Concerns about the loss of aquatic life, including the fish we eat, have rippled around the globe this year with warnings about the loss of certain salmon, the Alaskan Pollock (the fish sticks fish) and of course sharks, which are becoming endangered at alarming rates.

This week brought more hard to digest news, that mountains of edible saltwater fish are being ground up and turned into animal food, for farm-raised fish, chickens and pigs, no less. This raises so many questions that it would be difficult to list them all here. But let’s start with: “What happens when pigs and chickens are forcibly turned into carnivores?” and “We’re catching fish to feed fish, really?”

“It defies reason to drain the ocean of small, wild fishes that could be directly consumed by people in order to produce a lesser quantity of farmed fish,” said Dr. Ellen K. Pikitch, executive director of the Institute for Ocean Conservation Science and a professor at Stony Brook University’s School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, one sponsor of the study “Forage Fish: From Ecosystems to Markets”.

The study found that some 31 million tons of forage fish are being taken from the oceans every year, and more than 90 percent of that haul is ground up into meal for farmed fish, pigs and poultry.

The practice, which is not well managed, could have far reaching effects.

“Skyrocketing pressure on small wild fishes,” Dr. Pikitch said, “may be putting entire marine food webs at great risk.”

Because I eat primarily vegetables and fish, but not other meats, I’ve been hyper-attuned to these recent stories.

I fear that overfishing is an issue that’s just washing over the public, one more dire earth-related concern on a crowded plate, no pun intended. It’s a straightforward concept: We’re harvesting too many fish, in too many places, and by the time that overfishing crosses the bounds of sustainability, the fishery can be on the verge of collapse. That’s the concern in the case of the Alaskan Pollock. Scientists believe that years of bounty could be followed by a sudden collapse of this vital food source. And to compound matters for the U.S. fishing businesses, climate change is driving the Alaskan Pollock to migrate northward into Russian seas.

You don’t need an ecology course to see how these losses can shred whole ecosystems. Even in the case of the forage fish, which we don’t consider suitable for a human lunch or dinner, the pain travels resoundingly up the food chain.

“We must find a better way to manage forage fisheries before we cause irreversible damage to the broader ocean environment which depends on them as a food source,” said Joshua Reichert, managing director of the Pew Environment Group, another sponsor of the Sea Around Us. “Human beings are not the only, or necessarily, the most important consumer of these fish. Whatever people take out of the sea needs to be carefully calibrated to ensure that sufficient fish are left to sustain populations of other fish, seabirds and marine mammals which all play a major role in the healthy functioning of the world’s oceans.”

One way to become a better steward of the oceans is to be a more mindful gourmet. Whether cooking or eating out, we can all try to consume fish that are responsibly farmed or harvested in the wild.

Environmental Defense Fund, a Washington policy and conservation group, has produced three lists to guide your choices: The top “Eco-Best,” the “Eco-OK” and “Eco-Worst” lists take into account the size of marine life population, pollution and fishing techniques.

Here’s the top 10 Eco Best List. Tape it to your pantry door and flip to this page on the ED website for recipes. Enjoy these (and don’t be a pig about it, because well, the pigs…we’ll come back to that one).

Anchovies
Char, Arctic (farmed)
Mackerel, Atlantic
Mussels
Oysters (farmed)
Sablefish (Alaska, Canada)
Salmon, wild (Alaska)
Sardines, Pacific (U.S.)
Trout, rainbow (farmed)
Tuna, albacore (U.S., Canada)

(The study, “Forage Fish: From Ecosystems to Markets,” is a product of the nine-year Sea Around Us Project, a partnership between the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and The Pew Charitable Trusts. The Sea Around Us Project has been primarily funded by the Pew Institute for Ocean Science, which is now the Institute for Ocean Conservation Science at Stony Brook University.)

Copyright © 2008 | Distributed by Noofangle Media

Remember the global food crisis of earlier this year? Unfortunately, the intervening mortgage, energy and banking crises have not solved it.

The next food shortages are headed our way in waves – from the oceans, where overfishing has led to the steep decline of shark populations worldwide, the closing of West Coast salmon fisheries and now, the potential slide of the Alaskan Pollock.

This latest fish-in-trouble was once so prolific that it became the world’s most omnipresent, affordable everyman’s seafood, sliced into faux crab, minced and pressed into fish sticks and filleted into fast food McFishwiches.

Now, the workhorse Pollock, once vastly abundant, is experiencing a sudden unanticipated population decline of about 50 percent, jeopardizing the world’s supply of fish sticks (which may or may not alarm you), the survival of the Stellar Sea Lions of and countless Alaskan fishing jobs, according to a survey by the National Marine Fisheries Service.

The findings have conservationists calling for a reassessment fishing limits in the seas along the Bering Strait. They want the North Pacific Fishery Management Council to set new reasonable catch limits on the Pollock that consider sustainability when the council meets in December.

Without a reassessment, they say, the entire Bering Strait ecosystem, where seals and whales also depend on the Pollock for food, could collapse.

Ocean and marine life experts say that the focus on single species management – with catch quotas based on estimates of what the fish can “sustain” – are missing the mark. More sophisticated models that look at the entire ecosystem, which includes the Pollock’s natural predators, are needed.

“Economic pressures to keep on fishing at such high levels have overwhelmed common sense,” said Dr. Jeremy Jackson, Director of the Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, in a press release.

“With the huge uncertainties inherent in fisheries models, a far more precautionary, ecosystem-based approach is required. Otherwise, fisheries managers are gambling with the health of our oceans and coastal communities,” Jackson said.

A report by Greenpeace, the Alaska Oceans Program, the Center for Biological Diversity and Trustees for Alaska concluded that urgent action is needed to ensure adequate Pollock, which are largely caught off Alaska’s vast coastline. Marine managers must rebuild fish stocks at higher levels to “preserve the ecological relationships between the exploited, dependent, and related species in the food web” and establish a network of marine reserves to conserve fish and wildlife habitats, according to the report called Rethinking Sustainability: A New Paradigm for Fisheries Management.

The extensive continental shelf in the eastern Bering Sea accounts for about half of the marine fish and shellfish caught in the entire United States annually, the report said.

Copyright © 2008 | Distributed by Noofangle Media