Word: fishly
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Thick swordfish steaks. Orange roughy fillets. Great mounds of red-fleshed tuna. Judging from the seafood sections of local supermarkets, there would seem to be plenty of fish left in the oceans. But this appearance of abundance is an illusion, says Sylvia Earle, former chief scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Already, Earle fears, an international armada of fishing vessels is on the verge of exhausting a storehouse of protein so vast that it once appeared to be infinite. "It's a horrible thing to contemplate," shudders Earle. "What makes it even worse is that we know better...
...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...
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...
...swimming machines that have earned the nickname "Porsches of the sea." In the western Atlantic, the breeding population of northern bluefin, the largest tuna species, is thought to consist of perhaps 40,000 adults, down from some 250,000 two decades ago. Reason: the flourishing airfreight industry that allows fish brokers to deliver Atlantic Ocean bluefin overnight to Tokyo's sashimi market, where a single fish can fetch $80,000 or more at auction. "To a fisherman, catching a bluefin is a lot like winning the lottery," sighs Stanford University marine biologist Barbara Block...
...crash of commercially important fisheries is not new. What is new is how quickly fisheries arise and how quickly they are exploited. In recent years, piked dogfish, a small spiny shark, has begun to stand in for cod in the fish and chips served by British pubs, and the Patagonian toothfish has become a popular substitute for sablefish in Japan. But environmental groups are concerned about the long-term viability of the fisheries that are serving up these quaintly named piscine treats. This year, for example, ships from around the world have converged on the Southern Ocean, where the toothfish...