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Depletion of World Fish Supply


CrescentFresh

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I can't help but feel that all of this is related to our "Must have it now lifestyles". There is surely something to be said for cooking and eating seasonally and sustainably. :)

BTW, Has anyone seen this weeks "Iconoclasts" episode on IFC. Alice Waters (Chez Panisse) is featured and it's interesting to see what she is doing now.

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I can't help but feel that all of this is related to our "Must have it now lifestyles". There is surely something to be said for cooking and eating seasonally and sustainably. :)

i agree: nature tells us no frogs or turtles in the winter, when they are stuck in the mud, and it is our job to listen.

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cooking and eating seasonally and sustainably.
It is difficult to dodge seasonality of fish since laws dictate fishing seasons and fishermen face fines for surpassing quotas.

eg: western halibut, salmon, and sablefish season ends in November. Anything sold afterwards is frozen or farmed. Wild fish prices fluctuate based on when the fisheries are temporarily closed so that stocks and quotas can be calculated.

The burden on the individual consumer should not be the specific creature consumed but the manner in which it is fished or harvested. What the article’s paranoid fantasy doesn’t foresee is that given a limited resource, man will find a way to fish farther and deeper, like the oil industry, and that much like skate and monkfish were the scourge of nets a generation ago, man will find previously unconsidered species to feed upon.

Consumers can choose dayboat products which are fished on a smaller scale, relatively benign to other species. Oceanaire often buys from dayboat fishermen and Jeff Buben catches his own tuna. NOAA is pushing legislation to mandate nets that allow undesirable items and bycatch to pass through. Bycatch is the curse of commercial fishing. Don’t be loathing fish... loathe fishing.

If one is so naive and disillusioned to believe that their personal eating habits can change an $80 billion industry, the best they can do is avoid processed industrial products or seafood from impersonal chain establishments and consider dayboat fishermen. Furthermore, rather than over-subsidizing farmers, government should encourage fishermen financially, much to the detriment of the consumer, to police their waters of poachers, and maintain quotas.

At the Boqueria in Barcelona oil drums are full of immature bycatch fish sold for stew, mostly monkfish and few more than 4" in length. At the famed Bergen, Norway fish market however, next to the minke whale steaks were only 2 monkfish, each close to 40".

The pescapocalypse will affect more populous areas that rely on factory fishing to feed their masses whose vacant relationship with the sea is a parallel to the plight of inland farmers vs greedy/thrifty aloof consumers.

For better or worse, within the next 40 years science will probably yield the luxury of synthesizing caviar and cod in our refrigerators anyway.

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There are certain practices that commercial fishing fleets legally follow that are incredibly detrimental to the environment and the health of the fisheries:

Drag netting- towing huge nets across the bottom of the sea floor and raking in anything and everything. After a drag net operation, the floor is a dead zone. Why is this pracice allowed? It would be like alowing farmers to destray narby habitats when they harvest their target crop.

Long line fishing- letting out lines miles (up to 100 mi long) with hooks. The process takes days so any by catch hooked or snagged will be dead by the time the line is brought into the boat.

Dumping of bycatch- Fishing boats dump bycatch and the remains after at sea processing over the side. This results in rotting fish fouling the ocean floor and often results in killing the fish and other life on the sea floor. It is illegal for the person building your house to dump construction waste in anything but a designated landfill but fishing fleets are allowed to do so.

This has nothing to do with personal choice as most fish is not labeled clearly enough to tell if these kinds of practices are followed. These practices should be outlawed as wasteful.

Organizations such as the Marine Stewardship Council have been formed to evaluate the health of selected fisheries and regulate the harvest fof such fish as wild salmon and halibut from Alaska. By allowing sustainable amounts of harvest, the health of the fishery over time is improved at a slight reduction of fishing in any given year. Once a heathy fishery is reestablished, the sustainable harvest is not all that much different from the unregulated ahrvest. But once a fishery collapses, the harvests are only a few percentage points of what they were when the fishery was healthy. See cod or oysters in the Chesapeake as examples. Unfortunately, the MSC represents a miniscule amount of the worlds fisheries.

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Had really planned on keeping my mouth shut, but...

If one is so naive and disillusioned to believe that their personal eating habits can change an $80 billion industry, the best they can do is avoid processed industrial products or seafood from impersonal chain establishments and consider dayboat fishermen.
just have to say - dolphin safe tuna.

Mouth back shut.

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I don't see how to keep this a fact based conversation and not one that dissolves into opinions, emotions, and (mis)perceptions. You can already see that in the previous posts and the news stories -- on all sides of the story. Everyone is certainly entitled to their opinion and you can only have the same conversation so many times. That is why I'm keeping my mouth shut.

