"We Have Caught Most Of The Big Fish, And Now We Are Going After Their Food"

[hatrack]

EDIT

New figures from the Food and Agriculture Organisation show that the small fish on which birds and marine mammals feed have become the main target of fishing fleets since stocks of bigger fish have become exhausted. Four times as much of these "prey fish" are now brought to shore as half a century ago, and seven of the world's largest 10 fisheries now go after them.

More than four-fifths of this catch does not go directly to feed people, but is ground up into fish oil and fish meal and increasingly used to raise carnivorous species such as salmon in fish farms. A captive fish needs up to 11b of food to put on a single pound in weight. And, as a result, there is less and less left for its natural predators.

"We have caught most of the big fish and are now going after their food," says Margot Stiles, a marine scientist for Oceana, the leading international sea protection pressure group.

A new report by the group, Hungry Oceans, describes how "scrawny predators – dolphins, sea bass and even whales – have turned up on coastlines all over the world", adding that scientists are finding them and seabirds "emaciated from lack of food, vulnerable to disease and without enough energy to reproduce".

EDIT

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/predators-starve-as-we-plunder-oceans-1671066.html

[phantom power]

1. So long, and thanks for all the fish.

[glitch]

6. That was funny when we still had living oceans.

Now it just hurts.

[pscot]

2. The Human Race is insane

Suicidally insane.

[populistdriven]

3. I for one welcome the coming age of microscopic grey goo that will encircle the earth.

I just hope it is tasty.

[truedelphi]

4. It's always so interesting and so sad, that

The regulators oftren penalize the little guys.

The great big ships, big as a small city, continue to plunder the sea. Probably because they don't fish within three or six miles of any nation's shores.

While the people that fish closer to home are penalized again and again for doing thing right (Or at least trying to.)

[glitch]

5. We are the stupidist species since blue-green algae. nt

[Dead_Parrot]

7. That's a bit harsh...

...on them, isn't it? After all, they took the CO₂ out of the atmosphere, sequesting the carbon and releasing oxygen.

That's more than we've managed.

[glitch]

8. True, but by doing so they wiped out 90% of the life on the planet.

Back then, oxygen was baaaad.

CO2, the New Oxygen.

[Dead_Parrot]

9. Hey, we can do that, too!

Watch and learn....

[glitch]

10. Our greatest aspiration, to reboot 500 million(+/-) years of evolution.

Surviving species will refer to this as the Great Assholian Extinction (their language may vary).