Study reveals plunge in big fish numbers
Fully 90 percent of each of the world’s large ocean species, including cod, halibut, tuna, swordfish and marlin, has disappeared from the world’s oceans in recent decades, according to the Canadian analysis — the first to use historical data dating to the beginning of large-scale fishing, in the 1950s.
Fish stocks are down, but fishing isn’t necessarily the culprit. There’s been a huge increase in the whale population since prohibitions on whaling took effect a decade ago, and whales eat massive numbers of fish. Responsible whale harvesting will restore part of the fish population, and responsible fishing will keep it stable.
In US waters, the trend is “steady, incremental improvement.”
Wait, aren’t the largest whales baleen whales that eat plankton? If an overpopulation of these whales is causing a drop in plankton, which could result in less food for fish, you might have a point.
However, one cannot argue against the fact that the harvesting capacity of modern fishing fleets has increased over the past decade. I find it hard to believe that the collapse of, say, the cod fishery in the northeast is due to hungry whales. For that matter, did whales cause the collapse of the California salmon fishery? No, the various water projects that built dams on the rivers feeding the Sacramento did that.