Fish from the oceans were once viewed as an inexhaustible resource, able to fill nets and put food on our plates without limit for generations to come. But we’re rapidly proving the old adage wrong: In the face of human demands, there just aren’t enough fish in the sea.

The oceans are proving unable to keep up with a growing demand for seafood that is fueled by population increases and the industrialization of global fishing fleets. Recent scientific findings are sobering. Through our fishing efforts, people have eliminated 90 percent of the large fishes from the oceans. Today we’re struggling to manage fish populations that are a fraction of their historic levels.

Yet there are still millions of boats, small and large, removing billions of pounds of fish from the oceans each year. Our short-term needs for protein and profit overshadow the most important goal: to manage fisheries to be sustainable in the long term. The impacts on our oceans have been devastating, in four main areas:

Overfishing: We’re taking fish from the water faster than they can reproduce. Today, more than 70 percent of the world’s fisheries are at capacity, overexploited, or depleted.

Bycatch: Each year, fishing fleets accidentally catch billions of pounds of unwanted marine animals, including sea turtles, sharks, young fish and seabirds. Snagged in gear aimed at commercial species, most are tossed overboard, dead or dying.

Habitat loss: Vast expanses of seafloor are damaged by fishing gear, including trawl nets that plow the ocean bottom as efficiently as tractors in a field. Animals die, and the landscape is altered in ways that support less diversity of marine life. Even if the trawling stops, some habitats would need a century or more to recover.

Illegal fishing: Unregulated fishing still plagues the high seas, where resource managers can’t enforce catch limits and other regulations designed to ensure that fish populations remain healthy for the long term.

Aquaculture, or the farming of fish and shellfish, was once thought to be an easy solution—a way to alleviate pressure on wild species while meeting the growing demand for seafood. Unfortunately, the technologies of aquaculture advanced well before we understood the ecological impacts. Today, one-third of our seafood comes from farmed sources. And these systems are plagued with the same environmental impacts as industrialized animal rearing on land: pollution from animal waste and the spread of disease. The “Blue Revolution” has raised flags within environmental and scientific communities.

Fortunately, ecologically responsible fisheries and aquaculture operations do exist, and a growing sustainable seafood movement is working to make responsible fisheries standard fare for the future. The Seafood Watch program at the Monterey Bay Aquarium was created to help individual consumers, restaurateurs, and retailers to use their purchasing power to support these efforts.

Through Seafood Watch, we’re working to shift consumer demand to support ecologically sound fisheries practices. Our pocket seafood guides and web-based background information promote seafood that consumers should buy and species to avoid, all based on the environmental sustainability of the source.

And it’s working. Consumers are changing their buying patterns. Restaurants and retailers are offering sustainable choices—and teaching their customers about the importance of choosing sustainable seafood.

For us, it’s not about limiting options. It’s about identifying an abundance of great choices that are available and sustainable. Wild salmon, Pacific halibut, farmed tilapia, Dungeness crab, and shellfish are all Seafood Watch “Best Choices.” Think about how much thought people put into selecting the right bottle of wine at a restaurant, from scanning the wine list to talking with the server about possible alternatives. If we put half the effort into selecting seafood that we do into choosing the right wine, we’d be a long way toward assuring the future health of ocean wildlife.

And we are talking about wildlife—the last wildlife on Earth that we hunt on a large commercial scale for food. We have a chance today to save the ocean’s magnificent top predators, many of which, like the tunas, are prized commercial catches. Or, we can stand by while they slide toward extinction like their terrestrial counterparts—the tigers, pandas, and countless less charismatic but unique species.

Because the concept for Seafood Watch is simple—people can make a difference for ocean wildlife through their seafood choices—it’s having significant impacts. For example, two of our members were invited to attend a special dinner at Yosemite National Park. Chilean sea bass was on the menu—a species to avoid until its fishing operations no longer harm the marine environment. With our help, they wrote the park concessionaire explaining why Chilean sea bass and other species should not be on the menu in a place dedicated to preserving natural resources. As a result, the concessionaire took Chilean sea bass off the menu for that event. Then it went further, removing all “avoid” species from the menu at Yosemite and seven other national parks. This simple action is now helping to reach millions of park guests each year.

Today, millions of Seafood Watch pocket guides are being distributed. They can be found at Mount Rushmore, at Patagonia clothing stores, at community and co-op markets throughout the West, at zoos and aquariums nationwide, in corporate dining halls. The guides can also be quickly downloaded off the web, at www.seafoodwatch.org.

Using Seafood Watch guides, each of us can use our buying power as consumers to shape market demand. As we do, this demand will influence the supply, bringing more sustainable seafood into the marketplace.

We invite you to get involved in working toward a healthy future for our oceans. Learn more about sustainable seafood, share what you know, and most important, enjoy!


Julie Packard, Executive Director The Monterey Bay Aquarium