By Stephen Leahy Nov 2 ’06 (IPS) – Every single commercial fishery in the world will be wiped before 2050 and the oceans may never recover if over-fishing continues at its current rate, a four-year scientific investigation has found.

“By the time my nine-year-old son is my age, there would be no wild seafood left,” said Emmett Duffy, a scientist at the Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences in the United States.

In this grim, not-to-far-off future, not only will there be no fish to eat, humans will also lose the vital services oceans provide, including processing wastes, cleaning beaches, controlling flooding and absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

The world’s oceans are already in a precarious state, hammered by extensive coastal pollution, climate change, over-fishing and the enormously wasteful practice of deep-sea trawling, in which heavily weighted nets dragged along the sea floor scoop up everything in their 100-metre-wide paths, including vast amounts of unwanted sea creatures, the so-called bycatch.

The only way to reverse this slide into an abysmal future is to stop fishing out one species after another to ensure there is an abundance of biodiversity in the seas, researchers have found.

For complete article see — Ocean Life on the Brink of No Return