Unit 5: Oceans and Fisheries

OCEANS AS A RESOURCE

● Oceans play a vital role in the regulation of the climate: distributing heat from the
equator towards colder latitudes through warm and cold ocean currents.

● Oceans can absorb carbon dioxide so they are an important carbon sink (carbon
storage). It helps so that not so much carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere.
Soil (with decomposition), continental plants (with photosynthesis), and aquatic
plants (with photosynthesis) are all carbon sinks.

● Oceans contain vast (huge) resource potential: food, building materials and
chemicals (rocks), power generation, tourism, transportation, and drinking water.

Food

Seafood is composed by aquatic plants and animals that are consumed by humans directly
or indirectly. Many fish are caught or produced through aquaculture (farming).

Building materials and chemicals

Erosion has led to the concentration of mineral resources that are useful to humans. These
are either:
● Formed in the sea but are now on land due to the change in the sea level and
tectonic uplift (tectonic plate´s activity)
 ● Extracted from seawater
● Extracted from the seabed

Examples:
● Seawater contains a small proportion of dissolved solids such as sodium chloride to
make salt
● Sand is extracted offshore for building materials for houses and roads. Extracting
sand from the bottom of the sea can cause erosion impacts if not managed properly.

Power generation (Tidal power, Offshore wind power and Wave power)

Offshore winds, waves and tides have vast unexploited potential to satisfy our energy needs.
There are many environmental and economic challenges in increasing technology and
getting the electricity to exploit these sources. The main methods to collect, control, and use
the power of the oceans are:
● offshore wind farms and wave generators
● nearshore/onshore wave generators
● tidal stream generators
● tidal barrages (dams)

Tourism

It is globally the largest economic sector, generating 1/10 of global gross domestic product
(GDP). Many people visit coastal environments because they are attracted by them and
want to go for leisure (tiempo libre) and recreation. They cause impacts in ecosystems such
as: mangrove (bosques de un tipo de planta acuática) and reef (arrecifes) destruction,
habitat alteration and marine pollution. However, they continue to use tourism because it
brings economic benefits.

Transportation

Transport of goods in oceans is increasingly large and fast. There are container ships,
tankers and bulk carriers for trading. These cause pollution, accidents, and impacts on
marine species.

A source of drinking water

Most of the water is not safe for human consumption. That is why there are desalination
plants to eliminate salt from seawater. It is more expensive and energy consuming than
landwater. As there is freshwater scarcity, it is likely that there will be an investment in
desalination in the future, making the technology more affordable and reducing the large
environmental impact that waste produces when entering the sea.
WORLD FISHERIES

Ocean currents

➔ An ocean current is a continuous movement of seawater (never stops) that is driven

by:
● the gravitational pull of the sun and moon creating tides
● surface currents caused by winds
● warm and cold currents that are driven by THERMOHALINE CIRCULATION
(differences in temperature and salinity)

➔ They have an impact on the climate and the distribution of marine species (that
affects the location of profitable ($) fisheries). They play a key role in the erosion,
transportation and deposition of sediments along the coast.

➔ These currents have a clear pattern: warm surface water moves away from the
equator in giant spirals of water (gyres). These gyres spin clockwise (para las agujas
del reloj) in the northern hemisphere and anticlockwise in the southern hemisphere.
This spiral movement is caused by the coriolis effect (the rotation of Earth).

Fig 5.8
➔ When warm water from the Equator reaches the pole, it cools and becomes more
dense and saltier and it sinks to the seabed (↓). Then, it moves back to the Equator
along the seabed.

➔ As the current moves it causes nutrient-rich water to rise to the surface. This process
is called upwelling. Upwelling stimulates food chains (because the nutrient-rich water
attracts phytoplankton to make photosynthesis, which attracts zooplankton to eat
them, which attracts fish to eat zooplankton) and concentrates different fish species.

➔ These water currents combine to create a conveyor belt that is driven by

thermohaline circulation. It is in constant motion and the water currents move always
in the same direction, they never change.
 Fig 5.9

The distribution of major marine fish populations

Key areas where major fish populations are found:

● In shallow (not deep) waters around the continental shelf where sunlight can
penetrate to the sea floor. (lots of photosynthesis means lots of food chains and
oxygen)
● In coastal waters (upwelling occurs)
● Around coral reefs
● Where ocean currents cause upwelling
● Around oceanic islands

A key factor in the distribution of species is the relationship between marine topography
(relief, shape and height of land underwater), ocean currents and photosynthesis (mainly by
phytoplankton).

The bigger the concentration of fish species, the more valuable the fisheries.

El Niño

It is a complex oceanic-atmospheric interaction that weakens the wind and reverses the
warm ocean current patterns in the Pacific Ocean.
IMPACT OF EXPLOITATION OF THE OCEANS

Overfishing

Fish are one of the most traded food commodities in the world.

Bycatch: The unwanted fish and other marine creatures trapped by commercial fishing nets
during fishing for different species.

Overfishing: It occurs when more fish are caught than the population can replace through
natural reproduction.

Causes of overfishing:
1. Lack of management
2. Increasing technology
3. Use of ever-larger boats

● As demand for fish has increased, the profits to be made from fishing have risen

Large companies can afford to build ships with increased capacity, like the pelagic trawlers.
These use radars to identify places where there is a high concentration of fish and they have
massive nets.

