Where Are The Last Fish in the Sea?
The news this week that a “mass extinction” of marine life is already underway is both frightening on the surface and simultaneously tricky to visualize. The notion that we may one day figuratively take the last fish from the sea has always been hard to comprehend, to imagine.
A new graphic created by the Pew Research Center helps focus on what may be the most easy-to-comprehend issue: overfishing. Want to see just how badly man has hammered fish populations in North Atlantic in the past century? This is the best illustration yet—as close to a 100-year-long time-lapse video—of how man has abused marine life in one big corner of the planet’s one ocean. Of course, what man has wreaked in the Atlantic, he has repeated in the other four geographic oceans too (the Indian, Pacific, Arctic, and Southern).
The illustration shows the sizable biomass/tonnage of big fish (bluefin tuna, cod, haddock, halibut, mackerel, Pollock, salmon, sea trout, and more) that spread off Atlantic shorelines from Florida to Greenland, Iceland to Spain in 1900. Those stories of pulling buckets full of fish straight out of the sea were not exaggerated; there were more than enough fish to support boom fishing industries in North America, Europe, and down into Africa through the early half of the 20th century.
But today, 100 years later, evidence of any big fish populations has literally been erased except for a thin line running along the eastern coast of North America. The rest of the Atlantic has essentially been emptied, one commercial fishing boat at a time.
This new illustration goes hand-in-hand with last year’s first-ever, 10-year-in-the-making, global Census of Marine Life (COML), for which 360 scientists around the world logged 230,000 different species living in the ocean. The report also predicted the mass extinctions of the big predator fish that man has traditionally pursued.
Today the so-called “charismatic species”—whales, sea lions, turtles, and sea birds— account for less than two percent of the species dependent on the world’s ocean. The study reported “major collapses” in fisheries around the world, where only five to ten percent of once-dominant species still existed, largely due to overfishing and lack of management. The North Atlantic was its prime example.
The bright spots for the future of marine life highlighted in the report were along the coasts of Australia and Japan, which are regarded as the most biologically diverse in the world. Of course the COML was released before the nuclear reactor at Fukushima began leaking into the Pacific.
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