The Last Wild Fish in the Sea

Though it covers 95 percent of the earth, the ocean, alas, is not a bottomless resource. Roughly 70 percent of the world's commercially important marine fish populations are now being fished at capacity or beyond, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) in Hook, Line and Sinking: The Crisis in Marine Fisheries, a report released this month. In U.S. waters, NRDC reports, 80 percent of marine fish for which we have data are classified as "fully fished" or "overexploited."

"Nothing in hundreds of millions of years of fine tuning for survival has prepared ocean life for the killing techniques we now apply," says Sylvia Earle, Ph.D., marine biologist at Sea Web and author of Seachange (G.P. Putnam Sons, 1995), citing "acoustic detection and capture with high speed boats..." (Much contemporary search-and-kill fishing technology is based on military models.) In 1996, in an unprecedented move, the World Conservation Union added more than 100 species of marine fish, including bluefin and albacore tuna, most species of grouper, the great white shark, the North Atlantic swordfish and Atlantic haddock and cod, to its "red list" of the world's most threatened animals. "What's news is that very common species that people eat all the time are overfished: swordfish, sole, snapper," says Lisa Speer, senior policy analyst at NRDC. The U.S. Endangered Species Act lists four species of wild Pacific Northwest salmon, which once seemed as plentiful as stars to the Native Americans of the region. The wild Atlantic salmon, a legendary fighter, is virtually extinct, its gene pool tainted by farm-raised fish.

Overfishing hurts not only a species, but an ecosystem. The NRDC report stresses that "ecosystem management must replace the now-dominant system of managing fishing for single species, as if that species lived in isolation..." Children studying the ocean today learn that every fish counts. While snorkeling with my son in Hawaii last summer, I pursued the birdwatchers' game of trying to spot rare species--the rarer the better. But to my son, who was taking a 5th-grade marine biology class, the common gray snapper and blue jack were as important as the rare Moorish idols and butterfly fish.

My son and I watched a tiny blue-and-yellow fish nose its way along the side of a black triggerfish. "That guy's a cleaner wrasse," my son explained. "He's like the service station attendant. They line up and he cleans the parasites out from between their scales." Cleaner wrasses have lately been overcollected for tropical aquariums, leaving other fish less healthy for lack of their services. At the other end of the spectrum, the more big, top-level predators we scoop from the ecosystem, the more lower-level predators survive to devour greater numbers of the next fish down the food chain. Sylvia Earle calls swordfish, tunas, sharks, grouper, snapper and halibut "the lions, tigers, wolves, eagles and owls of the sea," pointing out that we don't eat these land varieties. By consuming ocean predators, we're creating imbalances--a dangerous situation in the sparsely-studied undersea realm, she warns. For example, we have no population data for most large pelagic (open ocean) fish in the Pacific. "Knowledge even of nearshore ecosystems is primitive," Dr. Earle adds.

Fish are an incredibly healthy component of our diets, high in protein, low in fat, rich in omega fatty acids that help prevent heart disease. Historically known as "the poor man's protein," fish ranks as the main source of animal protein for about one billion people worldwide. But through overfishing by a $70-billion-a-year industry, along with pollution and destruction of habitat, we have imperiled the ability of the sea's wild "herds" to reproduce. The problem is not traditional fishermen in small boats. Rather, it's the world's bloated, government-subsidized fishing fleets--the big guys in the factory ships equipped with sonar. It's a problem driven home by the 1993 collapse of principal stocks of New England groundfish (haddock, flounder, cod) fisheries, which caused an estimated annual loss of over $350 million to the area's economy.

While grave, the situation is far from hopeless. "Most fish can recover in relatively short order if the pressure on them is reduced--it's in our power to fix this problem," Lisa Speer says. In Alaska, salmon rebounded after a 1992 ban on drift nets, and quotas saved sablefish and halibut fisheries. Already, sharp limits on fishing, including reduction in days at sea and closure of fishing grounds, have resulted in signs of recovery in New England. "The good news is, we're no longer overfishing most stocks, except the Gulf of Maine cod," says Andy Rosenberg, Ph.D., New England Regional Director of the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS). No longer declining, however, remains a far cry from reviving. For 1997, in an effort to revive breeding stock in New England, the NMFS will require that catch of cod, haddock and flounder be reduced by 41 percent overall, with yet greater cutbacks in Gulf of Maine cod. In July 1997, days at sea for the fleet will be reduced by more than a third.

