can't blame just the fishermen....
In round numbers, the various marine mammal species in the northwest Atlantic consume 20,000,000 metric tons of food each year. And at an average 3% annual increase, a fairly conservative estimate, each year the amount of food they consume could increase by more than half a million metric tons.
The total commercial landings for all species (finfish and shellfish) from the U.S. East Coast and Atlantic Canada are 680,000 and 870,000 thousand metric tons respectively. (Canadian Division of Fisheries and Oceans -
http://www.qc.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/peches/e...ts/dfo_adm.pdf and National Marine Fisheries Service
NMFS Commercial Fishery Landings Data ).
In perspective, in the Northwest Atlantic in 2006, marine mammals ate approximately 13 times as much fish and shellfish as commercial fishermen landed, and the annual increase in their total consumption might well have exceeded the U.S. East Coast landings in 2007.
And what are they eating? In large part, it’s what the fishermen are catching. If a fisherman wants to catch it, there’s an excellent chance that a whale or a dolphin or a seal is going to want to catch it as well. And if a commercial fisherman doesn’t want to catch it, then the probability is that something that he or she wants to catch is going to be eating it.
Consider the most numerous species, harp seals. If cod make up only five percent of their diet (it is reported as “a small percentage”), they consume on the order of 500,000 metric tons of this valuable species every year. At the fishery’s peak, cod landings for the north coast of Newfoundland, which is in the middle of the harp seals’ range, didn’t quite reach 800,000 tons. Capelin, one of the harp seals’ preferred foods, is also a preferred food of cod. This single species could be eating as much cod as Newfoundland’s commercial fishermen were once catching, and are undoubtedly eating far more of the cod’s preferred food, the cod have been declining as the harp seal population has been increasing, and yet overfishing is considered to be the reason for the decline.
In view of the massive levels of marine mammal predation, and remembering that much of it is either on the species that fishermen target or the food of those species, from any rational perspective it seems incredible that our fisheries management systems and our fisheries managers are still exclusively focused on fishing. And we haven’t yet considered the other factors, human-induced and natural, that will be the subject of subsequent Fishnets. But that’s what we’ve done and that’s what we’re doing, and because of the slavish devotion to that view, the concept of Ecosystem Based Management has been distorted into just another iteration of the failed “blame it all on fishing” philosophy.
Getting real about ecosystem based management
the seal population hasn't increased at all on the Cape...has it?
Hybrid Mode
