Publication - June 3, 2004
The life of the oceans is being destroyed. Huge ecosystems, once thought to be resilient and inexhaustible, are collapsing. The biggest single threat to marine ecology today is overfishing. If current quotas are maintained they will soon exceed the oceans' limits, with devastating impacts on marine ecosystems. The damaging impacts of overfishing do not stop at the targeted fish species, or at those species caught incidentally in fishing gear such as marine mammals or seabirds. Overfishing is increasingly affecting all the marine ecosystems. Scientists are warning that this will result in profound and possibly irreversible changes in our oceans.