Over fishing: Hong Kong's fishing crisis finally arrives.

Wherever I go in the world today, newspapers invariably contain a story about over fishing. In Australia, it is Patagonian toothfish, abalone and the resources of the Great Barrier Reef. In Asia, shark finning. In the Caribbean, Garoupa s. In the Pacific, Tuna, and in the Atlantic, Cod. To name but a few. We have come to regard over fishing as a fact of life, but in a few places it has become a major social problem. One such place is Hong Kong. There has been a steady decline in fish catches from Hong Kong waters over the last 25 years or so and in 1998, the Agriculture and Fisheries Department of the Hong Kong Government commissioned a consultancy study to assess the situation and identify ways to remedy any identified problem. The study found that the catch had indeed fallen by 50% and that fish fry production had decreased by 90% over the last decade. Twelve of the 17 commercial fish species assessed were ‘‘heavily over-exploited’’ and the remaining five ‘‘fully exploited’’. The local fishery was further shown to have shifted from one dominated by large, slow growing, high value species to one comprising small, faster growing, low value species. To understand how this situation has come about, one has to delve into history. Prior to the SecondWorld War, Hong Kong was a remote colonial outpost far from the gems, such as India and Malaysia, in the imperial crown of the British Empire. Artisanal fishing easily provided for the few people then resident in the infant colony. In 1928, one of the most important persons in the history of colonial Hong Kong, G.A.C. Herklots, was appointed as a Reader in Biology at the University of Hong Kong. Herklots set about developing the subject of biology in Hong Kong by inviting to it various marine (and other) scientists