THE OCEANS IN CRISIS

Newfoundland isn't the half of it. This week's scientific bombshell reveals that all the world's oceans are emptying of fish, ALANNA MITCHELL writes. But the cod fishery is the worst-case scenario -- and to deny that, experts say, is sheer idiocy.

By ALANNA MITCHELL
Saturday, May 17, 2003 - Page F7

At first, even the scientists conducting the study didn't believe their results.

First one population of big fish, then another, cut down by 90 per cent just since industrialized fishing started five decades ago.

First blue marlin, then sailfish and finally swordfish in the tropical Atlantic Ocean. First codfish, then flatfish on the southern Grand Banks.

As one species was fished out, another would rise temporarily, spurred by the extra food available in the sea. Then it, too, would be targeted and heavily fished (or killed by accident when commercial fish were caught), and driven to dramatic population declines.

And not one open ocean system, but nine of them. Not one continental shelf, but four. And not just some species, but all of the biggest fish in the ocean, throughout the global ocean, in every single major fishery in the world from the tropics to the poles.

"If you look at the big picture, you see this amazingly consistent pattern," said Boris Worm, the Emmy-Noether Fellow in Marine Ecology at the Institute for Marine Science in Kiel, Germany.

He and Ransom Myers, who holds the Killam Chair in Ocean Studies at Dalhousie University in Halifax, are the authors of the first comprehensive, long-term look at how many fish are left in the ocean since modern commercial fishing fleets began to scour the sea with the help of sonar and satellite. Published in this week's issue of the prestigious scientific journal Nature, it has staggered the public imagination.

Species after species, the researchers found the same pattern: Thriving populations speedily crashed as the voracious commercial fishing fleets moved in. And crashed to the tune of 80 per cent within the first 15 years of sustained fishing.

In the Gulf of Thailand, for example, 60 per cent of large fin fish, sharks and skates were killed off during the first five years of industrialized fishing.

The fish that are left are far smaller on average than they were before. Some get as big as half the size of fish 50 years ago. Some get to only a fifth.

It would have been easier for Profs. Myers and Worm not to believe any of it, to concentrate instead on the crashes of local fisheries, rather than on the whole global story. But after sifting through the masses of data collected over a full decade, they realized that denial was not an option.

They realized that what they dubbed this "grim mosaic" could get far, far worse. Unless they drew attention to the problem, and unless the world was persuaded to halt the destruction, humanity could well face a future without fish.

Not just fish on the dinner table, but fish in the seas. Unless all the fish at the very top of the ocean food chain get a chance to get on with their lives -- eating and breeding -- some of the species could go extinct. Maybe, eventually, all of them.

They wrote their paper. Nature's editorial team was so gobsmacked that the story made the cover, the scientific equivalent of making a sermon to the masses on the highest of high holidays.

But denial is still going strong. Profs. Worm and Myers knew that their findings would cause a storm. And when they passed their paper around to many of the leading fisheries scientists and managers in the world, the scientific denial held fast. While many of the scientists could accept the general finding that fish populations across the global ocean are hugely depleted, they questioned whether some of the individual species are in such dire straits.

The reason the study is a landmark, and a controversial one, is that it uses data that go back 50 years, to when the ocean's fish were abundant. Most fisheries scientists don't go back that far, so they have been comparing current levels of fish to levels that had already been heavily fished out -- which makes the current populations of some fish, such as bluefin tuna, seem closer to normal.

To Prof. Myers, the denial is just as quintessentially human an activity as the urge to fish in the first place. "We have a hard time imagining that our local actions, summed over the world, could have such huge effects," he said.

Worse, Prof. Worm said, is that having 10 per cent of fish left in the sea can still provide profit for fishery workers -- until they are fished out, and the cost of catching them rises above the prices they can fetch on the luxury market.

That's why it's so hard to convince local fishermen that they must stop fishing, or cut their catch. The economics require taking the long view instead of just worrying about money today.

But of all the denial, of all the destruction, what is happening today in Newfoundland is in a class of its own.

"Cod is one of the very bad examples," Prof. Worm said. "It's not one of the typical examples."

To Prof. Myers, who has worked on the data on cod for decades, the cry to keep fishing in Newfoundland is sheer idiocy.

None of the rest of the global biological destruction that he and Prof. Worm catalogued is as thorough as that off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, Prof. Myers said. Instead of being reduced to 10 per cent of historic populations, like so many other big fish of the sea, cod stocks have fallen to just 1 per cent. At those levels, it may not be possible for cod to come back. At those levels, any cod being caught are just babies.

The cod stocks have fallen so low that they have gone past the point at which scientists are able to predict what they will do.

"We're changing things in unprecedented ways," Prof. Myers said. "The cod was there for more than five centuries and now it's gone."

Strangely enough, even though the Nature paper has focused so much public attention on fishing, the fate of the fleets is only a small part of what Profs. Myers and Worm are worried about. The greatest worry -- and therefore the cause for greater public denial -- reaches far beyond the fellows running the boats.

Because it's not just fish. Recent examinations of the seas have found that dolphins and porpoises are in trouble too. Some species may not live out this decade.

Shark populations are in terrible shape, partly the result of being caught in the kilometres-long lines set for commercial fish, but also because of the growing practice of shark-finning: Sharks are pulled out of the water just long enough for the fishermen to slice off fins and tails for the shark-cartilage remedies popular in Asia.

The live sharks, now finless, are then dropped back into the water, where, unable to navigate, they fall to the ocean floor and drown. Some shark populations have dropped so low that marine biologists fear the sea animals are on the brink of extinction.

Green sea turtles are in danger too. Pacific leatherback turtles are balanced on the knife's edge between survival and extinction.

Put together, these pieces tell a far scarier story for humanity than one about a community losing its livelihood, a family driven out of work or even a province robbed of its natural patrimony. These pieces tell the tale of ecological meltdown within the global ocean. The ocean makes up 70 per cent of the surface of Earth. The ocean regulates climate, temperature, humidity, oxygen and carbon systems -- the very ability of the planet to sustain life.

What happens when that massive planetary regulator is altered this dramatically and this rapidly? Is this playing with fire?

"This is playing with nuclear explosives here," Prof. Myers said. "We're losing the ocean."

The irony is that to restore the fish and therefore the ocean to health, all that needs to be done is nothing. No seeds have to be sown, no harvests reaped, no forced feeding or extra nurturing or gentle care. The solution is simply to leave the fish alone and let them reproduce.

This week, while Prof. Worm was fielding calls from all over the world about his study, he kept looking out the window of his office in Kiel to the vast expanse of the Baltic Sea. Fifty years ago, it was full of big tuna and whales, he said. Today, the biggest creatures in its waters are jellyfish, zooplankton and the odd herring. It is, in effect, a sea without fish.

He noted wryly that some fishermen in fishless seas have turned to catching the jellyfish for world tabletops. The jellyfish are still okay. But maybe not for long.

Globe senior features writer Alanna Mitchell's book about the world's biological health will be published in January.