The Earth’s oceans feed billions of people, but overfishing is decimating the fish stocks that make this possible:
We’ve removed 90% of all large fish from the oceans. Just 10% to go.
From the article:
Daniel Pauly: This is 90% of all big fish, tuna, cod and groupers, the problem is the big fish that live longer and they are gone almost everywhere. And while in some regions of the world, in Europe a little bit, in the US, there has been a trend towards rebuilding the stocks, reducing the effort or at least not letting it increase as it was happening before, and the result of this is that the situation as you will read in newspapers is not as bad as before.
Robyn Williams: The point about big fish, many fishers have always gone for the bigger fish and thrown the little fish back, but it turns out that the big fish are the ones which are most fertile and produce the most offspring, so if you catch big fish you are depleting the next generation. Is that true?
Daniel Pauly: That is exactly what is happening. The depletion of big fish effects that species very much. These are the more threatened. If you think of groupers, big groupers or big bluefin tuna or sturgeons that are almost extinct everywhere. So the fish that gets big and that need a long time to reach maturity, they are the ones that are the most under pressure. And then within the species, the fish that are big are pushed to the brink because fisheries are selective for big fish usually. There are two kinds of big fish and both of them are impacted.
The Doomsday Book has a whole chapter on the decimation of living organisms on Earth today: fish, birds, insects, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, rainforest biomes, etc. All wildlife is being crushed by humanity from multiple angles: habitat loss, pesticides, extermination, hunting, poaching, artificial lighting… Populations are falling, and unless humanity takes radical steps toward preservation, extinction is inevitable for many species. Thus we are in the planet’s sixth mass extinction event.
“The Doomsday Book” by Marshall Brain lays out this scenario in amazing detail and offers solutions to prevent this doomsday scenario from unfolding. You can order the book today on Amazon and other retailers.