http://aguanomics.com/2009/11/worldwide-decline-in-fisheries.

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08 November 2009
Worldwide Decline in Fisheries

This [unedited] guest post is by a student in my EEP100 class (background post).

Please praise/critique/comment on its economic quality and importance to you.

Ben Rego says:

Recently in the San Francisco chronicle I read a story about how more and more
dead seals were turning up on beaches around the bay. The article went on to say
how the seals are starving because of the decline in fisheries around the Bay
Area. The decline in fisheries has been talked about for some time now. The
largest catch on record was 86 million tons in 1989 but since then it has been two
long decades of declining catch yields.

Scientists in Nature magazine estimate that over 90% of the worlds predatory fish
are gone and that the sea will crash by 2048 assuming no change in practices. In
the United States alone one quarter of the fisheries are overfished with another
quarter experiencing overfishing. The impending collapse of domestic fisheries
would have a devastating effect on our economy and economies worldwide. In the
early 1990s New England's cod fishery collapsed which caused 20,000 jobs to be
lost. In 1992 a Canadian fishery collapsed causing 40,000 people to lose their
jobs and destroying the marine ecosystem in that region.

This problem is fixable though. With minimal regulations on catching only the
maximum sustainable yield we will be able to fish what we need and since fishermen
maintain high profits despite lower stock abundance no jobs will be lost by
catching less.

Bottom Line: Fishery collapse is very real and if better regulations aren’t set up
to prevent them from collapsing then thousands will lose their jobs not to mention
a major food source will disappear.
..............
Mr. Rego:
It's not the fishermen who are harming the fisheries. It's guys like Warren "Old
Man Non-River" Buffet who have plopped tens of thousands of dams and levees into
all of our rivers. They make too much money off their destructive plugs to let us
obliterate them for the sake of the fishies and the water cycle. These dams and
levees have partitioned off entire river systems into stagnant little succo-eco-
systems, separating off the fishies' from their ancient supplies of allochthonous
resources. A good example of allochthonous resources ---> the Salmon which not-so-
long-ago would swim all the way from the Pacific Ocean to Redfish Lake in the
Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho. Can you guess why they called it "Redfish Lake" and
"Little Redfish Lake"? The Salmon would spawn at Refish lake, then they would die
and then their bodies became beaucoup allochthonous resourses for the other
fishies!
See http://www.fao.org/docrep/004/Y2785E/y2785e02.htm
for futher info. Cutting off fish food and starving the little fishies is not the
only harm done by dams. Where's Hayduke when we need him? I hear Hayduke's a part-
time night watchman but I don't know where. If you see Hayduke, ask him to contact
me, he and I are Vietnam Veterans and we want to discuss allochthonous resources.
09 November, 2009 04:04
.......
I have a few comments in response to everyone else's comments.

Kathryn - the answer to your question is no. The typical response of fishermen to
greater controls over fisheries and reductions in catch limits is to sue NMFS to
slow or prevent their implementation.

Dr. Hamid Rasool - the fishermen are definitely harming fish stocks (in addition
to the dams). Overfishing is a global phenomenon and it clearly isn't restricted
to anadromous fish stocks. See for example red snapper, grouper and Atlantic
bluefin Tuna. Also look at the fact that there is a widespread need for fish
stocking in order to maintain fish populations in lakes that are both affected and
unaffected by the construction of dams.

Josh - I think the paper you are referring to has Boris Worm and Ray Hilborn as
the main authors. It might also be useful to look at the paper Sibert et al. 2006.
Biomass, size and trophic status of top predators in the Pacific Ocean. Science
314:1773-1776
09 November, 2009 16:44