- Overfishing happens when fish are taken from the sea faster than they can reproduce.
There are a number of reasons why overfishing is happening:
- Improved ships: Super-trawlers have increased the amount of fish caught each year. These ships can catch fish and then store their catch in large refrigerators to preserve them. Smaller ships take the catch back to land, while the super-trawlers stay at sea.
- Improved technology: Super-trawlers have the means to better locate fish. They use echo sounders and sonar equipment to local shoals.
- Powerful motorised winch cranes can haul in huge nets full of fish.
- Netting: Monofilament nets are hard for fish to see. They hang like huge curtains in the ocean. Trawl nets scoop fish from the bottom of the sea floor.
Sustainable Exploitation of Fish Stocks
- Ensuring fishing trawlers only fish within their own waters.
- Reducing the amount of fish that are allowed to be caught; these are set by the government and the European Union.
- Reducing fishing fleets in our seas.
- Restricting fishing of certain types of fish at specific times of the year so as not to interrupt breeding seasons.
Sustainable Fishing in Ireland
- Aquaculture helps to provide sustainable fish supplies in Ireland.
- Aquaculture is the breeding, rearing and harvesting of animals and plants in water.
- Fish farming is Ireland's most common type of aquaculture.
- The positives and negatives of sustainable fish farming and aquaculture can be examined environmentally, economically and socially.
- Environmentally: Fish farming and aquaculture has helped fish stocks recover and even increase for some types of fish such as salmon. However there is a concern that wild fish caught and processed into food for farmed fish will reduce wild fish stocks.
- Economically: Fishing is worth hundreds of millions in Ireland each year. In 2015, the Irish seafood trade was valued at €891 million.
- Socially: The number of people employed in fish farming is 1,841 and in aquaculture there are 3,217 employed.