The environmental impact of fishing includes issues such as the availability of
fish,
overfishing
Overfishing is the removal of a species of fish (i.e. fishing) from a body of water at a rate greater than that the species can replenish its population naturally (i.e. the overexploitation of the fishery's existing fish stock), resulting in th ...
,
fisheries
Fishery can mean either the enterprise of raising or harvesting fish and other aquatic life; or more commonly, the site where such enterprise takes place ( a.k.a. fishing ground). Commercial fisheries include wild fisheries and fish farms, both ...
, and
fisheries management; as well as the impact of
industrial fishing on other elements of the environment, such as
bycatch
Bycatch (or by-catch), in the fishing industry, is a fish or other marine species that is caught unintentionally while fishing for specific species or sizes of wildlife. Bycatch is either the wrong species, the wrong sex, or is undersized or juve ...
. These issues are part of
marine conservation, and are addressed in
fisheries science programs. According to a 2019
FAO report, global production of fish, crustaceans, molluscs and other aquatic animals has continued to grow and reached 172.6 million tonnes in 2017, with an increase of 4.1 percent compared with 2016. There is a growing gap between the supply of fish and demand, due in part to
world population growth.
Fishing and pollution from fishing are the largest contributors to the decline in ocean health and water quality. Ghost nets, or nets abandoned in the ocean, are made of plastic and nylon and do not decompose, wreaking extreme havoc on the wildlife and ecosystems they interrupt. The ocean takes up 70% of the earth, so overfishing and hurting the marine environment affects everyone and everything on this planet. On top of the overfishing, there is a seafood shortage resulting from the mass amounts of seafood waste, as well as the
microplastics that are polluting the seafood consumed by the public. The latter is largely caused by plastic-made fishing gear like
drift nets
Drift netting is a fishing technique where nets, called drift nets, hang vertically in the water column without being anchored to the bottom. The nets are kept vertical in the water by floats attached to a rope along the top of the net and we ...
and
longlining equipment, that are wearing down by use, lost or thrown away.
The journal ''
Science'' published a four-year study in November 2006, which predicted that, at prevailing trends, the world would run out of wild-caught
seafood
Seafood is any form of sea life regarded as food by humans, prominently including fish and shellfish. Shellfish include various species of molluscs (e.g. bivalve molluscs such as clams, oysters and mussels, and cephalopods such as octopus an ...
in 2048. The scientists stated that the decline was a result of
overfishing
Overfishing is the removal of a species of fish (i.e. fishing) from a body of water at a rate greater than that the species can replenish its population naturally (i.e. the overexploitation of the fishery's existing fish stock), resulting in th ...
,
pollution and other environmental factors that were reducing the population of fisheries at the same time as their ecosystems were being annihilated. Many countries, such as
Tonga, the
United States,
Australia
Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a Sovereign state, sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous List of islands of Australia, sma ...
and
Bahamas, and international management bodies have taken steps to appropriately manage marine resources.
Reefs are also being destroyed by
overfishing
Overfishing is the removal of a species of fish (i.e. fishing) from a body of water at a rate greater than that the species can replenish its population naturally (i.e. the overexploitation of the fishery's existing fish stock), resulting in th ...
because of the huge nets that are dragged along the ocean floor while
trawling. Many corals are being destroyed and, as a consequence, the
ecological niche of many species is at stake.
Effects on marine habitat
Some fishing techniques cause habitat destruction.
Blast fishing and
cyanide fishing, which are illegal in many places, harm surrounding habitats.
Blast fishing refers to the practice of using explosives to capture fish. Cyanide fishing refers to the practice of using cyanide to stun fish for collection. These two practices are commonly used for the aquarium trade and the live fish food trade.
These practices are destructive because they impact the habitat that the reef fish live on after the fish have been removed.
Bottom trawling, the practice of pulling a
fishing net along the sea bottom behind
trawlers Trawler may refer to:
Boats
* Fishing trawler, used for commercial fishing
* Naval trawler, a converted trawler, or a boat built in that style, used for naval purposes
** Trawlers of the Royal Navy
* Recreational trawler, a pleasure boat built tra ...
