On this page we will present
you a couple of facts about fishing and ocean harvesting that will make you feel sick. As
a consumer and a diver you have a special responsibility to protect the creatures you love
against the onslaught of unscrupelous money-makers and decadent conaisseurs. Only very few
fish have a lobby, but most are subject to heavy fishing or are affected by the
destruction of their habitat or the interruption of the food-chain. Surf our page to find
out about sharks, dolphins, whales and other acquatic animals and why and how they are
affected by the perversions of humans. |
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First, look at the figures: per year, there are between 10 to 15 deadly shark attacks on humans. On the other hand,
humans kill over 100 million sharks a year. The ratio is thus no less than 1:6,666,666! |
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| What you can do:
Speak out against making sharks seem to be senseless killers |
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Finning is possibly the most atrocious way of
harvesting parts of sharks. Especially in Asia, shark fins (for example as shark fin soup)
are considered a delicacy. They yield a much higher price than normal shark meat. Fins,
however, are not always a by-product of shark-fishing. The fins of sharks are cut off
while they are still alive. The mutilated bodies are then tossed back into the sea, where
the sharks meet a slow and painful death. In addition to this unmatched brutality, finning
is also an enormous waste of proteins. Fins account for only about four to seven per cent
of a shark's weight. The rest of the shark's body is not used for commercial reasons: the
low-value bodies would take up too much room on the boats, which could be used for the
high-yielding fins. One kilogram of shark fins yields between 47 and 123 dollars depending
on size and region. The most important market for shark fins world- wide is Hong Kong. In
1994, the former British colony bought shark fins for over US$ 150 million. Even if we
assume that all fins cost US$ 123, that business still killed over 1.2 million sharks. The
true figure is probably considerably higher. The total weight of the sharks which had to
be killed for this delicacy amounted to 730,000 tons. Most fins come from Japan, the US
and the United Arab Emirates. But even the Maldives (a diving paradise), together with Sri
Lanka and India, exported in 1996 2,000 tons of shark fins. |
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| What you can do:
Boycott restaurants that serve shark fin soup and other shark meat (mostly
shark is served under a different name) and inform your fellow people about the situation. |
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India, together with Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and the Maldives, is the world's biggest supplier of shark fins. According to the World Wildlife Fund, the
subcontinent exported roughly 2,000 tons of shark fins valued at around 1.8 million dollars in 1996. However, this is only what's accounted for officially.
In the waters around South Africa, the fins of sharks which are netted as by-catch are cut off and the tortured creature then thrown back alive, meeting
a terrible fate. This according to Nan Rice, speaker of «Dolphin Action and Protection». In the port of Cape Town, the going rate for a kilogram of shark
fin fresh off the boat was between 7 to 12 USDollars in 1996. After drying, the price goes up to around 40 USDollars. Once this questionable item makes
it to Hong Kong, which is the world's shark fin capital, the price can be as high as 560 USDollars per kilogram, depending on the quality. According to
the official statistics from Hong Kong customs, the import of dried shark fins rose from 2,742 tons in 1980 to 6,121 tons in 1995!!! The former British
crown colony, which is now part of China, imports fins from 125 states. |
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| What you can do:
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Sportfishing is also a major killer of sharks.
