By Daniel Pauly

To manage the fisheries in their Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs), countries need to know their catch. Ideally, countries (i.e., their department of fisheries or equivalent agencies) would know much more—size and productivity of the stocks being exploited, economics of the fisheries, etc.—but it is essential to know about catch as the goal of a fishery is to generate and maintain a catch, and if possible, to increase it.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) does maintain a publicly available database of fisheries statistics, based on submissions by its member states, but this covers only landings (i.e., it omits discarded bycatch), does not identify the EEZs where the landings come from, doesn’t present the data by sectors (i.e., industrial, artisanal, subsistence and recreational) and doesn’t estimate the illegal and otherwise unreported and undocumented (IUU) catches usually generated by roving distant-water fleets.

A publicly accessible database that builds on the FAO statistics but overcomes the deficiencies mentioned above has now been created (at www.seaaroundus.org) which covers the fisheries of all maritime countries and territories of the world, from 1950 to 2010, and will be regularly updated. It is based on historic catch reconstructions by about 400 colleagues throughout the world, a decade-long support of the Sea Around Us by The Pew Charitable Trusts, and the technical wizardry of programmers at Seattle-based Vulcan Inc., which complemented a two-year grant from the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation.

The database, which also presents catch-related data and indicators (e.g., ex-vessel values of catches, different types of subsidies received by the fisheries of each country, stock-status plots) allows managers, scientists, students or ocean activist to find out how much is caught of the EEZ of each country and territory, by species or group of species, by sectors, by catch type (discarded or retained), and thus to acquire an understanding of the fisheries that was impossible to obtain previously, and which should help toward an improvement of their management. The data underlying the interactive graphic displays can be downloaded for further analysis.

All information on marine biodiversity in that database is derived from FishBase (www.fishbase.org) for fishes and from SeaLifeBase (www.sealifebase.org) for invertebrates. These recognized online encyclopedias are closely linked to www.seaaroundus.org, and so allow for acquiring more information on exploited species.

Additionally, the database has a spatial expression, i.e., the catch data it contains have been plotted in space using knowledge of the global distribution of exploited fish and invertebrates (from FishBase and SeaLifeBase) and of the fisheries that rely on them. The result is that catch maps can be produced, by (group of) species and/or countries, showing, for example, how fisheries have expanded geographically from 1950 to the present.

As mentioned above, this database does not provide all the key information required to manage fisheries; notably, it lacks time series of biomass (i.e., the weight is of the fish left in the sea). We have plans to overcome this deficiency in the next few years. In the meantime, however, we hope that the interactive graphs and maps that can be viewed on, and datasets that can be downloaded from, www.seaaroundus.org will contribute to a better understanding of marine fisheries. For example, using this database, we could recently demonstrate that the world marine fisheries catches are about 50% higher than suggested by the FAO statistics (which can be viewed as a good thing, since it implies the oceans are more productive than we thought), but have been declining rapidly since 1996, which is definitely an issue that needs to be addressed.

This was just one example of what can be done with our database and website. We hope that these tools, moreover, will be questioned by empowered users, and that their feedback will gradually improve both. We also hope that, in the process, our website will become a relied upon one-stop go-to place for information on marine fisheries, and will thus contribute, via their improved management, to the incomes and food security of the millions of people who depend on fish.

The database described here allow time contrasting, for the first, the performance of large-scale (industrial) and small-scale (artisanal and subsistence) fisheries on a global basis. The definitions of large-scale (‘industrial’, often mislabeled ‘commercial’) and small-scale (often mislabeled ‘traditional’) are those prevailing in each maritime country. Governments tend to favor industrial fisheries, although it is the small-scale fisheries with meets most of the sustainability criteria.

The original article in the Huffington Post can be found here.

How will the 10 billion people expected to be living on Earth by 2050 obtain sufficient and nutritious food?

In the face of declining fish catches this question is much harder to answer. Yet, in a wide ranging article, several researchers — including Dr. Dirk Zeller from the Sea Around Us — try to answer it.

Read the full commentary in Nature here.

The following is a features essay written by Daniel Pauly in the most recent Save Our Seas Magazine. Below he describes the effects of industrial fishing on the oceans over the last 130 years — and how marine protected areas are needed to help conserve and restore what has been lost.

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Industrial fishing began in the 1880s, when steam trawlers started to be deployed along the coasts of the British Isles. Frighteningly efficient, they soon liquidated coastal stocks of bottom fish – fish that had previously been exploited by subsistence and artisanal fisheries for centuries, even millennia, but had persisted.

The steam trawlers then had to expand their range into the open North and Irish seas and subsequently beyond, all the way into North Atlantic and Icelandic waters. The same expansion, but shifted a decade or so later, occurred with the nascent industrial fisheries of France, Germany, Russia, the United States and Japan. It’s a recurring pattern: the introduction of industrial fishing begets expansion because trawlers and other industrial fishing vessels (such as purse seiners) generate a pressure that generally cannot be tolerated by the species being targeted at a given fishing ground – and even less by the by-catch species, which are, by definition, subjected to unregulated fishing. Thus, one stock disappears after the other, and new stocks in previously unfished areas have to be found.

