Deep-Sea Fishing: Marine Scientists Call For Sustainable Alternatives

There are plenty of fish in the sea ... or are there?

An international group of marine scientists are calling for an end to most deep-sea fishing and supportive government subsidies after finding that most deep-sea fisheries are unsustainable.

"The deep sea is by far the largest but least productive part of the ocean," according to a recent study published in the journal Marine Policy.

"We're doing some of the world's most destructive fishing in the world's worst place to fish," Elliott Norse, president of the Marine Conservation Institute in Bellevue, Wash., and the lead author of the study, told The Huffington Post. He added, "If it continues, fish that were once abundant become rare or extinct. Damage is caused that can take decades, centuries or longer to recover."

Unfortunately, Norse said, "It is economically rational for trawlers to seek out a concentration of deep-sea fish -- like an oasis in the desert -- and fish them down to a point where it is no longer economically viable and move on."

Trawling, a method of deep-sea fishing that involves scraping huge metal plates across the ocean floor, kills fish, sharks and coral that people do not eat. The unwanted dead are just thrown back into the sea, the study says.

"We're talking about the frigid black depths of the ocean where fishes are very slow to mature and can't recover quickly from fishing pressure. They didn't evolve in situations where giant trawlers scoop them up," Norse said.

Some species of deep-sea fish can live for more than a century and some corals can live for 4,000 years, according to a statement released by the Marine Conservation Institute. The poster child for slow-maturing deep-sea fish being wiped out by bottom trawling is the orange roughy. The fish takes 30 years to reach sexual maturity and can live to more than 125 years.

Norse said that to stop fishing for orange roughy would not reduce the world's food supply. "Orange roughy are only eaten by affluent people in places like Japan, Korea, the U.S. and Europe. We're not talking about feeding the poor here, we're talking about feeding the rich."

Another author of the study, New Zealand-based fisheries biologist Malcolm Clark, noted that fishing for orange roughy in New Zealand grew rapidly during the 1980s and 1990s. "Most of the fisheries were overexploited, and catch levels have either been dramatically reduced or the fisheries closed all together," he said in the institute's statement.

Ray Hilborn, professor of aquatic and fishery sciences at the University of Washington, said the study was correct that deep-sea fishing is not managed, but added that the study did not say what should be done.

"They're basically saying we shouldn't do it without saying what we should do," Hilborn told HuffPost. "Long-lived species can be sustainably managed. They can be managed if they are harvested at a low rate and have a science program set up that regulates their abundance."

Coastal-water fisheries are much more productive, Norse said, but have also collapsed because of overfishing. There is no "magic way" to help overfished areas to recover, he said, and the only thing to be done is to stop killing the fish and "control our appetites."

But trawlers continue to fish the high seas, said Norse, "because the governments subsidize them heavily." According to study author Rashid Sumaila, a fisheries economist at the University of British Columbia, high-seas trawlers receive $162 million in government handouts each year.

"They don't have an incentive to fish sustainably," Norse said. That's why he urges the United Nations and individual countries to stop deep-sea fishing "unless you can prove that you're fishing sustainably."

The overfishing of coastal fisheries has slowly pushed commercial fishing fleets into waters that are more than a mile deep, according to Selina Heppel, a marine fisheries ecologist at Oregon State University and an author of the study. She said, “On the high seas, it is impossible to control or even monitor the amount of fishing that is occurring. The effects on local populations can be devastating.”

Hilborn told the Washington Post, “From a conservation perspective, maybe we shouldn’t fish at all, and the ocean should be left pristine." But then he wondered, "Where is the food going to come from?”

The call to close most deep-sea fisheries comes as the United Nations considers whether to continue to allow fishing in the high seas.

Comments

[Beautiful World]

11:10 PM on 09/13/2011

In 48 hours the UN will be reviewing the destructive practices of deep sea trawling used by the fishing industry. "The seafood industry uses long chains of heavy metal disks to drag nets across the sea floor in search of fish, crushing everything in their path. This bottom-trawling is like clear-cutting a forest to catch a parrot"

The US and Australia have already banned this process.

Please take take 3 minutes of your time to review and sign this online petition. Quick read , I promise. Every vote will help. Please spread the word.

http://www.avaaz.org/en/stop_ocean_clear_cutting/?cl=1269501545&v=10242

[leftyirishwoman]

07:47 PM on 09/11/2011

We are a pretty disgusting species.

[caroline gray]

03:35 PM on 09/11/2011

The way we are heading I the future being that like a Margaret Atwood dystopia.

[B Amero]

07:00 AM on 09/11/2011

Sadly this is not surprising. Humans will fish untill there is nothing left...we suck.

[Genders]

09:27 PM on 09/10/2011

Let the market decide, right?

Only a democratic republic form of government has the motivation to protect the commons for all the citizens.

Cut way back back all fishing till we reach 90% of the waters historical abundance. That's roughly ten times our current fish bio mass due to over fishing.

