Overfishing and the need for sustainable seafood
As part of Shedd’s sustainable seafood program, Right Bite, local culinary students often take field trips to Shedd to discover the relationship between the fish in the ocean and the fish in their kitchens. The students learn about Shedd’s five primary concerns with commercial fishing, connect firsthand with animals impacted by these concerns, and leave the aquarium with the tools and knowledge necessary to make seafood choices that will help protect our oceans.
One concern we discuss during these field trips is overfishing. Simply put, overfishing is catching fish faster than they can reproduce – an issue plaguing an astounding 75% of fisheries worldwide! Take orange roughy for example, a fish found primarily off the coasts of New Zealand, Australia, and southwest Africa. Orange roughy are slow-growing, long-lived animals. They take at least 20 years to mature and can live over 100 years. Because of their long life span, orange roughy are often caught as juveniles, before they’ve had the opportunity to reach adulthood and reproduce. Unfortunately, their populations have drastically declined in result. This is one reason why orange roughy is the "avoid" column of Shedd’s seafood wallet card.
It’s amazing how long certain fish, like orange roughy, can live. To highlight a real-life example at Shedd, we take the culinary students to see Granddad, an Australian lungfish and the aquarium’s oldest resident. Full-grown when he first arrived here in 1933, Granddad is at least 80 years old!
So what’s a seafood lover to do to prevent overfishing? A few things:
First, download one of Shedd’s seafood wallet cards – your quick reference for environmentally friendly seafood. Simply keep it in your purse or wallet, and use it to make sustainable seafood choices on your next trip to a restaurant or grocery store.
Second, give smaller fish a try. Generally speaking, tiny fish such as sardines, herring, capelin and mackerel tend to mature and reproduce quickly, resisting any threat of overfishing. Plus they taste great! Right Bite staff love eating sardines on toast. Mmmm…
Third, stay informed! If you’d like to learn more about overfishing, check out "The End of the Line" by Charles Clover. It’s a well-written book that documents the consequences of overfishing from a variety of perspectives, and is required reading for Right Bite staff. We’d be happy to chat with you about it at Shedd’s next Right Bite dinner at Uncommon Ground on May 5th.
Happy Earth Week!
Posted by Kassia Perpich, conservation
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