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Findings released more than a year ago in Science Magazine provide overwhelming evidence that loss in marine biodiversity, which is "directly caused by exploitation, pollution, and habitat destruction, or indirectly through climate change and related perturbations of ocean biochemistry" (Worm et al., 2006, p. 787), lead leads to significant overall decrease in productivity. This decrease in biodiversity and subsequent decrease in productivity, as well as the disruption of ocean currents from global pollution (Pew), directly impacts all of humanity, from those who eat and catch fish to the land-locked nations without any immediate connection to the fishing industry. Boris Worm, the scientist who introduced the idea of "no fish by 2050," has been quoted in an article as saying, "weWe're going to run out of viable fisheries, out of all seafood species by the year 2050" (ScienCentral, 2006), in . In conjunction with several other authorsothers, issued Worm wrote the report article in Science Magazine relating the devastating effect of the loss of biodiversity:
"Human-dominated marine ecosystems are experiencing accelerating loss of populations and species, with largely unknown consequences. We analyzed local experiments, long-term regional time series, and global fisheries data to test how biodiversity loss affects marine ecosystems ecosystem services across temporal and spatial scales. Overall, rates of resource collapse increased and recovery potential, stability, and water quality decreased exponentially with declining diversity. Restoring of biodiversity, in contrast, increased productivity fourfold and decreased variability by 21%, on average. We conclude that marine biodiversity loss in increasingly impairing the ocean's capacity to provide food, maintain water quality, and recover from perturbations. Yet available data suggest that at this point, these trends are still reversible" (Worm et al., 2006, p. 787).
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"In 2000, the FAO stated that 72% of the world's marine fish resources are either fully exploited or in decline. This state of overexploitation has led to practices in cascade fishing, where smaller, immature individuals or different stocks of lesser value and quality replace the former stocks that existed in higher trophic levels. Thus, leading to the current declining trend in fish harvest from high-value demersal fish to lower-value pelagic fish" (Duke). According to Annual Commercial Landing Statistics from NOAA, statistics from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which manages U.S. fisheries, the tonnage of fish caught in US American fisheries from 1950 to 2006 has nearly doubled to more than 4.3 million tons per annum, with a peak in 1997 at nearly 4.8 million tons (NOAA, 2007), yet because of this increase in production, the fish stocks have decreased by 90% since 1950 (Big-Fish, 2003). "Only 10 percent of all large fish - both open ocean species including tuna, swordfish, marlin and the large groundfish such as cod, halibut, skates and flounder - are left in the sea, according to research published in today's issue of the scientific journal Nature" (Big-Fish, 2003). The fisheries are as susceptible to collapse as the ecosystems upon which they depend.
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One of the largest problems the oceans face today is the increasing demand for fish products. As stocks are continuously fished beyond sustainable levels and demand increases, fish populations world wide worldwide face the possibility of collapse.
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+Footnotes+
\[1\] Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America are members of ICES. Australia, Chile, Greece, New Zealand, Peru, and South Africa are affiliate countries.
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(CHILD PAGE 2 FOR PRESENT ENDS HERE)
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Today, both scientist and commercial fishermen track fish. While both use SONAR for biomass estimates, fishermen use the estimates to "catch fish more effectively, while scientists use \[the data\] to study fish distribution and \[to\] estimate stock abundance" (ICES, 2006). Scientists also use more extensive methods to survey fish populations, such as trawl surveys and tagging projects. |
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