Archive for October 24th, 2008

(Author’s note: This piece was originally written in 2003)

Forty feet below the waves off Caye Caulker, Belize, a cloud of jacks changes direction, as though dozen silver coins could simply flip, head-to-tails, as one. Nearby, a spiny lobster scurries beneath the coral reef. He is wary of the enthralled divers, with reason: they feasted on his brethren, caught in fishermen’s traps and roasted in lemon butter, in Caye Caulker’s restaurants the previous night.

Little but a dark shadow from the surface, for the curious diver, the reef world becomes a carnival of parrot fish, angelfish, turtles and rays, decked in more colorful costumes than the tourists on the beach. But even more astonishing than these creatures is what isn’t there. “Groupers, snappers, barracuda and sharks are a normal part of everyday reef life,” says oceanographer Sylvia Earle, who dove in Belize’s waters in December, 2003. “They’re gone. You might see a few little ones. It’s rare to see a big one.” During her 50-year diving career spanning 6,000 hours underwater, this former Chief Scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) estimates the sea has lost 90% of its big fish — the tuna, cod, marlins and snapper that delight divers and diners alike.

For while seafood consumption has soared in the developed world, fishing has lingered as an industrial version of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle Caye Caulker’s lobstermen live. As previous generations hunted buffalo, so today’s captains prowl the seas with their trawl boats and longlines. As rising demand cleared the prairies of their beasts, so fishing has thinned the seas. While the decline of many species has slowed, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization reports that 75 percent of the world’s sea stocks are fished at or above sustainable levels.

Fly from Caye Caulker to Belize City, though, and the plane passes over 100 ponds just north of the Philip Goldson International Airport. This NOVA Ladyville shrimp farm, owned by the Bluecadia Aquaculture Group of Fairfax, VA, can churn out 100,000 pounds of crustaceans a day. Worldwide, aquaculture enterprises produced an estimated 37.5 million metric tons of seafood in 2001, about 30% of the world’s total seafood. Just as man first planted seeds and domesticated cows thousands of years ago, these farms are leading the planet from a hunted seafood supply to a harvested one.

Fish farms, combined with carefully managed wild fisheries, offer the best hope for keeping the sea full of fish — and seafood lovers happy. Whether large-scale fish farming can be healthy and environmentally sustainable, though, remains as much a mystery as the ocean deep.

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Information on fish populations is tough to gather. NOAA reports that of 932 federally managed fish stocks, status is not known for 695. Of those known, 86 are designated “overfished,” including the Cape Cod yellowtail flounder and the Pacific whiting. Worldwide, fish such as bluefin tuna, orange roughy, and red snapper are down to fractions of their World War II-era levels. Their decline has led Earle and other oceanographers to believe the world is flirting with an ecosystem collapse.

Even many fishermen agree that past practices have damaged the seas.

Nelson Beideman began catching swordfish and other species at age 7 in his father’s boat off the New Jersey coast. Now the executive director of the Bluewater Fisherman’s Association, he reports that declining stocks alarm the fishing community. “We’re totally dependent on the health of the resource,” he says. After the swordfish population plummeted in the 1980s, cuts in the quota allotted to each fisherman brought the species back. But now he worries about bluefin tuna and the white marlin, which he estimates has fallen to 15 percent of its optimal biomass.

Depletion has two main causes — what flows into the sea, and how the sea’s bounty is reaped. Chemical run-off from paved coastal regions and farms poisons fish. Garbage ebbs and flows with the tides. Earle reports that once, twelve miles off the California coast and 1,000 meters deep, she swam toward a marvelous red and silver creature — only to discover it was an RC Cola can.

On the fishing side, conservationists rate trawl boats — immense vessels with nets up to a quarter-mile wide — as the worst offenders. Trawls clear-cut the sea floor for a few fish, then dump the rest — “like bulldozing an orchard for a bushel of apples,” says Earle. Industrial longlines with thousands of baited hooks also land “bycatch” (unwanted fish) that are usually thrown back dead. Everyone knows about the celebrity bycatch victims — dophins and turtles — but while special nets and laws have limited their suffering, experts still estimate that bycatch accounts for 25 percent of all seafood that’s caught.

Even when fishermen hook the right fish, they can grab too much. Sixty percent of the world’s oceans lie outside national jurisdictions. While many countries manage their fisheries well, migratory species pay no attention to borders. As new fish gain culinary fame, countries compete for market share in open waters. This has led to shortages of cod in the north Atlantic, Chilean sea bass in the Antarctic and tuna worldwide.

