DECLINES IN FISH STOCKS WORLDWIDE_the ecology of exinction

@farmerman,

farmerman wrote:

Soon the artificially sustained , farm raised fish will be optimized for all the world to take, thus obviating all the ocean bottom vacuuming and crashing fish stocks.

I hope that you are correct in that assumption. I mistrust, however, the greed and cupidity of capitalists.

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@JTT,

Fish are supposed to be managed as a renewable resource, not an extractive resource like gold or diamonds. Whene the fishing industry acts irresponsibly and mines the ocean floor or doesnt consider sustainability when it gets in front of immediate profits then I have several major problems with that.
Japan operates one of the largest fishing fleets and doesnt involve itself in anything that smacks of conservation

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@farmerman,

I don't know if a poster has already commented, about the Salmon industry. Due to commercialization of salmon farms, these salmon farms are crowded without free flowing water and given antibiotics and PCB's (cancer causing). They have contaminants and have genetic modifications. They are getting out of their pens and mating with wild salmon. They are also plagued with a sea lice on their scales, due to not enough running water and oxygenization. So far the wild salmon that run right next to the salmon farms are not getting this bug, but they are getting PCB's and antibiotics that are not absorbed by the farmed salmon. So when you order salmon in a restaurant make sure it is "wild" salmon, not farmed salmon full of drugs. Assume any salmon you purchase is farmed if it does not state wild.

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@Philis,

Its not a matter that one'll kill you and the other wont. Fish, especially top predators , are wonderful collectors of PCBs and TCDDs. Id rather eat farmed salmon if grown in US or CAnada because both countries use prime ocean bottom for salmon pen ops. We both use swift waters and those that are deep. While methods of farming were more primitive just 10 years ago, many advances have made aquaculture quite advanced.

Wild sa,lmon is another species that is being depleted because we cannot agree on international treaties for its conservation. Weve got entire rivers that are depleted in the NW and in the East (there are presently NO streams open to salmon fishing in US or MAritime CAnada) and the stocks dont look like theyre gonna rebound.

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US backs bluefin tuna trade ban
The Age Australia
JULIET EILPERIN
March 5, 2010

The US has thrown its support behind a ban on the international trade in Atlantic bluefin tuna.

Sushi lovers in Japan and elsewhere have consumed bluefin for decades, causing the fish's population to plummet.

In less than two weeks, representatives from 175 countries will convene in Doha, Qatar, to decide whether to restrict the trade in Atlantic bluefin tuna and an array of other imperilled species under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species.

Japan, which consumes three-quarters of the global bluefin catch, says a global trade ban is too drastic and has left open the option of defying any such restriction.

The bluefin is the largest of the tuna family and is highly prized for sushi and sashimi. Stocks have fallen drastically, declining in the western Atlantic by more than 80 per cent from 1970 to 2007.

Spain, Greece and Malta, which all have significant tuna industries, are opposed. Other countries believed to be opposed include Canada and China.
Mr Strickland, assistant secretary for fish and wildlife in the Department of the Interior, who will lead the US delegation to the conference between March 13 and 25, said on Wednesday that the US had decided it needed to push for the extraordinary new protection because ''the regulatory mechanisms that have been relied upon have failed to do the job''.
A ban on the global trade would not affect Pacific bluefin tuna, whose stocks are also in decline but are administered separately, or other varieties of tuna consumed in many Western countries.

read the full artical here
http://www.theage.com.au/environment/us-backs-bluefin-tuna-trade-ban-20100304-plqt.html

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Good article, DP, thanks. ICCAT, the international body concerned with Atlantic tuna stocks, says the annual Atlantic bluefin catch is 60,000 tons. If Japan is getting three quarters of that, that's 45,000 tons per annum. That's just incredible to me, that one nation has such a heavy impact on a fish stock. (And, of course, that doesn't include their take from Pacific and Southern ocean sources.)

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@Setanta,

Both the Atlantic and SOuthern Bluefin Stock are endangered and , here we go again, the Japanese are not going to cooperate in achieving some degree of sustainable catch, or shift over to yellowfin.
We see tuna in large numbers in the BAy of Fundy and Gulf of MAine. They come cruising through our wake like torpedos and the only thing we see is a huge wake and a few small fins at the surface. If theyre feeding they are like a bunh of piranha.

WHenever I used to go up to New York Id often eat at Nobu (restaurant chain is wildly successful as a chain in US and Europe. Its owned by Robert deNiro). I no longer eat at Nobu because they apparently served bluefin waaay too much as an unidentified fish species. These 2 NY kids did a series of DNA tests on restaurant fish (including Macdonaklds fish samwich).

Japan and Canada both claim that their catches are sustainable so this plays back a bit to the other "thread" .

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What bothers me most are two things. The first is that it isn't necessary. Japan can meet its protein needs without plundering the seas--this is all about making huge piles of cash selling popular forms of sashimi to the Japanese public. The second is that the Japanese are exploiting other fisheries because they've **** in the own nests. The coastal waters and the waters of the inland sea in Japan are so badly polluted that the government tells people not to eat the fish caught there. So the rest of the world is to sit by and watch the Japanese destroy the pelagic ecosystems because their capitalists lust after the huge profits to be reaped from selling popular types of sashimi and because they destroyed their own coastal fisheries.

