New technology allows fleets to double their fishing capacity and deplete fish stocks faster

Technological advances are allowing commercial fishing fleets to double their fishing power every 35 years and put more pressure on declining fish stocks, according to new research.

Researchers from The sea around us The University of British Columbia initiative analyzed more than 50 studies related to increasing vessel capture capacity and found that the introduction of mechanisms such as GPS, fish sounders, Sound sounders or acoustic cameras led to an average of 2% per year increase in the ability of boats to catch fish.

"That means that if a fleet has 10 boats today, a generation later, these same 10 boats have the fishing power of 20 ships.The next generation, they have the power of 40 boats, etc.", said Deng Palomares. The sea around us project leader and lead author of the study, published today in Ecology and Society.

An increase in fishing power is known as "technological creep" and is generally ignored by fisheries managers who are responsible for regulating the number of days and hours and techniques that each vessel under their supervision is supposed to fishing during a given period.

"This" technology stream "is also ignored by most fisheries scientists who are responsible for proposing policies," said Daniel Pauly, director of the agency. The sea around us principal investigator. "They tend to conduct short-term studies that take into account only the nominal effort, which corresponds, for example, to the number of vessels fishing with longlining over a year, employing a number However, they do not take into account the effectiveness of these vessels' efforts through the technology that allows them to maintain their catches or to catch more fish. "

In their article, Palomares and Pauly propose a new equation that allows fisheries managers and scientists to easily estimate the technological creep accurately and determine the fleet's efficiency.

"It's important because if you do not understand that the power increase occurs, you do not understand that you can run out of stock," Pauly said. "We already know that catches of sea fishing have decreased by 1.2 million tonnes per year since 1996, so by encouraging vessels to fish deeper on the high seas, these new technologies are only helping the industry to offset the decline in the abundance of fish populations. "