I have been thinking about fish a lot. Alix and I do like to eat fish, and not just on Fridays. I suppose that when you are about to sail across the sea that has been most-heavily exploited for the longest period of time, it’s not an irrelevant subject to dwell on.
At Port-La-Nouvelle yesterday, one of the half-dozen or so day trawlers had landed its catch, some of which was being sold from wooden shacks on the quayside. There was a short queue of local customers. Much of what was on offer was small, with more fin, scale and bone than flesh. That sort of fish may well have been discarded in years gone by in favour of bigger, more fleshy specimens, but now is bought simply to pop into a fish soups, such as bouillabaisse.
So, we passed on that and headed to the poissonnerie in town, where we picked up some fish for the barbecue. This included some small Spanish sardines, local squid and very small local mackerel, probably caught by small-sized mesh gill nets? These species are fecund and can spawn when still physically small, relative to other more slowly maturing species. So, I guess they are sustainable; at least, they are more sustainable than the larger species of fish that are no longer easily found.
We have visited many French supermarkets and larger French outdoor market stalls, and these tend to have a huge selection of fish on the counter; far greater than a typical British supermarket. The Continentals do seem to enjoy their fish more than their British counterparts. You marvel at the size and variety of fish, and start to wonder naively where is all this French fish coming from. It certainly isn’t landed by the remaining Mediterranean day boats.
Maybe it is caught by fisherman in the EU waters of the North Atlantic, or the Channel or North Sea? But then you look at the huge plastic wallchart behind the fish counter, which shows you the geographical sources of fish (the French are pretty good at telling you where your food comes from.) You soon realise that the fish on display has been landed in waters from all four corners of the globe; from the Arctic to Africa; and from North Atlantic to South Pacific. And much of it is probably flown in!
You might glibly brush this off as simply the globalisation of markets. But then you start to ask yourself, why is this globalisation needed? France lies next to the shallow, nutrient-rich continental shelf, which should be one of the most productive ocean habitats on the planet. Why does France, or indeed any European country, need to source so much fish from around the blue planet?
This book (pictured below) identifies the root causes and proposes many of the answers. It should be on all National Curricula. It is an excellent historic piece of writing, with 387 pages full of facts, narrated by a professor of marine biology. As it is mostly quite a depressing affair, I don’t advise you add it to your holiday reading list. In fact, you might not have the time to read it at all. So, I have read it to save you the trouble.
The Unnatural History of The Sea
Man has always fished for food in the freshwater rivers and the shallow, coastal shores. The freshwater environment was the first to be exploited, in mediaeval times, as the human population grew. Urbanisation also led to greater demands for protein sources. Innovation solved the problem of how to catch more fish, through new net and trap technology, and also the damming of rivers. Overfishing was one result, but habitat destruction was a greater problem, because as the rivers’ flow slowed, siltation spoiled spawning grounds and fish spawning runs were physically prevented. Deforestation for agriculture and resulting soil erosion also worsened water quality.
Attempted regulation of these technologies typically followed soon after, as the negative consequences became apparent. But the pressure to fish prevailed, until soon there was little freshwater fish to be caught. Men then turned to the coast, and focused on the deeper seas and more distant oceans.
Trawling for fish behind sailboats had been invented in the 14th century. In the 19th century, a further innovation was bottom trawling using a beam, which scraped the sea-bottom, allowing the indiscriminate collection of any living thing that the trawl scraped up. (The fishermen didn’t realise at that time that they were also wrecking the habitat that fish, and their prey, needed to reproduce and grow). Line fishermen realised early on that trawling was both wasteful and destructive, but petitions to ban or moderate it has always failed.
At first, there seemed to be a bountiful and endless supply of sea fish (not to mention whale oil, seals skins and walrus ivory.) When local fisheries were unable to supply enough fish for the growing medieval coastal towns, the sailing boats ventured further afield. Early explorers to North America marvelled at the bounty they discovered. They were ignorant that a similar bounty had been wiped-out in their home waters, long before they were born, by the actions of their predecessors. Nowadays, this has a technical term – ‘Baseline Creep’ – where today’s scientists are unaware of what the unfished population size would be, simply because they were not alive to measure it.
Fortunately for the fish, one limiting factor was the inability to land the catch before it became unfit to eat. But innovations soon solved this problem: ancient fishers had carried salt to preserve the fish onboard; and later, fishermen would buy and transport natural ice, to freeze the fish as soon it was hauled aboard. Some ships even created flooded, central hull sections, to keep the fish alive until they returned to port. These techniques allowed more distant fish populations to be exploited.
The invention of the railway, and later the refrigerator, then fish canning processes, opened up the inland markets and major urban areas. These innovations meant that fish could soon to whisked to these exploding markets. The industrial nations all got a taste for fish, and they demanded more.
