisticated scale. It IS possible to over-forage, any crop you might care to look at or name, ocean or land.

And ya, I lived in new england for a spell, the lobstermen I talked to then were already grumbling about it. You go out now try to start to be a lobsterman, chances are one it would be illegal, and two, the other guys would shoot ya on the first foggy night they could get away with it, because the stocks are dwindling and they want to protect their harvesting turf.

I think both political extremes are dangerous. Total control via some world bodies with one world government agendas is nuts, but to go to the opposite extreme and say *no* control is warranted is silly. that's one of the reasons the radical extreme enviros got such political power eventually in this country, because the conservatives back then simply would NOT concede the tiniest point on conservation and pollution, etc. they wouldn't do it, despite the evidence that there is and was some validity to it. When their arguments got looked at by most people years ago when it came to environmental issues and the total denial that there were any of note, they got abandoned by millions who went on and started a much larger and impractical environmental movement, now look what we have, the opposite extreme has taken over, they run the show now, that's obvious.

Extremists-on either side of most issues- always create extreme situations, but the extremism results when common sense moderation is ignored in favor of short term financial or political "profit".

I hope this makes some sense, I tried. Not meaning to be a flame effort or anything. Look at the political damage done when "offical" organised conservatives abandoned conservation, and denied there was any pollution. Wham, we got nailed with millions of people going over to the other side, where they got used-and still are- as useful idiots. We lost tons of suport, and in the critical areas of the young people. Instead of having allies, we now have millions of people who only think of conservatives as narrow minded bigots who deny any sort of resource exploitation or pollution happens, when it didn't have to happen in the first place. We traded some short term profits based on real world denial for long term political loss. Fishing is just part of it, it's all mixed in together.

For my loot, I think it's better to concede early on on some rational points and not let the extremists short term profiteers call the shots constantly, it works out better in the long run. That's just my opinion on it. The bulk of the people in this country are NOT represented by the viewpoints on either dorks unlimited forum, or free reublic. Most people are in the middle on these issues, and can see where reality is in most cases. There's a need for environmental regs, in a lot of instances not as much as we have, but then again, right now, without *any* do you think there would be any clean aquifers left around most places?

I live on a decent sized spread, -theoretically speaking only- if I go out tomorrow and just start blasting all the deer here, just keep popping them and giving the meat away, how long before I only have one or none? Will my market pressure increase the deer herd size? Temporarily it will *look* like that is happening, it will look like by golly there's just more and more deer, I could easily go from one deer hanging to a dozen deer, could even have more hunters show up and harvest more deer, it would certainly appear like there's a lot of deer, because I'll quickly have dozens of deer hanging to look at and count up the lbs of meat, but that will only last a short time until the "collapse" of the herd will be dramatic and sudden.

I THINK this is what this original article is saying. It's a very similar situation, only the scale and importance is different. It's an extremely large scale, and it's globally important.

[Carry_Okie]

This is a problem the world over, but using the UN to fix it through global regulation would be an inevitable disaster. The real fault is that the ocean isn't private property because boundaries are so hard to resolve and defend. That can now be done.

Further, IMO, the ocean is being starved. It used to be a lot more productive before we had sewerage treatment plants and nonpoint pollution control projects. Those nitrates and phosphates (that we banned) used to feed millions of tons of algae that supplied the entire marine food chain with primary nutrients. Obviously we shouldn't have been dumping raw sewerage into rivers, but the question is, what is the best thing we could have done? I don't think that question was asked and for certain we do not know the answers. Clearly coastal productivity in lagoons and estuaries is key and an obvious demonstration why UN plans such as the Wildlands Project are so terribly stupid.

I have proposed a new free-market environmental management system as an alternative. It is intrinsically capable of resolving such complexities, in part, because it its principles and design of checks and balances are so simple. It is now being reviewed at NMFS, Yale, Berkeley, and elsewhere.

[ppaul]

.....people were catching cod a few decades ago. Now they're catching sea cucumber.

Yick!

[semper_libertas]

"The people who think the free market is the answer to everything are as silly as the Marxists who think the govt. is the answer to everything."

---

"If a nation could not prosper without the enjoyment of perfect liberty and perfect justice, there is not in the world a nation which could ever have prospered."

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Book IV, Chapter IX and silly man

---

.

[semper_libertas]

".....people were catching cod a few decades ago. Now they're catching sea cucumber." Yick!

_______________________________________

"A cucumber should be well sliced, and dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out, as good for nothing. "
-- Samuel Johnson

_______________________________________

[dennisw]

 

Sounds like capitalism will be the MOST effective means of regulation. As fish become more scarce prises will rise, demand will drop and number of fishing vessels will drop accordingly. 

