How 94% of fish stocks have vanished from British waters



Britain's fish stocks have fallen by 94 per cent since peak levels in 1937



Stocks of some popular fish in the waters around Britain have fallen to just 6 per cent of the level they were 120 years ago, an alarming study revealed yesterday.



It means that despite the march of technology, trawlers must work 17 times harder for each fish they catch than in the 19th century when vessels were sail-powered and kept close to port.



Experts found that the decline of cod, haddock and plaice since 1889, when the first government records of fish landings began, has been far greater than thought. But it has been masked by technological developments.



Fishermen now spend weeks at sea travelling to new fishing grounds and use deeper nets after being guided by radar towards shoals of fish.



Government statistics have been analysed for the first time by experts at the University of York and the Marine Conservation Society.



They show that levels of fish brought to shore peaked at 804,630 tons in 1937, compared with just 148,000 now.



In England and Wales the amount of fish being caught in the 19th century was more than four times greater than current levels.



Writing in the online journal Nature Communications, researchers said the decline in stocks of popular fish ‘is far more profound than previously thought’.



They warned that fisheries had been declining more seriously and over a longer period than has been suggested by scientific assessments of European fish stocks, which go back only 20 to 40 years.







And they called for much stronger reform of the EU Common Fisheries Policy to allow for fish in the seas around the UK to recover.



The policy allows foreign trawlers to take British fish on a massive scale and restricts what UK vessels can catch.



Britain is locked in a battle with Brussels over fish quotas-which force fishermen to dump nearly one million tons of dead fish into the North Sea each year.



A fisherman is banned from bringing fish ashore, even if it was caught accidentally, once he has reached his year’s quota for a particular species.



The scientists’ data showed that stocks of halibut, turbot, haddock and plaice have plunged by 94 per cent since 1889.



Cod has fallen by 87 per cent, hake by more than 95 per cent.



The study compared the effort trawlers put in with the amount of fish they were rewarded with to assess the availability of fish, taking into account the size of boats and the technology available.



In 1889 fleets of smaller boats spent far less time at sea but landed much greater catches.



Since the 1950s larger boats, new technology and much longer times at sea have all been introduced – but productivity has fallen dramatically, suggesting a rapid and sustained decline in stocks.



The crash since 1889 has been huge for some species – with the rate at which halibut were being caught declining 500 times.



Ruth Thurstan, the study’s lead author, said: ‘For all its technological sophistication and power, today’s trawl fishing fleet has far less success than its sail-powered equivalent of the late 19th century because of sharp declines in fish abundance.’