Sportfishermen and tourist companies meet in a true killing frenzy usually attributed to
sharks. Some of these "sport"-events aim at pulling out as many and as sizeable
sharks as possible. At the end of such a massacre, the boats and beaches are littered with
hundreds of dead sharks, which are then buried in waste dumping sites. In only one year,
sportfishermen on the American east coast pulled out over 2.5 million sharks. |
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| What you can do:
Don't go fishing on charter boats. If you do, make sure that you put back
all fish you caught and that you unhook them properly. Make sure the crew does not pull in
fish with the boathook, thereby spearing them. |
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To make it plain and short: no. Even though shark
cartilage pills are enormously popular as a drug against cancer, there is no serious
medical proof of this at all. But the betrayed patients help to manufacturers to gain
hundreds of million of dollars. The shark cartilage powder is mixed with all sorts of
other ingredients and will yield nothing more than a placebo-effect, if that. |
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| What you can do:
This one is a tough one, because people suffering from cancer will
understandably try out all potential medication. But the data speaks another language. If
you consider taking shark cartiladge, contact a serious doctor and ask for his or her
advise. You may find that there are more reliable treatments. |
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According to news from Israel, the government of the country intends to ease the restrictions on catching sharks. In the
Mediterranean as well as in the Red Sea on which the country is bordering, commercially important species of sharks would be open to fishing
again. When many of the world's countries are coming to their senses about the potential for extinction of many sharks which play an immensly
important role in the ocean's food chain, Israel goes against the current and against the environment. |
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| What you can do:
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South Korea has one of the highest consumption shark liver oil worldwide. Between 1988 and 1994, around 358 tons were
used per year on average. More than three quarters of that amount came from Indonesia, one of the prime diving destinations, yet. In 1985, South
Korea had imported only 1.7 tons. Products containing shark liver oil are also on sale in various European countries, Germany, Switzerland,
Belgium and France among them. They are mostly sold as vitamin bombs or phantasy pharmaceuticals promising the cure of all sorts of illnesses
for which no scientific proof exists. Shark liver oil is also used to cure leather, as ingredient in perfumes and cosmetics or - as in Japan - as additive
in paper towels for cleaning toilets!!! |
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| What you can do:
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There are quite a few countries which practice
whaling under all sorts of labels. The Japanese, for example, catch whales for
"scientific" purposes. The meat and other parts of the whales are then processed
and sold or used in products. But there are also "traditional" but wholly
unnecessary slaughters. We are not talking about the one or two whales an eskimo tribe can
kill per season. The Faroer Islands (belonging to Denmark but geographically located above
Norway), for example, have a yearly mass-killing of whales simply out of tradition. The
whales are killed in a true bloodbath by the whole village, the meat is then split up
among the villagers and the rest of the cadavers left to rot on the beach. |
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| What you can do:
Boycott countries that are known for whalehunting such as Norway, Denmark,
Japan. Never buy or eat anything made out of whales. |
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Huge nets dragged along the ocean floor to catch as
many fish as possible of a certain type. When they do so, thousands and thousands of
bottom-dwelling creatures are also netted as so-called bycatch. Bycatch is simply a nice
word for catch that cannot be industrially processed, is not the right kind of fish or too
small. While the sought-after fish is processed, thousands of these creatures die on the
boat, just a few feet from their natural habitat. In due time, the boat ramp will be
cleared and the dead debris flushed overboard. Industrial fishing fleets cause 94 per cent
of all marine "waste" in Alaska alone. They kill about 100,000 tons of salmon,
more than the total of the quota granted to the whole fishing fleet before Alaska. But
this catch does not show in the statistics, since it was not "official". But
because it is over the quota, the catch is simply flushed back. In the northern sea, two
to four kilograms of undesired bycatch for each kilogram of desired fish. Biologists have
calculated that the seafloor before the coast of the Netherlands is "cleared"
seven times per year with dragnets five tons each. This underwater clearcutting has
completely destroyed the seafloor fauna on the Dutch coast. The FAO has estimated that 27
million tons of bycatch are fished every year, about one third of the whole amount of fish
landed. All of this is lost to the oceans as well as a huge waste of high-grade protein. |
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| What you can do:
Don't eat fish or make absolutely sure where the catch came from, that it
was not industrially caught and that it had not been industrially processed. Best bet is
that you eat freshwater fish from a lake nearby. |
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As avid grocery shoppers we
can convince ourselves on a daily basis of the abundant fish stocks which find their way on our plates for
dinner or as snacks in between. But even though the shelves never seem to go empty, the oceans are. In
fact, they are emptied at an alarming rate. One generation ago, experts claimed that improved fishing techniques
would allow the landing of up to 1.4 billion tons of fish, thereby nicely solving the problem of a lack of proteins for
a constantly growing world population. Indeed, between 1950 and 1989, the amount of fish taken from the oceans
rose five-fold (but only from 18 to 86 million tons of fish landed, which does not include bycatch thrown back into the
sea dead). But ever since 1989, the reservoir has run dry, despite attractive world-market prices, despite immense
subventions, highly developed methods of catching the fish and a continuous decline in size and quality of the fish caught.