, removes around 5 to 25% of an area's seabed life on a single run. Most of the impacts are due to commercial fishing practices. A 2005 report of the
UN Millennium Project
The Millennium Project was an initiative that focused on detailing the organizational means, operational priorities, and financing structures necessary to achieve the Millennium Development Goals or (MDGs). The goals are aimed at the reduction of ...
, commissioned by UN Secretary-General
Kofi Annan, recommended the elimination of bottom trawling on the high seas by 2006 to protect seamounts and other ecologically sensitive habitats. This was not done.
In mid-October 2006,
United States President
George W. Bush
George Walker Bush (born July 6, 1946) is an American politician who served as the 43rd president of the United States from 2001 to 2009. A member of the Republican Party, Bush family, and son of the 41st president George H. W. Bush, he ...
joined other world leaders calling for a moratorium on deep-sea
trawling. The practice has shown to often have harmful effects on sea habitat and, hence, on fish populations, yet no further action was taken (Vivek). The sea animal's aquatic ecosystem may also
collapse
Collapse or its variants may refer to:
Concepts
* Collapse (structural)
* Collapse (topology), a mathematical concept
* Collapsing manifold
* Collapse, the action of collapsing or telescoping objects
* Collapsing user interface elements
** ...
due to the destruction of the food chain.
Additionally, ghost fishing is a major threat due to capture fisheries.
Ghost fishing
Ghost nets are fishing nets that have been abandoned, lost or otherwise discarded in the ocean. These nets, often nearly invisible in the dim light, can be left tangled on a rocky reef or drifting in the open sea. They can entangle fish, dolp ...
occurs when a net, such as a gill net or trawl, is lost or discarded at sea and drifts within the oceans and can still act to capture marine organisms. According to the
FAO Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries, States should act to minimize the amount of lost and abandoned gear and work to minimize ghost fishing.
Overfishing
Ecological disruption
Overfishing can result in the over-exploitation of marine
ecosystem services.
Fishing can cause several negative physiological and psychological effects for fish populations including: increased stress levels and bodily injuries resulting from lodged fish hooks.
Often, when this threshold is crossed,
hysteresis
Hysteresis is the dependence of the state of a system on its history. For example, a magnet may have more than one possible magnetic moment in a given magnetic field, depending on how the field changed in the past. Plots of a single component of ...
may occur within the environment.
More specifically, some ecological disturbances observed within the
Black Sea marine ecosystem resulted from a combination of overfishing and various other related human activities which adversely affected the marine environment and ecosystem.
Ecological disruption can also occur due to the overfishing of critical fish species such as the tilefish and grouper fish, which can be referred to as
ecosystem-engineers.
Fishing may disrupt
food webs by targeting specific, in-demand species. There might be too much fishing of prey species such as
sardines and
anchovies, thus reducing the food supply for the predators. Disrupting these types of wasp-waist species may have effects throughout the ecosystem. It may also cause the increase of prey species when the target fishes are predator species, such as
salmon and
tuna.
Overfishing and pollution of the oceans also affect their carbon storage ability and thus contribute to the climate crisis. Carbon stored in seafloor sediments risk release by
bottom-trawling fishing.
Fisheries-induced evolution
Fisheries-induced evolution or evolutionary impact of fishing is the various evolutionary effects of the fishing pressure, such as on size or growth. It is manly caused by selective fishing on size, bigger fish being more frequently caught. Moreover, policy of
minimum landing size, based on the idea that it spares young fishes, have many negative impacts on a population by selecting slow growth individuals.
Bycatch
Bycatch
Bycatch (or by-catch), in the fishing industry, is a fish or other marine species that is caught unintentionally while fishing for specific species or sizes of wildlife. Bycatch is either the wrong species, the wrong sex, or is undersized or juve ...
is the portion of the catch that is not the target species. These are either kept to be sold or discarded. In some instances the discarded portion is known as
discards Discards are the portion of a catch of fish which is not retained on board during commercial fishing operations and is returned, often dead or dying, to the sea. The practice of discarding is driven by economic and political factors; fish which are ...