That is not a solution. It is the Tragedy of the Commons. The situation stabilizes with a very small number of fish in the sea.

That's exactly what it is. Tragedy of the Commons and freepers should read up on it. The fishing grounds near the NorthEast coasts of America and up into Nova Scotia and Newfoundland are way over fished. Boats that land  in New Bedford bring in a fraction of what they did 10 years ago. Gets worse each year and baits must stay out longer each fishing trip to get a catch worth marketing.

May 24, 2000

Advisory board: Cod limits should be cut

By MICHAEL MACDONALD -- Canadian Press

ST. JOHN'S, Nfld. (CP) -- Atlantic Canada's beleaguered cod fishery received more bad news today.

The Fisheries Resource Conservation Council, a federal advisory body, issued a bleak report saying catch limits for northern Newfoundland and the Georges Bank off Nova Scotia should be reduced this season.

The council, which recommends catch limits to the federal Fisheries minister, said the cod stocks in both areas are not recovering as quickly as expected.

Off the coasts of northern Newfoundland and southern Labrador, the council recommends the total allowable catch for northern cod be reduced to 7,000 tonnes from 9,000 tonnes.

"The northern cod stock was by far the largest cod stock in Atlantic Canada," said Fred Woodman, chairman of the fisheries council, which is made up of government and industry representatives.

"Today, it is only a dismal remnant of what we had."

In the mid-1980s, the northern cod fishery was hauling in 200,000 tonnes annually.

Atlantic Canada used to land about 500,000 tonnes of cod annually in the 1980s. The total cod catch now is about 10 per cent of what it used to be.

Federal scientists say the stocks remain fragile, especially farther offshore. Until the offshore stocks start to grow, the inshore stocks will remain small, scientists concluded in an earlier report.

On the Georges Bank, the total allowable catch for cod caught by U.S. and Canadian fishermen should be cut to 2,000 tonnes from 3,000 tonnes, the council said.

"The council continues to be very concerned with the lack of recruitment experienced in the stock," the council said.

Recruitment refers to the number of fish that survive long enough to be considered big enough for commercial harvest.

However, there was some good news for other groundfish stocks on George Bank, an area southwest of Nova Scotia that is frequented by U.S. fishermen.

Catch limits for haddock and yellowtail flounder will be increased this season.

"The haddock and yellowtail stocks are recovering from the lows of the 1990s," Woodman said in a letter to Fisheries Minister Herb Dhaliwal.

As for cod, the council said it was convinced hungry seals were taking a big chunk out of the northern cod stocks.

"The council agrees with fishermen that predation by seals is negatively impacting the stock," Woodman's letter says.

Last month, scientists with the federal Fisheries Department issued a bleak report saying the size of the cod population off northern Newfoundland was still 97 per cent smaller than in the early 1980s.

However, the scientists said they didn't have enough scientific data to determine what impact the seals were having on the stocks.

The once-thriving commercial cod fishery collapsed in the late 1980s, prompting a widespread moratorium in 1992 that wiped out 40,000 jobs in Atlantic Canada and eastern Quebec.

After seven years of rebuilding, a small commercial quota was established last year for inshore fishermen in northern Newfoundland and southern Labrador.

When asked what was causing the slow recovery of the cod, scientists have cited a number of factors, none of which have proved conclusive.

Overfishing by huge, foreign trawlers is a favoured theory on the East Coast. Rising water temperatures in the latter half of the 1980s has also been linked with big changes in the North Atlantic's ecosystem.

Earle McCurdy, head of the 23,000-member Fish, Food and Allied Workers union, blames seals for the high mortality rates among cod.

Earlier this year, the council recommended reducing catch limits for cod in the northern Gulf of St. Lawrence and southern Newfoundland.

Dhaliwal later approved those recommendations, which included cutting the limit in southern Newfoundland by one third to 20,000 tonnes. The south coast cod fishery is the only major cod fishery left in Newfoundland.

 

 

 

[semper_libertas]

"Teddy Roosevelt writes of hunting bear in the South (Georgia, I believe) around 1900 - that the were common then. Can you still do that now? "

I don't know what the zoo regulations are. Probably not. ;o)

[seriously though, that was more a matter of human population incursion into bear habitats. I don't own any property in the Atlantic, but I do know a fellow who could sell you some, if you wish to be a true pioneer.]

[Liberty Tree Surgeon]

Obviously fish prices have not gone up nearly enough. When they do, that will be the end of the "overfishing" problem.