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the japanese are actually ahead of the rest of the world in farminf bluefin. most of the countries that farm blue fin rely on wild catch then fattening in pens. there has been little sucess in raising bluefin from eggs, however the japenese are streets ahead in their research of breeding

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Let's hope they advance to the point at which they no longer need to rape the oceans.

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Companies from Japan, which consumes three-quarters of all bluefin and effectively controls the global trade, have put an estimated 30,000 tons of the fish, worth between $10 billion and $20 billion, in frozen storage

Read More http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/07/tunafarms/#ixzz0hUo4E1Og

Swimming in a McMansion-sized tank in a nondescript warehouse in Port Lincoln, Australia, are 60 bluefin tuna. They’re about four months old, a foot long, and might represent the salvation " albeit an uncertain, ambiguous salvation " of that magnificent, desperately threatened creature.

Researchers in Japan have tried to breed Southern bluefin in captivity for more than 30 years, but though they’ve learned to keep the fish alive, year-to-year egg harvests have been inconsistent. The European and Australian teams seem to have solved that problem, but there’s still more to do.

Read More http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/07/tunafarms/#ixzz0hUpNrZJR

artical about japanese research
http://www.pesca.sp.gov.br/noticia.php?id_not=4659

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I have a strong suspicion that the oceans are doing to die much more rapidly than is curently expected. We might well pull out and eat everything that we can now, so as to get some use out of what is in the ocean.

Quote:

Blumenthal, McClatchy Newspapers Les Blumenthal, Mcclatchy Newspapers " Sun Mar 7, 12:01 pm ET
WASHINGTON " Lower levels of oxygen in the Earth's oceans, particularly off the United States' Pacific Northwest coast, could be another sign of fundamental changes linked to global climate change, scientists say.

They warn that the oceans' complex undersea ecosystems and fragile food chains could be disrupted.

In some spots off Washington state and Oregon , the almost complete absence of oxygen has left piles of Dungeness crab carcasses littering the ocean floor, killed off 25-year-old sea stars, crippled colonies of sea anemones and produced mats of potentially noxious bacteria that thrive in such conditions.

Areas of hypoxia, or low oxygen, have long existed in the deep ocean. These areas " in the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans " appear to be spreading, however, covering more square miles, creeping toward the surface and in some places, such as the Pacific Northwest , encroaching on the continental shelf within sight of the coastline.

"The depletion of oxygen levels in all three oceans is striking," said Gregory Johnson , an oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Seattle

http://news.yahoo.com/s/mcclatchy/20100307/sc_mcclatchy/3444187

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@farmerman,

Quote:

The "new" cods are more lean (almost gaunt looking as opposed to the "fat cod"ook of the pre 1990's).

Presumably an evolutionary survival mechanism to become less attractive to fish and chip shop customers.

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If you are ever in the water and are about to be attacked by a Great White (happens too frequently off South Australia) you wont have a leg to stand on because you have eaten fish. I however, will be able to look the shark in the eye with morale superiority.

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@Ionus,

Quote:

I however, will be able to look the shark in the eye with morale superiority.

How happy can you be if youre gonna be lunch

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I got to thinking about farming tuna

Quote:

Farm raised tuna generally has a higher fat content than wild tuna. The main expense of raising blue fin tuna is the cost of food. A one meter tuna need about 15 kilogram of live fish to put on one kilogram of fat, and about 1.5 tons to two tons of squid and mackerel are needed to produce a 100 kilogram bluefin tuna
http://factsanddetails.com/japan.php?itemid=936&catid=24&subcatid=159

So we take 1.5 tons of seafood and turn it into 1 tonne of seafood.

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Farming of bluefin tuna is common in the Mediterranean. The practice began there in Croatia in 1996 and since has then has begun in Italy, Spain and Turkey .
In the Mediterranean the tuna are caught in their spawning ground in waters off Libya. They are transferred to underwater boxes and fattened up with fish meal, sardines, mackerel and squid, up to two years, to increase the fatty meat valued in Japan. According to a WWF report fish farming is responsible for depleting stocks of bluefin tuna in the Mediterranean because so many spawning fish are caught. Japanese firms own a sizable part of the bluefin tuna farm industry in the Mediterranean.

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@dadpad,

Quote:

So we take 1.5 tons of seafood and turn it into 1 tonne of seafood.

The best ratio for food in, meat (protein) out, apart from Soylent Green, is chickens.

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@dadpad,

You turn 1.5 tons into 100 kilograms of tuna. Not such a great ratio. Maybe that's why they mixed English tons with metric kilograms.

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@roger,

So if we didnt have whales, sharks, tuna, seals, dolphins etc we would have more fish for ourselves ? And before people get injured in the stampede to lynch me, just saying, thats all.

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DECLINES IN FISH STOCKS WORLDWIDE_the ecology of exinction

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