HOPES that short-term cuts in fishing will quickly replenish Europe鈥檚 fish stocks are likely to be dashed 鈥� because overfishing goes back to the Victorians.
This week, ministers trying to reform the European Union鈥檚 Common Fisheries Policy , but more than half of these could recover to 1970s levels if fishing lets up for a few years. Yet this assumes that stocks were healthy 40 years ago.
That may be wrong. A team led by Ruth Thurston at the University of York, UK, calculated the amount of fish, such as cod, British trawlers caught between 1889 and 2007 per unit of 鈥渇ishing power鈥�. This is a measure based on factors such as the boat鈥檚 horsepower and the size of nets. They found that this dropped 17-fold in this period, suggesting that stocks had already fallen by over 90 per cent by the 1970s (Nature Communications, ).
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Overfishing for so long may have damaged marine ecosystems too much for them to recover quickly.
