The North Sea viewed from a windswept Grimsby beach looks cold and uninviting. Mud-stained waves slosh fragments of seaweed, plastic bottles and shells along the Lincolnshire shoreline, while gimlet-eyed seagulls crouch on the harbour wall. It is hard to imagine the scene of 120 years ago, when Grimsby was a great Victorian seaport receiving the wealth of the North Sea from the holds of countless fishing vessels. Boats crammed the harbour, five or 10 abreast, and the quayside thronged with fishers, auctioneers, merchants and carriers. At dawn, the fishmarket floor was covered with cod and halibut so large that they were sold individually. Pods of porpoises followed boats almost into the harbour, and dolphins were regularly seen in the estuary.
Today, the once mighty cod has been humbled, the halibut are gone, and fishers concentrate their efforts on fish that were used as bait or sold to the poor in 19th-century Britain. The Humber dolphins are extinct, and few visitors are lucky enough to glimpse a porpoise. Now we consider the state of scarcity of fish and wildlife in Britain's seas as normal, but in reality fishing has caused the progressive collapse of marine ecosystems around these islands. BBC camera crews filming the Blue Planet and Planet Earth series had to travel thousands of miles to find scenes of underwater abundance that were once commonplace around our shores. Two centuries ago, vast shoals of herring that covered thousands of square kilometres approached our coast to spawn in spring each year. Contemporary accounts described a breathtaking wildlife phenomenon that has not been seen around these islands since the 1930s.
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On a map of the seabed dating from 1883, an area the size of Wales is marked simply as "oysters". These oyster grounds consisted of reefs built of oysters, knitted and interlaced with countless other invertebrates. The bottom of the southern North Sea was hardened by living crust. Delicate invertebrates offer scant resistance to the heavy bottom trawls that cut them down and plough them into mud. The spread of trawling caused the greatest human transformation of marine habitats ever seen, before or since. The descriptions of witnesses to an 1883 inquiry into the effects of trawling chart the shift from biologically rich, complex and productive habitats to the immense expanses of gravel, sand and mud that predominate today. This change came first to Britain and parts of Europe, but by the 1920s had spread to the Americas, Africa, Australia, New Zealand and seas beyond. Shifting sands now drift where once an oyster empire spread across the southern North Sea. The last wild oysters were fished there commercially in the 1930s, and the last living oyster was caught in the 1970s.
Human mastery of fishing technology has not so far been matched by increasing powers of restraint. Scientists estimate that, since 1900, North Atlantic populations of table fish - species such as cod, haddock and halibut - have fallen by 90%, much of the decline following the intensification of fishing after the second world war. Some species, such as angel sharks and "common" skate, have suffered greater losses and have disappeared from most of their former haunts. The waters plied by 18th-century herring fishers frothed, glinted and surged with the packed bodies of fish and their predators. Compared to them, the seas around Britain today are quiet, almost empty.
We are playing out the endgame in world fisheries. The proud record of the last quarter of a century of North Sea fisheries management, for example, has been to see the fraction of species in danger of collapse rise from about 20% to nearly half. Unless we can quickly reinvent our relationship with the sea, some scientists predict that fisheries for all the species we exploit today will have collapsed by 2050.
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http://society.guardian.co.uk/societyguardian/story/0,,2162131,00.html
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