For lack of fish commonly considered "high quality" fishermen have to lower their nets increasingly to start depelting
fishstocks of a lower quality. Since these "lower" fish in many cases are what the quality fish feed on, the fish at the
top of the food chain have even less potential to recover from decreasing stocks. Many biologists are warning that there will come
a "point of no return" where a massively depleted type of fish will not be able to keep its position in the food chain and
be replaced by another species, leading to its actual extinction. According to the UN-Organisation FAO, two-thirds of the world's
stocks of bottom-dwelling fish, bluewater fish, crustacean and molluscs such as squid and mussels are either overfished or so depleted
that they can no longer be fished economically. Before the coast of New England, shellfish has virtually disappeared and the red tuna
is no at one tenth of its 1970 numbers. Because of the dwindling stocks, any newly discovered potential food fish is immediately subjected
to fishing so intense, that its stocks too are depleted within a few years. |
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| What you can do:
Inform your friends about these facts. Convince them that they are eating fish on borrowed time and that their consumption,
too, helps to support an industry which is neither economically viable nor necessary for our intake of protein (which we in the West can cover from
other sources). Speak out against indifference. |
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The biggest killer on the oceans by far, however, is industrial fishing:
a grossly overexpanded, oversubsidized killing machine. One might think that fishing is a rewarding business, but fact is, that worldwide more money
is spent to subsidize this faltering economy than is actually made by the fishing fleets. Three million fishing vessels (big & small) anually land fish in the
market value of 70 billion USdollars. This compares to costs of 124 billion USdollars for maintenance, nets, fuel, insurance, wages and costs on capital.
Consequently, people (mainly in the West of course) subsidize their fishing industries with a whopping 54 billion USdollars on a crusade to extinct much
of the sealife. Meanwhile, 1.2 million large vessels chase the last remaining stocks, but the catch constantly decreases. At the same time these industrial
vessels destroy traditional fisheries in countries where people are dependent on fish as their major source of protein. And it is those people who cannot
afford to buy the expensive products later sold in our stores. Newfoundland in Canada is a case in point. There, the immense stock of codfish that has
kept fishery going for generations. A whole economy depended to a large extent on one single fish. But once the industrial fishing fleets started to fish in
these waters, day and night, all year round, with no seasonal pause for the cod to recover and reproduce and with nets which offered no escape even
to juvenile fish, stocks went down to virtually nothing. Today, fishing for cod is pointless around Newfoundland and thousands of people have been
without work for years. Industrial driftnetters in Alaska produce 94 per cent of all "marine waste" and kill, among other fish, 100,000 tons of
salmon, more than the total quota allowed for the season. Industrial fishing fleets will turn our oceans into wasteland. |
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| What you can do:
Do not buy fish when you don't know its exact origin and form of catching. Do not buy frozen and industrially processed fish. And when
you are asked to consume it, talk to your hosts and point out the facts to them. The industrial fish market can only be challenged by the consumers. The
less we buy, the less they can sell. |
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Dolphins are some of the most popular mammals which are
"accidentally" killed by the fishing fleets around the world. They are also decimated by abandoned nets drifting in the ocean,
by aquariums who like their artistic talent and last but not least by fishermen, who consider them a challenger to "their" fish, and
routinely kill the competitors in massacres. The eastern Pacific is home to the large yellow-fin tuna shoals. There, enormous nets are drawn
in a circle around the tunas, also catching a large amount of dolphins, sharks, turtles, seals and birds. Caught in the nets, the dolphins are
unable to breathe and suffocate or die from stress or injuries. Mexico and Venezuela alone, kill 50,000 dolphins every year while aiming to
catch other fish. In many cases, the tuna you buy has cost the lives of a couple of other creatures along the way. Apart from the fact that
we suggest you do not consume tuna at all, since this species, too, is in decline, the Earth Island Institute (EII) has succeeded in convincing
many processing companies to stop buying tuna which has been obtained through fishing methods endangering dolphins. EII checks these
companies and their vessels on a regular basis. You may find out through EII what the dolphin friendly brands are in your country. In some
countries such as Peru (ranking second after China in a list of which countries catch the largest amount fish), for example, dolphins are simply
another source of meat, like any other fish. Not surprisingly, the Japanese fishermen have thought of a special treatment for the dolphins. In yearly
roundups, fishermen of various communities catch thousands of dolphins in nets, then proceed to kill them in masses with clubs and knives. The
dead dolphins are then turned into fertilizer... The reason for these killings is simple: dolphins eat fish, and if there are less dolphins, there's more fish
