More Than Just Meat

Here's an article from The Washington Post (registration required, though it's free) that explains how scientists have recently learned that "the red grouper off Florida's east and west coasts and throughout the Gulf of Mexico have created entire ocean communities by digging large holes in the sea's sandy bottom. In the same way beavers construct dams, red grouper excavate and maintain distinct holes whose rocky surfaces provide a place for coral, sponges and other marine life to congregate."

Why is this important? Well, it helps us understand that fish live in ecosystems. As one person says, "We now see fish as living, breathing entities, not only as meat." The fact is, we've been despoiling the seas, and one reason for that is because we catch fish without considering the impact on their entire ecosystem.

By building complex, three-dimensional structures that expose the hard rock beneath the sand, Miller said, red grouper create an environment in which seaweed, coral and sponges can thrive. These communities then attract everything from cleaner fish to female grouper seeking a mate.

"It's just a very cool ecological story," Miller said. "They really have this tremendous ability in getting these diverse communities of organisms to exist in a place that otherwise wouldn't be there."

Steve Bortone, executive director of the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council, said he and other managers need to consider the environmental impact of red grouper digging patterns when they set future commercial and recreational catch quotas for the species. "We need to take into account this community aspect, which I think has been neglected," Bortone said.

We've been destroying one species of sea life after another for decades now, and it's only getting worse. We decimated the whales long ago, but that same sort of thing continues still. We over-fish a desirable species until the population crashes, at which point we switch to another and do the same thing. (That's why we see formerly undesirable fish like slimeheads - renamed to "orange roughy" for obvious reasons - becoming popular for awhile, until their numbers also plummet.)

These species often don't recover, because their numbers just get too small, and removing them from the ecosystem causes too many changes. They're not just meat, they're living species. They live in a particular environment, and they also affect that environment. Through our greed, our extreme myopia, and our willful ignorance, we are decimating our planet, and nowhere worse than in the oceans. Well, maybe it's easier to overlook when it's underwater.

"If you remove that fish, it puts into motion a whole chain of events," said Don deMaria, who used to fish for red grouper near Key Largo, Fla., but no longer does. "There's a whole lot of other critters that are affected. I'm not saying you can't catch them. But you can't do it to the extent we've been doing for the last 20 years." 

That's just it. We must learn to fish sustainably. Otherwise, we are just raping the planet and stealing from our grandchildren. And we must look at ecosystems, not just individual species. If we don't wise up, the next species to crash might well be our own.

Edit: see also this post on Unsustainable Fishing.