what's a fish, grandpa?
in 50 years all fish will be dead. I recommend anyone interested in studying fish to plan on retiring in 50 years. Actually, if fish go extinct, fish researchers will be the paleontologists of the 21st century.
posted by kevinPlusAmEqualsLove at 9:23 PM
2 Comments:
Yeah, and remember when computers first came out and they were going to do all of our work for us and everyone would be unemployed but nobody would care because robots would be doing our chores and we'd be sitting by the pool eating bonbons?
I sometimes get really annoyed with these doomsday, chicken little predictions. We've had so many of them that don't come true that it makes it hard to trust them anymore. Or do they not come true because people were scared into being motivated to do something about it??
Okay. So, this study has some good points. 1. ecosystem diversity is important for preserving fish stocks so that we can keep extracting good numbers of fishes from them, and diversity also seems to help with recovery after over-fishing. 2. The way we manage fisheries is flawed, and lots more protection should be given to nursery grounds, fishing grounds in general, and we need to change the way we manage just about everything in our fisheries (they didn't state this, but it's inferred).
However, don't be too scared by their seemingly concrete projections. While we should be thinking seriously about better ways to manage fish stocks (some of which is in progress in some parts of the world), I think their study is flawed.
The main problem is that they infer most of the fish stock status from catch data, i.e. how many fish were caught in a given year, relative to the maximum annual catch. While this might work for some species to accurately track the species' abundance, it most definitely doesn't work for all. Fisheries get governmental restrictions which can lower annual catch size, interest in certain species waxes and wanes with changes in tastes, policy, effort required and price, so this is not an especially good indicator.
So, ecosystem diversity and health is important for fisheries and maintaining healthy, extractable populations of fishes. So, lets curb pollution, protect estuaries, and get more marine protected areas. However, take the doomsday scenario that they've put forth with at least a couple of grains of seasalt.
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