Two excellent reports have just come out, both with important messages for everyone who's interested in a future with healthy populations of wild fish in our oceans. The first addresses the tragedy of Atlantic bluefin tuna in the face of relentless fishing pressure. The second is a hopeful report from the Gulf of Mexico about how fish populations can rebound dramatically once people stop catching them as if there were no tomorrow.
First, the very bad news.
For decades, Atlantic bluefin tuna have been spiraling toward commercial extinction under the insatiable demand of an international fishery that seems unable to stop hammering the population at levels that cannot be sustained.
This classic tragedy of the commons, played out on the high seas, is detailed in a new investigative report by an international team of journalists. (Many thanks to Andy Revkin of the dot.Earth blog at the New York Times for highlighting it.)
This tour de force of reporting underscores everything that Barbara Block, Julie Packard and the team at the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Tuna Research and Conservation Center have been saying for years: Short-term greed is quickly killing off the golden goose. (OK, golden tuna.) Will this new report be enough to turn the tide? That remains to be seen. But I'm not getting my hopes up -- especially in light of another report that found at least a 20 percent drop in juvenile Atlantic bluefin in the Gulf of Mexico this year. (The BP blowout hit right on their spawning grounds, at the peak of spawning season.)
Meanwhile, despite recent reports of a die-off of deep-water corals, likely the result of the BP blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, and new information that contaminants from the oil are making their way into the ocean food web (and presumably onto our plates at some point), there's very encouraging news from the Gulf as well:
The closure of commercial fishing in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon diaster sparked an almost immediated threefold INCREASE in many populations of marine life, from sharks to shrimp to snapper, in Mobile Bay. Ben Raines of the Press Register in Mobile, Alabama reports on the findings of a research team from the Dauphin Island Sea Lab, which has been surveying coastal marine life in Alabama and Mississippi for years.
This kind of rebound is exactly what scientists worldwide have found when you create marine protected areas that are closed to most commercial and sport fishing. Marine life in those waters increases dramatically, and their numbers spill over into adjacent waters, where fishermen are free to catch them. The overall result is more productive ocean ecosystems -- and healthier fisheries for people whose livelihoods depend on them.
California continues to expand its network of marine protected areas, a process that will be completed from the Oregon border to Mexico in 2011. It's encouraging to find evidence from the Gulf of Mexico disaster that the creating protected areas should pay big dividends -- without the added challenge of overcoming the impacts of a major oil spill.
Photo credit: Bluefin tuna school, © NOAA; kelp forest, © Douglas K. Klug