While some may celebrate World Fisheries Day, taking place today, Nov. 21, here at One Green Planet, we feel that it’s a great time to really evaluate the toll that fishing plays on the environment.
It’s estimated that over 70 percent of all marine fisheries have been exploited, over-exploited or have fully collapsed and 90 percent of vital ocean apex predators have disappeared.
There are a number of reasons that these saddening statistics exist including the death of animals caught in bycatch, fishery mismanagement, overfishing, unregulated fishing and habitat destruction.
Aside from shark finning, the dolphin slaughters in Peru and Japan, and “scientific whaling” (as the Japanese government insists it is, but we all know better), deep sea trawling has one of the most destructive effects on the marine ecosystem.
Check out the infographic below for an easy-to-understand look into the damaging effects of this fishing practice.
The image below was originally posted on Penelope Bagieu’s blog and translated by Le Huffington Post. The graphic was then subsequently published in its translated version on The Huffington Post.
Infographic source: Huffington Post
Image Source: Wikimedia Commons
While I appreciate the overall intentions of the infographic, it has some wrong info: water does *not* make up 98% of the Earth’s volume, unless you only compare surface waters to land above water, which leaves out most of the lithosphere and the atmosphere; the giant siphonophore is not *larger* than a blue whale, merely *longer* (and, I can find no online source that gives a length of greater than 40 m).