Jaw dropping animated video on over fishing. Talk about perspective.

Some of the statistics in the video are insane.

Like the dragnets the size of 4 football fields that can fit 13 jumbo jets or 500 tons of fish which are mostly bycatch.

shrimp trawlers throw 80% to 90% of the marine creatures caught overboard so for 1kilo of shrimp on your plate up to 9 kilos of other marine life is caught and wasted.

or long line fishing deploys 1.4 billion hooks a year that need a slice a fish for bait.

They are predicting the collapse of all types of fish species by less than 60 years.

7 billion people need to eat.....interesting times we live in.

The precarious state of the Ocean fish populations is nicely detailed in Jared Diamonds' book Collapse, Why Societies Choose to Fail.

Not only are the industrial fishing methods hurting all manner of sea life and destroying the sea bed itself but over half the world's population is dependent upon protein caught from the sea to survive.

Large species like tuna may take 30 -40 years to reach sexual maturity.
Once we've ruined the ocean life on land will quickly deteriorate as well.

Eta: I love your quote in your signature OP.

reply to post by Asktheanimals



No doubt in my mind this is our fate if we dont change.

What a well made video. S+F for the find.

I dont eat very much fish at all so im all for actually controlling the fishing levels. Kind of shocked how we have a safe level, which is ignored so blindly that it may as well not even mentioned as a safe level.

Very nice video. We don't eat fish in this household. We never really ate a lot fish to begin with...after the Fukushima incident, we have not eaten any..and never plan too. Even locally caught fresh water fish is so contaminated that I feel unsafe feeding it to my family.

reply to post by TiM3LoRd


The major powers have never addressed the destruction of the rain forests caused by human consumption of "meat". Maybe with the destruction of Earth's oceanlife humans and TPTB may suddenly grow a collective backbone and put a stop to this. I doubt that will happen, but may end up surprised at where the mainstream (pun intended) will move.

Very good info and very true. I have talked to people from the fish and wildlife service about this. It seems that we are spoiled, wanting only certain fish....this is bad. I like fish a lot, but it does not really matter what kind of fish other than I prefer fish that comes from clean water. Most people want fish like salmon and the salmon eats a lot of other fish. They are ferocious eaters. The only reason I will eat a wild salmon here is because I want their populations reduced in the great lakes so the populations of other fish will rebound. Trout are not that ferocious of eaters as salmon are.

I think we should eat all of the problematic Asian carp in the Mississippi river. That would be the best solution to the problem. Maybe those carp will shortly be the only fish we have if we do not change our ways. I would rather eat smelt than those carp though.

reply to post by Aleister


Our countries leaders are unbelievably dumb. Laws passed do not fix anything. If I catch a fish undersized and it swallows the hook, I have to throw the dying fish back instead of taking it as one of my limit. That is dumb. If a fish is injured during capture it should be required that it be one of your fish. I bet this practice alone causes the death of five percent of all fish caught when we go fishing. If they are small fish, they become food for bigger fish but if the fish are big, they are just seagull food....if there are seagulls around.

reply to post by rickymouse


I never thought of this, that toss aways should be counted in the fishing limit. Wish it were so. But we have something to look forward to: Once the fish are gone, corpsearians can eat the seagulls!

All of us are complicit in these crimes against the Earth, and not until mankind becomes sympathetic and responsible for its actions will we start to reverse this devastation. Humanity now face untold suffering and hardship, for generations to come.

rickymouse
reply to post by Aleister

 

Laws passed do not fix anything. If I catch a fish undersized and it swallows the hook, I have to throw the dying fish back instead of taking it as one of my limit. That is dumb. If a fish is injured during capture it should be required that it be one of your fish.

The laws for the little guy do nothing to help the little guy, only criminalize him. They force us to throw back dead fish. Not only fish with swallowed hooks, but fish caught in deep water often die when they are brought to the surface but if they are within the law you are forced to throw a dead fish back because no one wants to get caught with an illegal fish, especially licensed Captain's.

The big commercial boats can kill indiscriminately. They pay for that 'right.' The laws are setup for the big guys to win and the little guys to loose. No longer can someone bring their catch straight to the restaurant where I am from,t has to be sold to a licensed whole-seller, who then sells it to the restaurant. This is supposed for consumer protection, yet well over 90% of fish sold commercially is not inspected.