Um, no, it'll mean more drastic measures to capture those remaining fish. The higher price will help cover the costs of more expensive means of production. That means drag nets miles wide and 4,000 feet down if that's what it takes. Real world example: the oil business. Are more wells running when oil is $15 a barrel, or $30? The higher the unit sales price, the more units will be offered up (potentially driving the price down) but in the case of fish, they can spoil before being sold.

Just as the enviromentalist whackos are fools to instantly assume the planet is dying, people who believe there can never be an environmental catastrophe aren't exactly thinking clearly themselves. Overfishing is real, folks, and the free market might not come to the rescue in time.

LTS

[US_MilitaryRules]

Normally, falling catches would drive some fishers out of business. But government subsidies actually encourage overfishing, Watson says, with subsidies totalling about $2.5 billion a year in the North Atlantic.

I'm a commercial fisherman and what you see in bold is the BIGGEST problem. If it was left to people who can make a living on the ocean, and not the gov subsidising it their would be less fisherman. The countries that have these fishing boat are just giving these guys jobs. They go out and catch an awful lot of juvinile fish because they have to catch fish to please their bosses. Give them a job on land somewhere so they will stop raping the ocean.

[semper_libertas]

good catch, cap'n.

[b4its2late]

Here's a good fish story....I once to one of these nut jobs that goes house to house for signatures and money, that I loved the taste of dolphin in my tuna and that it sort of reminded me of chicken, so I don't think I'll sign your petition against it! She never came back, so it worked!

[Lurker]

Dip it in an egg wash, coat it with a mixture of seasoned flour and bread crumbs, and fry it in hot oil until it's golden brown.

Top with your favorite hot sauce and enjoy.

L

[lavaroise]

I THOUGHT THE GREENIES BELIEVED IN RENEWABLE SOURCES OF ENERGY????

[US_MilitaryRules]

It's not invented environmentalist BS. It's real. Commercial fishermen have a history of destroying fishery after fishery.

GOVERNMENT SUBSIDISED Commercial fishermen have a history of destroying fishery after fishery.

[liberallarry]

There are pictures of Errol Flynn catching giant swordfish in Santa Monica Bay in the late '30s. Can't do that either, today.

[semper_libertas]

"BINGO!!"

from US_militaryrules:

"Normally, falling catches would drive some fishers out of business. But government subsidies actually encourage overfishing, Watson says, with subsidies totalling about $2.5 billion a year in the North Atlantic.

I'm a commercial fisherman and what you see in bold is the BIGGEST problem. If it was left to people who can make a living on the ocean, and not the gov subsidising it their would be less fisherman. The countries that have these fishing boat are just giving these guys jobs. They go out and catch an awful lot of juvinile fish because they have to catch fish to please their bosses. Give them a job on land somewhere so they will stop raping the ocean.

The government has been ARTIFICIALLY keeping boats IN the water hauling in fish that otherwise WOULD NOT BE PROFITABLE! Eliminate the subsidies NOW!

(gee, I was quick to jump on that bandwagon... thank goodness 'cause my legs were getting tired...hehehe)

[max61]

We used to have plenty of fresh sea food markets and plenty of reasonably priced seafood restaurants here. We don't anymore thanks to the efforts of one magazine, radical environmenatlists and idiot voters.

Get a clue. The reason that we in Florida have less fresh fish markets has little to do with the net ban passed in 94, which was a wise decision, but it might have something to do with LESS FISH. Maybe you can speak to the advantage of using 8-12 mile long purse seine nets and how they not only net fish, but anything else that might be there as well. Or are you speaking of the turtle exclusion devices that were required?.

I can't tell you how many times I've been fishing in the gulf only to pull in a few hundred feet of monofilament net left over by some commercial fishing ship.

Since the time of that ban, fish numbers for a variety of fish species which were banned have risen to the point where you are now allowed to catch them.

---max

[semper_libertas]

bigger bolder type does mean I'm more correct right?

[semper_libertas]

" Therefore, it's not enough to say that higher prices will reestablish equilibrium, as that hasn't been true so far. Even at higher market prices, fish populations continue to drop. There is no healthy equilibrium. "

A fisherman Freeper tells us in an earlier post that the government SUBSIDIES fishing to the tune of $2.5B. There would appear to be the problem. Our otherwise free-market has been bastardized by the government. They are paying fisherman to purge the ocean of otherwise unprofitable fish.

First lets ELIMINATE government subsidies so that the fish prices will seek a natural level, then lets see who is left...

[LS]

Maybe, and I am in favor of the market solutions. But what about Physicist's point, above? That does not sound like a subsidy problem to me.