Word: fishermen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Pacific, conservationists' most immediate concern is finning. Every year at least 50,000 blue sharks landed by longline fishermen off Hawaii are stripped of their valuable fins and tossed back in the water. While the regional fisheries councils responsible for U.S. Pacific waters haven't yet addressed this problem, California has: the state legislature in 1993 passed a bill protecting white sharks from being caught or killed by commercial fishermen, along with more limited restrictions on other species and rules against killing sharks for their fins alone...
...does to ruin one. Consider the present state of the orange roughy on New Zealand's Challenger Plateau. Discovered in 1979, this deep-water fishing hole took off in the 1980s when the mild-tasting, white-fleshed fish became popular with U.S. chefs. Happy to stoke the surging demand, fishermen are believed to have reduced the biomass of orange roughy as much as 80% before officials stepped in. Now, says Yale University ichthyologist Jon Moore, it may take centuries before the fishery rebounds. As scientists have belatedly learned, orange roughy grow extremely slowly, live 100 years or more and take...
...fishermen around the world soon start hauling back empty nets and fishing lines, it will not be for lack of warning. In the 1990s, after increasing for nearly four decades, the wild catch of marine fish leveled off worldwide and in some years actually declined. "We are reaching, and in many cases have exceeded, the oceans' limits," declare the authors of a sobering report released by the Natural Resources Defense Council earlier this year. "We are no longer living off the income but eating deeply into the capital...
Fights have already started to break out over the dwindling supply. Two weeks ago, hundreds of Canadian fishermen blockaded a British Columbia port for several days to keep an Alaskan ferry from leaving. The reason for their protest? Alaskan trawlers were sweeping up the salmon that spawn in Canada's rivers. Now the Canadians are threatening to do to the salmon runs of Washington State what U.S. fishermen have done to theirs...
Until now, the worst threat most creatures of the sea had faced at fishermen's hands was so-called commercial extinction. Whenever local populations of a particular fish plummeted, boats simply targeted some other species or moved to more distant waters. The depleted stocks almost always recovered. But now, experts warn, unprecedented forces--among them, industrial-scale fishing gear and a burgeoning global seafood market--are altering this age-old cycle. The economic and technological barriers that have kept overfishing within bounds appear increasingly shaky, like dikes along a river that floodwaters have undermined. Should these barriers collapse, commercial extinction...