A short history of nearly everything - Bill Bryson [140]
Elsewhere, however, the misuse of the oceans has been more wanton than inadvertent. Many fishermen “fin” sharks—that is, slice their fins off, then dump them back into the water to die. In 1998, shark fins sold in the Far East for over $250 a pound. A bowl of shark fin soup retailed in Tokyo for $100. The World Wildlife Fund estimated in 1994 that the number of sharks killed each year was between 40 million and 70 million.
As of 1995, some 37,000 industrial-sized fishing ships, plus about a million smaller boats, were between them taking twice as many fish from the sea as they had just twenty-five years earlier. Trawlers are sometimes now as big as cruise ships and haul behind them nets big enough to hold a dozen jumbo jets. Some even use spotter planes to locate shoals of fish from the air.
It is estimated that about a quarter of every fishing net hauled up contains “by-catch”—fish that can't be landed because they are too small or of the wrong type or caught in the wrong season. As one observer told the Economist: “We're still in the Dark Ages. We just drop a net down and see what comes up.” Perhaps as much as twenty-two million metric tons of such unwanted fish are dumped back in the sea each year, mostly in the form of corpses. For every pound of shrimp harvested, about four pounds of fish and other marine creatures are destroyed.
Large areas of the North Sea floor are dragged clean by beam trawlers as many as seven times a year, a degree of disturbance that no ecosystem can withstand. At least two-thirds of species in the North Sea, by many estimates, are being overfished. Across the Atlantic things are no better. Halibut once abounded in such numbers off New England that individual boats could land twenty thousand pounds of it in a day. Now halibut is all but extinct off the northeast coast of North America.
Nothing, however, compares with the fate of cod. In the late fifteenth century, the explorer John Cabot found cod in incredible numbers on the eastern banks of North America—shallow areas of water popular with bottom-feeding fish like cod. Some of these banks were vast. Georges Banks off Massachusetts is bigger than the state it abuts. The Grand Banks off Newfoundland is bigger still and for centuries was always dense with cod. They were thought to be inexhaustible. Of course they were anything but.
By 1960, the number of spawning cod in the north Atlantic had fallen to an estimated 1.6 million metric tons. By 1990 this had sunk to 22,000 metric tons. In commercial terms, the cod were extinct. “Fishermen,” wrote Mark Kurlansky in his fascinating history, Cod, “had caught them all.” The cod may have lost the western Atlantic forever. In 1992, cod fishing was stopped altogether on the Grand Banks, but as of last autumn, according to a report in Nature, stocks had not staged a comeback. Kurlansky notes that the fish of fish fillets and fish sticks was originally cod, but then was replaced by haddock, then by redfish, and lately by Pacific pollock. These days, he notes drily, “fish” is “whatever is left.”
Much the same can be said of many other seafoods. In the New England fisheries off Rhode Island, it was once routine to haul in lobsters weighing twenty pounds. Sometimes they reached thirty pounds. Left unmolested, lobsters can live for decades—as much as seventy years, it is thought—and they never stop growing. Nowadays few lobsters weigh more than two pounds on capture. “Biologists,” according to the New York Times, “estimate that 90 percent of lobsters are caught within a year after they reach the legal minimum size at about age six.” Despite declining catches, New England fishermen continue to receive state and federal tax incentives that encourage them—in some cases all but compel them—to acquire bigger boats and to harvest the seas more intensively.