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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
The mighty Pacific halibut is thriving, even as dozens of other big fish species are being commercially harvested out of existence. How is this googly-eyed monster defying the odds?
Jun 5, 2003 | The Pacific halibut is an unlikely poster fish for conservation concerns.
It lacks the cuddly appeal of land-dwelling mega-fauna, like the grizzly bear, that mug it up on environmental brochures aimed at encouraging human beings to open up checkbooks.
The big flatfish, which can grow staggeringly huge, up to 495 pounds, is shockingly alien-looking.
It's the eyes.
When the little halibut is a mere 1-inch-long larva, its left eye starts wandering. Literally. It migrates across its snout to the other side of its face. The grown fish has both eyes lodged on the right side of its head, so it can swim a fishy sidestroke on the bottom of the seafloor while using both peepers to gaze upward, scanning for prey.
Scientists say the freaky eyes and strange sidestroke are perfectly reasonable evolutionary adaptations for a bottom-dwelling fish. But they still look wrong to us. And yet, the Pacific halibut is one of the few large fish that has anything going right for it today. Unlike its Atlantic halibut cousins, which have been commercially fished nearly out of existence, and scores of other giant sea creatures that are barely hanging on, the Pacific halibut is thriving. As a result, conservation groups consistently recommend Pacific halibut as a good choice for seafood lovers, while the Atlantic halibut is strictly off-limits.
Throughout the seven seas, the world's biggest fish are getting smaller -- literally -- caught before they can grow to a size worthy of Hemingway, their populations declining to pitiful, historic lows. International fishing regulations tend to be an after-the-fact joke, and even the U.S.'s fishing industry suffers from a back-scratching level of self-regulation worthy of Enron. But through tight regulation and international cooperation, the Pacific halibut is making a comeback, weathering the rise of industrial fishing techniques that have clear-cut the oceans.
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On May 15, Nature magazine published a bombshell of a report, based on a decade of research by two biologists, charging that most of the oceans' big fish populations have been reduced to just 10 percent of their historic levels.
In the study, Ransom A. Myers and Boris Worm from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, document the dramatic decline of the ocean's large pelagic, or oceangoing, fish such as tuna, swordfish and marlin, as well as groundfish, such as cod, halibut, skate and flounder. Nine-tenths of the oceans' largest, most valuable fish have simply been fished out, they conclude.
"It's on a similar scale to the liquidation of the bison and the passenger pigeon," says Mark Powell, director of fish conservation for the Ocean Conservancy.
Today, the wholesale slaughter of the American bison in the 19th century inspires frank incredulity at its sheer barbarism. But how will the world respond to the mass disappearance of huge, valuable predatory fish that are hidden deep in the ocean? "Fishing is our last buffalo hunt," says Kate Wing from the Natural Resources Defense Council. "Fishing is the only wild capture industry that we have left in the United States. Everything else is produced or farmed."
Since industrialized fishing began in the 1950s, the industry has found ever more efficient ways to strip-mine huge catches from the sea, including long lines that cast thousands of hooks on a single line running as far as 50 miles out into the ocean. Myers and Worm found that it takes just 10 to 15 years for these industrial-strength commercial fishing techniques to reduce a newly discovered fish community to a tenth of its natural population.
But well before such techniques were pioneered, overfishing decimated stocks. Case in point: the Atlantic halibut. By 1830, the Atlantic halibut had nearly been fished out of the Massachusetts Bay region, after just five to 10 years of commercial exploitation, according to "The Conservation of Atlantic Halibut in the North Atlantic," a paper also authored by Myers.
As fishermen moved to different regions throughout the Gulf of Maine in search of the fish, the pattern of discovery and overfishing continued. "The Atlantic halibut was once very abundant off of the Northeast coast of the U.S., but has now decreased to the point where it is not even mentioned in most management plans," Myers writes.
The numbers are sobering for anyone who has ever enjoyed a tasty halibut fillet. "In the 1950s, Atlantic halibut landings peaked at almost 25 million pounds; in 1999 landings were approximately 25,000 pounds," says the Seafood Choices Alliance, one of several conservation groups trying to encourage consumers to make environmentally conscious choices about what fish they eat.
