The Outlook for Fisheries Research in the Next Ten Years

Abstract

The first stage of the industrialization of fisheries had been completed between 1879 and 1910: steam-driven purse seiners worked for menhaden off the eastern seaboard of the United States from 1870, steam trawlers operated in the North Sea from 1881 onwards, and steam longliners fished in the Pacific halibut fishery from the first decade of the present century. The second stage of industrialization took place in the 1950s and 1960s, with the introduction of factory methods aboard stern trawlers. At the beginning of this period, most stocks were unexploited (Graham 1951) but by the mid-1960s most were heavily fished; distant water fisheries expanded with freezer trawlers from Europe and the USSR, with pelagic longliners from Japan and Korea in the subtropical oceans (Rothschild and Uchida, 1968), and the four major upwelling areas (off California, Peru, North West Africa, and Namibia and South Africa) were exploited by purse seiners working for fish meal and oil. The present world catch is about 60 million tons (averaged from 1975 to 1979) and today most regions, but not all, on Graham’s chart would be recorded as being overfished, that is, more fish are killed than are needed for the optimal or even the maximal yield. There were three components of demand: (1) that of the Russians and Japanese for a main source of protein, (2) that of Western Europe and North America for frozen fish rather than lightly iced fish, and (3) that of the need for fish meal as an additive in animal food stuffs (as a cheap source of the essential amino acids lysine and methionine, absent in vegetable protein such as soya).