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Oceans Reports
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Executive Summary
America’s oceans are home to whales, dolphins, sea turtles, fish and an enormous variety of other sea life. But today our oceans are in trouble. Destructive overfishing, pollution, and habitat damage are putting important marine animals at risk. Many populations are in serious decline. The result of this poor management is a drastic reduction in fishing opportunities for commercial and recreational fishermen.
On the west coast, about one in seven (14% or 7 out of 49) of all federally managed fish stocks for which there is adequate information are overfished. Approximately one in twenty (6% or 3 out of 49) stocks are experiencing overfishing and headed in that direction.
Taken together, ten federally managed fish stocks are either depleted or experiencing overfishing. This represents 20% of the 49 fish stocks for which the federal government has enough information to make an assessment. In addition, another ecologically and economically valuable fish, Pacific whiting, is being driven down towards an overfished level with the help of poor decisions from the Pacific fishery management council.
‘Overfished’ typically means that a fish population has been reduced to below 20-25% of its original population. When eight out of ten fish of any kind are missing from the ocean, it has profoundly negative effects on the rest of the ocean’s animals like whales, dolphins, sea turtles and other fish. The ecosystem is unbalanced; predators may not find enough to eat and prey species may explode because there are not enough predators to eat them. ‘Overfishing’ means that a fish stock is being caught faster than it can replace itself and it is therefore heading towards overfished status or not recovering to healthy levels. Taken together these two terms describe fish stocks in jeopardy or threatened.
In an effort to improve fisheries management, Congress revised the primary law governing fishing in U.S. oceans, the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, at the end of 2006. The Act requires the National Marine Fisheries Service and the regional fishery management councils, which devise and propose local plans that are supposed to maintain healthy fish populations, to follow new rules. These rules are now under development; and this report recommends that the new rules follow important conservation principles.
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