Many African Americans are very concerned about their diets. In this health-conscious era, many have removed red meat from their diets completely and are only consuming chicken or fish. But what if there was no fish one day? This is what a new study examining seafood consumption around the world suggests.
Annually, more than 170 billion pounds of fish and shellfish are caught around the globe. Although this number has been relatively stable over the past decade, the study being conducted by Daniel Pauly, a fisheries scientist at the University of British Columbia and marine ecologist Enric Sala, a National Geographic fellow, suggests that the world catch is not stable or fairly divided among the nations of the world.
The study reveals the true effect on the sea in terms of the raw tonnage of fish caught. But not all fish have the same impact on the sea. “A pound of tuna represents roughly a hundred times the footprint of a pound of sardines,” says Pauly. This means that because tuna are predators, they feed at the very top of the food chain.
The largest tuna eat enormous amounts of fish like anchovies, which prey on microscopic creatures called copepods. A large tuna must eat the equivalent of its body weight every 10 days. This means that one single 1,000-pound tuna might eat 15,000 smaller fish in a year. Stated simply, any large fish like a salmon or sea bass depends on several levels of the food chain for sustenance.
Most fish are bought by wealthy nations but the catch-to-consumption ratio differs. Japan, for example, catches less than 5 million metric tons of fish a year, but consumes 9 million metric tons annually. The U.S. catches 348.5 million metric tons of primary production. Both nations also tend to consume the largest fish, like tuna and swordfish and are consuming more fish each year. According to researchers, the sea can’t support this level of demand long term.
Although supermarkets in developed nations like the U.S. appear to have a never-ending supply of fresh fish, that is not the case given our insatiable and unsustainable demand for seafood. One day the fish we take for granted may no longer be available. –torrance stephens, ph.d.
