First of all, overfishing is the act of fishing too much that the fish cannot sustain their population. The thing that is causing over fishing is that our fishing fleets are two or three times bigger than it should be. Reason that overfishing is such a big threat to us is because we are losing species as well as our whole ecosystem. In addition, we are losing our precious food source.
Overfishing is also a huge problem because there is a huge imbalance in the marine life. There will not be enough breeds, which will decrease the amount of fish in the ocean. Overfishing doesn’t only kill the fish that are targeted for food but also other sea animals as well. For example, dolphins or sea birds have been caught in the fishing gear and got killed. Most of them are when they are catching shrimp. So for every one kilogram of shrimp, up to nine kilograms of other marine animals are caught. In the last 60 years, the fish stocks as fallen by 90% due to overfishing. The scientist says that we are facing the collapse of all types of fish. In 2008, fishing limits where defined for the highly prized blue fin tuna. The scientists recommended a fishing limit of 10,000 tons. However, they ended up catching 60,000 tons of tuna, which is 6 times more than the scientists’ limit. So the amount of fish in the ocean is decreasing at a very fast rate due to overfishing.
We should try our best to prevent it from happening. How we can do this is that our politicians have the responsibility to make the decisions. We citizens have the rights to persuade them to make these decisions happen.
The video below descriptively tells us why overfishing is such a big problem and how it is affecting our lives today.
Video: Ending Overfishing from OCEAN2012 on Vimeo
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