Over fishing a threat - Deccan Chronicle

Visakhapatnam: A team of scientists from the Central Institute of Fisheries Technology (CIFT) conducted a study on new fishery resources in the Bay of Bengal at a  depth of 300 m to 1100 m, found 155 new species of fish belonging to 88 families and 33 orders from the depths ranging from 50-1100m. Legless cuskeel, Deep-sea spiny eels, Common fang tooth, the bramble shark, and the sickle fin chimaeras were found to exist in the Bay of Bengal. Amongst them, Teleosts were represented by 121 species belonging to 65 families and 21 orders. Fishing has been an important occupation of mankind for some 90,000 years. But now worldwide coastal fisheries are in deep crisis due to over fishing, which threatens the world's food security, especially the animal protein supply, in developing countries. The deep-sea,  the part of the ocean over a depth of 200m,  is the largest habitat on earth where deep demersal fish comprising  about 6.4 per cent of the total number of species of fishes were identified. Deep-sea fishing continues to  flourish in developed countries and continents like Europe, Soviet, USA, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. India has a wide exclusive economic zone of about 2.172 million sq. km all along the 8129km long coastline. The living and non-living resources in this zone constitute around two-thirds of the landmass of the country. Of these, an area of 1.631 million sq. km covers the deeper parts of the EEZ at depths in excess of 500m, and the rest 0.541 million sq. km occurs in the shallow areas. Trawlers are  the main mode of the fishing sector and 50 per cent of the total Indian catch comes from trawlers. Scientists envisage that identifying new fishery resources can reduce the pressure on coastal fishery. The marine fish production which was only 0.5 million tons in the 50s had consistently increased to 2.7 million tons by late 90s. The present marine fish exploitation from Indian EEZ is 3.0 million tons out of the total estimated harvestable potential of 3.9 million tons. The remaining potential of about 0.92 million tons, largely in the deep-seas and oceanic region, remains untapped. The study by principal investigator Dr U. Sreedhar and his team revealed details of the various species of fish and their  concentration  at various depths along the Indian coasts. The study throws light on unknown stock structure of the deep-sea living resources and their diversity, according to the researchers. via Science - Google News http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&usg=AFQjCNFo28pyjMyRT9tzbTjnmUyJYU19hQ&url=http://www.deccanchronicle.com/130529/news-current-affairs/article/over-fishing-threat

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