Pew laboring overtime on Tuna, in the Biblical sense.

Fish News EU reports another missive from Pew (see copy and link below). And it’s a Beaut…so full of feeling.

“THREE days after a single Pacific bluefin tuna fetched $1.76 million at auction in Tokyo, scientists have revealed their population has dropped 96.4 per cent from unfished levels, due to decades of overfishing.”

Notice how Pew cites the generic “scientists”, never mentioning exactly who these “scientists” are, or for whom they are working or receiving grants from, or who funded this particular scientific revelation.  As if with the word scientist, the reader should pause a moment in awe and wonderment and take every word that follows as gospel—no need to inquire any further.  If the Pewian scientists have revealed unto us…Behold, and we shall then believe.

A 96.4% drop from unfished levels? Now that’s a pretty specific number from the scientists; and at the risk of blasphemy, who was doing the stock surveys when the fish were “unfished” in order to determine the reference points for the “unfished  levels”, that is, before “the decades of overfishing” dropped them to 3.6%?

Unfished levels? They must have discovered some ancient papyrus stock assessments, the ancient Polynesians, Egyptians, Phoenicians (who apparently trap fished Tuna 2000B.C.http://www.fao.org/fishery/topic/16917/en), Atlanteans and other Antediluvian peoples must’ve liked to eat and fish for Tuna?  Everybody likes Tuna,right? And I’ll bet most civilizations probably always have liked Tuna.  So how far back would one have to go to get a stock assessment biological reference point for an “unfished level”?  Now this seems to be getting more into the realm of archeology or paleontology than fisheries science.

This latest Pew piece on Tuna is almost as good as Daniel Pauly’s (Fisheries Centre, University of British Columbia, the recipient of over $17.7million in Pew grants) claiming how a Stone Age tribe in Africa fished a giant catfish into extinction some 90,000 years ago—which he contends (I had hoped for his sake, metaphorically—but I fear not) started the downward slide that the fisheries have been experiencing ever since.  How many other giant catfish-like species have been extinguished in the last 90,000 years or so?  We’ll never know, now all we have to go by are giant catfishish empty spaces swimming around, mere shadows of their former selves—due to overfishing.

 “Daniel Pauly, the director of the Fisheries Center at the University of British Columbia and a noted expert on global fishing trends, cites the example of the earliest anglers, Stone Age peoples in Africa who eradicated a six-foot-long catfish 90,000 years ago and then moved on to another animal. ‘This pattern,’ Pauly says, of fishermen ‘exterminating the population upon which they originally relied, and then moving on to other species, has continued ever since.’” (The Catch, P. Greenberg, NY Times, 10/23/05) http://www.fishnet-usa.com/

 Pauly is also author of the now famous postulate that by 2048 fishing will have been reduced to chasing jellyfish http://www.fishtruth.net/Jellyfish.htm due to the “fact”, as discovered by Worm and Myers of Dalhousie University (also Pew moola’ recipients), http://fishtruth.net/BigFishGone.htm, that 90% of all large fish (Tuna, Swordfish, Marlin, etc.) are gone—by the 1980′s, they state, levels for large fish were at only 10% of their “historic abundance” which, I guess, is something like the ancient “unfished levels” of Tuna cited above, that is, before 5,000 years of overfishing. These Pewvian “scientists” have an uncanny window into the fisheries of the ancient past—God (Yaweh,Thor, Zeus) bless ‘em.

This most recent Pew decree on Tuna sounds an awful lot like these earlier cartoonish pronouncements by Pauly and Worm—but, might as well recycle, after all, these “scientists’ Revelations” don’t come cheap! http://fishtruth.net/Pew%20Grants.htm

 

From Fish News EU:

 

Bluefin feel the pinch PDF Print E-mail
Wednesday, 09 January 2013 10:09
http://www.fishnewseu.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=9642:bluefin-feel-the-pinch&catid=46:world&Itemid=56 THREE days after a single Pacific bluefin tuna fetched $1.76 million at auction in Tokyo, scientists have revealed their population has dropped 96.4 per cent from unfished levels, due to decades of overfishing.“This new data show that the population of Pacific bluefin is a small fraction of what it used to be, and is in danger of all but disappearing,” said Amanda Nickson, who directs global tuna conservation at the Pew Environment Group.Despite these findings, countries are still fishing for Pacific bluefin in its only known spawning and nursery areas in the western Pacific. The current management measures in the western Pacific do not limit overall catches and fail to ensure the long term sustainability of this fishery, according to Pew.Slightly better management exists in the eastern Pacific. At its annual meeting last June, the body responsible for managing Pacific bluefin off the west coast of the Americas, adopted the first catch limits for this species. This conservation measure caused the fishery to shut down early when the limit was exceeded in August. While those actions were encouraging, say Pew, they are not nearly enough.“The Pew Environment Group believes the most responsible course of action is to immediately suspend the fishery until significant steps are taken to reverse this decline,” said Nickson.“This latest assessment shows just how bad the situation really is for this top predator. This highly valuable fish is being exploited at almost every stage of its life cycle, and more than 90 per cent of Pacific bluefin caught are juveniles, taken before they have even reproduced. Further, fishing continues on the spawning grounds of this heavily overfished tuna species.“We call on the major countries fishing this species – Japan, Mexico, South Korea, and the United States – to immediately take necessary conservation and management actions for Pacific Bluefin,” she added.Measures suggested by Pew include science-based catch limits, and major reductions in the catches of juvenile bluefin by implementing size limits across the Pacific Ocean and preventing fishing on bluefin spawning grounds. Robust monitoring and enforcement measures must also be implemented to ensure that the rules are followed.

The trouble and the true tragedy involved in all of this fish “conservation” buffoonery from Pew, EDF, CLF, Oceana, and NOAA doing the bidding of their corporate overlords is that any intelligent and realistic protection that these animals actually need is ignored.

The question then for the Pew Tuna Conservation Stalwarts is: What have you done to call out the major oil companies regarding their reckless decimation of the western Gulf of Mexico Tuna spawning grounds, and to prevent such atrocities happening again and again in the future?

What, in fact, have you done to protect the entire Outer Continental Shelf’s Tuna and all other fish and shellfish and marine animal’s habitat from the impending industrialization by the oil/gas/wind/minerals mega-corporation shysters?

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