Survey someone randomly to name three significant threats to marine life. Most people will likely reply with plastic pollution and climate change as their first two answers, but then they will struggle to name a third. Yet the third unrecognized threat is as harmful as plastic pollution, a frequently discussed topic, if not more. What is it? Overfishing.
While catching fish is not inherently harmful to the ocean, overfishing is. Fishing vessels are supposed to ensure that they are not catching fish faster than they can replenish their population. However, some fishing vessels catch too many fish at once, making the fish population too depleted for any recovery. That is called overfishing - a third deadly hazard to marine life that is hardly discussed.
While overfishing at a surface level may seem inconsequential when stacked next to plastic pollution, many environmentalists have already highlighted that industrial overfishing is more dangerous to the ocean than plastic. The Friends of Ocean Action revealed that nearly 90% of the world's marine fish stocks are now fully exploited, over-exploited, or depleted. On top of that, 90% of the stocks of large predatory fish (such as sharks, tuna, and swordfish) are already extinct. With these staggering statistics in mind, it is no wonder that studies declare that fishes will be extinct in a mere three decades based on current trends.
Of course, these dire stats and analytics would make anyone presume that governments are already beginning to take action, but that is not the case. Not only are governments not averting the collapse of the ocean ecosystem, but they are also providing the current incentive to overfish - subsidies are given to the fishing industry, which is a significant driver of overfishing. The financial support keeping the massive companies operational perpetuates this crisis, and it skews production costs to the point where unsuccessful and costly fishing operations can still be continued. That is a vital issue as the worldwide fishing fleet today is estimated to be about two-and-a-half times larger than needed.
Plastic pollution and climate change are absolutely critical points that need to be addressed immediately; however, overfishing is just as critical as those two, and governments across the globe have not taken enough (if any) measures to mitigate this issue. The fishing industry needs to be held accountable for this: they are actively killing trillions of fish, irreparably destroying entire ecosystems.
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