Economists call this the tragedy of the commons. When no one owns a resource, everyone has an incentive to take all they can get. Of course, there are some checks on the market — “People in the fishing business are smart enough not to fish themselves out of business,” says Linda Candler of the National Fisheries Institute, an industry group. Fishermen notice declining catches before land-based environmentalists. Fishermen must weigh current and future returns, but, says Candler, “many of them want to hand their businesses down to their kids.” In the U.S., at least, fishing remains an old-fashioned family enterprise. Until recently, many Manhattan chefs purchased seafood at the 170-year-old Fulton Fish Market — stalls of ice and flesh near the East River with names like “Third Generation Seafood” or “M. Slavin & Sons.” Even on a frigid January morning before the sun peeks over the Brooklyn Bridge, these burly men were out hawking frozen catfish and live lobster.

But the city has been in the process of moving the market to a modern facility in the Bronx, and the industry is changing too. Americans are eating ever more seafood — up nearly a pound to 15.6 lbs per person in 2002. “We’re more adventurous diners than we used to be,” says Candler. Savvy dieters know the health benefits of salmon’s omega-3 fatty acids. Popular fish-based Asian and Latin dishes are starting to shove meat and potatoes off America’s plates. While the Fulton Fish Market moved millions of pounds of seafood each year during its existence, when mall food courts serve sushi, family fishermen simply can’t meet the demand.

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Enter aquaculture — the relief valve. Done right — just as acres of wheat freed our ancestors from constant hunting, and let the human population grow — fish farming could spare wild stocks and create steady deliveries of enough fish to feed our soaring appetites.

“Farmed fish are the only source of increasing supply,” says George Chamberlain, president of the Global Aquaculture Alliance and owner of a fish farm. Wild fisheries are at their limits and “we’re not going to discover any more.”

Aquaculture is growing by nearly 10 percent a year, the UN reports, but fish farming has its opponents. Critics say farmed fish is loaded with antibiotics and that carnivorous species such as salmon and shrimp still require wild fish for food. In a recent issue of Science, U.S. researchers reported that farmed salmon contained more toxic chemicals than wild salmon.

But technology is changing this. The farm Chamberlain owns in Malaysia uses no antibiotics; probiotic and disinfection technologies keep the shrimp disease-free. While many fish farms do use fish meal (generally anchovies or sardines) for food, overall fishmeal catches have not risen — fish farmers simply outbid poultry and pig farmers, who’ve switched to other feeds. Researchers are investigating meatless protein sources. Fish farmers are searching for species that can be domesticated and are using selective breeding to produce hardier strains of tilapia and salmon that can survive farming better. Governments and industry can both support research to make fish farms environmentally sound. The easiest source of funds? The subsidies now bestowed on wild fisheries — an estimated $15 billion per year worldwide. Since the U.S. does not subsidize its fisheries as heavily as Japan and other nations, America has an incentive to lead international talks on cutting payments that keep overfishing profitable — and subsidize the destruction of the seas.

Minus subsidies, and with few possibilities for expansion, “some fishermen are going to have to exit the business,” Chamberlain says. “But there will always be a market for the wild product,” just as some consumers buy organic or free range meat. Wild fish will become a niche market. Wisely managed through strict international quaotas and incentives to reduce bycatch, wild fisheries can be sustained. NOAA and fishermen have already developed a new circle-shaped hook which reduces accidental turtle catches by 90 percent on test boats.

Consumers can push such changes — nationally through their governments, and internationally through market pressure. Tuna fishermen developed dolphin-safe nets when people demanded them; fishermen will use more gentle methods than their trawls if consumers speak up. Fish afficionados can also choose their meals wisely. Sylvia Earle loves seafood, but now she eats only farmed tilapia and catfish, species she believes are responsibly managed. In general, herbivorous fish are better than carnivores and (with exceptions) farmed fish are more sustainable than those caught at sea.

The problem, says Earle, is getting people to see fish as wildlife, no less than toucans, tigers or apes. “The worst thing we’re doing to the oceans is ignorance,” she says. Few people have seen the world beneath the water, like Caye Caulker’s jacks and rays. Clear-cut rainforests scream of waste and loss. But from the surface, reefs of fish and reefs of ghosts alike are just dark shadows beneath the blue.