Looks like we need to cut back on the sea food…or settle for farm raised…hmmm, another study warning of imminent disaster.
An excerpt.
Study finds we're eating seafood to extinction
By Carrie Peyton Dahlberg - Bee Staff WriterPublished 12:00 am PST Friday, November 3, 2006
We are scooping life out of the world's oceans so fast that if the trend continues, every seafood species now fished will collapse by 2048, a sweeping evaluation published today in the journal Science predicts.
With our dining favorites depleted, "we might be eating things like plankton or sea squirts," said UC Davis marine ecology professor Jay Stachowicz, one of 14 authors on three continents who assembled the analysis.
Stachowicz and many of his co-authors stressed that we can avert such dire scenarios by taking to heart their key conclusion: that a diverse ocean, rich in many species, will be more resilient and more productive.
The study joins a steady stream of policy papers and analyses warning that ocean life is dwindling and must be managed from a broader "ecosystem" perspective to thrive for future generations.
In a telephone press conference Thursday, the authors called for more protected areas, ocean "zoning" to limit destructive activities and replacing single-species regulations with ones to preserve whole ecosystems.
While U.S. officials are interested in some of those ideas, they are far less alarmed than the international research team.
"People ought to be concerned but not overly concerned, particularly in the United States," said Steve Murawski, chief scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration's National Marine Fisheries Service.
Fisheries regulators have a very different idea of species "collapse" than the research team used in its analysis. U.S. officials figure when we've lost three-fourths of the fish needed to ensure the maximum sustainable yield, that's collapse.
By contrast, the new paper assumes a species has collapsed when the current catch is 90 percent lower than the biggest catch on record.
