Seafood sayonara

Overfishing and global warming mean no more fish (or shellfish) in the sea

By Caroline Cummins

January 9, 2007

OK, so anybody who read Mark Kurlansky’s bestselling 1997 book Cod is aware that humans are pretty adept at harvesting a species into extinction, or near enough.

But a new study has pronounced humans even more efficient than we thought. “By the middle of this century, fishermen will have almost nothing left to catch,” writes Unmesh Kher in Time magazine. According to the study, a third of the world’s fish species have already collapsed. And fish farms, often hailed as a solution to overharvesting, can be environmental disasters in themselves.

Meanwhile, other researchers have figured out that global warming will probably knock out most of the world’s shellfish. As humans pump out ever-increasing levels of carbon dioxide, the ocean absorbs a great deal of it. All that CO2 in turn does a number on the calcium-based shells of everything from zooplankton to oysters.

Bye-bye, bivalves on the half shell. Or no shell.