And yes, I have met him. There are many people in the marine sciences who have names that live up to their professions. I always love that. I've meet Herring, Sharky, Worum (just say it fast), Leech, Leach, Skate, Seel, Gupi, Salmond, Neptune, Tack, Reel, and Reefe to name a few. Makes me wish for either different parents or an appropriate marriage. :)

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dolphin safe tuna.
The “dolphin safe” appellation is not a blessing to stocks in the eastern Pacific which have not recovered from the 1960's decimation and the “dolphin safe” tuna fishing practice does not guarantee dolphin survival.

Many still die. Probably just to spite us. That's how cynical they are.

What the “dolphin safe” label does not mention is the other bycatch as a result of purse seining...sharks, turtles, Swedish fish, mermaids and plenty of Neptune’s smaller fishes which are eaten by bigger fishes and so forth.

While it may please the few conscientious consumers to purchase “dolphin safe” tuna, the repercussions are pushed further down the food chain and the majority of world wide tuna fish salad consumers may not question the fishing policy of their lunch counter nor might they have the luxury of choosing one brand over another.

Though most commercially caught tuna destined for canning is albacore (chunk white) and yellowfin or skipjack (chunk light) are in somewhat healthy populations depending on how they are fished, better quality tuna stocks are still dwindling.

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Aw shucks, thanks Don. Much as I try to escape a hands on role in fisheries it just doesn't seem to be working. We'll be bringing an issue to the highest authority here in two weeks to create a new no-take marine reserve. Success or failure will depend on how well we can explain impact of catch-and-release mortality to a stressed, but still healthier then most, ecosystem.

These days I'm eating Gulf crabs (thanks to country of origin labelling laws leading to further niche marketing this close to the Gulf to respond to consumer demand for fresh local seafood) and they work Cajun style. I go for something else when the menu reads Maryland style crabcakes. What would be the point? Next week, I'll be enjoying my first stone crabs of the season, definitely not cajun style.

Again, not going to get into interpretation of the data but merely clarify that I pointed to dolphin safe tuna as a successful example of how consumer demand led to drastic changes in fishing methods in a big money, corporate fishery(as opposed to owner-operator akin to small scale or family farmer). I did not mean to imply it had entirely solved the problem it targeted or problems it was never intended to solve, particularly in fisheries in which it is not utilized. Most of the shifts in fisheries management in this country, good and bad, are directly related to public pressure.

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BTW, Has anyone seen this weeks "Iconoclasts" episode on IFC. Alice Waters (Chez Panisse) is featured and it's interesting to see what she is doing now.
By far the best part was when Baryshnikov goes on about gefilte fish and compares it to vodka:

What's wrong with geiflte fish? There is a good gefiltefish and bad gefiltefish. Actually there is no bad gefilteifsh. It's like vodka. Good vodka, or very good voka, it's still vodka, no?
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Yeah, and I have been waiting for you to chime in on this subject. Wanna enlighten us all? Please?

Nothing to enlighten about. I just thought it was funny that the fisheries scientist's name is Worm. I remember this guy who used to own a cloth diaper business in NY. His name was Alan Leakoff. Swear!

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At the Boqueria in Barcelona oil drums are full of immature bycatch fish sold for stew, mostly monkfish and few more than 4" in length. At the famed Bergen, Norway fish market however, next to the minke whale steaks were only 2 monkfish, each close to 40".

Though this is off topic, I was at the Bergen fish market just a couple of weeks ago and was greatly disappointed. So tiny!

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For those who have been fooled into believing that their salmo salar “Atlantic Salmon” is a variety other than those farmed in Nordic fjords, Chile, Scotland or Russia; Orri Vigfusson is trying to ensure that future wild stocks will be made available to consumers before most in the community loose their wits/teeth/sight/libido/hair.

The U.S. government has participated in similar efforts and even bought out the entire Greenland traditional fishing quota one year (attempted several other times) to protect the portion of the stock that spawn in U.S. rivers, about 8-20 individual fish per annual run. (No, that is not a typo.)

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Had a nice chat yesterday with Gubeen's uncle, who retired to the life of a Long Island lobsterman some years ago. It's looking terminally bleak up there, as subtly rising water temperatures have dramatically impacted the population through both increasing disease vectors, and alterations in the lobsters' lifecycle that result in weakened specimens. They're still harvesting a catch, but it looks like it's only a matter of time before the American lobster's southern range retreats farther up the coast.

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