The world’s largest food fishery faces collapse
Posted by edro on October 11, 2008
Pollock population declined by 50 percent last Year
The world’s largest food fishery is on the verge of collapse. Pollock, used to make McDonald’s fish sandwiches, frozen fish sticks, fish and chips, and imitation crabmeat, have had a population decrease of 50 percent since last year. —Greenpeace.
Pollock biomass in U.S. waters have declined by nearly a million ton (to 0.94 million ton) from 1.8 million tons last year, said Taina Honkalehto, a research fishery biologist with the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service.
“Economic pressures to keep on fishing at such high levels have overwhelmed common sense,” said Jeremy Jackson, director of the Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
Two of the four Alaska pollock stocks are now shut down completely and a third is a small fraction of its previous size due to overfishing. However, the industry continues to aggresively target the pollock spawning aggregation, removing large numbers of pregnant fish before they release their eggs. Thus, the pollock is prevented to reproduce, grow and mature to reproduce again, Greenpeace said.
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