Asian Restaurants' Demand For Reef Fish Crushing Spawning, Populations In Tropical Waters

[hatrack]

KOTA KINABALU, Malaysia — It is a slow night at the Port View Restaurant here, and still the place seems packed. Several banquet tables are crowded with a dozen people apiece. Each table seems as if it could collapse from the weight of plates. Falling to the forks are steaming spring prawns, spotted lobster, coral trout and especially giant grouper, which minutes before had been listlessly swimming in one of the many murky tanks at the Port View, one of the most popular restaurants in this tourist town on the northeast tip of Borneo, in Malaysia’s Sabah province.

The fierce appetite for live reef fish across Southeast Asia — and increasingly in mainland China — is devastating populations in the Coral Triangle, a protected marine region home to the world’s richest ocean diversity, according to a recent report in the scientific journal Conservation Biology. Spawning of reef fish in this area, which supports 75 percent of all known coral species in the world, has declined 79 percent over the past 5 to 20 years, depending on location, according to the report.

Overfishing in general, and particularly of spawning aggregations that occur when certain species of reef fish gather in one place in great numbers to reproduce, may be the culprit, says Yvonne Sadovy, a biologist at the University of Hong Kong who wrote the report along with scientists from Australia, Hong Kong, Palau and the United States. She said the report’s conclusions were based on the first global database on the occurrence, history and management of spawning aggregations. It includes data from 29 countries or territories. Some of the information is based on interviews with more than 300 commercial and subsistence fishers in Asia and the western Pacific between 2002 and 2006.

“The Coral Triangle has relatively few spawning aggregations reported in the communities we went to,” Dr. Sadovy said in an e-mail message. “We think that this might be due to the more heavily fished (overall) condition of reef fisheries in many parts of the Coral Triangle, where there is uncontrolled fishing and high demand for live groupers for the international live fish trade.” About one-third of the species mentioned in the report are sold in Asian markets.

EDIT

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/20/science/earth/20reef.html?_r=1

[tom_paine]

1. "Mmmmmmmmmmmm. Extinction."

[Nihil]

2. Locusts.

Sick fuckers who are determined to screw the ecosphere for their
own twisted pleasure.

Hope that the mercury catches up with them quickly.

:mad:

[GliderGuider]

3. This is little different from eating filet mignon in a steak house

Or even a slice of bread in your own kitchen. The ecological devastation comes from the eating, regardless of the food.

[Nihil]

4. 50:50

> The ecological devastation comes from the eating, regardless of the food.

The ecological devastation comes from the eating multiplied by the number
doing it (and a "growing market" is not a good indicator in this respect).

> This is little different from eating filet mignon in a steak house
> Or even a slice of bread in your own kitchen.

How many other animals were killed as "by-catch" while obtaining your cow?

How many cows died en-route for the sake of getting live ones to your
steak house for you to choose one to chew?

How many fields were ripped bare and lifeless by the "hunters"?

:shrug:

Eating highly specialised "food" puts far more strain on the system than
eating the nutritionally equivalent amount of "plain stuff". Developing
such activities as a business interest (e.g., specialised "pick your live
rare species here" restaurants) is obscene. (And yes, this would also
apply to vegans too if they went down such a path.)

[GliderGuider]

5. When it comes to human food, there is no "plain stuff"

It just looks that way to us.

How many fields were ripped bare and lifeless by the "hunters"?

Go out into a corn field and tell me how many indigenous animals you see. Go into any monocrop field and repeat the observation. Industrial agriculture, the model we have chosen to feed almost 7 billion of us, is responsible for most of the world's extinctions through habitat destruction. In ecological terms, comparing virgin ocean to a fished-out pelagic ecosystem is exactly the same as comparing a virgin boreal forest to a soybean field treated with Roundup. The manifestation is different in the oceans, but the problem is virtually identical.

[Nihil]

6. I see your point

I was about to list the indigenous animals as requested then remembered
that you are in Canada ...

We don't have that scale of industrial agriculture in the UK (although
there are one or two businesses who are trying to do this in East Anglia).
As a result, the corn fields near me are much smaller and the remaining
hedgerows provide havens & corridors that you simply don't get.

I still disagree that "there is no plain stuff" (there can be when it
is small scale and local) but also understand that, for a world of 7 billion,
even the production of "plain stuff" is devastating to the ecosphere ...
which brings us back to the "elephant in the living room" issue of
overpopulation again.

Mind you, there is approximately zero chance of getting the major consumers
to revert to "plain stuff" anyway so the whole debate is somewhat academic.

[GliderGuider]

7. I've always envied England's "hedgerow culture"

It makes for a much more humane landscape as well as being more ecologically sound than a hundred square mile wheat field.