There are also floating fish factories. An example is The LaFayette. It does not actually catch
fish but acts as a mothership to a fleet (flota) of super trawlers. It has freezers beneath it to
freeze the fish the super trawlers catch. The LaFayette rarely has to go to the shore, it can
maximise its time operating and processing fish.

Some species are being threatened by the following actions:

➢ catching of vulnerable species
➢ destructive fishing methods
➢ overfishing
➢ non selective fishing methods that create wasteful bycatch (the methods that collect
many species at the same time)
➢ illegal or pirate fishing

It is estimated that the global fishing fleet is two to three times larger than the oceans can
sustainably support.

● Purse seiner (type of net that produces a lot of bycatch)

Tuna is a highly valuable fish, which in some locations is being pushed beyond sustainable
limits.

Bycatch and discards

Giant nets can catch marine species unintentionally. When this bycatch is too small or of
species that are not allowed to sell, these are discarded (thrown back into the ocean), often
dead, wasting natural resources and harming future fish stocks.

Shrimp nets (which mesh size is very small) are the worst for bycatch because they can
catch a huge proportion of other marine species, affecting the biodiversity (number and
variety of species) of the seas.

The role of aquaculture in managing global fisheries

● Aquaculture is the breeding of aquatic animals or the cultivation of aquatic plants in

tanks or enclosures for food.
● It is the fastest growing food production system in the world.
● If managed responsibly it can cause an impact on marine species that will be allowed
to recover.
● It affects biodiversity because it uses hormones and antibiotics that create
deformities in humans and animals, and because many species are fished to feed
the fish in the farm and these species are reduced.

MANAGEMENT OF THE HARVESTING OF MARINE SPECIES

Controlling the global fish industry and reducing its impact is a very complex environmental
challenge due to:
● Lack of agreement between countries
● Lack of international laws
● Lucrative nature of the business (it gives them money so they tend to overfish to
produce income)

There are a range of different strategies to manage or reduce overfishing and aquaculture.
These include: managing net types and mesh size, pole and line fishing, quotas, closed
seasons, international agreements or protected areas and reserves, and concentration laws.
Net types and mesh size (size of the holes in the nets)

Methods used to catch fish:

● drift nets

● pelagic trawlers

● beam trawlers
 ● bottom dredging

● purse seining (ya hay una imagen)

Efforts to reduce bycatch are focused on net design that takes into account predictable fish
behavior (alguna conducta que se sepa que tienen) and changing the mesh size to allow
certain species to escape. Changing the shape from a diamond to a square, allows smaller
fish to escape when the net is being pulled up, reducing bycatch. For bigger fish, some nets
now contain separator grids and holes to let them swim away.

Pole and line

It is a selective and more sustainable method used to attract fish to the surface by throwing
live bait so they can be caught. Poles and lines with barbless hooks (garfios) are used to
grab the fish and bring them on board. It is an effective method that avoids unwanted
bycatch as nets are not used. Unwanted or small fish can be returned to the sea. The
drawback is that fish become valuable because catching them is difficult and time
consuming. This leads to high prices.
Quotas

They are strict limits placed on the total allowable catches of certain species (la cantidad de
peces de la misma especie que están permitidos pescar).

● They reduce the number of fish being caught and ban (no dejan) the catching of
other endangered species. With these limits, more fish are left to breed and
reproduce, allowing the population to recover.
● The quotas are allocated to individual vessels (boats), fishermen or groups of
fishermen to prevent problems.
● Some can be bought and sold between vessels.

Consequences (disadvantages):
● Due to net sizes and bycatch, some fishermen catch more than the allowed so they
select the most valuable and biggest ones, throwing the rest of the dead fish into the
sea.
● Fishing vessels can catch fish that are not the target species or have already
reached the quota on numbers, and to avoid fines (multas), they discard perfectly
good fish that could be eaten or sold.
● Sometimes vessels are being paid not to fish.
● Ensuring that people follow these quotas is sometimes difficult because there is lack
of control over the fishing industry.

Closed seasons

It is a useful strategy in which the catching of fish is effectively banned during the breeding
season (reproduction season) or for a prolonged period of time. This method relies on the
compliance (cumplimiento) of fishing vessels and the use of fines as punishment. This can
be an effective strategy if monitored.

International agreements on protected areas and reserves

In places where there has been massive overfishing and stocks are about to collapse or in
places where there is high biodiversity value, protected areas, where ALL fishing is banned
(and ships cannot enter), are introduced. These are commonly known as Marine Protected
Areas (MPAs).

● There is illegal fishing though, and the use of satellite control (GIS) is needed.

● MPAs are key to the sustainable management of fisheries.

Conservation laws

Establishing (MPAs), these laws can increase long-term benefits from an area and ensure
the sustainability of food supply. They allow scientists to make annual species assessments
(tipo un control) and to set annual catch limits.

International agreements

Coastal countries have control rights over a specific zone (exclusive economic zone). This
exclusive economic zone (EEZ) allows a country to ban fishing by foreign vessels (botes
extranjeros) or sell permits (permisos) to these vessels. When international agreements
combine with high-tech monitoring (monitores de alta tecnología) of vessels and fish stocks,
it is possible to manage the protected areas and allow the species to recover.