Overfishing

11:41 AM Posted In , , Edit This 4 Comments »
"The world’s largest food fishery is on the verge of collapse. Pollock, used to make McDonald’s fish sandwiches, frozen fish sticks, fish and chips, and imitation crabmeat, have had a population decrease of 50 percent since last year.
The dwindling fish populations are largely due to the enormous amounts of fishing being removed from Alaska’s Bering Sea. Factory fishing trawlers take over a million tons of pollock out of the ocean each year. The fish cannot reproduce and recover as quickly as they are being fished."

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

We (biologists) keep telling them they have to establish large no-fishing zones if they want SUSTAINABLE fishing, but what the hell do we know, we're just scientists...*grumble, snarl*

~Reave

Anonymous said...

How about reading the REAL scientific data before propogating greenpeace propaganda. This is a natural cycle. The only way to have avoided it would have been to take MORE fish the last five years. TOO MANY fish from the earlier year classes ate the young from the upcoming year classes. So there is a hole in the stock. Now that the large year classes are dying off, the juvenile populations are doing very well.

SLiver of Jade said...

Good point, I forget that not everyone lives in the Pacific Northwest and worries about the local economy in conjunction with how well the fishing industry is doing. So I suppose that these reports are also propaganda:
http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/environment/archives/142200.asp Which is from this past summer.
Or how important the salmon runs are, and how well they've been doing since allowable catches have been reduced.
In 2005, the catches were shockingly low. http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/05/11/news/salmon.php Within the past year, we had a record run since the restrictions.
Then there's the fact that I have family who works for Alaska's Fish and Game department, who might have a fairly good idea about what's going on in their fishing industry (also highly tied to their economy), but I can't exactly cite that source with proof. You might think he's just a figment of my imagination.
And I suppose that Reave, who commented before you and is a biologist also here in the Pacific Northwest where if the fishing fails so does our local economy, also hasn't read any REAL scientific data.
Speaking of which, where are your sources? I don't know why I even bother responding to these trolls since they obviously don't care what I have to say. They just want to push my buttons.

SLiver of Jade said...

Oh, and then I forgot about these.
"Overfishing is suspected as the reason for the steep declines in many wildlife populations of the Bering Sea."
http://www.alaskaoceans.net/facts/overfishing.htm