No Fish by 2050

[RedEarth]

No Fish by 2050



Enjoy the next 50 years of aquatic cuisine, for that might be all we have left.

By Jack Penland

November 02, 2006 | Environment





Research unveiled today is projecting that by the year 2050, all current fish and seafood species will collapse. The report is the work of 12 researchers worldwide and is published in this week's edition of the journal Science.

"I was chilled," says the report's lead author, Boris Worm of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada who adds, "I was really shocked because, I didn't expect it to be so soon."

Worm and the other researchers studied worldwide fishing records from the past 50 years, fishing records from 12 places that stretch back as long as 1,000 years, and records of small scale controlled studies. He says the studies all point in the same direction, "We see very clearly the end of the line. It shows that we're going to run out of viable fisheries, out of all seafood species by the year 2050." He says the report shows that one third of the fisheries have collapsed, but that the trend is accelerating, and that, "We only have another 40 or 50 years now."

Worm says the problem is that commercial fishing is harming the ability of the fish to maintain steady populations, especially against other threats such as pollution and global warming. Additionally, fishermen often unintentionally catch and kill sea life nobody wants to eat, what fishermen call "bycatch." However, that bycatch is often the food for the commercially important fish.

http://www.discover.com/web-exclusives/no-fishing-2050-stocks/

[hughee99]

1. Don't hold your breath. n/t

[murray hill farm]

2. As I understand it,

we will still have jellyfish in abundance. Now, if we can just develop a taste for it...euuuuuuu!

[jilln]

3. So typical!

The headline implies the only worth of fish is as "food". That's exactly the problem. People without the imagination to eat something else are overfishing and polluting the earth (factory farms contribute a lot).

Heaven forbid anyone should actually have to change what they do on a daily basis to oh, say, help keep fish from becoming extinct.

[Dead_Parrot]

4. To be fair...

...there's a difference between 'commercially extinct' and really extinct: although some animals (like the great auk, dodo or the moa) have been picked one by one until there's nothing left, doing that with fish is less likely. There will come a point where you could spend a month in a boat and not catch a single blue tuna, even though there are thousands still out there: It's a big ocean, and fishing is fairly hit-and-miss.

How far you can push a population before it fails to recover is another question, though. I hope we don't find out.

[NNadir]

5. I guess fish won't get to enjoy 50% renewable energy in Europe.

A pity, really.

We reckon that almost half of Europe’s total energy demand could be met from renewable energy sources by 2050 - at the same time, carbon dioxide emissions from the sector could be reduced by more than 70% by 2050 (compared to 1990 levels) while phasing out nuclear power entirely.

http://weblog.greenpeace.org/makingwaves/archives/2006/10/are_we_projecting_renewable_en.html

I wonder how many fish are members of Greenpeace. Given the fondness for extinction, lots of them I guess.