For the Seafood Lover in You

If you're a fan of fish and other seafood, you'd best run out to Red Lobster as soon as you can. According to this report in Science, if we don't do anything to counteract current trends, we've only got 42 years before wild seafood is depleted.

As reported in The Washington Post, this is a result of "overfishing, pollution and other environmental factors." In 1980, 13.5 percent of the 6,048 species fished had collapsed (which means they were down to 10 percent or less of their historic maximum catch levels). In 2003, despite the fact that commercial fishing had expanded the species it caught by 1,736, the collapse had spread to 29 percent of fished species. Do the math: Of 7,784 species of fish that are caught commercially throughout the world, roughly 2,257 of them have collapsed.

Not surprisingly, the Bush administration isn't sure there's a problem. Steve Murawski, chief scientist of the Fisheries Service of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, told The New York Times that the study "doesn’t gibe with trends that we see, especially in the United States."

He said the Fisheries Service considered about 20 percent of the stocks it monitors to be overfished. "But 80 percent are not, and that trend has not changed substantially," he said, adding that if anything, the fish situation in American waters was improving.

Murawski seems to be a glass-half-full kind of guy, but even if we take his more optimistic numbers, he's essentially saying that even if 1,557 species are overfished, that leaves 6,227 that are not. Unfortunately, as the number of species declines, the loss of those species undermines the biodiversity of their immediate environments, and that strengthens the decline. The National Fisheries Institute has suggested fish farms as a way to make up the difference, but that just further commercializes a natural resource.

But The Washington Post piece provides some hope:

Yesterday's report suggests it is possible to resolve this puzzle. The researchers analyzed nearly 50 areas where restrictions had been imposed to stop overfishing and found that, on average, the range of species in the water increased by 23 percent within five years. That provides reason for optimism, [lead author Boris Worm, a marine biologist at Canada's Dalhousie University] said, because it means sound management can halt the decline of fish stocks worldwide.

"It's not too late to turn this around," he said. "It can be done, but it has to be done soon."

Of course, such a response would demand having political leaders who are willing to recognize the problem. Maybe after Tuesday.