THE FISH CRISIS

By J. MADELEINE NASH

Thick swordfish steaks. Orange roughy fillets. Great mounds of red-fleshed tuna. Judging from the seafood sections of local supermarkets, there would seem to be plenty of fish left in the oceans. But this appearance of abundance is an illusion, says Sylvia Earle, former chief scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Already, Earle fears, an international armada of fishing vessels is on the verge of exhausting a storehouse of protein so vast that it once appeared to be infinite. "It's a horrible thing to contemplate," shudders Earle. "What makes it even worse is that we know better. Yet here we go, making the same mistake over and over again."

If fishermen around the world soon start hauling back empty nets and fishing lines, it will not be for lack of warning. In the 1990s, after increasing for nearly four decades, the wild catch of marine fish leveled off worldwide and in some years actually declined. "We are reaching, and in many cases have exceeded, the oceans' limits," declare the authors of a sobering report released by the Natural Resources Defense Council earlier this year. "We are no longer living off the income but eating deeply into the capital."

Fights have already started to break out over the dwindling supply. Two weeks ago, hundreds of Canadian fishermen blockaded a British Columbia port for several days to keep an Alaskan ferry from leaving. The reason for their protest? Alaskan trawlers were sweeping up the salmon that spawn in Canada's rivers. Now the Canadians are threatening to do to the salmon runs of Washington State what U.S. fishermen have done to theirs.

Of course, overfishing is not the only human activity that is jeopardizing life in the oceans. Coastal pollution and habitat destruction--filling in wetlands, building dams--are contributing to the crisis. But it is overfishing, the NRDC report makes plain, that constitutes the most urgent threat and demands the most immediate action.

Until now, the worst threat most creatures of the sea had faced at fishermen's hands was so-called commercial extinction. Whenever local populations of a particular fish plummeted, boats simply targeted some other species or moved to more distant waters. The depleted stocks almost always recovered. But now, experts warn, unprecedented forces--among them, industrial-scale fishing gear and a burgeoning global seafood market--are altering this age-old cycle. The economic and technological barriers that have kept overfishing within bounds appear increasingly shaky, like dikes along a river that floodwaters have undermined. Should these barriers collapse, commercial extinction could escalate into biological catastrophe.

In most imminent peril are the giant predators of the oceans--sharks, of course, but also marlin, sailfish, swordfish and bluefin tuna, the magnificent swimming machines that have earned the nickname "Porsches of the sea." In the western Atlantic, the breeding population of northern bluefin, the largest tuna species, is thought to consist of perhaps 40,000 adults, down from some 250,000 two decades ago. Reason: the flourishing airfreight industry that allows fish brokers to deliver Atlantic Ocean bluefin overnight to Tokyo's sashimi market, where a single fish can fetch $80,000 or more at auction. "To a fisherman, catching a bluefin is a lot like winning the lottery," sighs Stanford University marine biologist Barbara Block.

The crash of commercially important fisheries is not new. What is new is how quickly fisheries arise and how quickly they are exploited. In recent years, piked dogfish, a small spiny shark, has begun to stand in for cod in the fish and chips served by British pubs, and the Patagonian toothfish has become a popular substitute for sablefish in Japan. But environmental groups are concerned about the long-term viability of the fisheries that are serving up these quaintly named piscine treats. This year, for example, ships from around the world have converged on the Southern Ocean, where the toothfish makes its home. "At this rate," predicts Beth Clark, a scientist with the Antarctica Project, "the entire fishery will be gone in 18 months."

Unfortunately, it takes longer to rebuild a fishery than it does to ruin one. Consider the present state of the orange roughy on New Zealand's Challenger Plateau. Discovered in 1979, this deep-water fishing hole took off in the 1980s when the mild-tasting, white-fleshed fish became popular with U.S. chefs. Happy to stoke the surging demand, fishermen are believed to have reduced the biomass of orange roughy as much as 80% before officials stepped in. Now, says Yale University ichthyologist Jon Moore, it may take centuries before the fishery rebounds. As scientists have belatedly learned, orange roughy grow extremely slowly, live 100 years or more and take 25 to 30 years to reach sexual maturity.

