What's Troubling Our Waters
Ocean fish are wildlife—the last wild creatures that people hunt on a large scale.
Once it seemed the ocean would supply an endless bounty of seafood. Today, we're discovering its limits. Between 1950 and 1994, ocean fishermen increased their catch 400% by doubling the number of boats and using more effective fishing gear. In 1989, the world's catch leveled off at just over 82 million metric tons of fish per year. That's all the ocean can produce. Sending more boats won't help us catch more fish.
Fisheries boom, then bust
Overfishing means catching fish faster than they can reproduce. Overfishing pushes the fish population lower and lower, until fish are so few that fishermen can't make a living any more. Many fisheries have already collapsed, throwing thousands of people out of work. All over the world, fishery after fishery booms as we send in more boats, then busts as the fish population crashes.
Chilean seabass live at least 40 years, orange roughy at least 100. A Pacific rockfish caught in 2001 was 205 years old—born when Washington was still president! Such slow-growing fishes are very vulnerable to overfishing; choose seafood from our Green List instead.
Off New England, cod were once so plentiful that boats had trouble pushing through them. Now the cod are nearly gone, and a centuries-old fishing tradition is ending. Other overfished species include sharks, bluefin tuna and many kinds of West Coast rockfish. When one kind of fish is no longer plentiful, fishermen must move on to new species. Monkfish and sharks were once discarded as "trash fish," but now they're valuable—and are themselves overfished! Overfishing has also forced fishermen to look deeper for new species like orange roughy and Chilean seabass.
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This trawler catches literally tons of fish in one haul of their net. Hundreds of thousands of fishing vessels across the globe extract millions of tons of fish from the ocean every year.
Cod reproduce prolifically, and so should be able to sustain heavy fishing, but long-term overfishing and destruction of their seafloor habitat by bottom trawlers have sent Atlantic cod into drastic declines.
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