Overfishing

Fishing today has become a gigantic industry which has grown to a level where it has turned into globally detrimental problem to the earth’s oceans. Commercial fishing is undoubtedly hurting the environment by abusing the oceans resource of fish. In the BBC documentary The Death of the Oceans Historian Jeffrey Bolster at the University of New Hampshire  states that the amount of cod caught in the Gulf of New Hampshire dropped from 70,000 metric tons of cod in 1885 to 4,000 metric tons in 2010. Basically what this means is that there are over seventeen times less cod in the gulf of New Hampshire in 2010 opposed to 1885.

The graph above shows the the population of northern sea cod from the year 1963 to 2002. This graph supports Professor Bolster’s standing that fishing is dramatically affecting the population over time.

However, overfishing not only affects the population of the targeted fish or prey but of many other species that were not even intended to be caught. This phenomenon is called bycatch. According to the environmental group Oceana 650,000 whales, dolphins and seals are killed around the world as a result of bycatch. Species are becoming more and more extinct due to the needless killing produced by fishermen practicing bad fishing methods and using fishing gear which catches most anything in its path. Along with inaccurate reporting of bycatch which hurts the governments ability to accurately determine how much fishermen should be able catch.

Porpoise caught in fishing line.

 

Sea turtles and dolphins are also very common victims of bycatch.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

However, despite the fishermen being the ones doing the actual overfishing and or killing of other ocean creatures what is really to blame is societies overwhelming demand for seafood which drives the phenomenon of overfishing. If no one wanted to eat seafood then there would simply not be a demand for fishing and overfishing would basically be an impossibility. Of course the demand for seafood won’t disappear completely but change change on a societal level is the change needed to combat overfishing and bycatch.