Greenpeace is well known for non-violent direct action in support of conservation. Very recently, they took a bold step in the German North Sea when they placed large granite boulders, each weighing two to three tons, around the Sylt Outer Reef. This reef is one of the few areas of rocky sea bed in the North Sea and is designated as a Special Area of Conservation under European Law. At first glance it might seem like some madness has overcome Greenpeace activists since the reef is officially protected. But Greenpeace’s action highlights the present weakness of marine protected areas in Europe.

Special Areas of Conservation (SACs) are intended to protect sites that support species and habitats determined by European legislators to be important. In the sea, this means reefs, caves, shallow sandbanks and a few other habitats, and a rather short list of species that includes charismatic animals like the Harbor Porpoise. Setting aside the problem that the list of habitats and species SACs can protect is brief, arbitrary, and fails to encompass anything like the range of wildlife that needs protection, at present most SACs offer little benefit to marine life at all.

SACs are intended to maintain habitats and species’ populations in ‘favourable condition’, which in practice usually means little more than ‘not declining’. To designate one, conservation agencies seek places with sufficient in the way of life that it seems worth having one. In most cases, it is assumed that these places are in favourable condition and management is therefore focussed on preventing decline. If you take this view, as many government conservation agencies have, it implies that present uses of a site are entirely compatible with conservation. This is rather convenient if you want to avoid having to upset anybody whose activities might be curtailed, and it is certainly a good way to save money on management costs. But it is a policy that is failing Europe’s marine life badly. In my view, the acronym SAC perhaps more accurately expands to Suspicious Absence of Conservation!

The problem with this thinking is that it fails to redress past human impacts that have degraded the sites. A little history is in order here. In the mid-19^th century and before, a vast area of the Southern North Sea was crusted with oysters and a myriad of other invertebrates including corals, seafans and sponges. In the 1880s, newly invented steam trawlers began to drag their nets back and forth across the seabed to catch fish, in the process tearing up marine life. Before long, little of this highly productive habitat remained, leaving behind the shifting sands and gravel familiar today. The last commercial catches of oysters were made in the 1930s and the last living oysters were caught in the 1970s. Only a few pockets of hard bottom remain, like the Sylt Outer Reef.

The German government has not protected the Sylt Outer Reef  SAC from bottom trawling. Greenpeace’s boulders are intended to help achieve what they have not. In the Mediterranean, many seagrass meadows have been damaged or destroyed by bottom trawlers. France and Spain have both seeded important areas of seagrass with anti-trawling reefs that snag and tear trawl nets, keeping fishers out. Hopefully, the Sylt Outer Reef will at last get the protection it deserves.

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Callum Roberts is Professor of Marine Conservation at the University of York in England and the author of The Unnatural History of the Sea. Click here to visit his website.

This week I was interviewed for The Food Programme which airs on radio in the UK. Its subject was the anchovy, a marine fish humble in size but prolific in life. Most of us are familiar with anchovies only as dark, finger-sized fillets in olive oil. Their piquant flavour gives zest to hundreds of dishes from pizza to stuffed peppers to lamb chops. What is less well known is that their popularity as a cooking ingredient extends back thousands of years.

Anchovies have been caught in commercial quantities in Europe since antiquity. Archaeologists have, for example, found the remains of fish salting vats in Black Sea coastal settlements that date from the 2^nd and 3^rd Centuries AD. Layers of bones at the bottom of show they were used for processing anchovies and other small-bodied fish. Salted anchovies, probably preserved in oil much as they are today, were traded over long distances, reaching as far afield as England.

Anchovies were used to make garum, a highly popular fish sauce in ancient Rome. This was made up of the macerated guts of anchovies and other fish, fermented in brine and mixed with wine, vinegar, pepper or water. Apparently, the process was so offensive that garum factories were forbidden from built up areas. The deep history of culinary use perhaps explains our fondness for anchovy today. Anchovy paste has been spread on toast for hundreds of years and the fish is a key ingredient of Worcestershire sauce, a condiment that dates to the early 19^th century.

