The Empty Ocean

I once had a conversation with a marine ecologist working on the Wallace Line. I asked her if she was beyond the reach of blast fishing and she said that even there she could always hear it like distant thunder underwater as she did her research. As we talked, I asked her why a Swedish marine ecologist was here, in an extremely remote part of the world, and her reply has stayed with me. She said, ‘In Europe we just study how dead the ocean is, but here there is Life!’

That was twenty years ago and the situation has not improved. Ocean ecosystems are being destroyed, degraded, and heavily altered by human activity.

This is the Sixth Extinction. This is the Anthropocene. We are the apex predator in the ocean.

Around the world all parts of the environment are now, as Science called it, ‘human-dominated ecosystems’ (Special section, 1997).

Ocean ecosystems are declining rapidly and many species and ecosystems have declined in the 45-99% range (see Table 1). Over 90% of predatory fish have disappeared globally (Myers and Worm, 2003). Newfound fish populations may well be exhausted by 2020, which means that the serial depletion of fisheries (‘boom and bust and move on’ fishing) will not continue and a global collapse of fisheries is estimated, at the earliest, by 2048 (Froese and Kesner-Reyes, 2002; Worm et al., 2006), although this has been disputed. The cause of this destruction and decline is easy to identify: Overexploitation. The reasons for this overexploitation and why it still happens is the subject of much interest. Industrial fishing methods are a main driver, but recreational and artisanal fisheries also play a part (McPhee et al., 2002); with the pattern of depletion being scalar, as Worm et al. (2006) found the same pattern from local (recreational and artisanal) to global shelf and oceanic fisheries. Now entire ocean ecosystems are becoming endangered, with coastal and shelf systems the most endangered (Jackson, 2008; Jackson and Jacquet, 2011).

We have sophisticated and large scientific knowledge bases and extensive research and analytical capacity. For example, the EU bases its Common Fisheries Policy on the work done by the International Council for the Exploration of the Seas (ICES) which has over 120 years worth of research data, yet overfishing continues. Globally, there are large and expert fishery research institutions; ICES in Europe, the National Marine and Fisheries Service in the US, in Australia the CSIRO, and Chile has IFOP, to name a few. Yet marine fish populations continue to be overfished, with marine fish abundance declining globally by an average of 38% since 1970 (Hutchings et al., 2010).

Humans have always fished the seas and the first identifiable depletion by overfishing occurred about 125,000 years ago when the giant clam (Tridacna costata) disappeared from the Red Sea (Richter et al., 2008). Starting in 11th century Europe, new methods of fishing began to have direct and deleterious effects on ocean ecosystems (Roberts, 2007). This impact accelerated in the late Nineteenth century with the invention of the steam engine, leading to the destruction of whale populations, fisheries, and oyster beds, to name a few. However, the real exploitation and destruction of the global ocean environment began in the 1950s, with the global expansion of trawl and seining fisheries (Fig. 1).Download to read the rest:
Jon_The_Empty_Ocean_TT_story.pdf