The fish also had some initial reprieve through the limitations of sailing boats: a sailboat trawling a net or a beam trawl cannot sail if there is no wind, or too much wind, or against a strong tide. And a sail cannot easily power a trawled net over a rocky bottom. The innovation of the steam-powered trawler and new gear changed that. Powered trawlers could go out when there was no wind, or too much wind, or adverse tides, and didn’t need to avoid rough ground. The fish had no respite and their populations had no time to recover.
As industrial nations emptied their own waters, they built bigger boats that could explore further. They also built more powerful boats that could trawl much, much deeper into the abyss. New gear allowed rocky ground to be exploited, with less risk of snagging.
As the new fish stocks continued to collapse one by one - almost as soon as they were found and exploited - new technologies helped seek out and catch what was left. Innovations like sonar and GPS for example, make fishing less like ‘fishing’ and more like simply catching. Geological surveys of the deep have identified invisible sea mounts in the middle of vast oceans. These submerged mounts have been respites for species, such as tuna, on their long migrations to feed and spawn. Massive factory fleets fished these once remote and invisible refuges and stripped them bare.
Now, even in the middle of the deep blue, where there may be no fish to be seen, fishermen place satellite-tracked ‘logs’ overboard. This sort of flotsam tends to be a magnate for marine organisms of many species, which gradually gather around it. When the returning fishing boats track the targets, they simply scoop up the unsuspecting fish. There is almost nowhere left for fish to hide to hide.
Technology creep and continued expansion into new, previously unexploited waters had created a myth that fishing was sustainable. This myth was even believed, perhaps, by the architects of policy such as the EU’s Common Fisheries Policy. The situation was simply not sustainable, despite scientists’ fragile models and negotiated quotes.
The reason that the tonnage of fish taken seemed to be maintained was because, bigger boats were using better techniques and over a much greater area, to maintain the tonnage. The take was for ever smaller fish and for new species, as the populations of the original larger target species collapsed. At the same time, the ex-quota bycatch was being thrown overboard and the underwater habitats wrecked.
Perhaps counter-intuitively, the industry’s systemic taking of larger fish is also unsustainable for two reasons. First, the larger fish tend to be top predators, and removing them destroys the fine balance of the food chain. Second, the larger and older fish produce far more eggs per gram of body weight than smaller and younger fish. Fewer eggs, means fewer young and eventually fewer adults.
The EU, for one, has realised that its own policies have failed and that its waters have been wrecked as a result. One of its responses is to negotiate trade deals with poorer Africa countries who still have territorial fish stocks. The EU pays African nations for fishing permits and large fleets of EU boats power up and down the west coast of Africa exploiting the waters and paying the poor countries only 5% of the landed value of the catch.
Perhaps this is where some of the fish I see in the French supermarkets comes from? Should I be ashamed to buy it and eat it? Should I even buy fish landed in the Mediterranean?
Over the next few months on Missy Bear’s voyage, what can I do to make our fish-based meals more sustainable? Professor Roberts provides some suggestions, and I have adapted them. If I see a petition:
- to reduce the amount of fishing, I will sign it;
- to end quotas and replace them with strict limits on fishing effort, I will sign it;
- to remove politicians from setting fishing quotas and to leave it to the (albeit imperfect) fishery scientists, I will sign it;
- to ban the discard of bycatch and to enforce the use of the latest, least damaging gear, I will sign it;
Most importantly, if I see a petition to implement any new marine reserve, where fishing is totally banned, I will sign it.
And so should you, even if you are a fisherman! These marine reserves offer a refuge for the habitat, and the food chain and the fish species themselves. As the fish populations recover, the evidence is that they tend to migrate out of the reserves and the fishermen who fish outside the reserves are suddenly seeing their catches increase.
Aquaculture is part the solution, provided the feed is not simply other fish species hoovered up to be ground into fish food. Although our beds of native oysters are long gone, here in Port-Leucate, foreign Asian oysters are now farmed in the etangs. Also in Marennes, in the Charante Martitime, we eat farmed oysters that are raised in the old disused sea-salt pans. And they are delicious.
On a slightly more hopeful note, In Aubeterre-sur-Dronne, I was chatting to a local Dutch friend called Marjet. Her son works in as a fisheries scientist affiliated to a Dutch university. He is studying a new reef or bed of oysters that has sprung up in the North Sea. Oyster beds would have been a widespread maritime habitat half a century ago, but have been obliterated by raking and then bottom trawling. Why this particular bed has suddenly appeared, they don’t yet know. But they are studying it and working out how to protect it. I wish him well. And so should you.