[bobby_bbb]

Eh. Overfishing isn't a problem for the earth, or for the oceans, or for ocean life. It's a problem for the fishing industry.

We send certain types of boats with certain types of gear out to certain small areas where we have found concentrations of certain kinds of fish, and they catch lots and bring them back to factories with certain kinds of processing equipment which then send the product out to be consumed.

And after a while we've caught a good percentage of that concentration of fish, and then they start to peter out and it become uneconomical to run that entire costly process. And so we then identify other kinds of edible ocean life, and we change our boats and gear and locations and seasons and factories at great cost, and consume a different batch of fish.

And while we're on that second effort, the first area is being repopulated with the first type of fish, or maybe another, because the food sources for fish are still out there and available - the planktons and smaller fish - and nature abhors a vacuum.

It's all just a cycle. Fish stocks may move around in response to our overfishing - more reproduction over here, bigger schools back in the same place once we move on - but the net effect is that the biomass remains the same.

But change is expensive, and so we hear from the payers about how we're overfishing "their" fishstocks.

We're a tiny blip on the oceans' consumption radar. Don't mourn for the fish. Mourn for the people who need different boats and gear and territories every ten years or so.

[adr1an]

I remember Ecology lectures, starting from Lotka-Volterra model... And getting into more complex scenarios. One, was an actual model of how much fishes the industry can predate while guaranteeing the sustainability of their biz. Of course, it only happens in books. Sadly, the seas are largely unregulated.. Or even if regulations are in place, enforcing is so difficult. In fact, it can very easily turn into conflict between nations.

[bobby_bbb]

IIRC, most of the models were predicated on, how can we sustain THIS small ecology in this spot with this type of fish so as to cause no change. But I'd argue that we change everything, and change isn't a bad thing by itself, and so if we go beyond the models - say, to the point of a cod fishery depletion - it becomes much like decrying an erosive path in a huge desert - fighting for stasis merely for the sake of stasis. The cod no longer congregate in this one area, but they're still out there in others and new species can easily swoop in (and will because the cods' energy sources are still there.)

We'll never be no-impact (at least until the asteroid hits.) But so long as we're not poisoning life away, we're just another niche species on the ocean.