One Quarter of Grouper Species Being Fished to Extinction

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://www.calacademy.org/newsroom/releases/2012/grouper.php

[font face=Serif]Andrew Ng [phone]
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Helen Taylor [phone]
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[font size=5]ONE QUARTER OF GROUPER SPECIES BEING FISHED TO EXTINCTION[/font]
[font size=4]An international team of scientists has made a global assessment of threats and extinction risks in the multi-billion dollar grouper industry[/font]

[font size=3]SAN FRANCISCO (May 9, 2012) – Groupers, a family of fishes often found in coral reefs and prized for their quality of flesh, are facing critical threats to their survival. As part of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Species Survival Commission, a team of scientists has spent the past ten years assessing the status of 163 grouper species worldwide. They report that 20 species (12%) are at risk of extinction if current overfishing trends continue, and an additional 22 species (13%) are Near Threatened. These findings were published online on April 28 in the journal Fish and Fisheries.

“Fish are one of the last animal resources commercially harvested from the wild by humans, and groupers are among the most desirable fishes,” said Dr. Luiz Rocha, Curator of Ichthyology at the California Academy of Sciences, and one of the paper’s authors. “Unfortunately, the false perception that marine resources are infinite is still common in our society, and in order to preserve groupers and other marine resources we need to reverse this old mentality.”

The team estimates that at least 90,000,000 groupers were captured in 2009. This represents more than 275,000 metric tonnes of fish, an increase of 25% from 1999, and 1600% greater than 1950 figures. The Caribbean Sea, coastal Brazil, and Southeast Asia are home to a disproportionately high number of the 20 Threatened grouper species. (A species is considered “Threatened” if it is Critically Endangered, Endangered, or Vulnerable under IUCN criteria.)

Groupers are among the highest priced market reef species (estimated to be a multi-billion dollar per year industry), are highly regarded for the quality of their flesh, and are often among the first reef fishes to be overexploited. Their disappearance from coral reefs could upset the ecological balance of these threatened ecosystems, since they are ubiquitous predators and may play a large role in controlling the abundance of animals farther down the food chain.

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http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-2979.2011.00455.x

[msongs]

1. fish killers can start eating jellyfish since jellyfish are blooming thanks to fish killers nt

[GliderGuider]

2. Of course they are. It's what we humans do.

We've been hunting prey to extinction for at least the last 15,000 years. That's a lot of practice. We're good at it.

The behaviour is a product of our superior intelligence in responding to food scarcity and overpopulation. This may be sad because we can now recognize what we're doing, but it's pretty much par for the course.

[Nihil]

3. “Unfortunately, ..." sums it up across the board, not just for marine matters.

> "Unfortunately, the false perception that marine resources are infinite
> is still common in our society"

That is an unnecessarily specific.

The fact is that "Unfortunately, the false perception that resources are
infinite is still common in our society".

This report is merely another pebble in the landslide.