Reaching a turning point in a historic era of expansion, the world’s fishing industry ten years ago basically ran out of new places to fish, a new study shows.
So far, fishing vessels have been able to solve the problem by continually moving to less depleted waters, the researchers say, but warn that we are rushing toward critical limits there, as well.
“The sooner we come to grips with it … the sooner we can stop the downward spiral by creating stricter fishing regulations and more marine reserves,” co-author Enric Sala said in a statement.
Sala is associated with the Centre d’Estudis Avançats de Blanes in Spain and the National Geographic Society in Washington, D. C., while the five-man group behind the study also embraced an Australian researcher and three scientists from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, including the internationally renowned professor David Pauly.
“We knew the expansion was going on, but this is the first time we have quantified it,” Pauly said about the report, published in the online journal PloS ONE and based on computer models that examine both the total number of fish caught and the impact that catching different types of fish has had on the ocean’s productivity.
The researchers had studied data from 1950 to 2005, and found that while some 19 million tonnes of fish were landed globally in 1950, the catches grew dramatically, and peaked at 90 million tonnes annually in the late 80s. According to Pauly, many people still have the romantic misconception that fishing is done mainly by local people, while most fishing is actually a business for big companies that can afford to move on when the stocks get too depleted. By the late 90s, however, the fleets had generally run out of new fishing grounds to exploit, the study shows, adding that more has to be done to protect those stocks that remain.
According to the study, most heavy fishing in 1950 was done in the North Atlantic and the Western Pacific, but by the mid-90s one third of the world’s oceans and two thirds of the continental shelves were exploited.
That expansion has left only unproductive fishing areas on the high seas and the ice-covered waters of the Arctic and Antarctic for boats to move into, according to a summary of the study on the Scientific American website.