Deep sea fish biomass 10 times more than previously thought

Crew members aboard the Malaspina Expedition traveled over 36,000 miles, studying life far beneath the ocean surface using sound waves. The crew, led by Carlos Duarte, took readings from latitudes ranging from 40 degrees north to 40 degrees south. They found mesopelagic fish had the ability to avoid nets. Trawling was essential to earlier counts of population sizes, and having the skill to avoid such nets may have caused earlier population measurements to be too low.

Source 1, Source 2

With a stock estimated at 1,000 million tons so far, mesopelagic fish dominate the total biomass of fish in the ocean. However, a team of researchers with the participation of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) has found that their abundance could be at least 10 times higher.

Details of the study was profiled in the journal Nature Communications.

Interesting news, 10 times more than previously though, how much else is there to find among that 10 times more?

On the sad note, now that they know the fishing nets are inefficient for these kind of fish how long will be until a new fishing method is developed to tap this unexploited resource

reply to post by Indigent


The "seafood" industry will probably jump all over this and use it when restrictions on fishing are discussed and debated. Those nets should have been outlawed long ago. When I first saw the movie "The Perfect Storm," and it portrayed the beautiful fish that the boats were killing, I rooted for the storm.

reply to post by Indigent


the article concerns all fish,not just the ones the fishing industry targets.As previously noted,I'm sure the fishing industry will use this to they're advantage,but how many of these are edible?

Aleister
reply to post by Indigent

 

When I first saw the movie "The Perfect Storm," and it portrayed the beautiful fish that the boats were killing, I rooted for the storm.

edit on 9-2-2014 by Aleister because: (no reason given)

Hey ichthyophile is a real thing I won't judge a man and his love for his beautiful fish

ok I learned next time I see a news I won't try to put a controversial angle to it

Aleister
reply to post by Indigent

 

The "seafood" industry will probably jump all over this and use it when restrictions on fishing are discussed and debated. Those nets should have been outlawed long ago. When I first saw the movie "The Perfect Storm," and it portrayed the beautiful fish that the boats were killing, I rooted for the storm.

edit on 9-2-2014 by Aleister because: (no reason given)

In the movie "The Perfect Storm" I believe they were long lining for swords, not trawling nets.

I agree with you about the big nets. So much by catch is destroyed, sometimes 90%+ of the haul is by catch. Also dragging nets on the bottom destroys the habitat. It is a destructive practice that will be continued as long as there is money to be made.

reply to post by jrod


Or as long as humans don't squawk too much about it, which they don't seem to be doing. People gotta love their mercury filled fishies, crabs, and assorted lifeforms (let alone dolphins. total disclosure, I once ate a piece of dolphin like some kind of barbarian).

It'll take a concerted effort on the part of people from many countries to put an end to overfishing, big nets, let alone fishing for the "harvest" (words control actions), something I don't see happening for awhile, but it will happen. Remember that Star Trek movie where humans had killed off all the whales? A lot of good that film did, I wonder if it was ever translated into Japanese.

I don't think we can eat a lot of the fish that they are talking about. Some of those fish are strange looking and others glow in the dark. We can evolve to eat them if we incorporate them into the diet slowly over many generations. They probably won't taste right to us because of this.

Lobsters were never eaten before, they started feeding them to prisoners to lower costs because they were so plentiful. Look what happened with those. four or five generations and people got hooked on them...mostly the rich, so they still are preferred by cons, deceivers, and crooks. I bet they are eaten a lot by the people in the white house.

So we are constantly being told how we are depleting our ocean resources.

Based on figures of fish populations.

Figures of fish populations are based on a method that doesn't actually capture any sort of representative slice of the population.

When people go around saying "see, the facts say it's true!" people really need to look where those facts come from.

There are less fish in the sea. Says who? A guy with a net? Why does he think his net will be able to capture a representative slice of the population?

Is it not possible fish are responding to netting, and learning to avoid nets, or avoid areas where netting takes place?

You may say people have been netting fish for thousands of years, but they have not been doing it on the scale of the modern day, nor out at sea nearly as far.

If I go to the beach and put a 5-gallon bucket in the water and don't come up with any fish that's a piss poor method of deducing there are no fish in the ocean. Their methods are just as shoddy, just on a larger scale.

Elephants are evolving to be born without tusks due to poachers. Animals respond to predation. You can't measure a population of animals in the same manner before and after large scale interaction with its predator because it's behavior is going to change.

If you counted elephants by how many tusks you could find, you aren't getting an accurate representation of the elephant population. In the same way counting how much fish there are based on how many we can catch seems ridiculous. They will respond to predation and their behavior will change.

this might be a silly question, but....

If all of the fish/mammals were removed from the oceans, would it be enough to lower the sea level?

Could over population of ocean critters cause the sea level to rise?

Just an odd question that popped in to my mind when reading this thread :p

reply to post by Indigent


The real problem are countries that don't care about laws and devastate our oceans. This can be seen all around the world. There are places where you could not be bitten by a shark if you tried, they are gone fished out. Countries that slaughter even the highly intelligent dolphins by the hundreds, it is just awful.

Japan killing whales despite bans under a flag of research. What crap is that. There are huge Russian ships that take every living thing they can net, whether it is useful or not. Processing ships travel with them.

Fish feed more people than the other foods combined. Not only that we get right around sixty percent of our oxygen from ocean life. We are killing ourselves by messing up this eco system. Fukishima is not helping and we will have to wait and see how bad the damage really is from the radiation.

Bottom line is we don't survive without healthy oceans.

The Bot

reply to post by Indigent


Hmm... I wonder where that nuclear meldown mess travelling down the Pacific Ocean is going to. Stuff will "surface", I think...

reply to post by SomeoneWatching


Although it is much radiation and will affect local areas, by the time it spread across all the oceans it will be so diluted that it wont have much effect.

I don't think Godzilla will come soon

blkcwbyhat
reply to post by Indigent

 

the article concerns all fish,not just the ones the fishing industry targets.As previously noted,I'm sure the fishing industry will use this to they're advantage,but how many of these are edible?

Inedible fish will be turned into firtiliser, same as they are now.

dlbott
reply to post by Indigent

 

The real problem are countries that don't care about laws and devastate our oceans. This can be seen all around the world. There are places where you could not be bitten by a shark if you tried, they are gone fished out. Countries that slaughter even the highly intelligent dolphins by the hundreds, it is just awful.

Japan killing whales despite bans under a flag of research. What crap is that. There are huge Russian ships that take every living thing they can net, whether it is useful or not. Processing ships travel with them.

Fish feed more people than the other foods combined. Not only that we get right around sixty percent of our oxygen from ocean life. We are killing ourselves by messing up this eco system. Fukishima is not helping and we will have to wait and see how bad the damage really is from the radiation.

Bottom line is we don't survive without healthy oceans.


I have just googled these figures, 2005 fish production = 141 million tonnes
2013 wheat production 708 million tons
2010 potato production 324 million tons.
Looks like the fish are a side dish to me.

reply to post by pikestaff


Yes fish is not only used as a food they are also processed as protein additive and for that all fish is used