90 percent of big fish wiped out, study says

Advertiser Staff and News Services

Industrial fishing fleets have systematically stripped 90 percent of the giant tuna, swordfish, marlin and other big fish from the world's oceans, according to a new study that suggests the virtual collapse of these stocks — such as happened to the cod off New England — is a distinct possibility.

These three specimens were part of the 17 million pounds of tuna Hawai'i's fishing fleet brought in last year. Big fish are being stripped from the oceans because of overfishing, according to a new study. Advertiser library photo • Dec. 26, 2002

"Fishermen used to go out and catch these phenomenally big fish," said Ransom A. Myers, a fisheries biologist at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. "But they cannot find them anymore. They're not there. We ate them."

Fishing industry experts in Hawai'i were critical of the study and say they will examine it closely.

"The study is very simplistic," said Paul Dalzell, senior scientist for the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council. "It ignores chances in fishing over time in terms of fishing technology. It ignores that we have very good stock assessments for the western and central Pacific."

While some fish populations have been in decline, none are anywhere near 90 percent gone, he said. "While the picture isn't entirely rosy, it is not as gloomy as it is painted in this study," Dalzell said.

Sean Martin, president of the Hawai'i Longline Association, said the study "sounds out of whack to me."

"I believe it is off the mark and misleading," he said. "In the study, they didn't use any north Pacific data. They specifically excluded it in this report."

He said that decision was made because that broad expanse of ocean, which is used by the Hawai'i-based fleet, was already "industrially exploited" before fishing management and data collection.

There about 100 boats in the Hawai'i fleet. Last year, they caught 17 million pounds of bigeye, yellow fin and albacore tuna. The year before, they caught 15 million pounds.

Myers' Nova Scotia study, with Dalhousie University colleague Boris Worm, is the third in a series of recent scientific papers that challenge the notion that the oceans are so resilient they can provide an inexhaustible supply of fish to feed the world.

The first study, by Jeremy Jackson of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, looked at the decline of many ocean species over several centuries and documented how it set in motion the collapse of kelp forests and coral reefs.

The second study, by Daniel Pauly of the University of British Columbia, focused on how the worldwide catch of all seafood has been on the decline since the late 1980s, as evidenced by the ever-dwindling catches of an expanding global fishing fleet.

Myers' study focused on the demise of what was once considered "the blue frontier," caused by the introduction of industrial fishing in the years immediately after World War II. It was then that most of the biggest fish were pulled from the sea, never to rebound because of continuing fishing pressure. These oceanic giants are now mostly memories, romanticized in novels such as Ernest Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea," or in yellowing photos of fishermen beside their enormous catches.

The loss of these fish presents a considerable problem for fishery managers from the 192 nations that signed a declaration last year at a United Nations summit to restore fish to healthy levels by 2015.

Pauly said the new study shows that in most places, fisheries managers are arriving too late. He likens the situation to saving a forest after harvesting has taken place. "It's like we have a forest of stumps," Pauly said. "We are trying to manage a forest of stumps."

Yet tuna industry scientists immediately challenged the study's conclusions, saying they were simplistic and inconsistent with other data.

"Their analysis has several implicit assumptions that are either unsupported or weakly supported," said Mark Maunder, a fisheries expert with the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission in San Diego. A group of top tuna scientists, he said, would be scrutinizing the study and would issue a formal rebuttal later.

"No doubt scientists will quibble over the details," said Andy Rosenberg, former deputy director of the National Marine Fisheries Service and now a dean at the University of New Hampshire. "But the study shows we can very rapidly deplete a broad range of species even in the largest and deepest oceans. The bottom line is we are killing too many fish."

In the study, Myers and Worm analyzed 47 years of detailed fishing records kept by the Japanese long-lining fleet, in which ships unfurl baited hooks from lines that stretch up to 50 miles off their sterns.

The Japanese pioneered long lining after World War II. In the first few years after the war, the Japanese fleet was forbidden from leaving the waters immediately around Japan, but later was permitted to spread across the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic oceans. Other fishing fleets adopted the same technique and other methods of fishing designed to greatly increase their catch.

"Anytime (the Japanese) went into new areas, they caught 10 big fish per 100 hooks," Myers said, "and then quickly it would decline to one fish per 100 hooks."

Advertiser staff writer Mike Gordon contributed to this report.