What Happens When the ‘Aquarium of the World’ Has No More Fish?
Jacques Cousteau once called the Sea of Cortez—the blue-green sea that fills the geographic split between Baja and Mexico’s mainland—the Aquarium of the World.Takepart.com- Environment
What Happens When the ‘Aquarium of the World’ Has No More Fish?
Jacques Cousteau once called the Sea of Cortez—the blue-green sea that fills the geographic split between Baja and Mexico’s mainland—the Aquarium of the World.
He was referring to the incredible abundance that used to provide 80 percent of Mexico’s fish.
But, like so many things Cousteau, those were the good old days. Today the aquarium is nearly empty. Though it is still home to 950 different species of fish, 85 percent of them are overfished due to the rapacious demands of the U.S., Japan and, increasingly, China, .
This fact, according to Mexico City-based science writer Erik Vance, makes the Sea of Cortez the best “place on earth to look at the future of global fishing and the crisis facing the oceans.”
I’ve long been a fan of John Steinbeck’s Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research—the log of his boat journey with Cannery Row pal Ed Ricketts—and have spent time there following in his footsteps. I’ve fished there too, though unfortunately my fishing story begins and ends with the lies of local guide Hector Villesenor. Hector spent my down payment on steaks, red wine and a lady of the night, so that by the time he showed up with his panga the next day at noon, it was too hot to fish. As he drank the 12-pack of Tecate he’d brought for our lunch, he entertained me with stories about the days not so long ago when the fish literally jumped into your boat.
Like the sunset-adjectives of Cousteau, that time is good and gone. Once-thriving lobster, crab and turtle populations have been decimated by a fishing fleet that keeps growing. Many of the small boats motoring out from small ports each morning do so illegally and thus unregulated. The number of big trawlers has paled thanks to the decline in fish. Today, inland fish farms have replaced the abundance once pulled straight from the sea.
Some highlights from Vance’s on-the-scene report:
1) The pre-1940s days of fishing from canoes—a mode that gave the fish a sporting chance—are long gone. In its place, outsiders taught locals how to fish using motors and dynamite.
2) The World Conservation Union estimates that just one percent of the world’s boats have the capacity to snag 60 percent of the global catch. In the Sea of Cortez today about 50,000 fishermen run 25,000 pangas while 10,000 fishermen run 1,300 big industrial boats.
3) Leatherback turtles—once so plentiful in the Sea of Cortez it was said you could walk on the sea on their backs—are nearly extinct. Their fate was sealed when fishermen discovered that during the winter the turtles lay on the seafloor, barely moving, making them easy pickings.
4) As recently as the mid-1990s, as many as 70 boats would pull into the port at the small fishing town of Kino loaded with 600 to 700 pounds of shark. With big demand for shark meat in Mexico and fins in China, the sharks are mostly gone. So are sea bass, manta rays, halibut, tuna, oysters and many other species.
5) The booming species today? Jellyfish, so thick on the water during spring they can be shoveled up. At $230 a ton, they actually have a market as a very boring appetizer—in China.
6) Shrimp farms stretching over the eastern shoreline of Baja are the boom business. Unfortunately, the waste created by aquaculture promotes disease among the farms and finding sufficient fish meal to keep them going is a never-ending problem. The most successful farm? Inland, in the heart of the dry desert.
7) It’s hard to believe, but Baja’s desert is getting even more dry thanks to the Colorado River no longer arriving there and delivering the valuable nutrients that once fed the northern Sea of Cortez. Desertification and neutered waters are the result.
8) Things are so bad that since 2008 the government of Mexico has been paying fishermen not to fish. In exchange for handing over their fishing permit, the government pays them $30,000 and encourages the ex-fishermen to invest in tourism. But thanks to a sour economy north of the border, and a reputation for nasty drug-related violence, tourism in Baja is down.
All of which makes me wonder what my old pal Hector Villesenor is up to these days. He deserves a visit. I’m sure his “goold old days” have gotten even more rich as the fabled fisher of the Sea of Cortez becomes history.
Tuesday, July 30, 2013
Aquarium of the World Has No More Fish?
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