Daniel Pauly Feeds Media the Wrong Story About Global Fisheries Decline; Other Scientists Object
SEAFOODNEWS.COM by John Sackton - January 25, 2016
Last week the media was full of a new round of global fishery disaster stories, prompted by an article in Nature Communications by Daniel Pauly & Dirk Zeller affiliated with the Sea Around Us project.
Pauly and Zeller state that FAO global fisheries data has underestimated prior catch, and that therefore if this is taken into account, the decline in fish catch from the peak in the late 1990’s is not 400,000 tons per year, but 1.2 million tons per year.
“Our results indicate that the decline is very strong and is not due to countries fishing less. It is due to countries having fished too much and having exhausted one fishery after another,” said Pauly to the Guardian newspaper. As a result, a new round of handwringing ensued about global overfishing.
But, the facts don’t support Pauly’s interpretation. Catch rates are simply not a suitable measure of fisheries abundance. In fact, declines in catch rates often are due to improvement in fisheries management, not declines in abundance.
Over at cfood, a number of scientists specifically rebutted the premise of Pauly’s article.
Ray Hilborn of the University of Washington says:
This paper tells us nothing fundamentally new about world catch, and absolutely nothing new about the status of fish stocks....
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