Then allow more fishing of as long as it does not deplete it more than 10%. Each year adjust the allowed fishing quotes based on sampling of the abundance.

[Jake Thomas]

03:23 PM on 09/10/2011

I keep thinking about Stella Maris College Rugby Team and how perhaps our overall situation could very well become analagous to theirs. I am as poor as dirt and I am already eyeballing my neighbours hungrily anticipating humanitys food supplys ulitmate colapse.

[Chuck Rewalt]

02:42 PM on 09/10/2011

Only when the last tree has died and the last river has been poisoned and the last fish has been caught will we realize we cannot eat money.
…Cree Indian proverb

[Jake Thomas]

03:26 PM on 09/10/2011

You could be surpised, if prepared properly how tasty and nutritious money can be. Of course you have to ad things, sort of in the tradition of that famous old story, "Stone Soup". It can be fulfilling albeit not as much as real fish and fowl.

[Warren Yuill]

02:19 PM on 09/10/2011

Read an National Geographic article a few years back. They were talking about the millions of tons of by-catch(unwanted species) that get tossed back after the nets are cleared. "Millions of tons". The oceans will soon cease to be a reliable source of protein for humans.Whats to eat after that happens?
How many millions of people right now are dependant on the sea for their daily ration of protein. Who's going to feed them. Who's going to stop them when they start scouring the countryside looking for meat. Mass migrations of starving people with nothing to lose.

[relentless63]

01:12 PM on 09/10/2011

Who started the rumour that man was an intelligent being? What do you call a species that gorges on and wastes the very and only environment that can sustain its future? A cancer?

[caroline gray]

03:33 PM on 09/11/2011

excellent post.

[rf dude]

11:23 AM on 09/10/2011

The new "Soylent Green" is the solution!

[LeFlaneur]

11:18 AM on 09/10/2011

Would earth have been better off if a species of herbivore had take over instead? Maybe we just would have over-grazed.

[Trekkiefandom]

03:59 PM on 09/10/2011

Either way we are a leech on this Earth, we destroy its natural wonders, consume vast amount of both renewable(though we don't take advantage of it) and non-renewable resources, we kill of thousands of species so we can settle the land and build or cities and suburbs. We explode radioactive bombs under ground, we pollute the natural waters to the point where deer have sex hormone drugs in their system. We are at a cross road, either we wake up and regardless of the money start doing are part to make our societies greener and ourselves more nature friendly. We have to remember we are just a very small segment of a rather big environment, we are supposed to share this Earth with its vast bio-diversity, but there is no sharing with humans.

[ScapeGoat]

10:48 AM on 09/10/2011

With over population, the supply of food will dwindle causing famine and violence. We need to have more birth control and lower the world population. In Maine, the lobsters used to crawl out of the water onto the shore. You could walk the beach and pick up lobsters. Now their numbers have dwindled to the point where there are laws to protect the lobster population and breeding facilities to release baby lobsters. We are literally overfishing the ocean.

[moonflowerjewelry]

10:47 AM on 09/10/2011

Vegetarians have been warning for years that over-fishing was reaching critical proportions. These days I have become kind of a fatalist: there are just too many people, and most of them determined to breed. Human life on the planet as we know it is NOT sustainable. At least there will always be cockroaches :-).

I just finished reading Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler. Talk about prophetic!

[Jake Thomas]

03:32 PM on 09/10/2011

We are as ants doing only what is instinctual. Our creation and destruction of the world around us is part of our biological imperative, it is neither good nor bad. We are not above nature, we are nature. We will be put in check. The idea that vegetarians are somehow above this is laughable. You are as bloody and complicit as anyone else. There not degrees of humantiy there simply "is" humanity.

[jagwhier]

10:03 AM on 09/11/2011

I don't see where he said anyone is "above" this. Just that some people have acknowledged it and have tried to change in some way. When your biological imperative is to destroy yourself and everything around you, and you have the capacity for rational thought, then you can't just shrug your shoulders and say "its neither good nor bad". It is quite clearly bad.

Complacency is a choice.

[leftyirishwoman]

07:52 PM on 09/11/2011

Humanity does have the choice to work around its biological drives.

[cambo]

03:52 PM on 09/10/2011

Yes, as a pescetarian, I`m now eating fish once a week tops - it`s all contaminated these days and I`ll probably stop completely soon. Humans can only live sustainably on this planet as vegetarians, especially 7billion of us. 7 billion of us can consume nuts,cereal,vegetables and fruits on a daily basis the opposite isn`t true if we were to all eat meat,or lobster or any specific type of fish for that matter. Humans have a gun ho approach and it won`t be until the scales have completely tipped, will we learn.

[island101]

10:24 AM on 09/10/2011

well... there goes that theory!

[Roadrun]

10:20 AM on 09/10/2011

Oh come on people! It's only 70% of the surface of the earth. There is still 30% we haven't polu..... uh ..... er ..... wait, at least we still have clean ai.... uh, oh never mind!