For years, the best minds in the science of fisheries held a conceit: Humans could not drive oceanic fish into extinction. Now, America's preeminent professional society of fishery scientists has roiled those old waters and concluded that humans can--and are--pushing once-common species of saltwater fish toward the brink.
In a study of North American waters, the 10,000-member American Fisheries Society listed 82 species and stocks as "at risk of extinction."
The roster includes a surprising cross-section of fishes that are well-known and formerly abundant--some of them staples of long-established commercial and recreational fisheries. Among the West Coast varieties are lingcod, cowcod, bocaccio, giant sea bass, Pacific ocean perch, shortspine thornyhead and eight species of other rockfish.
Published in the November issue of the society's peer-reviewed magazine, Fisheries, the trailblazing report comes just as West Coast fishery managers set year 2001 catch restrictions for some of these same species.
Faced with evidence of ever-declining fish stocks, the regulators too decided this month to abandon old orthodoxy. Instead of trying to restrict fishing only by the time-worn control of seasons and bag limits, the regulators declared two vast tracts of Southern California coastal waters off-limits to deep-water fishing in recognition of diminishing cowcod.
Beyond the large number of species listed as in jeopardy of survival, the Fisheries Society's report represents a shift in thinking. The government's official endangered and threatened species list includes 102 species and stocks of freshwater, estuarine and anadromous fish, such as salmon that live in both fresh and saltwater--but no non-anadromous oceanic fish.
Until now, that was simply the creed of marine science. That also was what regulators assumed when they made management decisions for commercial and recreational fishing: Somehow the ocean was too vast and fish too resilient for humans to entirely extirpate a species. Overfishing could reduce stocks, sometimes frighteningly so, but extinction was not a management consideration.
"It has long been a dogmatic view that extinction of marine fish stocks is an impossibility," said John A. Musick, lead author of the Fisheries Society report and professor of vertebrate ecology at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science. "Now we're beginning to realize that we can drive these fish out of existence."