There are nearly 140 species of anchovies worldwide. Most live close to coasts and estuaries in warm temperate waters, like those of California, the Mediterranean, Japan, South Africa and Peru. Few species reach more than 6 inches (15cm) long. But what they lack in size they more than compensate for in production. Anchovies live fast and die young, first spawning at about a year old and rarely living beyond four. They eat plankton and with their prodigious powers of increase prosper when plankton blooms. Five to ten percent of world fish catches are anchovies, most of which come from highly productive places like Peru where nutrient rich water upwells from the depths. Despite their abundance, we don’t eat that many, at least directly. The vast majority are converted to fishmeal and fed to hogs, chickens and fish and prawns raised in aquaculture facilities. Others are used as bait for species like tuna.

When environmental conditions are right it is almost impossible to overfish such productive species, which is why anchovies are listed as an excellent choice in most ethical seafood guides. But when conditions are bad things can go wrong quickly. During good times fishing boats pile in to the industry as there is plenty for all. But in bad times this excess fishing capacity can hit stocks hard. Intense El Nino conditions in Peru in 1972 precipitated the collapse of the world’s largest fishery. By the 1980s, the fishery recovered, but landings continue to fluctuate widely. In Europe’s Cantabrian Sea off the coasts of France and Spain, one of the most ancient fisheries for anchovy has been closed since 2006. There is a lot of waiting in fishing. Nobody knows how long people will have to wait there for the next anchovy boom.

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Callum Roberts is Professor of Marine Conservation at the University of York in England and the author of The Unnatural History of the Sea. Click here to visit his website.

Majorca is a Mediterranean Island hugely popular with European tourists. This year, visitors lounging on its beaches may notice an unusual number of fishing boats sweeping back and forth just offshore. This level of activity might surprise tourists who have heard of recent declines in European fish populations, especially hard pressed nearshore stocks in the Mediterranean. The solution to this conundrum is that the boats are after jellyfish, not fish.

Jellyfish are a bit of a spoiler for a beach holiday, particularly the stinging variety. In the Mediterranean, Pelagia noctiluca or the mauve stinger, is notorious and especially prone to blooms. Swarms pushed inshore by wind and tide can clear the sea of bathers almost as fast as a shout of ‘shark‘! Sometimes beaches have to be closed for days. In the heavily polluted Adriatic Sea east of Italy, great heaps of jellyfish are occasionally thrown onto beaches where they expire and putrify in the sun. Should such blooms threaten Majorcan beaches, the hope is that they will not make it ashore. Forty fishing boats are on standby throughout the summer to catch jellyfish if the need arises.

Plagues of jellyfish have become a regular phenomenon in places where fish have been overexploited and nutrient pollution fertilises the ocean. Overexploitation of fish reduces predation on jellyfish and raised nutrients stimulate plankton growth. Both conditions apply in the Mediterranean. There coastal fish populations are among the most overexploited in the world having been subject to commercial fishing since antiquity, and nutrient pollution is high from agricultural runoff, industrial effluents and sewage (much of it from the millions of visitors). As a result, the region often suffers serious outbreaks of jellyfish and other gelatinous zooplankton.

Increased jellyfish numbers can pose problems for fish stocks. In the North Sea, favourable climatic conditions in the early 1970s led to high abundances of jellyfish. Jellyfish prey on fish larvae and compete with them for other zooplankton food. The outbreak helped precipitate the collapse of herring stocks in the North Sea putting many fishers out of work. Aquaculture facilities are also at risk. Last year, more than 100,000 salmon were wiped out in an Irish fish farm after a ten square mile swarm of mauve stingers swept inshore.

