Fishing for context

The damaging of the seas is now one of the world's gravest environmental problems, according to a new report by a group of distinguished scientists who have studied one of the world's key fishing grounds: the North East Atlantic. The team travelled around Europe, visited the US and gathered additional evidence from Australia, New Zealand and Japan. Their conclusion is that fishing activity in this region of the Atlantic not only threatens commercial species but the collapse of whole marine ecosystems which may be very hard to re-establish. Such destruction has been caused by over-fishing in the marine environment and only extended protected zones, where all fishing is banned, will allow the sea's damaged areas to recover, members of Britain's Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution report. These non-fishing reserves should cover 30 per cent of UK territorial waters, the commission suggested, in the most drastic call ever made to scale back fishing in Europe. The proposals were welcomed by environmentalists, but attacked by some fishing industry groups, who said they would threaten yet more livelihoods, and that recovery measures have already been taken. But the commission was insistent. It is not just the question of falling fish stocks, critical though many of these are, it said. Rather, the concern is for the whole marine ecosystem, with seabirds, dolphins and porpoises killed in their thousands, smaller marine organisms wiped out and the seabed extensively destroyed by trawling over vast distances. The report, Turning the Tide, calls on policymakers to recognize the real scale and nature of the problem: that decades of competitive fishing have put whole marine ecosystems under siege. The central point is that it is the ecosystem, and not just the threatened individual fish stocks such as cod or haddock, that needs looking after. The report, for example, suggests that globally, over 90 per cent of larger predatory fish may have been lost since the pre-industrial era. " This can affect predator–prey relationships, genetic diversity and breeding ability as well as resulting in catches of smaller, younger fish and creatures at lower trophic levels — a phenomenon known as fishing down the food chain. " All at sea: A new report looking at the state of the marine environment in the North East Atlantic finds a crisis situation with over-fishing threatening not only commercial species but whole ecosystems involving birds, mammals and invertebrates alongside fish. It calls for the …