April 16, 2012 – The true lesson of this book is that fisheries science is complicated; that the management of any given species must be considered in terms of its ecosystem; that fishing for one species alters the food web as a whole — and that sometimes there is not enough data to make good recommendations.
To hear some people tell it, the increasingly energetic and sophisticated fishing industry has left the world's oceans a shambles, with species of cod, sharks, tuna and other fish hunted almost to extinction and vast stretches of the ocean floor wrecked by bottom-scraping trawlers.
To hear some other people tell it, many depleted stocks are recovering nicely.
Ray Hilborn, a fisheries scientist at the University of Washington, wades into this disagreement in his new book and comes out with a lucid explication of a highly tangled issue.
And he gets into the issue of trawling, in which boats drop weighted nets to the bottom and drag them along, scraping up everything in their path. Critics liken trawling to harvesting timber by clear-cutting. For Dr. Hilborn, this analogy is not always apt, since in some areas the creatures rapidly repopulate the ocean floor.
Some countries do well by their fish, he writes, but with one exception they are relatively small: New Zealand, Iceland and Norway. The exception? The United States.
Read the full article at the New York Times.