Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Fish, the Bounty of the Sea
Seafood consumption by Americans has exploded during the past thirty
years. Consumption in 2008 was 16.3 pounds per person per year, near
the all-time high of 16.6 pounds set in 2004. Prior to World War II, fi sh
in the oceans were thought of as inexhaustible; their ability to evade
traps and their rate of reproduction were great enough to maintain their
numbers against the technology then available to catch them.
This changed in the 1950s as military hardware was adapted to serve
the commercial fi shing industry, and today ocean fi sh are being hunted at
a rate that exceeds their ability to maintain their numbers. The ocean is
becoming a marine “dust bowl.” The large predatory fi sh that Americans
enjoy—Atlantic salmon, swordfi sh, halibut, tuna, marlin, cod, fl ounder—
are nearing extinction. A few years ago, a single bluefi n tuna sold for a
record $173,600 in Tokyo. According to fi shery experts, only 10 percent
of the original numbers of these large fi sh are left in the sea.
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Two-thirds
of the world's fi sh stocks are either fully exploited or overexploited.
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The world fi sh catch has stagnated, and these large fi sh are being
replaced on American dinner plates by fi sh lower on the food chain.
Today's seafood is often yesterday's trash fi sh and monsters. Many of
the fi sh listed on restaurant menus today were not present a few decades
ago. Part of this has resulted from renaming. The slimehead was renamed
in the 1970s as “orange roughy” to remove the gag refl ex associated
with the original name. With this tasty-sounding name, the slimehead
was widely overfi shed. Joining the slimehead on the renamed list are
goosefi sh (renamed monkfi sh), Patagonian toothfi sh, and Antarctic
toothfi sh (both renamed Chilean sea bass, although they are not sea
bass), snakehead (renamed channa), and whore's eggs (sea urchin). It is
reminiscent of the renaming of bull testicles as 'Rocky Mountain oysters.'
Decreases in numbers are also occurring to tiny fi sh such as anchovies,
herring, sardines, mackerel, and other small to medium-size fi shes. Thirty-
seven percent of the world's marine fi sh catches are ground up and fed
to farm-raised fi sh, pigs, and poultry. Pigs and poultry in the United
States consume six times the amount of these forage fi sh than human
fi sh eaters do.
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This, of course, reduces the food supply for the remain-
ing large fi sh, many of which are visibly emaciated and starving. Scrawny
predators have turned up on coastlines all over the world. Not only
whales and fi sh species have been affected. Fish-eating birds, as well as
other large mammal predators such as seals and sea lions, have also been
found emaciated from lack of food, vulnerable to disease, and without