. Even sports fisherman discard a lot of non-target and target fish on the bank while fishing. For every pound of the target species caught, up to 5 pounds of unintended marine species are caught and discarded as bycatch. As many as 40% (63 billion pounds) of fish caught globally every year are discarded, and as many as 650,000 whales, dolphins and seals are killed every year by fishing vessels.
Shark finning and culling
Shark finning
Shark finning is the act of removing fins from sharks and discarding the rest of the shark. The sharks are often still alive when discarded, but without their fins. Unable to swim effectively, they sink to the bottom of the ocean and die of suffocation or are eaten by other predators. Though studies suggest that 73 million sharks are finned each year,
[https://www.livescience.com/1027-shark-slaughter-73-million-killed-year.html ''Shark Slaughter: 73 Million Killed Each Year.'' Ker Than. September 26, 2006. Retrieved January 1, 2019.] scientists have noted that the numbers may actually be higher, with roughly 100 million sharks being killed by finning each year. The deaths of millions of sharks has caused catastrophic damage to the
marine ecosystem.
Shark culling
Shark culling is the killing of sharks in government-run "shark control" programs. These programs exist to reduce the risk of
shark attacks — however, environmentalists say that they do not reduce the risk of shark attacks; they also say that shark culling harms the
marine ecosystem.
[https://web.archive.org/web/20181002102324/https://www.marineconservation.org.au/pages/shark-culling.html "Shark Culling". marineconservation.org.au. Archived from the original on 2018-10-02. Retrieved January 1, 2019.] Shark culling currently occurs in
New South Wales,
Queensland,
KwaZulu-Natal
KwaZulu-Natal (, also referred to as KZN and known as "the garden province") is a province of South Africa that was created in 1994 when the Zulu bantustan of KwaZulu ("Place of the Zulu" in Zulu) and Natal Province were merged. It is locate ...
and
Réunion
Réunion (; french: La Réunion, ; previously ''Île Bourbon''; rcf, label= Reunionese Creole, La Rényon) is an island in the Indian Ocean that is an overseas department and region of France. It is located approximately east of the island ...
.
[http://www.sharkangels.org/index.php/media/news/157-shark-nets "Shark Nets". sharkangels.org. Archived from the original on 2018-09-19. Retrieved January 1, 2019.] Queensland's "shark control" program killed roughly 50,000 sharks between 1962 and 2018 — Queensland's program uses lethal devices such as
shark nets and
drum lines
A drum line is an unmanned aquatic trap used to lure and capture large sharks using baited hooks. They are typically deployed near popular swimming beaches with the intention of reducing the number of sharks in the vicinity and therefore the prob ...
.
Thousands of other animals, such as
turtles and
dolphins, have been killed in Queensland as
bycatch
Bycatch (or by-catch), in the fishing industry, is a fish or other marine species that is caught unintentionally while fishing for specific species or sizes of wildlife. Bycatch is either the wrong species, the wrong sex, or is undersized or juve ...
. Queensland's shark culling program has been called "outdated, cruel and ineffective". The shark culling program in New South Wales (which uses nets) has killed thousands of sharks, turtles, dolphins and
whales.
KwaZulu-Natal's shark culling program killed more than 33,000 sharks in a 30-year period.
Marine debris
Recent research has shown that, by mass, fishing debris, such as buoys, lines, and nets, account for more than two-thirds of large plastic debris found in the oceans; in the
Great Pacific Garbage Patch, fishing nets alone comprise at least 46% of the debris. Similarly, fishing debris has been shown to be a major source of plastic debris found on the shores of Korea.
Marine life
Marine life, sea life, or ocean life is the plants, animals and other organisms that live in the salt water of seas or oceans, or the brackish water of coastal estuaries. At a fundamental level, marine life affects the nature of the planet. M ...
interacts with debris in two ways: either through
entanglement (where debris entangles or entraps animals), or ingestion of the debris (either intentionally or accidentally). Both are harmful to the animal. Marine debris consisting of old fishing nets or trawls can often be linked to phenomena such as ghost fishing, wherein the netting debris, referred to as
ghost nets, continues to entangle and capture fish.