Once the fish stocks are depleted so much that fish become unaffordable, the big food industries win because more will be forced to eat and pay for their kibble.

jrod

rickymouse
reply to post by Aleister

 

Laws passed do not fix anything. If I catch a fish undersized and it swallows the hook, I have to throw the dying fish back instead of taking it as one of my limit. That is dumb. If a fish is injured during capture it should be required that it be one of your fish.

The laws for the little guy do nothing to help the little guy, only criminalize him. They force us to throw back dead fish. Not only fish with swallowed hooks, but fish caught in deep water often die when they are brought to the surface but if they are within the law you are forced to throw a dead fish back because no one wants to get caught with an illegal fish, especially licensed Captain's.

The big commercial boats can kill indiscriminately. They pay for that 'right.' The laws are setup for the big guys to win and the little guys to loose. No longer can someone bring their catch straight to the restaurant where I am from,t has to be sold to a licensed whole-seller, who then sells it to the restaurant. This is supposed for consumer protection, yet well over 90% of fish sold commercially is not inspected.

Once the fish stocks are depleted so much that fish become unaffordable, the big food industries win because more will be forced to eat and pay for their kibble.

And that's the kicker. Only the ultra rich will be able to afford real fish. The middle class will be long gone by then do only the rich and poor will exist. The poor will have to settle for synthetic fish meat. Grown in the lab maybe. Hmmmm I can't wait.

reply to post by TiM3LoRd


I seriously doubt there will be faux lab fish on the market. The big food industries want all us peasants to consume their GMO produce and their hormone fed livestock.

The food industry is one of the biggest in the world. With reports of common people being forced to rip up personal gardens, people getting arrested for fishing for food, and with pollution and deforestation it is becoming increasingly difficult for someone to live off the land. When we can't live off the land then we all will be forced to eat GMO produce and hormone tainted livestock

It scares and angers me that we now live in a world where you can be arrested for simply trying to live off the land.

We have all the technology we need to raise our own fish for farming and I believe this was actually on Bush's wish list. Giant fields of farmed fish out in the ocean that we monitor and maintain according to supply.

If all the fish start disappearing the political roadblocks to this will go away and we will have all we ever need. We will never run out of fish.

Its the same with fresh water. For the cost of the Iraq war we could have built enough desalinization plants to give everyone in the country fresh water. Not exactly but you get the point.

Spookybelle
We will never run out of fish.

Its the same with fresh water. For the cost of the Iraq war we could have built enough desalinization plants to give everyone in the country fresh water. Not exactly but you get the point.

Actually clean fresh water is becoming harder to find, if we keep doing what we are doing we will run out of clean fresh water. Desalinization plants are not very effective and cannot produce enough water for the world. It has been predicted that we will have water wars in the not too distant future.

Fish farms are not the best answer either, since most fish are carnivorous, fish farms pretty much take smaller fish with little or no market value and feed that to the fish with market value. While there will always be fish in the ocean, the way we fish is not sustainable. Bluefin Tuna is one popular fish that we may fish into extinction, just for an example. Many of the netting methods involve dragging large nets across the bottom destroying the habitat and killing indiscriminately. It takes hundreds if not thousands of years for some of those habitats to recover from just 1 netting.

We've depleted the fish stocks around the world, and if we continue to fish the way we do then the fish will become so scarce that it simply won't be affordable anymore.

I do have my commercial fishing license so I know this issue more intimately than most.

reply to post by rickymouse


You want people to eat carp? Asian or otherwise - make it palatable.

Thre below is a joke but it is not far from the truth.

Carp recipes are common. Ron Brooks reminded mo how to cook roasted planked carp. Scale and gut a carp. Nail it to a plank. Roast over an open fire until the meat flakes. Throw away the carp and eat the plank. Onions and bell pepper may be added. There is also a recipe for baked carp. Scale and gut the carp and split into two halves. Place a brick between the two halves, cover with bell pepper, onion and salt and wrap in tin foil Bake in an oven for three hours. Unwrap carefully, throw away the carp and eat the brick. It will be better than the carp. Also works with a shingle or, if camping, a river rock.

The problem lies with our attitude towards food. We have an eat now worry tomorrow mentality.

It is this that is unsustainable since we live on a finite space with finite resources.