[swatcoder]

Overfishing is an issue for sure, but the number just speaks to home unfathomably huge the oceans are.

Poke around and look up how big wild schools of anchovy can be, or how many krill it takes to feed a whale. And each of those numbers you find are just teensy little blips. The ocean is really big and its teeming with life.

[dredmorbius]

The ocean is really big and its teeming with life.

As earlier responses have noted, this is an exceedingly common misperception. It further fails to acknowledge harms done.

Estimates are that upwards of 90% of all marine animal life has been destroyed largely by human activity.

Vast fisheries have utterly collapsed, notably Grand Banks cod off Newfoundland, sardines off California, orange roughy, and more. Surviving fisheries are hugely impacted, often with both far fewer and far smaller individuals than in historical records.

Records and understand themselves are exceptionally limited, as major scientific study of the oceans dates only to the mid-20th century, after which much of the harm had already been done.

A fascinating trivium is that there is more oil floating in tankers over the oceans than there are fish swimming in it.

And, as myshpa noted, the deep oceans tend not to have much biological activity. Fish (and plankton) aggregate near continental boundaries where upwelling provides essential nutrients. Sunshine and water alone are vastly insufficient.

Map of global fisheries / fish stocks: <https://www.theglobaleducationproject.org/earth/fisheries-an...>

State of fisheries: <https://worldoceanreview.com/en/wor-2/fisheries/state-of-fis...>

Notably this map showing sustainable- / over-exploitation status: <https://worldoceanreview.com/en/files/2013/04/wor2_c3a_s52_3...>

[myshpa]

"There are large areas in the middle of the major oceanic basins called the subtropical gyres. These could be considered the deserts of the ocean in that the biomass (total mass of all organisms) density and biodiversity are low. This is because the ocean circulation doesn't replenish the nutrients available in these areas for algae to live off, which are the base of the food-chain.

In general, you tend to find much more biomass and biodiversity closer to the coasts. But you can get hotspots of productivity in other places such as upwelling regions and also near seamounts (shameless plug of my paper on this)."

"People assume, well oceans are massive so fish stocks are massive as well. But if you went hunting for game as a protein source you wouldn't assume it lives at the top of every mountain and bottom of every valley. You know it has a range that confines its distribution and therefore its abundance. You dont go hunting across the vast, empty desert.

Commercial fisheries know this and are squeezing the last bits they can out of the pelagic fish we all expect on the dinner table (tuna, mahi, etc), but as you aptly point out, the majority of fisheries biomass is near the coast. Fish we eat do not come from habitat that covers 70% of the planet, its much closer to < 10 %."

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/imu81a/if_you_p...

https://www.sciencealert.com/there-s-a-desert-in-the-middle-...

[mellavora]

> The ocean is really big and its teeming with life.

The ocean is really big and was teeming with life.

There, fixed it for you