*Tomorrow our first menus come out! Make sure to comment if you see them!*
Alex Hofford, Greenpeace/Marine Photobank
Did you know that 118 million tons of fish are extracted from oceans each year? Yep that’s a MILLION TONS! And what’s even scarier is that we expect this number to increase by an additional 32 million tons by 2020.
Without proper management and restrictions on fishing populations it will be impossible for the fisheries of the world to keep up with this growing demand for seafood. With 2/3s of consumed seafood being wild-caught it’s hard to imagine how we’d even have fish left in the wild if we continue to harvest that much seafood each year.
Indeed, it appears as if fish stocks are not keeping up with the pace of seafood consumption. Just take a look at these maps put together by Monterey Bay’s Seafood Watch program of past (1900) and relatively recent (1999) fish biomass.
(c) Seafoodwatch.org; colors depict tons of fish per kilometer squared
(c) Seafoodwatch.org
Pretty scary that we could do that in just a century. Currently, 85% of the world’s fisheries are either fully exploited, overexploited or have collapsed. In the US alone, 27% of US fish stocks are overfished leading us to import 82% of our seafood.
When I think about what this means for the species in our oceans, the effects it will have on food webs around the globe and on future generations, it makes me shudder. Unless we address these issues TODAY there will be no way to save our ocean’s species. Already, 90% of large predatory fish are gone since the advent of industrialized fishing. Some populations have been so overfished that recovery, if it’s even possible at this point, is a long-term proposition. For example, the Atlantic cod is estimated to be at 4-1% of it’s historical biomass and data released in 2011 indicated that even closing the fishery would not allow populations to rebound by 2014.
So, as you think of heading out to a seafood restaurant over the weekend (with the nice weather fated for Portland – 93!) make sure you send a message with your purchase. A message that you want sustainable seafood options that are not threatened by overfishing or declining populations.
-Meg
