April 2, 2014 — For lovers of fatty tuna belly, canned albacore and swordfish kebabs, here's a question: Would you be willing to give them up for several years so that you could eat them perhaps for the rest of your life?
If a new proposal to ban fishing on the open ocean were to fly, that's essentially what we might be faced with. It's an idea that might help restore the populations of several rapidly disappearing fish – like tuna, swordfish and marlin — that we, and future generations, might like to continue to have as a food source.
The novel conservation plan, introduced recently in a in the journal PLoS Biology, would close international waters – where there's currently pretty much a fishing free-for-all — to all fishing and restrict commercial fishermen to coastal areas managed by individual nations. The authors, and , suggest turning the open ocean into a worldwide reserve for the migratory species that travel huge distances.
That reserve would give these fish populations to chance to rebound. And the fish that strayed into coastal national waters, where fishing would remain legal, could meanwhile be caught by fishermen. Overall, under such a plan, fish populations would grow healthier, fishing would become a more lucrative business and we would have more fish to eat, the researchers argue.
But let's face it: Closing off most of the ocean to fishing boats would be a pretty drastic move.
But as White, a marine biologist at the California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, notes, the policies we currently have in place to regulate fisheries — catch quotas, seasonal closures and minimum size limits — aren't working.