overfishing

Bluefin tuna - sometimes you just can't believe how absurd the story gets.

News today from WWF and a Green MEP show that over an eight-year period the EU bluefin tuna fishing industry received subsidies totalling €34.5m. Yes folks, your tax helped fund the overfishing of a species now teetering on the very brink of extinction. A species that 21 out of 27 EU countries now think should be subject to an international trade ban.

So, here in Brazil, the game is on. At the end of yesterday’s session the parties around the table at the ICCAT meeting were asked what their priorities were for conserving bluefin tuna. One by one they made positive murmurings about wanting to 'follow the scientific recommendations', and enforce compliance with them. They all pretty much said they want to see illegal fishing tackled. No rocket science there, and you would be forgiven for wondering why they have not done those things already!

In this, the second instalment of the 'Our Ocean Wonderland' animations, Stephen Appelby considers the culinary seafood options likely to be open to us once we've emptied the seas of edible fish.

Having made a startling movie which has changed the way people think about what’s on their dinner plate, Charles Clover and the End of the Line team have now turned their attentions to restaurants which are still serving endangered fish.

A survey of more than 100 top restaurants conducted for their new guide, fish2fork.com, found that nearly 9 out of 10 were serving at least one 'fish to avoid' from over-exploited stocks. And some of the most critically-acclaimed eateries are among the worst offenders - 7 out of 25 Michelin-starred restaurants visited served species officially listed as endangered on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature's Red List.

Those of us who've been trying to make sense of what sort of impact destructive overfishing is having on marine life know things are bad - when you have a global fleet with the capacity to catch every edible thing in our oceans four times over, patchy regulations at best, and a massive incentive for fishermen to catch the most valuable species quickly before someone else fishes them out - it's not surprising many fish stocks are in trouble.

Every once in a while in my meanderings through the web, I come across something that really hits the spot - like this amazing animation from Phil Reynolds, for example. Phil's taken an idea from Charles Clover's book about overfishing, The End of the Line, and he uses it beautifully to illustrate the problem of 'bycatch' - the non-commercial species which are also killed during the process of bringing our favourite fish species to the table.

So. Is the glass half full, or half empty?

There are of course other options, and it may well be difficult to tell because you are looking at the glass from a funny angle. That certainly seems to be the conclusion when reading the various media interpretations of an important new study published in the journal Science on the world's fisheries.

A haul of giant bluefin caught off Scarborough in the 1930s © Prof Callum Roberts

As per the great British tradition, there was something fishy in yesterday's news: an interesting little snippet in PR Weekly, announcing that a new PR firm has been hired to work for Seafish.

Despite the old adage, it seems that crime does pay... at least if you are the Stevenson family of Newlyn.

As reported by the BBC, the family, who operate fishing trawlers in Cornwall, were prosecuted for routinely landing illegal fish. Not only were they landing species they had no quotas for, but they were doing so by passing them off as other species, so it was all pre-meditated and well-orchestrated. They also conveniently ran the auctions where the fish are sold, and falsified the records of what fish had been sold to match what the skippers said they landed.

With around 80 per cent of fish stocks in trouble, species driven to extinction and ecosystems on the brink of collapse, it's time to rethink how we harvest our oceans. This new video shows how Greenpeace has been encouraging retailers to clean up their seafood shelves - by switching to a sustainable seafood sourcing policy they can change the world's fisheries and help to protect the world's oceans.