Editor's note: This story is part of a series of online exclusives about natural phenomena and human endeavors we'd like to see come to an end. They are connected with the September 2010 special issue of Scientific American called "The End."

The meeting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, or CITES (pronounced "sight-eez") this past March was a decided defeat for the Atlantic bluefin tuna. Delegates voted 72 to 43 not to restrict fishing and international trade of the tuna so prized for its sushi that stocks are estimated to be at 15 percent of their historic levels. Although dismayed, conservationists remain upbeat, because they have at their disposal other management tools that could save the species.

Those strategies belong to the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT), which actually has the job to manage tuna and tunalike species (a point argued by Japan and other opponents of a CITES trade ban). Conservationists had forged ahead with a CITES effort anyway, because "we felt that a CITES ban would be a useful part of a package of tools to help reduce incentives for going over the quota," says Rebecca Lent, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Office of International Affairs and U.S. commissioner for ICCAT.

ICCAT, one of many regional fishery management organizations around the world, used a different tool to rebuild Atlantic swordfish populations (pdf) last September—namely, quotas. "The most important thing was setting the quotas at the appropriate level," Lent says, so that both the fish and the fishery economy can be sustained. To help enforce those limits, ICCAT tracked international trade to find countries that were catching (and selling) more fish than they reported. And domestically, the U.S. prohibited fisheries from waters where juvenile swordfish were getting killed as bycatch.

Still, getting countries to adhere to quotas is "the hardest challenge internationally," Lent says. Catch share programs, in which regional fishery councils divvy up quota shares to fishermen, could help ease this burden. Instead of creating a "struggle over a shrinking pie, you make [fishermen into] stakeholders, and that generates an incentive to be better stewards," says Frank Alcock, director of the Marine Policy Institute at the Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, Fla. In the Pacific Northwest, for example, the program helped cut halibut fishing levels by one quarter.

As for the bluefin, if ICCAT fails to manage the fish's rebuilding this year, Lent points out that CITES will vote a second time, as it often does before protecting a species, in 2013. Expectations are high, she says, because "the global awareness on these species is highly increased."

FIVE FISH ON THE TO-GO MENU
Like bluefin tuna, many species popular at the dinner table, including Atlantic cod and Chilean sea bass, share red-list status as defined by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species. Overfishing, in fact, threatens at least a dozen other species. Five less familiar ones are:

Hammerhead Sharks
Hammerhead sharks have declined by 89 percent since 1986, a rate even more alarming than that of white sharks (79 percent) and tiger sharks (65 percent). The species, which CITES also failed to protect in March, are prized for their fins, used to make a delicacy soup. And the catch method is particularly cruel: After fishermen remove the fins they typically toss the live sharks back in the water to drown.

Russian Sturgeon
For the past three generations Russian sturgeon have been facing a double threat: the loss of spawning grounds and the overharvesting of their eggs for caviar. These insults have whittled their population down 90 percent of its level from 45 years ago and put the species on the critically endangered list of the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

Sicklefish Grouper
Sicklefish grouper may now only exist in small pockets of its former range, from North Carolina to Venezuela. The IUCN classifies the fish "near threatened" because it is sparse and is being overfished.

European Eel
The unsustainable harvest rates of European eel and diminished migration (because of dam construction around Europe) add up to a decline of at least 80 percent of the population since 1968. Restocking efforts are underway, but because the eel reproduce late in life, restoration could take several generations—60 to 200 years.

Orange Roughy
The trawling of broad swaths of ocean floor off the New Zealand coast has stripped the ocean of orange roughy. From the 1970s to 1990s, the population dropped by 80 percent, and similar to other exploited species the fish have started to aggregate in smaller regions of the sea, making them more vulnerable to fishing pressure.

7 Comments

1. 1. aquaponics.me.uk 01:42 PM 8/23/10

   Human population increases will only add to this lamentable story, we must farm our fish, and only eat that.
   China is leading here, and laudibly already consumes more aquacultured than wild fish.
   Ban trawling now, and eventually phase out hunting fish altogether, it's evolution. See my www.aquaponics.me.uk for the answer!

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2. 2. Jose Palazzo 03:19 PM 8/23/10

   ICCAT is an indecent mafia conclave presiding over the massacre not only of bluefin tuna, but millions of sharks, albatrosses and sea turtles which fall prey to their unregulated longlines. This and other regional fishing mafia bureaucracies simpl,y refuse to adopt proper conservation measures and continue to serve as a cover-up for the rape and mining of our shared ocean resources. It trikes me that Scientific American buys into this kind of BS... or maybe not, there are so many scientists working as accomplices to these massacres... bah.

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3. 3. jtdwyer 04:39 PM 8/23/10

   The article states:
   "...Delegates voted 72 to 43 not to restrict fishing and international trade of the tuna so prized for its sushi that stocks are estimated to be at 15 percent of their historic levels. Although dismayed, conservationists remain upbeat, because they have at their disposal other management tools that could save the species."
   
   So these unnamed management tools that could save the species would have made the bluefin tuna trade ban unnecessary? I feel much relieved, knowing that the world's cooperative fishing management organizations can prevent the extinction of seafood.
   
   It's a good thing the Japanese and other international seafood harvesting conglomerates will comply, because without the nutrients from seafood the current human population could not survive, much less the expected increased population.

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4. 4. Wayne Williamson 08:37 PM 8/23/10

   aquaponics.me.uk...you are 100% correct...all food should be farmed...and alot of it is...just needs to be much more....

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5. 5. scientific earthling 09:39 PM 8/23/10

   Dream on. How do you control the Japanese? Remember how they complied with Tuna legislation, then humbly apologised?
   
   Not a problem though. The Anthropogenic sixth extinction will claim the Homo sapien as its greatest prize.

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6. 6. aquaponics.me.uk in reply to Wayne Williamson 06:12 AM 8/24/10

   Thanks for the valediction Wayne! How can we lobby to make this happen? Because the horrors are happening "out of sight" there is very little public awareness or sympathy. The trawling/crabbing documentaries are entertaining, but they do not show the devastation of the ecosystem.
   Can we lobby these trawling companies, Scientific American and National Geographic to fix cameras on trawls, forward and rear facing? Lobby to ask people to eat farmed fish only, and get more stories in the news media about how wonderful fish farming is! Farmed fish is easier, safer, cheaper - prices will drop, then it will become uneconomic to go to the sea to steal fish from the environment. Lets start lobbying!

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7. 7. Dr Jimmy and The Birds in reply to aquaponics.me.uk 09:07 PM 8/24/10

   This is so true and so obvious - the first customer should be McDonald's, based not on environmental issues alone, but mainly ecomonics. The double arches have gone to great lengths to secure and sanitise their supply chain, which will be impossible soon with commercially harvestable fish on their scale. The only way forward with fish is aquaculture, which is so obvious that it frightens me.

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