A study performed in southern Japan on
octopus
An octopus ( : octopuses or octopodes, see below for variants) is a soft-bodied, eight- limbed mollusc of the order Octopoda (, ). The order consists of some 300 species and is grouped within the class Cephalopoda with squids, cuttle ...
es noted that there was an estimated mortality rate of 212,000–505,000 octopuses per year within the area's fishing grounds, due in large part to ghost fishing. Tracking garbage and monitoring the logistics of human waste disposal, especially waste materials primarily associated with fishing, is one method to reduce marine debris.
Using technological or mechanical innovations such as marine debris-clearing drones can further serve to reduce the amount of debris within oceans.
Recreational fishing impacts
Recreational fishing is fishing done for sport or competition, whereas commercial fishing is catching seafood, often in mass quantities, for profit. Both can have different environmental impacts when it comes to fishing.
Though many assume recreational fishing does not have a large impact on fish, it actually accounts for almost a quarter of the fish caught in the United States, many of those being commercially valuable fish. Recreational fishing has its biggest impact on marine debris, overfishing, and fish mortality. Release mortality in recreational fisheries is the same as the impacts of bycatch in commercial fisheries.
Studies have suggested that improving recreational fisheries management on a global scale could generate substantial social benefits of the same scale as reforming commercial fisheries.
Catch and Release
Catch and release
Catch and release is a practice within recreational fishing where after capture, often a fast measurement and weighing of the fish is performed, followed by posed photography as proof of the catch, and then the fish are unhooked and returned ...
fishing involves several practices to reduce the negative environmental impacts of fishing that include: the duration, timing, and type of hook used during angling.
To increase the effectiveness of catch and release fishing and mitigate its negative impacts, species-specific guidelines are required.
These guidelines help tailor specific rules and regulations to specific species of fish in relation to their locations and mating and migration cycles.
A metastudy in 2005 found that the average catch and release mortality rate was 18%, but varied greatly by species. While catch-and-release fishing has been wildly used in recreational fishing, it is also beneficial for maintaining fish populations at a stable level for commercial fisheries to receive social and economic benefits.
Combining catch and release fishing with
biotelemetry data collection methods allows for researchers to study the biological effects of catch and release fishing on fish in order to better suit future conservation efforts and remedies.
Countermeasures
Fisheries management and fish farming
One method to increase fish population numbers and reduce the severity of adverse environmental impacts and ecological disturbances is the utilization of traditional
fisheries management systems within fisheries.
Essentially, traditional fisheries management incorporates the aspects of fisheries management; however, the conservation efforts take into account concepts that place restrictions on the type of gear used and the allotment of permitted angling.
Traditional fisheries management also incorporates communities within its conservation efforts which often result in management scenarios where there is co-management conservation efforts led by communities.
Ecosystem-based management
Ecosystem-based management is an environmental management approach that recognizes the full array of interactions within an ecosystem, including humans, rather than considering single issues, species, or ecosystem services in isolation. It can be ...
of fisheries is another method used for fish conservation and impact remediation.
Instead of solely focusing conservation efforts on a single species of marine life, ecosystem-based management is used across various species of fish within an environment.
To improve the adoption of these types of fisheries management, it is important to reduce barriers to entry for management scenarios in order to make these methods more accessible to fisheries globally.
Many governments and intergovernmental bodies have implemented
fisheries management policies designed to curb the environmental impact of fishing. Fishing conservation aims to control the human activities that may completely decrease a fish stock or washout an entire aquatic environment. These laws include the quotas on the total catch of particular species in a fishery, effort quotas (e.g., number of days at sea), the limits on the number of vessels allowed in specific areas, and the imposition of seasonal restrictions on fishing.
In 2008, a large scale study of fisheries that used
individual transferable quota Individual fishing quotas (IFQs), also known as "individual transferable quotas" (ITQs), are one kind of ''catch share'', a means by which many governments regulate fishing. The regulator sets a species-specific total allowable catch (TAC), typicall ...
s and ones that didn't provide strong evidence that individual transferable quotas can help to prevent collapses and restore fisheries that appear to be in decline.