Many other regional fisheries are being fished to the max--and beyond. Off the West Coast, bocaccio (red snapper), Pacific perch, yellowtail rockfish and ling cod are listed as overfished. Bottom fish and spiny lobster are overfished in the Hawaiian Islands. Jim O'Malley, executive director of the East Coast Fisheries Federation, says, "Leaving an area closed permanently, where fish will have a fountainhead to regenerate themselves, makes a substantial contribution." He cites the success of marine life refuges off Cape Cod, the Georges Bank and Nantucket Island. O'Malley has fought for years for limits on "less glamorous" species such as monkfish, whiting, butterfish and scup.

Sounding the Depths

The three principal causes of fishery decline are overfishing, habitat degradation and loss, and pollution.

OVERFISHING: More boats mean less fish. In twenty years, from 1970 to 1990 the world's industrial fishing fleet doubled to 1.2 million boats. Restrictions on fishing in the 80s could have averted the New England disaster, according to Carl Safina, Ph.D., director of the National Audubon Society's Living Oceans Program. "A lot of fisheries are in that 80s situation now," he says.

National laws regulate waters within a nation's 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone. Currently, vessels on the high seas are virtually unregulated by their port nations and international laws. Future international agreements will be critical to the management of wide-ranging migratory species. In the Western Pacific Ocean, for example, swordfish, tuna and shark are pursued by fleets from Pacific Rim nations and declining Atlantic fisheries. "We have to closely monitor the swordfish fishing--we're all fishing from the same stocks," says Kitty Simonds, executive director of the Western Pacific Regional Fisheries Management Council.

Then there's the appalling waste. Nearly one-fourth of the worldwide annual catch is discarded due to spoilage or because it's "bycatch" (species that fishermen don't want or aren't licensed to take). That includes sea turtles, dolphins, whales and marine birds. The greatest malefactors may be shrimp trawlers, which catch and discard millions of red snapper and Atlantic croaker in the Gulf of Mexico. Shrimpers denude vast swaths of sea bed habitat. They snag endangered sea turtles in their nets. Shrimping boats produce less than two percent of the world's seafood, but they kill a third of the global bycatch.

HABITAT DEGRADATION AND LOSS: Just as the wild shrimp industry lays waste to fisheries, farm-raised shrimp ruin habitat. "At least 75 percent of the marine fish caught in commercial and recreational fisheries spend all or part of their life cycles in coastal estuaries, wetlands, mangroves, and inshore waters," NRDC reports. They add the staggering fact that "about half of the world's saltmarshes and mangrove forests have been destroyed." In Central America and Southeast Asia, mangrove forests are replaced by shrimp ponds. Mangrove roots filter estuarial waters. But shrimp excrement fouls their waters, causing nutrient pollution (see below).

Wild salmon and steelhead runs in the rivers of the Pacific Northwest have been destroyed by hydropower dams, logging, mining and urban development. Coral reefs, a habitat for about one-fourth of all marine species, are failing to regenerate after exposure to pollution, coral mining, bottom trawling, dredging, and use of dynamite and cyanide to stun fish.

POLLUTION: "Nutrient overenrichment" is a pretty euphemism for the nitrogen and phosphorous carried out to sea from municipal sewage plants, industrial and agricultural runoff, forestry operations and livestock waste ponds. Human sewage is thought to promote the growth of toxic microorganisms, including certain species of dinoflagellates that bloom in "red tides." The latter poison shellfish, causing sickness in people who eat them, and can wreak such havoc as the massive fish kills in North Carolina's river estuaries in 1995.

Chemical contaminants such as mercury, DDT and PCBs also enter waterways and collect in fish. Local "fish advisories" warn against consumption of specific fish by children and pregnant women.

Habitat degradation and fish depletion can destroy an entire ecosystem, from the shellfish and young finned fish that need clean freshwater inputs in inshore waters, to the open-ocean fish who approach the shore to spawn and feed. My son's marine biology class also read about a rash of tiger shark attacks on surfers and swimmers in Hawaii in 1993. Scientists and fishermen surmised that overfishing of the sharks' normal prey was one likely cause. When we upset the balance of the seas, we have all sorts of dues to pay. But there's still time to save our seas, and ourselves.