Fisheries Gone Wild: Orange Roughy
JUNE 23, 2007 - I thought I'd heard the furthest extremes of the global fisheries. Shipping Pacific Northwest salmon to China to remove the pin bones so they can be shipped back to North America, for example. Or the fact that one of the major uses of the world's big fish, which some leading scientists say have been depleted by 90%, is pet food for house cats. Then I heard Ron D'Or, senior scientist with the Census of Marine Life, speak at the ideaCity conference in Toronto.
Since the year 2000, he said, a "certain country" - he was too Canadian to name that country, and I haven't been able to turn it up in research - has been subsidizing its fishing fleet so it can afford the fuel to catch a species of fish called orange roughy on "seamounts" (mountains under the sea) far offshore in the southern oceans. He also noted that, as is typical with groundfish in less disturbed areas, many of these orange roughy are 100 years old or older.
Here's how D'Or put it: "Irreplaceable fuel is being burned to catch irreplaceable fish to bring to market at a net loss."
The Census of Marine Life research, by the way, is working to determine where fish stocks are at different times - something science currently knows remarkably little about. For example, we may one day know that the fish we currently bottom-trawl off seamounts, destroying 1,000-year-old coral forests in the process (a recent seamount fishery in the southwest Indian Ocean took only four years to collapse), may at some other time in their cycle be fished sustainably over soft sandbanks closer to shore.
D'Or's tagline: "More fish, less guilt."-JBM
