Chris Mooney is a visiting associate in the 
Little over a year ago, scientists warned the world's fish and seafood populations may collapse by 2048. But wait one second... If they're serious, what's a seafood lover like me to do 40 years from now?
Okay, while we may be headed for trouble - let's remember fishing can be done responsibly and sustainably. My post at Correlations is now up examining what's going on just beneath the surface with this ominous prediction.
We humans long believed oceans must be so enormous, the abundance of resources in the marine realm had to be limitless. We're funny about holding onto notions like that...The full article is here.More recently, we woke up and figured out this idea of an imagined boundless supply is pretty ridiculous. While it's not easy to observe the web of complex interactions below the surface, we've learned enough about fish stocks to understand we're actually impacting them tremendously through our fishing practices. Just consider the state of oceans in 2008...
Music by Israel Kamakawiwoʻole.
Life Science
Comments
Miss Sheril,
As with many such things in science, this needs to some grains of salt attached to it. Worm et al do make some dire predicitons, but answer me this - if 29% of the world's commercially fished populations have collapsed, how are the other 71% doing? It's one of the major flaws of the original paper - the authors suppose the collapse rate will continue, in the face of strong actions by many countries, the US included. The Magnuson-Stevens Reauthorization Act, signed into law in late 2006 by President Bush, REQUIRES the end of all US commercial overfising by 2012. Worm and his co-authors didn't take that into account in their predictions - the paper was published beforehand. See this letter inS cience for other rebuttals of their methodology:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/316/5829/1281b?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&fulltext=murawski&searchid=1&FIRSTINDEX=0&resourcetype=HWCIT
My point is simply this - fisheries management is a dynamic science. What is ture today may not be tomorrow, especially when countires take significant actions to confront a problem. The Worm paper makes predictions - which we can easily overcome, and the US at least is choosing to do so.
Posted by: Philip H. | December 3, 2007 10:25 AM
While this is quite a sombering prospect for all of us, I am going to focus of the accompaning video and music. The ocean beauty of Finding Nemo, and the extraordinary delivery of the music by the late artist Israel Kamakawiwo'ole started my morning with a smile. Co-incidently, the December picture on my calendar in front of my computer is that of fish and coral in the archipelago of the Solomom Islands in the South Pacific. It contains the second highest number of coral and fish species in the world, and would be unimaginable to me if we lose any of it.
Posted by: Linda | December 3, 2007 10:52 AM