Originally published August 20 2005
Fewer species of fish thrive in the ocean
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
In the past 50 years, the variety of ocean fish species has been cut nearly in half due to overfishing, habitat destruction and global climate shift, the journal Science reports.
The variety of species in the world's oceans has dropped by as much as 50 percent in the past 50 years, according to a paper published today in the journal Science.
A combination of overfishing, habitat destruction and climate change has narrowed the range of fish across the globe, wrote biologists Boris Worm and Ransom A. Myers of Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia and three other scientists.
In some areas, such as off northwest Australia where a wide variety of tuna and billfish used to thrive, diversity has declined precipitously.
Crews offload a tuna catch in the Marshall Islands last year.
Catches of tuna and billfish have soared, causing fish diversity to plummet, researchers said.
Graphic Dwindling Species For the first time, researchers have documented the worldwide decline in diversity among ocean predator fish, mainly due to large increases in fishing.
"Where you used to put out a fishing line 50 years ago and catch 10 species, now you catch five species for the same amount of effort," Worm said in an interview yesterday.
The study, which marks the first worldwide mapping of predatory fish diversity, identified five hot spots in the world that have a rich variety of species, two of them in U.S. waters.
"That's what's driving the pattern," he said.
But in an example of how shifts in temperature can also affect diversity, the study found that in the Pacific, the variety of fish expanded when the weather pattern known as El Ni�o swept in and brought warmer surface water but then contracted when temperatures dropped.
Predatory fish appear to like medium temperatures, around 77 degrees Fahrenheit, Myers said.
"We need protected areas in the open ocean," he said.
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