Thriving Oceans

Just happened to be thumbing through an April 2007 NatGeo and came across a few stats about our fisheries that caught my eye:

• Estimated 40 million sharks killed annually for their fins
• Global fish catch ~100 million tons (as of 2004)
• Bluefin tuna fished at 4x sustainable rate in the Mediterranean for sushi markets
• In longline fishing, discarded bycatch makes up nearly 30% of the take
• 12 species of shark are commercially extinct in the Mediterranean
• Catches in the northwest Pacific have been declining by more than 3% per year since 1998
• Closed since the early 1990s, the Grand Banks cod fishery shows few signs of recovery
• More than 33% of the world’s fish stocks are overfished
• World tuna catch in 2004 reached 6 million metric tons