Overfished

Over a decade ago, Marine Biologists warned that the Earth's oceans were becoming over-fished.Research regarding overfishing can be custom written on any fishing industry's pillage of the ocean or seas. You tell our writers what you want written about overfished waters and they will custom write your project as specific as you need it to be.

Scientists claimed that the fish stocks were continually depleting as the commercial fishing industry continued it's incessant netting.It wasn't until the early 1990's that the industry took the ecologists warnings serious when their catches became noticeably smaller.

Part of the problem is consumer ignorance. For example, orange roughly began to appear in fish stores and on the menus at fancy restaurants in the U.S. just a decade ago.Yet in that short time the species has become threatened with extinction.

The orange roughly lives up to a mile deep in cold waters off New Zealand.Now scientists have learned that species living in deep, cold waters grow and reproduce very slowly. The orange roughly, for example, lives to be 150 years old and only begins to reproduce at age 30.Recently, the principal stocks of orange roughly around New Zealand collapsed. Still, today in Annapolis, Maryland, fish stores, orange roughly is available for $8.99 per pound, and there's no sign telling consumers that the species is threatened. "People wouldn't eat rhinoceros or any other land creature that they knew was threatened with extinction. But they're eating fish like orange roughly without a clue to what's happening," says Greenpeace fisheries expert Mike Hagler in Auckland, New Zealand.

The oceans were initially used as a food source. Scientists have found evidence that the early coastal dwellers consumed shore shellfish and coastline fish.As sea going boats were invented, the collecting progressed from off of the shore to farther out in the sea. Larger, more effective nets widened the catch, the beginning of the depletion of the ocean's fish supply.Yet early scientists such as T. H. Huxley alleged that the ocean's supply were too numerous and the fishing methods so inefficient to ever make a dent in nature's abundance. Technology has advanced commercial fishing tremendously, as the example of Don Tyson illustrates.

In 1992, Tyson bought the Arctic-Alaska Fisheries Company, and three other fishing companies. They operate a fleet of industrial super-trawlers that each cost $40 million to build and reach the length of a football field.These trawlers pull nylon nets thousands of feet long through the water, capturing everything in their path --400 tons of fish at a single netting. These super-trawlers stay offshore for months at a time, processing and freezing their catch as they go, thus giving them a major advantage over smaller land-based boats.

Commercial fisheries, world wide, are partly responsible for the over-exploitation. Here are a few tragic facts regarding our overfished seas:

1. In the United State's coastal waters, 56 of the 157 stock groups of fish (36 percent) are over-fished.
2. Over 44 percent of the stock group are fished to their maximum. Never before have the species of cod, haddock, or halibut (to name only a few) had such low populations.
3. Many of Hawaii's snappers and groupers, once as prevalent as the other popular dinner fare, have diminished to levels of 10 to 30 percent of what they once where.
4. The Nassau grouper, that thrived in the Caribbean and South Atlantic, are no longer fished for commerce, for they have become all but extinct.
5. Oysters that bedded in Chesapeake Bay have ebbed to numbers that are a frightening 10 percent of what they were in the last century.
6. California's white abalone most likely will join the ranks of the extinct in the near future