for the Japanese fishermen. |
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| What you can do:
Our opinion would be that you can't trust a "dolphin friendly" logo. Paper is quite patient, and who are we to know where
the tuna really comes from. Second, talking about dolphins here should not detract from the fact that tuna stocks are declining. In Western Europe, eight
kilograms of tuna are consumed per head per year. Also, boycott zoos and aquariums which hold delphins or whales. |
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Now one may figure that aquafarming would be a great alternative
to fishing, but sadly it isn't, because the price is equally high. Today, shrimp and salmon almost have become the poor man's bread in the Western
World. Hunted down and grown in tons, these two former luxury delicatessen have become affordable for everyone. Many of them are being fished,
but the good price they yield compared to other fish predestines them for cultivation. However, in most cases shrimps are grown from wild larvae, taken
from their natural habitat and transferred to basins for cultivation. They only grow fast when fed with protein-rich food, which causes a constant contamination
of the basins. Consequently, the sickening animals have to be kept alive with antibiotics, hormones and other chemicals. Sediment from the cramped basin
is being dispatched by the ton into the ocean, poisoning the coastal fauna and destroying coral reefs, which are unable to deal with such loads. But installing
these basins also destroys the coastal biodiversity. The mangrove forest has to be clearcut to make room for the aquaculture, with consequences for the tree
and root-dwelling animals and fish as well as erosion of the coastal soil. After between five and ten years, these farms must be abandoned and built anew
because they are too polluted. A wasteland stays behind, which needs at least 30 years to regenerate. In Thailand, for example, 2,600 km of coastline are
used by shrimp farms. It is much the same story for salmon farming. In order to make the salmon more productive by growing rapidly they are fed protein-rich
food in the form of fishmeal. So it just happens that Peru, for example, catches tons of anchovies, only to grind them up and sell them to salmon farms for
feeding. Note that this fish is no longer a protein-source for poor Peruvians, but is taken out of the natural cycle in order to feed fish we would like on our
dinner plates in the west, come what may. |
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| What you can do:
Pass up the luxury fish and shrimps and have a piece of toast. You don't only absorb a multiplied amount of energy without any need
(one could just eat the anchovies...) but you also indirectly further the destruction of coastal habitat. Flat out refuse to eat shrimp or salmon, even at the
cost of being unfancy. In this context you should also now, that dragnet fishing for shrimp on the bottom produces the highest bycatch rate of any fishing,
up to 84 per cent. |
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Far off from national coastlines, rogue fishermen are plundering Antarctic waters for a prized delicacy, the Patagonian toothfish.
Australian Environment Minister Robert Hill warned that the depletion of fish stocks by vessels fishing illegally in these waters was putting botch
albatross and toothfish stocks at risk. Up to 70 boats per summer were working the southern waters over the last few years, taking fish worth millions
of dollars. Marine authorities estimate that the pirate fishermen are taking twice the legal limit of Patagonian toothfish. About 80 per cent of the illegally
fished stock is unloaded in Mauritius, a group of islands off the coast of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. Some 75 per cent of the fish then goes to
Japan, the remainder to the United States. Hill warned that unless serious measures will be taken very soon, there would be lasting environmental
damage, the world losing a valuable natural and economic resource. The latest weapons in the armory of modern technology should be employed in
batteling the illegal operators, namely satellites. Already New Zealand´s airforce began patrolling the area and France and Australia have arrested
several of the boats. |
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Illegal fishing with poison in Lake Victoria, the largest lake in all of Africa, has reached such large proportions, that the
government of Uganda was forced to stop exports of fish to Europe altogether, after three locals died after consuming fish from the lake. According
to the Ministry of Health, the poison-fishing industry has expanded tremendously over the past years. In order to catch fish more easily, fishermen
would dump pesticides or natural poison gained from plants into the water of Lake Victoria. After the fish die or become paralyzed by the poison, it is
much easier to net it. One of the consequences, as this shows, can be fish poisoning of the other kind. |
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Ecuadors government has called on the international community to form a coalition in order to curb illegal fishing operations
around the Galapagos-Islands, one of the world's richest biological grounds. Especially sea cucumbers and sharks are said to be illegally harvested
in the area. Japan has the highest demand for sea cucumbers, along with South Korea and Taiwan. According to the director of the Galapagos National
Park 85 per cent of all illegal catch taken from around the Park end up in Asia. The huge and insatiable demand leads to the formation of organized
illegal fishing enterprises. |
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