There have always been outbreaks of jellyfish and always will be. Animals that can put on 10-20% of their body weight every day soon become a nuisance when conditions favour. But the increased frequency and severity of outbreaks today is a human problem the cure for which is for us to fish and pollute less. For the past century or two, fishing has been simplifying aquatic food webs and in many places has reduced the abundance of large fish more than 10-fold. Complex food webs afford fewer opportunities for outbreaks of animals like jellyfish than simplified ones. We see this truth all around us on farmland where a few species of plants dominate and chemicals must be used to control pest and weed outbreaks. We have little recourse to chemicals in the sea so must instead change the way we manage ocean resources. Instead of thinking only of what we can extract from the sea, we need to rebuild the abundance, variety and complexity of life. In such a world, Majorcan fishers could concentrate on catching fish, not jellyfish.

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Callum Roberts is Professor of Marine Conservation at the University of York in England and the author of The Unnatural History of the Sea. Click here to visit his website.

My daughters are 7 and 8 years old. Like many children of their age, they like fish but are deeply suspicious of anything that looks like it might once have been alive. For them fish means fish sticks or cakes, crusted in unnaturally orange breadcrumbs and slathered in ketchup gore. At a push they sometimes accept a piece of Marine Stewardship Council certified sustainable pollock from the North Pacific, but breadcrumbs are mandatory.

Like many parents, I want my kids to eat fish for the health benefits but what goes into processed fish troubles me. A few years ago, I met a fish trader from the North Sea port of Grimsby on the English coast. He described to me the odyssey of a fishing trawler landing its catch in Europe. Once the hold was full, the captain first took the boat to France where prime fish sell for premium prices. He then headed to Holland where second quality fish were sold to less discerning customers. Finally, the captain chugged his way to Grimsby to offload the remainder of the catch, now rather tired and definitely third rate. They would be made into fish sticks and cakes…destined for our children.

Now I know that not all fish sticks are that bad. In the better ones, it’s even possible to make out the odd flake of fish flesh amid binder and protein gel. I wonder what my children would make of the diet of Harvey Cheyne, the 15-year-old boy in Rudyard Kipling’s 1897 novel, Captains Courageous. Harvey is a pampered rich kid who falls off a steamer in thick fog off the Canadian Grand Banks and is picked up by a fishing boat. He has to muck in with the crew and live like them. You might think that 19^th century fishers dined well on the best cuts of the fish they caught, and they did. But it wouldn’t be fish recognisable to most of us today. The cod they caught were mighty beasts. Rather than eat saleable fillet, the cook boiled up cod heads and sailors dined on tongues, cheeks and eyeballs. Most fish are sold today without their heads or are so small it is hard to put this diet to the test. But I can confirm from experience that cheeks are among the most succulent pieces of any fish. I’m not an eyeball man though…too crunchy!

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Callum Roberts is Professor of Marine Conservation at the University of York in England and the author of The Unnatural History of the Sea. Click here to visit his website.

Last Saturday I found myself in the local supermarket browsing for dinner. In the seafood section I spied a slim package with two pieces of plaice in it, a kind of flatfish rather like flounder. Each was little bigger than a dollar bill and weighed just four and a half ounces. What struck me about this package was a label that proclaimed they were ‘large’ fish. The fillets in the packet could not have come from an animal more than 10 inches long. Moreover, these fish were certainly immature and had never had a chance to breed. But they were legal to sell. Some years ago, if I recall correctly, the French Fishery Minister persuaded fellow nations in the European Union that the capture of juvenile plaice should be allowed because French consumers demanded fish small enough to fit their plates.

The fortunes of plaice have been transformed over the last 200 years. In the 19^th century they were shunned by well-to-do customers as ‘offal’ fish; good only for the poor. They gained favour in the early 20^th century as the new steam powered draggers brought record catches ashore that found a ready market in inland towns and cities. A hundred years ago, a large plaice was a grand beast. A fish had to be 20 to 24 inches long and weigh three to four pounds to be considered big. At that time, grizzled old timers of 32 to 40 inches long were still sometimes caught. I doubt such a fish has been taken from the North Sea in the last half century.

