Seventy percent of the world's important commercial fish species have been "fully exploited, over exploited, depleted, or are recovering from depletion," according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization as quoted in a press release from Ocean Wildlife Campaign (OWC). Eighty percent of the marine fish species that have been studied have been classified as fully overfished or over exploited. Such depletion warnings are not new; they can be traced back 30 years or more and I wrote about declining fisheries this past summer.
Faced with the declining fisheries, six non-government organizations have gotten together to create the Ocean Wildlife Campaign to raise consciousness about the problem and to possibly do something about it. The National Audubon Society, Natural Resources Defense Council, New England Aquarium, Wildlife Conservation Society, World Wildlife Fund and National Coalition for Marine Conservation have pooled resources to "conserve and restore giant ocean fish" — sharks, tuna and billfish (swordfish, marlin).
The problem, OWC explains, is that worldwide, "fishers are catching more fish, unwanted species, juveniles, and other marine wildlife than they aim to" and then "more than one-fourth . . . is killed unintentionally and thrown away." This "throw-away" is called "bycatch" or "bykill" — 20 million tons a year — "more than three times the entire catch of U.S. fishers." More than one-third of this bykill is created by the shrimp fishery.
The swordfish fishery in the North Atlantic offers a good example of how bykill affects a fishery. In two decades, the swordfish population has decreased 70 percent because of overfishing and the killing of juveniles (bykill) — as many as 30,000 a year. Overfishing and discarding juveniles as bykill (1) leaves no adults, and (2) leaves few juveniles to grow to adulthood. The result? In 1995, 86 percent of the Atlantic swordfish and 88 percent caught by the U.S. swordfish fishery were juveniles.
OWC says that longline fishing vessels, which fish by extending up to 80-mile long fishing lines with up to 30,000 hooks on them, are responsible for killing and wasting 40,000 blue sharks in 1995 in the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico. The Hawaiian longline fishery kills thousands of sea turtles and albatrosses (a bird) in addition to sharks.
OWC believes something should and can be done to stop the carnage. OWC and the American Sportfishing Association recommend a two-fold approach to the overfishing and bykill problem.
- Change fishing gear and fishing practices to reduce bykill. Elminate gear that cannot be modified.
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Reduce bykill by 75 percent by 2005 through the following steps:
- Adopt a United Nations resolution in December that expands "international
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