Does Overfishing Affect The Ecosystem?

2134 Words5 Pages

Asen Levov
Kateri Couture-Latour
Biology 10th Grade
16th June 2015

How does overfishing affect the ecosystem?

In the modern industrialized society we live in overfishing is a big issue because fish is one of our primary sources of protein. Nevertheless, fish is also really important for the ecosystem and its sustainability is vital for the survival of marine creatures and nature.
The human impact on this issue is that we are overexploiting our fish stocks and we fish more than the sea can sustain. We catch too much adult fish in a faster rate than they can reproduce, and, thus, we don’t leave enough to breed and reproduce. Therefore, their population can’t recover and many species of fish get extinct because of this. We do this because …show more content…

Human’s influence on marine life isn’t just in the water, but it in some cases transfers to rivers which affects plants and trees in the nearby areas, so terrestrial life is also affected. For example, in Trang River Estuary in Thailand mangroves are affected by polluted water because of overfishing nearby. If we want to be more precise, it was commercial farming and it was because of shrimp. From 1975 to 1993, it is estimated that about half of Thailand’s mangroves along its 2,560 kilometer coastline have been lost. This coastline is really important and vital for more than 200 hundred bird species, some of which are really close to extinction and seriously endangered, but nothing can be done because large industries have enough money to hide those facts and remain innocent in the eyes of the law. ('What Is Marine Pollution And How Does It Affect Marine Life’) All this could result the collapse of whole ecosystems and affect not only us and our food supply, economics and life, but also some biotic factors like other species. ('10 Alarming Facts about Overfishing') This could be a interspecific relationship because it is among different species. We are parasites to the fish because the benefit from them, but they lose from our influence. The human’s impact with overfishing has come to the point when National Geographic reports, “A study of catch data published in 2006 in the journal Science grimly predicted that if fishing rates continue apace, all the world’s fisheries will have collapsed by the year 2048.” By 1989, when about 90 million metric tons of catch were taken from the ocean, the industry had hit its high-water mark, and yields have declined or stagnated ever since. All this and we are still destroying and exploiting our main food source. ('Overfishing -- National Geographic')Not only this, but tax

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