My encounter with the supermarket plaice neatly illustrates the phenomenon of shifting baselines, changes in the way we perceive the world. Over time, intensive fishing has reduced numbers of big, old, fat fish. What would in 1900 have been almost too small to bother with is now all that is on offer, and to us seem large. The loss of big fish, while convenient for supermarket traders who like plate-size fillets, is bad news for the survival of fish in the wild. Landings of plaice into England have fallen by 96% since 1900 as stocks have crashed. And there is little prospect of recovery while most fish get taken before they have a chance to reproduce. Big fish produce many times more offspring than small ones so they are vital to sustaining healthy populations in the sea. If commercial fish like plaice are to have a future, we must create refuges in the oceans where big old fish can live long and productive lives. Their young will help fisheries prosper once more in the rest of the sea.

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Callum Roberts is Professor of Marine Conservation at the University of York in England and the author of The Unnatural History of the Sea. Click here to visit his website.

Recent hikes in oil prices are hitting the fishing industry where it hurts most: on the profit margin. In the process, some fish stocks are getting a much needed respite from intensive exploitation. Fishers in Europe have blockaded ports in recent weeks to protest at rising fuel costs, claiming that they can no longer make a living. This could well be true, because modern industrial fishing is one of the most fuel hungry means of producing food. 

A few years ago, Peter Tyedmers of Dalhousie University in Canada looked at how much fuel was used to catch the fish we eat. His research produced figures that should startle any seafood lover. If cod, haddock or flounder find their way onto you plate, the fuel cost of catching them was a third to a half of the weight of your fillet. If line caught swordfish or tuna are your favourites, the fuel burnt to catch them was roughly equal to the weight of your fish portion. Not all fisheries are this bad. Small open water fishes caught using purse seines, giant nets set around shoals of fish, are the least fuel intensive fisheries. If you enjoy herring or capelin for example, the fuel burnt to catch them is only one or two percent of the weight of fish landed. But most of these species are fed to pigs, chickens or pen-raised fish like salmon, and are not eaten directly by us.

A more alarming finding of Tyedmers’ research is that fisheries today burn more fuel to catch less fish than they did in the past. As fish stocks fall, fishers must travel further and fish for longer to land smaller catches. Over the period 1986 to 1999, the fuel cost of catching haddock off eastern Canada doubled, for example. While many industries are today reducing their carbon footprint to combat climate change, the fishing industry’s thirst for petroleum grows.

For many years, governments around the world have propped up unsustainable levels of fishing with generous tax breaks on fuel. In Britain, fishers are charged only half the price the public pay for fuel. For decades environmentalists have called for subsidies to be scrapped because they encourage overfishing. Most governments have resisted, perhaps because they know that withdrawal of subsidies could drive people out of business. Rising fuel prices have now exposed an industry hooked on oil whose profits are dependent on taxpayer handouts. According to the University of British Columbia economist Rashid Sumaila, profit margins in deep-sea trawl fisheries are wholly dependent on fuel subsidies. The same is true for many other fisheries.

Protesting fishers in Europe want deeper tax breaks on fuel from their governments. But what they should really protest for is better management. In the North Atlantic, fish stocks are less than 10 percent of what they were a century ago and the fishing fleet is an estimated 40-50% larger than the remaining fish can support. As painful as spiralling fuel costs may be, it is perhaps the best medicine for an ailing industry. Fish may at last get a little breathing space to help them recover.

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Callum Roberts is Professor of Marine Conservation at the University of York in England and the author of The Unnatural History of the Sea. Click here to visit his website.

News comes this week that the Giant Devil Ray (Mobula mobular) has declined so much in abundance in recent years that it has been listed as endangered on the World Conservation Union’s Red List of Threatened Species (according to Dulvy et al. writing in Aquatic Conservation: Marine and Freshwater Ecosystems). This vast fish has a wingspan that can top five metres and spends most of its time flapping gracefully near the surface, straining plankton and small fish from the water. It lives in the Mediterranean and eastern North Atlantic and has fallen victim to longline fishing.

The Giant Devil Ray is part of the manta ray family, a group of species that inhabit tropical and warm temperate seas and grow to extraordinary sizes. While this species sometimes punctuates its tranquil days with spectacular leaps, it can hardly be considered devilish. It was probably named after the two leathery ‘horns’ that funnel plankton laden-water into a permanent open-mouthed grin.

