I found this old article but it was a good read.
How Fisheries Are Making Big Fish Disappear
BY JIM WILSON
Illustration by Paul DiMare
Published in the September 2003 issue.
Big fish are vanishing because of fisheries practices that ignore basic science.
"For centuries we have viewed the oceans as beyond our ability to harm and their bounty beyond our ability to deplete," says
Leon Panetta, Chairman of the Pew Oceans Commission. "The evidence is clear that this is no longer true." In June 2003, the independent and bipartisan Pew Commission released the results of its 3-year nationwide study of the condition of the oceans. The report, titled "Ecological Effects Of Fishing In Marine Ecosystems Of The United States," is the first detailed look at our vast marine resources in 30 years. Its findings are as chilling as the icy waters from which generations of New England fishermen once hauled 200-pound Atlantic cod.
The laws that we thought were protecting both our oceans and the fisheries industry have utterly failed. "If we are serious about saving our fisheries and protecting the sea's biodiversity, then we need to make swift and perhaps painful decisions to preserve and maintain the oceans' ecosystems," says
Paul Dayton of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California. He is the lead author of the 144-page report.
Obsolete Laws
It has been said that the problems facing the seas are as difficult to sort out as a tangle of fishing line. What is rarely mentioned is that the line traces back to a single core problem: Politicians have listened to lobbyists when they should have been heeding scientists.
"The Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act provides the broadest articulation of American marine fisheries policy," explains
Pew Oceans Commission spokesman Justin Kenney. "Originally crafted in 1976, the law is based on three outdated principles." First, it emphasizes short-term economic gains for the fisheries industry over long-term conservation. Second, it leaves fish conservation and catch allocation up to the fisheries' industry-dominated councils. And third, it allows commercial fishing in areas where there are no fish conservation plans.
Sound Science
"U.S. ocean policy is a hodgepodge of narrow laws that has grown by accretion over the years, often in response to crisis and is in need of reform to reflect the substantial changes in our knowledge," the
Pew Commission concludes.
Less food means fewer big fish survive.
At the very top of the Pew Commission list of proposed changes is a plan to create a new American mind-set toward commercial fishing. This, it says, will begin with the passage of a National Oceans Policy Act that makes the protection, maintenance and restoration of the seas a national priority.
And what do the fiercely independent Cape Cod fishermen who have fought government regulations tooth and nail think of such a sweeping reform? I'll tell you after I talk to the guy setting up the hot dog concession on the beach. He used to be a commercial fisherman.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/scie...41.html?page=2