90% OF WORLD'S OCEANS LARGE FISH ARE GONE

Believe it or not, a study indicates that ninety percent of the large fish in the world's oceans are gone.

"Analysis suggests that the global ocean has lost more than 90 per cent of large predatory fishes," say study authors Ransom Myers and Boris Worm of Dalhousie University.
"We have to understand how close to extinction some of these populations really are," Myers interview was reported from Ottawa by The Canadian Press.

• The researchers spent 10 years collecting data on large fish in four continental shelf and nine oceanic systems from the beginning of record keeping to the present.
• They found that industrial fishing, using sensors and satellites, takes 15 years to reduce a new fish community to a tenth of its original size.
• "The amazing thing is, all these data sources show almost identically the same pattern," Myers stated. "Industrial fishing has cut populations of large fish in the oceans to a mere 10 per cent of 1950 levels."
• "The world is in 'massive denial', spending its energy fighting over the few fish left instead of cutting harvests before it's too late."
• Around the world ever bigger trawlers fish and freeze 24 hours a day.
• Taking advantage of faraway fishing grounds, the ships dock, sell their catch at the nearest port for export to distant countries. Exotic species are introduced to satisfy a demand no longer met from fished-out local seas.
• Bottom trawling now an extensive business and is scouring the continental shelf seabeds from the poles to the tropics profoundly altering the habitats of the world's benthic life.
• Hydraulic dredging and beam trawling for fishmeal is taking place despite the knowledge there is a definitive change of the substrate.
• Studies show that much of the Benthic fauna, the ocean bottom fauna, is destroyed when the boats dredge and trawl for fishmeal.
• Fishmeal fishing kills uncountable life forms that our science has only begun to identify. Creatures that will not be here for future generations.
• Scientists are saying that for a few decades of intense fishing we will obliterate the life of the oceans.
• Marine scientists around the globe have called for decisive action to end the blind destruction that is taking place in the world's oceans.
• They are asking governments to end subsidies encouraging unsustainable fishing, and for worldwide legislation to stop bottom trawling.

Source: Greenpeace, AFP