Who is eating all the fish? The number of overfished stocks has tripled over the past 50 years, as fishing fleets push further afield to feed their growing populations.

by silence7

26 comments

  1. “Feed their growing populations.” Wait, according to the brainwashed progressives on Reddit population isn’t a problem and environmental problems are all caused by overconsumption by affluent white people in Western Europe and North America. But that’s not who eats the most fish. The US is ranked 67th. Maybe people’s need for food and shelter has an impact regardless of their income. Lots of people require lots of food and houses.

  3. The fact that fish can’t reproduce anywhere near the rate of harvesting/consumption is a huge problem…adding the environmental factors on top and we have a serious problem in our oceans.

  5. A lot of wild-caught fish is used as feed for farmed fish, pigs and chickens, thus by eating any of those, you are contributing to overfishing

  6. One more reason to consider vegetarian/vegan choices.

  7. Lots of people became pescatarian to either cut back on meat without completely giving it up or to add some sort of meat to their vegetarian diet

  8. Wow, the size of the Chinese fishing fleet is crazy, as is their territory being fished.

  9. I wish I understood why so few people care about this issue. So many people just eating fish regularly like it’s NBD. 🙁

  11. Who is eating all the fish?

    Maybe the **5 BILLION** people we’ve added to the planet over the last 50 years??

  12. There might be some huge hidden fridgerated warehouses somewhere, where some rich assholes are hoarding frozen fish until its more worth than oil…

  13. All fishing outside of single line and hook should be banned

  15. Yo the Chinese government got bots blaming cat food companies for the overfishing 🤣in this post. It’s definitely Chinese fishing boats doing this

  16. Well, the population of the planet has doubled in 50 years, so there’s that……..

  18. No one is eating the fish!

    There once was a balanced planet. It was colonized by something called life which covered every space it could anchor itself and reach the energy of the sun or thermal vents. It was continuous and regulated by the climate which was in turn regulated by life; when (over evolutionary time) the balance tips towards dying and the carbon in the air increases, the planet warms to encourage more life, and the balance is restored.

    When you suddenly change the chemistry of that tightly bound and regulated cycle, life has no adaptation for that. What part of the human body temp being 37 and homeostasis makes it seem like we have a lot of room for the climate to change?

    Same is true for all organisms, starting at the bottom of the food chain. If there’s no algae or the wrong type of algae, there’s less food for the whole system. When there’s less food, especially in changing conditions, other species will reach critical thresholds for survival and vanish into the void of extinction.

    Like a fish tank so balanced, all it needed was food for one species, and that food was regulated by something as constant as the sun… then there’s suddenly less food. Organisms understand scarcity and start eating everything they can see, while parasites look for hosts that are able to keep feeding themselves.

    The bigger the gap, the more energy the individuals need to burn to find food… until, it costs more than the food is worth to catch, and the species starve.

    This is why fish are smaller and bonier. Why whales and sea birds are starving and why, I’m absolutely certain there will be a sudden jump in interactions with humans with predatory creatures (on land as well), before that species starts to vanish into extinction as well.

    Last to go are the bottom feeders. When the lobster population drops off, consider the oceans empty. The cauldron of existence we managed to sterilize in less than one lifetime of believing everyone could have whatever they worked hard enough to have…. and we all bought stuff to burn gas and change the carbon balance of a carbon budgeted system.

    This is like cancer realizing it can’t exist without the body it’s just consumed, but, unable to take responsibility, we’re certain there’s more of the body to eat *somewhere*, not at all concerned that there’s nothing to eat where there should be life in saturation.

    There are no fish because this isn’t earth anymore. It’s a planet with a runaway climate that has no seasons and nothing predictable about its weather. Its glaciers are melting so fast, the change in weight distribution is increasing the likelihood of seismic events.

    It should be as obvious as cranking the heat on your fish tank to well outside the ideal for the species, then bubbling CO2 into to water. It’s an alien environment that’s wiping out the oceans, which, in turn, is us making the air alien by burning bodies of life from the deep past.

    I wish we’d stop pretending we didn’t know what was going on… or if we don’t know, we should be willing to listen to the people that do, not the people calling them egg head losers, claiming this is all a hoax…. pretty elaborate hoax, hiding all the fish so the ocean starves and so do we.

    Vote only for candidates that demonstrate an awareness of how totally up the creek we are or continue doing nothing and enjoy the absolute worst case scenario you bought and paid for… and the knowledge that’s what we did with our lives to make our parents proud: we built a doomsday device that actually worked.

  20. Its disgusting how people just take advantage of mother earth like selfish vultures. She will hit back hard one day just wait!

  21. Is Easter Island really a mystery?

    They just cut down the last trees. Full speed ahead. No other plan.

    Highway to Collapse!

  22. Damn, I thought the industry was moving towards sustainable fishing. I remember reading an article where they interviewed a fisherman who was doubtful about new regulations but saw the difference it made.

  24. Wild caught fisheries numbers stagnated back in 90s, ever sinve then we have been putting more and more effort in to get the same amount of fish (meaning we are probably catching a larger proportion of a dwindling stock every year)

    The only reason a huge number of people reliant on the ocean for protein havent starved to death is because aquaculture is used to cover the rest of the demand.

  25. One problem is that the sale price of fish doesn’t reflect the external constraints: it should cost double or more its current price, and governments should tax producers accordingly to reduce fishing rates.

    Fishing rates wont drop until there is an economic reason. If one isn’t created, the environment will create one as the species all expire.

  26. That why we should have more responsibly farmed fish. I really don’t get all the hate for farmed fish, it’s an ethical alternative to farmed meat.

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