Fish farming has been proposed as a more sustainable alternative to traditional capture of
wild fish. However, fish farming has been found to have negative impacts on nearby wild fish
PLoS Biology - Can Farmed and Wild Salmon Coexist?
/ref> and farming of predatory fish like salmon can rely on fish feed that is based on fish meal
Fish meal is a commercial product made from whole wild-caught fish, bycatch and fish by-products to feed farm animals, e.g., pigs, poultry, and farmed fish.R. D. Miles and F. A. Chapman.FA122: The Benefits of Fish Meal in Aquaculture DietsFisheri ...
and oil from wild fish.Seafood Choices Alliance
The Seafood Choices Alliance was a program of the nonprofit ocean conservation organization, SeaWeb. It was established in 2001 to bring together the disparate elements and diverse approaches in a growing "seafood choices" movement in the United S ...
(2005
It's all about salmon
Marine reserves
Marine reserves serve to foster both environmental protection and marine wildlife safety. The reserves themselves are established via environmental protection plans or policies which designate a specific marine environment as protected. Coral reefs are one of the many examples which involve the application of marine reserves in establishing marine protected areas. There have also been marine reserve initiatives located in the United States, Caribbean
The Caribbean (, ) ( es, El Caribe; french: la Caraïbe; ht, Karayib; nl, De Caraïben) is a region of the Americas that consists of the Caribbean Sea, its islands (some surrounded by the Caribbean Sea and some bordering both the Caribbean Se ...
, Philippines and Egypt. To mitigate the negative environmental impacts of fishing within marine environments, marine reserves are intended to create, enhance and re-introduce biodiversity within the area. As a result, the primary benefits arising from the implementation of this type of management effort include positive impacts towards habitat protection and species conservation.
See also
*Finless Foods
Finless Foods, or Finless for short, is an American biotechnology company aimed at cultured meat, cultured fish, particularly bluefin tuna.
History Origins
Finless Foods was founded in June 2016 and is headquartered in Emeryville, Californ ...
* Population dynamics of fisheries
*List of harvested aquatic animals by weight
This is a list of aquatic animals that are Commercial fishing, harvested commercially in the greatest amounts, listed in order of tonnage per year (2012) by the Food and Agriculture Organization. Species listed here have an annual tonnage in exces ...
* Shark culling
* Shark finning
*Sustainable seafood Sustainable seafood is seafood that is caught or farmed in ways that consider the long-term vitality of harvested species and the well-being of the oceans, as well as the livelihoods of fisheries-dependent communities. It was first promoted throug ...
*Marine debris
Marine debris, also known as marine litter, is human-created waste that has deliberately or accidentally been released in a sea or ocean. Floating oceanic debris tends to accumulate at the center of gyres and on coastlines, frequently washing ...
* Individual fishing quota
* Destructive fishing practices
Books:
*'' The End of the Line: How Overfishing Is Changing the World and What We Eat'' (book)
*''One Fish, Two Fish, Crawfish, Bluefish
''One Fish, Two Fish, Crawfish, Bluefish: The Smithsonian Sustainable Seafood Cookbook'' () is a collection of seafood recipes specifically chosen for their environmental sustainability. It was written by Carole C. Baldwin and Julie H. Mounts, ill ...
'' (book)
Related:
* Environmental effects of meat production
* Human impact on the environment
References
Further reading
*Castro, P. and M. Huber. (2003). Marine Biology. 4thed. Boston: McGraw Hill.
*
*
*
*
*FAO Fisheries Department. (2002). The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
*
*
External links
Pelagic Fisheries Research Program
International Collective in Support of Fishworkers website
Bush backs international deep-sea trawling moratorium
Re-interpreting the Fisheries Crisis seminar by Prof. Ray Hilborn
UK Database of commercially sold fish with stock status
Database on stock status of US seafood
Conservation Science Institute
The facts about the Commercial Fishing Environment
Global Fishing Fleets
Project Regeneration
{{DEFAULTSORT:Environmental Effects Of Fishing