Fishing

Gourmets visiting Sylt, Germany’s idyllic North Sea vacation destination, can choose between fresh Pacific oysters and native blue mussels. But what seems like fine dining is actually a cautionary tale as the foreign oysters threaten to overrun the native mussels.

For thousands of years people have taken to the sea to fish and trade. Wars have been fought as rival rulers claimed the rights to the sea and its exploitation. Those conflicts have continued to this day.

Aquaculture is booming – in 2014 nearly every second fish consumed by people came from a fish farm. The ecological and social problems caused by this aquatic stockbreeding are immense.

The plants and animals that currently live in the “wilderness” of the ocean or in marine protected areas are just a fraction of what once thrived in the seas. To understand what we’ve lost and what we might be able to recover, we need to know what used to be.

Fish is a cornerstone of global food security. This global dependence on fish is actually the greatest threat to our fish populations. Many are overfished, and the number is rising.

This is the story of one Cambodian fisherman whose case stands for those of thousands of other men being forced to work on fishing trawlers.

Oceans have always played a key role for life on earth. In his lecture, marine conservation biologist and author Callum Roberts (University of York, England), describes the distressing dimension that the relatively short human rule of the seas has reached throughout the past decade.