PlanetCatfish.com

Perhaps many have already read it. It is heart-breaking. Could it really be true? I always try to believe in people's best but, paradoxically, here I find myself hoping the guy has an agenda and is exaggerating things or puts his chosen spin on things he observes and reports, no?

http://news.yahoo.com/the-ocean-is-brok ... 27474.html

Wow, that's a sad state of affairs. Like you, Victor, I hope it's just an exaggeration. However, I fear it is pretty accurate.

Read this story yesterday on PFK and if it an accurate account, it is a truely shocking and saddening report... Not just the lack of fish the sailor saw, but the fishing boat stripping the ocean bare 24/7 and netting crazy amounts of by-catch that are tipped back dead into the ocean daily.

It's a very depressing read, especially since I don't think its an exaggeration at all. I'm studying a bit of marine biology at the moment, and while very interesting there's also quite a few sad stories about how we're ruining the marine life- the plight of the whales for instance.
The optimist in me is glad the article seems to have gotten a lot of attention atleast, maybe maybe it will lead to something that actually makes a difference.

In a similar vain, The Black Fish (a marine conservation group, not the orca whale documentary), recently gave a talk at where I study. It was about the state of commercial fishing; a pretty damning assessment overall. It was very informative, but sombre, and made me reconsider a few things.

This is them - http://www.theblackfish.org/

Sadly the people who made the rules were often a little short sighted.

You can fish X amount of fish anything else throw back. The down side is often they catch other fish as its cheaper / faster to catch everything and discard. The down side is the damage it does but that doesn't go into a profit margin as they don't have to pay for it.

Many people of guilty of feeding this by the products we purchase. We will the buy the cheapest or best tasting and given the current climate the cheaper the product the more likely it is to be purchased. The best taste is likely to be wild caught. Not many people will purchase fish products from sustainable sources.

The rubbish being all over entirely possible as fish have washed up in America alive in a small boat that were in a box and the slow change of water meant they survived. So the amount floating is probably very high. People will of course argue in terms of the ocean its a small % covered.

I hope that eventually some of it will sink and form new living environments for the fish. Hopefully it wont rot releasing toxic chemicals (It probably will). I seem to remember a article about an artificial reef formed of old tram carts in America?

Overall nature can heal itself given help (If something is completely gone the start has to be helped) and time but we are not giving it these things so one day all that will be left of some species will be in the zoo's and peoples tanks. That will be a very sad day.

Some fish are adapting and moving out by help by humans but in doing so they often displace something else.