Fishing for the last fish: The war on the oceans

Science Show - 21 October 2006 - Depletion of world fish stocks
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Science Show on ABC Radio National

21 October 2006

Depletion of world fish stocks

Terry Hughes discusses reaction to a paper published in Science 17th
March 2006 which highlighted the issue of depletion of fish stocks in
the world's oceans.

Transcript
....Daniel Pauly talked of declaring war on fish.

Daniel Pauly: The figure that emerges is that we have about 10% of
the biomass of large fish left...or less in most cases. And that
means where we had ten tonnes per square kilometre of large fish we
have now one tonne or less, and for some of these large predators
such as sharks, it is one in a hundred that is left, not one in ten.

Robyn Williams: 90% have disappeared in what sort of time?

Daniel Pauly: Well, people who have looked at this in more detail can
show that it usually takes about 20 years for an industrial fishery
to reduce the stock to one-tenth of what it was before.

Robyn Williams: That's a very quick time, isn't it?

Daniel Pauly: Well, yes. Now, let's not forget it, most of the
technology we throw at fish is military technology. All the acoustic
equipment was developed, for example, in WWII by the allies in
chasing German submarines. The GPS, which is the global positioning
system developed during the Cold War to position things and to study
the Earth in great detail, and now this technology is available to
everybody to catch the last fish as if it were, I don't know, a
Soviet tank.

Robyn Williams: So it's in fact a war on fish you're describing.

Daniel Pauly: Yes, it certainly is a war on fish, and what I'm saying
is that we're winning it; we have won the war on fish.

Robyn Williams: We're going to wipe them out to the very last one.

Daniel Pauly: It's crazy but it is exactly what's happening. We have
deployed industrial military technology against the fish and we have
obviously won. The biggest fish have brains the size of peas and the
way they defend themselves against their enemies-by hiding or
swimming fast et cetera-to us they don't make much of a difference
anymore. Before they did; if a fish could hide between rocks at a
1,000 metre depth then you couldn't catch it, you couldn't see it,
obviously it was too deep, and even if you could reach that deep with
your net you couldn't catch it because it was between rocks. But now
we can see it because we have all the equipment so we see it,
ridiculously, like a soldier who has night goggles who can see
somebody who doesn't, and so we win, we win the war against fish.
.... [ 170 more lines in transcript ]
Guests

Terry Hughes
Director ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies James Cook
University Townsville Queensland 4811 Australia www.coralcoe.org.au

Daniel Pauly
Professor and Director Fisheries Centre The University of British
Columbia Vancouver, BC Canada http://www.fisheries.ubc.ca/members/dpauly/

Further Information

ECOLOGY: Globalization, Roving Bandits, and Marine Resources Berkes
et al. Science 17 March 2006: 1557-1558