Shawn Ku

Armand Gindap

RG

The movie, The End of the Line, talks about the number of fish radically declined for the past centuries. The global fish market declined 90 percent of fish in the ocean. People are catching too much fish in the ocean which is serious problem to sustain the number of the fish. According to this information and other studies it is possible that there will be point in time where fish are not sustainable.

We are catching more fish faster than they can repopulate, which is being made much easier with the advancements of technology. In the year of 2007 the rate of fish population reached a number that we can not recover. For example, the recommended rate of Bluefin tuna is 15% and for the Bluefin to recover the rate should be 10%. But the actual rate is 61% which is much higher than the recommended rate. Today the catches of the Bluefin had declined to about 30%. Many governments are not willing to cooperate with efforts to reduce fish catching since it usually makes a lot of money. For example the Italian government is doing nothing about the declining fish rate. Although there is a limit, the fisherman catch more fish than recommended and the government does not doing anything about it. Also, the famous Japanese car company Mitsubishi started a tuna catching business, which is 60% of the worldwide rate of tuna. Even though there are rules and restrictions to fishing, people can’t control themselves to stop catching fish since we’ve been catching it for millions of years. One of the main misconceptions of fish farming is that we catch tons of small fish (anchovies) to catch other kinds of fish like salmon. In the movie they mention that 3-4kg of anchovies only result in 1kg of salmon. Fish farming kills more than it produces.

By learning information from the movie we strongly believe that there could be no possibility to recover the number of fish which could result in a neo-Malthusian effect. Studies have shown that the fish rates could collapse at around 2048. 99 percent of the ocean is fishable while only 1% is not. Although there are plenty of attempts to save the fish in the ocean, we probably have realized too late. People are not aware of the endangerment of fish and are only aware of making money by selling them. People want big fish we need to eat smaller fish to save them. There are some solutions that the movie presented like pointing out which kinds of fish are endangered or not but it’s useless because they’re already dead and being sold in the market place. People are greedy enough to fish the most common resource in the world to extinction.

To conclude, we strongly think that it is not possible to sustain the number of the fish in the ocean. Although there were solutions shown in the movie which we think it is too late to initiate.

(Mr. Barnes the internet was not working in your classroom so I submitted in the library which delayed the submit ion.)