Environmental Impact Of Fishing

Environmental impact of fishing
The environmental impact of fishing can be divided into issues that involve the availability of fish to be caught, such as overfishing, sustainable fisheries, andfisheries management; and issues that involve the impact of fishing on other elements of the environment, such as by-catch. There is a growing gap between how many fish are available to be caught andhumanity’s desire to catch them, a problem that gets worse as the world population grows.
Effects on habitat
Some fishing techniques also may cause habitat destruction:
* Dynamite fishing and* cyanide fishing,
* Bottom trawling, the practice of pulling a fishing net along the sea bottom behind trawlers, removes around 5 to 25% of an area's seabed life on a single run.
Which areillegal in many places, harm surrounding habitat. A 2005 report of the UN Millennium Project, commissioned by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, recommended the elimination of bottom trawling on the highseas by 2006 to protect seamounts and other ecologically sensitive habitats.
1. Overfishing
Overfishing has also been widely reported due to increases in the volume of fishing hauls to feed aquickly growing number of consumers. This has led to the breakdown of some sea ecosystems. The extinction of many species has also been reported. According to a Food and Agriculture Organization estimate,over 70% of the world’s fish species are either fully exploited or depleted.
2. Ecological disruption
Fishing may disrupt food webs by targeting specific, in-demand species. There might be toomuch fishing of prey species such as sardines and anchovies, thus reducing the food supply for the predators. It may also cause the increase of prey species when the target fishes are predator speciessuch as salmon and tuna. Fisheries can reduce fish stocks that cetaceans rely on for food.
3. By-catch
By-catch is the portion of the catch that is not the target species. These are either kept...