This depletion–expansion dynamic prevailed through much of the 20th century, albeit with the interruption of two world wars, which radically reduced industrial fishing and allowed fish to recover – if only temporarily – especially in the North Atlantic. In some areas, when this effect was strong, like in the North Sea, the recovery after a temporary reduction in fishing established the principle not only that stock abundance was inversely related to fishing intensity, but also that overfished stocks could recover, and some within a few years. In the last quarter of the 20th century, some countries, for example the US and Norway, built on this to counter the depletion–expansion dynamic of their fisheries. They allowed the stocks they had overexploited to rebuild, which the stocks did and now support vibrant ‘new’ fisheries.

In most other countries, however, the depletion–expansion dynamic continued. Thanks to their onboard technology, trawlers and other industrial vessels could fish anywhere in the world, in deep or shallow waters or far from coastlines, and in conditions from tropical to polar. These developments meant that previous obstacles to fishing – depth, distance, ice cover and inclement weather – could now be overcome. We could fish everywhere, anytime we wanted. And we did.

As a consequence, essentially all fish resources in the world are being fished. Given that most of the world’s fisheries are not managed (or that their management is so ineffectual as to be non-existent), this also means that fish with characteristics that render them more vulnerable to fishing than other species, or which are highly sought after, are increasingly under the threat of extinction. This is particularly well illustrated by the sawfishes (Pritis spp.), whose long, saw-like rostra get caught in any net they encounter; by the manta rays now hunted because of the alleged curative value of their gill plates; or by the many species of large sharks being decimated by targeted fishing, driven by the high commercial value of their fins, which are used for shark-fin soup.

These species cannot withstand any fishery that is anything but extremely well managed (which is rare), and they will thus thrive only in the few places where they are left alone. Such places are marine protected areas or, more precisely, no-take marine reserves. Moreover, in addition to sheltering the biodiversity that sawfishes, manta rays and large sharks represent, marine protected areas safeguard thousands of other species – and the ecosystems in which they are embedded – from the depredations of industrial fisheries that are driven by an increasingly out-of-control demand, especially from East Asia and the rich countries of Europe and North America.

That marine protected areas are effective in protecting marine life is amply demonstrated in the scientific literature: within them, biomass and biodiversity are higher and individual fishes are larger, thus producing more eggs and larvae that can enrich surrounding areas. This is not surprising. After all, fishing removes fish from the ecosystem; thus ceasing to fish, given time, should reverse its effects.

There are obviously a number of factors that intervene in the effectiveness of the protection afforded by marine protected areas, such as the degree to which the regulations protecting biodiversity are enforced, the size of the protected area and the fishing activity surrounding the protected area. Nevertheless, the principle holds that marine protected areas, and especially no-take marine reserves, are our best defence against the depletion–expansion dynamic that characterises industrial fisheries, especially now that they are operating in all ocean areas.

It is thus encouraging that the fraction of the oceans that was protected by a motley collection of small, often ineffective marine protected areas, and whose growth had long been anaemic, has increased massively in recent years. This occurred through the creation of very large marine reserves around uninhabited islands in the Pacific and Indian oceans. The constructive example that these reserves provided has even jump-started a debate about the feasibility of protecting the High Seas, or at least some parts of the oceans currently beyond national jurisdiction, which we must do if they are not to be transformed to a seascape with more plastic than fish.

The original article can be viewed here.

New research from the University of British Columbia finds that rogue fishing vessels are able to secure insurance including those that have been flagged by international watchdogs for unlawful activity.

“Restricting access to insurance could play a major role in ending illegal fishing, and right now, it’s a largely overlooked method,” said lead author Dana Miller, who studied illegal fishing and insurance while she was a postdoctoral fellow at UBC. Continue reading →

The latest research report from the Sea Around Us investigates the use of fish for feeding livestock and farmed fish. In this report, we document the country by country analysis of which fish are used for feed, and in what forms. This is the first time this type of research has been conducted on a global scale.

Nearly 20 million tonnes of fish are not used for human consumption each year – but rather, are mainly fed to other fish, often during the process of ‘fish farming.’ Given the importance of fish as a source of food for billions of people around the world, for its protein and its micro-nutrients, the use of fish for purposes other than human consumption could negatively affect global food security.

To better understand this, I used methods similar to those used in ‘catch reconstructions’ to find out how much fish each country catches to feed other fish.

This work required me to comb through national statistics, peer-reviewed literature, newspapers, press releases, and other sources to gather data on the use of different species for these different purposes. The goal was to find out the amount of fish that was eaten by animals (fish or livestock) and by humans – and then to do this for each country, fish species, and time period from 1950-2010.

Most of the fish used for fishmeal are small bony fish that live near the ocean surfacelike anchovies, herrings, and sardines. While these are often passed over in favour of high demand species like tuna and salmon, they have a high concentration of good quality protein and micro-nutrients such as Omega-3 fatty acids.

Not only is this work useful to understand how we use fish to feed people (either directly or indirectly), it can also add value to other projects we are involved in. This new data will be incorporated into the newest version of our price estimation to better evaluate the value of fisheries globally. As fisheries used for feed are often less valuable than fisheries used for human consumption, accounting for the end use of the fishery landings allows us to make better estimates of the value of fisheries and to understand fishing behavior as it is driven by prices.

There are major impacts of using fish for animal feed rather than for feeding people. This work begins to uncover these trends in how this use has changed over time for every country and every species. This allows us to understand these impacts in a better way, and to propose solutions of how we can fish sustainably while maximizing economic and nutritional benefits to human society.

To learn more about the use of fish for feed and its implications, read the report, or Tim Cashion’s blog (the lead researcher) Fishing For Feed.

You can also follow Tim Cashion on Twitter: @FishingForFeed