How can a fishing fleet do so much damage so quickly? Until recently, many fish, especially deep-water fish, were too hard to find to make tempting commercial targets. But technical advances have given fishermen the power to peer beneath the waves and plot their position with unprecedented accuracy. Sonar makes it possible to locate large shoals of fish that would otherwise remain concealed beneath tens, even hundreds of feet of water. And once a fishing hot spot is pinpointed by sonar, satellite-navigation systems enable vessels to return unerringly to the same location year after year. In this fashion, fishermen from New Zealand to the Philippines have been able to home in on orange roughy and giant groupers as they gather to spawn, in some cases virtually eliminating entire generations of reproducing adults.

But what has amplified the destructive power of modern fishing more than anything else is its gargantuan scale. Trawling for pollock in the Bering Sea and the Gulf of Alaska, for example, are computerized ships as large as football fields. Their nets--wide enough to swallow a dozen Boeing 747s--can gather up 130 tons of fish in a single sweep. Along with pollock and other groundfish, these nets indiscriminately draw in the creatures that swim or crawl alongside, including halibut, Pacific herring, Pacific salmon and king crab. In similar fashion, so-called longlines--which stretch for tens of miles and bristle with thousands of hooks--snag not just tuna and swordfish but also hapless sea turtles and albatrosses, marlin and sharks.

What happens to the dead and dying animals that constitute this so-called by-catch? Most are simply dumped overboard, either because they are unwanted or because fishery regulations require it. In 1993, for example, shrimp trawlers in the Gulf of Mexico caught and threw away an estimated 34 million red snappers, including many juveniles. By contrast, the annual catch of red snapper from the Gulf averages only around 3 million fish. Indeed, so many snappers are being scooped up as by-catch that the productivity of the fishery has been compromised. Fortunately, there is a solution. Shrimp nets can be outfitted with devices that afford larger animals like snappers and sea turtles a trapdoor escape hatch.

To a surprising extent, solutions to the problem of overfishing also exist, at least on paper, and that's what critics of the fishing industry find so encouraging--and so frustrating. Last year, for example, Congress passed landmark legislation that requires fishery managers to crack down on overfishing in U.S. waters. Perhaps even more impressive, the U.N. has produced a tough-minded treaty that promises to protect stocks of fish that straddle the coastal zones of two or more countries or migrate, as bluefin tuna and swordfish do, through international waters in the wide-open oceans. The treaty will take effect, however, only after 30 or more nations ratify it--and even then, some question how diligently its provisions will be enforced.

What has been missing is a willingness to take action. Consumers no less than politicians bear some of the blame. Simply by refusing to buy bluefin tuna in Tokyo, grouper in Hong Kong or swordfish in Chicago, consumers could relieve the pressure on some of the world's most beleaguered fisheries and allow them the time they need to recover. To help shoppers become more selective about what they put on the dinner table, the Worldwide Fund for Nature and Unilever, one of the world's largest purveyors of frozen seafood, have launched a joint venture that in 1998 will start putting labels on fish and fish products caught in environmentally responsible ways.

A sign that consumers are worried about the world's fisheries could provide the jolt political leaders need. For the past half-century, billions of dollars have been spent by maritime nations to expand their domestic fishing fleets, subsidizing everything from fuel costs to the construction of factory trawlers. And until countries like Canada, China, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand, Norway, Spain and, yes, the U.S. are willing to confront this monster of their own making, attempts to control overfishing are likely to prove ineffectual. The problem, as Carl Safina, director of the National Audubon Society's Living Oceans Program, observes, is as politically intractable as it is intellectually simple: there is just too much fishing power chasing too few fish.