Fish for Fair Future (article)

Fish for Fair Future

With the word “fish”, the first thing that comes up to our minds would be food. Nothing such as “an aquatic vertebrate interacting with other marine animals, stabilizing the marine ecosystem” would occur. Well, that is a fish.

Undeniably, fish has been a crucial source of protein for humans since the dawn of time. A lot of countries such as Japan, India, Indonesia, Trinidad and Sri Lanka have fish as their main food supply. Worldwide, there are about 1 billion people depending on fish as their food supply. However, with the rapid growing population worldwide, the demand of fish as food supply has been increasing greatly. And the question is how long will they last?

Many considered the ocean as a considerate gift given to humans to keep us living, that it will be unlimited. However statistics show otherwise. With global warming worsening over the last couple of years, the sea temperature has gone up slowly but surely. The change in temperature disables phytoplankton to live.
Phytoplanktons are not only an oxygen generator, but also an essential food supply for fish in the sea. With them disappearing, it wouldn’t be of any surprise that the fish are also disappearing. The problem doesn’t stop there. Fishing industries have caused two thirds of the world’s fisheries have been exploited. And the exploitation will happen faster in future years due to the improvement of technologies. We have bigger vessels, better nets, and introduction of radars; the development of technology will not stop. The bigger problem is that some fishing methods such as using explosives, trawl nets and long line fishing are not only catching the fish that are intended to be catch. They also dragged other unwanted species living in the area. But in the end, the dying or dead animals that are caught accidentally are left in the ocean because they are unprofitable. We are catching fish in a faster rate than they are reproducing. In effect, the population of fish has been declining over the last few years.Between 1994 and 2003, the amount of seafood species has fell 13% globally (Richard Black, Environment Correspondent, BBC NEWS). The continuous trend expects the world fisheries to completely disappear by 2050. The uncontrollable fish catching industries will inevitably affect the marine ecosystem soon.

The marine ecosystem is somehow like a car. Each part is connected to each other, supporting each other so that the car would function. Remove a screw somewhere, it probably would still work. However if a lot of screws are taken, the cables, the battery and the tires are removed, it wouldn’t operate anymore. It’s useless. In the ocean, the disappearance of one fish probably wouldn’t affect the global ocean. But if thousands and millions are fished every year, the coral reefs destroyed, the sharks fished to extinction, the ocean will, in time, breaks down.

The importance of one species may be greater than what a lot anticipated. With the dependency of one species to another within the food chain, the disappearance of one species can destroy a whole ecosystem and also devastate us humans. Take a shark for example. We view them merely as a predator and that their existence would only detriment us humans. However, it’s not the case. One of sharks’ diet are rays. With 90% of the population of sharks vanished, the population of rays have gone blooming. In effect, the ray’s prey including scallops, clams and oysters are disappearing as well in a rapid rate. Unfortunately for us, shellfish species have participated greatly in sustaining the humans’ economy for a lot of years.

Though efforts made by the government and some privates to develop breeding of several species, the success of the method is still varied until today. However, in some countries like Australia, UK, USA, Indonesia and India, the breeding shows great results most of the time. The breeding (aquaculture) is a method used to raise a specific type of species outside the ocean (usually in tanks), in order to prevent them from being fished before reproducing enough. Therefore this method prevents the extinction of fish species. There are different methods of breeding; one is taking eggs from the ocean before the offspring are actually born. This method is advantageous for its speed, however, sometimes; the species can be mistaken from just looking at the eggs. The other type involves raising and waiting for a couple of the organism to reproduce the offspring itself. The type of species in this method will be accurate; however, this method takes a longer time, for it has to wait for the organism to reproduce first. Though breeding is used sometimes to recover endangered species, they are sometimes also used to breed more seafood supply. Some of the species that are breed are shrimps, clown fish, seahorses, hammours and golden trevally and damsel fish.

~ Felicia Jesslyn S.

28- 06- 2010