STATE OF OUR SEAS

Not Too Many Fish in the Sea

Could we soon be living in a world without seafood?

From tuna salad sandwiches in lunch boxes to lobster flown halfway across the country, seafood is an increasingly important part of the American diet. During the last 45 years, Americans' average consumption of seafood has grown by 60 percent. But the supply of wild fish from the ocean might not be able to meet the increasing demand. Destructive fishing practices have pushed three-quarters of the world's fisheries to -- or beyond -- the limits of sustainability. Ninety percent of the large ocean predators, including swordfish, marlin and the biggest tuna, are simply gone. Yet high-tech fishing fleets still ply the world's oceans, chasing fewer and smaller fish.

At first glance, supermarkets and seafood dealers appear to have fish aplenty. But a closer look at the numbers shows some troubling signs. Fishermen on the West Coast, for example, caught 11,000 metric tons of bocaccio, also known as Pacific red snapper, in the 1970s. By 2001, the catch was down to 214 metric tons. On the opposite coast, the peak commercial catch of cod on the legendary fishing grounds of New England's Georges Bank plummeted from 48,116 metric tons in 1980 to as low as 7,859 metric tons by the late 1990s.

The situation is not hopeless, however. If fish populations get a break from overfishing and if their habitats are protected, many species are pretty quick to recover their numbers. And we know how to provide that protection: by putting an end to overfishing and other destructive fishing practices such as bottom trawling in vulnerable habitats, by creating marine parks to give fish a safe place to rebuild their populations, and by reducing ocean pollution.

"The data show us it's not too late," says Dr. Boris Worm, lead author of a November 2006 Science study on the loss of ocean species. "We can turn this around. But less than 1 percent of the global ocean is effectively protected right now. We won't see complete recovery in one year, but in many cases species come back more quickly than people anticipated -- in three to five to ten years. And where this has been done we see immediate economic benefits."