The Falklands and other southern Atlantic islands were developed for their squid fishery several years ago. You may be familiar with those satellite images of light at night, in which you will see that the Falklands squid fishery lights up almost as strongly as London or New York. The squid fishery is apparently in decline now, not surprisingly perhaps. However, to the fishing industry there is room for doubt: at one conference recently a fisheries expert admitted this decline but blamed… climate change! As one scientific colleague put it: “It is difficult

enough to get people to care about fish – what hope for squid!”. Another wasteful problem comes from the observation (Sloan, 2006) that by the end of a successful hunting trip, the bottom third of the tuna in some ships’ holds may be too squashed from the weight of fish above to be of much value. Some presumably Everolimus ic50 can be used for tinned cat food, but the rest is used as fertiliser for fields of crops. To an ecologist, the energetics implied by inputting a top carnivore into the base of a new food chain is astonishingly wasteful. Too much of this sort of profligacy could be the difference between collapse of a species or its survival, and between continuing revenue and benefit or its loss. It is only possible Selleck RG7204 because wild pelagic fish capture is more akin to clear-fell logging than to harvesting. Depressingly,

probably little on a global scale will Chlormezanone be done in time regarding management of multi-national fisheries over a multitude of EEZs. The literature on excesses of the blue water fishing fleet is huge, yet nothing much has happened. If proof is needed, just look at past decades of history and the trends of fishing intensity and fish stocks (Roberts, 2007). This applies even in the generally much more regulated European Union and its North Sea fishing industry. Wakefield (2009) recently reviewed this from a legal perspective and concluded that the situation is long past being supportable, and even the EU itself recently concluded that it has, in fact, messed up on a truly massive

scale. The fact is that we know the key facts, and have done so for many years, but facts are not enough. It is difficult to find examples where industrial fishing has succeeded without collapsing the stocks. Traditionally the fleets have just moved on: deeper, further offshore, but there are fewer and fewer places left. As has been pointed out for the whaling industry, from a company perspective it pays not to fish sustainably, but rather to maximise a return now, liquidate the asset and invest the earnings elsewhere, rather than to save some for later. In an analysis of 27 Scombrid stocks over half a century (mostly Atlantic and Pacific but with the only two Indian Ocean stocks for which there was sufficient data) Juan-Jorda et al.