A study done by researchers at UNC has shown that up to 90 percent of predatory fish in coral reefs around the Bahamas, United States, Cuba, Mexico and Belize are gone due to predatory fishing.
The Daily Tar Heel’s Neecole Bostick interviewed John Bruno, a professor in the UNC Department of Biology, about the rapid decrease in fish.
The Daily Tar Heel: Why should we care about the fish?
John Bruno: For one, large vertebrate animals are under enormous pressure from (a) variety of factors, like fishing and human population growth. They could go extinct because they have smaller population sizes.
Predators are very sensitive to these factors. They have not evolved to fight against these factors, but prey generally have.
There’s a lot of economic and environmental factors ... affected by this. Coral reefs play a large part in tourism of these places. It’s a booming industry, and people pay a lot of money to see the wildlife in these ecosystems. It’s an enormous economic opportunity to restore these ecosystems, and will affect local coastal communities …
This is also very reflective of the entire ocean. Numbers of studies around the world have shown the same exact trend of roughly 90 percent of fish being removed. There are very few parts of the ocean where this hasn’t already happened. The problems are generally less severe in wealthier countries because there is less pressure to fish intensively — more so in the Florida Keys — than relatively poor Caribbean islands, like Haiti or the Dominican Republic. But other countries have begun to think about how to deal with this, like the Bahamas or Palau, and have started banning shark fishing.
DTH: Are these reefs protected by government laws?
