So long, and thanks for all the fish: The Sea Around Us, 1999-2014 A Fifteen-Year Retrospective So long, and thanks for all the fish: The Sea Around Us, 1999-2014, A fifteen year retrospective Daniel Pauly and Dirk Zeller Sea Around Us, Fisheries Centre, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C. V6T 1Z4 Canada [email protected] [email protected] Table of Contents INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................................................. 1 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................................................................... 7 GLOBAL SUMMARIES ..................................................................................................................................... 9 ON THE IMPORTANCE OF FISHERIES CATCHES .................................................................................................................. 9 MARINE FISHERIES CATCH RECONSTRUCTION: HOW TO DO IT ........................................................................................... 15 GLOBAL CATCHES OF LARGE PELAGIC FISHES, WITH EMPHASIS ON TUNA IN THE HIGH SEAS ...................................................... 25 THE DISTRIBUTION OF EXPLOITED MARINE BIODIVERSITY .................................................................................................. 33 RECONSTRUCTED CATCHES AND THEIR SPATIALIZATION ................................................................................................... 39 THE ECONOMICS OF GLOBAL MARINE FISHERIES ............................................................................................................. 49 GLOBAL HIGH SEAS MANAGEMENT ............................................................................................................................. 55 MARINE EXPLOITED SPECIES AND CLIMATE CHANGE ........................................................................................................ 63 MODELLING THE ECOSYSTEMS OF THE GLOBAL OCEANS ................................................................................................... 71 JELLYFISH FISHERIES – A GLOBAL ASSESSMENT ............................................................................................................... 77 GLOBAL SEABIRD POPULATIONS AND THEIR FOOD CONSUMPTION ..................................................................................... 83 GLOBAL TREND IN MARICULTURE PRODUCTION, 19502030 .......................................................................................... 89 DIOXIN IN THE SEAS AROUND US ............................................................................................................................... 99 THE VIEW PAST PEAK CATCHES ................................................................................................................................. 109 COUNTRY/TERRITORY SUMMARIES ............................................................................................................ 113 USA (ALASKA, SUBARCTIC) ..................................................................................................................................... 114 BAHAMAS ............................................................................................................................................................ 115 MAURITANIA ........................................................................................................................................................ 116 MÉXICO (PACIFIC) ................................................................................................................................................. 117 RAPA NUI (EASTER ISLAND, CHILE) ........................................................................................................................... 118 LIST OF SEA AROUND US PUBLICATIONS (19992014) .................................................................................. 119 ARTICLES IN PEERREVIEWED JOURNALS ..................................................................................................................... 121 CHAPTERS IN BOOKS AND REPORTS ........................................................................................................................... 135 BOOKS AND REPORTS ............................................................................................................................................. 151 WORKING PAPERS ................................................................................................................................................. 159 SELECTED OTHER PUBLICATIONS ............................................................................................................................... 163 The Sea Around Us, 19992014 And Wikipedia sayeth: “So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish is the fourth book of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy written by Douglas Adams. Its title is the message left by the dolphins when they departed Planet Earth just before it was demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass.” INTRODUCTION This report is to celebrate the first 15 years of the Sea Around Us and to thank The Pew Charitable Trusts for having initiated and steadfastly supported this activity, which began as the ‘Sea Around Us Project’ in mid-1999. The project arose from a request by Dr. Joshua Reichert, the Director of the Environmental Program of The Pew Charitable Trusts, Philadelphia, that we answer six specific questions about the North Atlantic (and by extension throughout the world): 1. What are the total fisheries catches from the ecosystems, including reported and unreported landings and discards at sea? 2. What are the biological impacts of these withdrawals of biomass for the remaining life in the ecosystems? 3. What would be the likely biological and economic impacts of continuing current fishing trends? 4. What were the former states of these ecosystems before the expansion of large-scale commercial fisheries? 5. How do the present ecosystems rate on a scale from “healthy” to “unhealthy”? 6. What specific changes and management measures should be implemented to avoid continued worsening of the present situation and improve North Atlantic ecosystem’s “health”? In the first five years of its existence (summarized in Pauly, 2005), we documented that we had achieved these aims for the North Atlantic and were on our way to tackle the same issues for the world as a whole. Major steps in this were (i) papers in Nature (Pauly et al., 2002) and Science (Pauly et al. 2003), documenting the main trends in global fisheries, and particularly demonstrating that the world catch, which was at the time supposed to be increasing (FAO, 2000), was actually declining, a fact then masked by exaggerated catch data from China (Watson and Pauly, 2001), (ii) a book on the state of fisheries and ecosystems in the North Atlantic Ocean (Pauly and Maclean, 2003), and (iii) the demonstration that the biomass of large fish in the North Atlantic had radically declined since the onset of industrial fisheries (Christensen et al., 2003). The successes of the Sea Around Us, whose mission was fully articulated in Pauly (2007) continued during the next 5 years, as documented in our 10-year retrospective report (Pauly, 2010). In it, we described the “Top 10 Accomplishments of the Sea Around Us” as follows: 1 Pauly and Zeller Top 10 accomplishments in the first 10 years of the Sea Around Us 1. Created the first database in the world that maps catch and derived information, such as catch values onto to the Exclusive Economic Zones of specific countries, and Large Marine Ecosystems (see p. 39). This work has made the Sea Around Us website (www.seaaroundus.org) the key source of spatialized fisheries information for the international scientific and environmental communities, used by thousands of users every month; 2. Using the catch maps in (1) to establish that China, by over-reporting its catches, had masked a global decline of fisheries catches that started in the late 1980s. These results, published in the journal Nature, and later tacitly endorsed by FAO, provided the background for discussions about the global crisis of fisheries; 3. Debunked, via reports presented at meetings of the International Whaling Commission and a ‘policy forum’ article in Science (Gerber et al., 2009), the assertion promoted by the pro-whaling community that marine mammals and fisheries globally compete for fish, and thus that the culling of whales would make more fish available to fisheries; 4. Estimated the extent of subsidies to the fishing industry on a global basis and by subsidy type (see p. 49). Dr. Rashid Sumaila, in collaboration with Oceana, an environmental NGO, was able to introduce these findings into WTO negotiations aimed at eliminating capacity-enhancing subsidies to fisheries; 5. Produced a series of papers investigating the successes and limitations of consumer awareness campaigns. This work, led by then Ph.D. student Jennifer Jacquet, was among the first to question the effectiveness of consumer awareness campaigns on the seafood industry, and highlighted obstacles to these efforts, such as product mislabeling, and lack of metrics for measuring campaign effectiveness; 6. Developed and applied a methodology for ‘reconstructing’ catch statistics from coastal countries (see p. 15), which generally yielded catch estimates much higher than those reported by the FAO