There is a more colourful explanation for the name. Few 19^th century books on ocean life were complete without a vivid description of some hapless pearl diver falling victim to a devil ray. Some books included illustrations of divers carried to the bottom wrapped in the wings of a ray, eyes bulging with fear as they succumbed to its clammy embrace.

But in truth, these were groundless tales from distant seas. Devil rays had more to fear from people than the other way around. Rays basking at the surface were often speared and hooked for sport by adventurers, or simply sailors maddened with boredom far from land. The rays often outwitted their hunters, towing boats with effortless strength until lines parted. Today, fishers have the upper hand, although few target the rays directly.

The Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic is criss-crossed with a giant web of hundreds of thousands of kilometres of longlines, studded with millions of hooks. They are set by fishers who seek valuable tunas and billfish in nutrient rich frontal zones where the water is thickened by plankton and prey fish, and where devil rays congregate. There are probably few devil rays above reproductive age (about 3 years) that have not at some point encountered a longline. While the rays are probably unimpressed by longline baits, they become entangled and some are hooked. In the 21^st century, the tables are turned. It is devil rays that are gripped in a death clasp. Unless we reduce fishing pressure and take the lines into deeper waters beyond the reach of rays, this species may disappear for good. What a sorry end that would be for a most devilish fish.

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Callum Roberts is Professor of Marine Conservation at the University of York in England and the author of The Unnatural History of the Sea. Click here to visit his website.

Next year could herald the beginning of a momentous change to the way the sea is managed around Britain, my home country. Members of Parliament (MPs) are holding hearings into the draft of a “Marine Bill” that will be debated in Parliament later this year. If the Bill gets through in anything like its current form, it will provide the means to establish a national network of marine protected areas, some of which could be highly protected from exploitation and other sources of human impact. It would also establish a Marine Management Organisation to unify governance roles that are now splintered among countless entities. These are worthy aims and the Bill has cross-party support. So why am I worried?

Last week I briefed the opposition party on the state of Britain’s seas. I began by posing a question that I put to my freshman students this year. How much fish do you think we land today into England compared with the amount caught in 1920? I could see some MPs mentally calculating the change in fishing power: steam to diesel engines; small to large vessels; hemp twine to monofilament nets; and the late 20^th century’s breathtaking technological advances in fish finding gear. A straw poll among my students returned estimates of catches two to ten times greater today than 1920, and the MPs drew similar conclusions.

The real answer is that we land less than one tenth of the fish caught in 1920 using bottom trawl gears. Catches have nose-dived. These figures paint a more arresting picture of change than any that emerge from government fishery establishments because they go back much farther in time. Most of the statistics offered up for ministerial consumption extend back only to the early 1980s at best, so the full sweep of decline is never seen. Make no mistake, industrial fishing has laid waste to Britain’s seas.

If fish are to remain part of the British diet we must reduce fishing and place conservation at the heart of marine policy. So the Marine Bill is a welcome opportunity for change. I worry though, because even faced with such compelling evidence, politicians find it hard to stomach the cure. When I suggested putting a third of Britain’s seas off limits to fishing as part of a package of reforms to the way we manage the sea, the response from MPs was “We couldn’t possibly do that! People would never accept it.” (Skeptical readers might substitute “the fishing industry wont buy it.”)

The ability to resist change is a human foible most of us share. We hate to abandon cherished ideas, no matter how compelling the evidence against them. Institutions, especially government ones, develop over time into Byzantine bureaucracies whose methods are hard to understand, let alone alter. But if politicians really want a future for the fishing industry, they must first rethink the future for fish. We can’t return the seas to their primordial state and nor should we. But we have to raise the level of our ambitions to restore the diversity, vitality, productivity and beauty of marine life. Policies that once seemed unthinkable - like protecting a third of our seas - must now be contemplated.

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Callum Roberts is Professor of Marine Conservation at the University of York in England and the author of The Unnatural History of the Sea. Click here to visit his website.