More than one-fifth of the fish caught by U.S. fishermen is immediately wasted, a new study shows.
In a teleconference with journalists today, scientists Andrew Rosenberg and Ransom Myers are scheduled to lay out their findings, which are based on government catch records and scientific literature. Myers was a co-author of the startling study in Nature a few years ago showing that 90 percent of the world’s large fish already have been caught. Rosenberg served on the prestigious-but-so-far-uninfluential U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy appointed by President Bush.
The new study, “Wasted Resources: Discarded Bycatch in U.S. Fisheries,” says more than 1 million tons of fish are thrown back each year because they are not the species being targeted. Of course, very few of those fish live.
U.S. regulations often require the so-called “bycatch” to be discarded. That 1 million tons of discard is a lot when you consider that the total actually brought back to shore to head for someone’s table is 3.7 million tons. The new study is to appear in Fish & Fisheries, which, like Nature, is a peer-reviewed scientific journal.
By far the largest single fishery in the U.S. is that of the Alaska pollock, which is prosecuted heavily by the Seattle-based fishing fleet and generally regarded as well-managed.
The discard rates for Alaska and the West Coast number among the lowest — 12 out of every 100 in Alaska and 15 out of every hundred for the West Coast. The highest rate was in the Southeast, where only 40 percent of the fish hauled in were brought back to shore.