THE INTERNET (March 17, 2009) – Recently I was snared — or hooked, snagged, or netted (pick your favorite fishing pun) — by a book that shows humanity’s enormous capacity to affect ocean life. We can nearly wipe out an entire species in just a few decades thanks to new technologies and taste trends.
Take the Chilean sea bass, Dissostichus eleginoides, a.k.a. the Patagonian toothfish. Until the 1990s, it was more or less unknown to most of the world. By 2002, stocks had been depleted so much that the National Environmental Trust launched a preservation campaign called “Take a Pass on Chilean Sea Bass” and the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch eventually added it to its “avoid” list.
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