Is the Med dead?

AndrewB

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Thank goodness fish farming is coming into the Med on an industrial scale. The Sea Bass and Bream in your local supermarket have likely come from Greece.

Even so, wild fish are still being overfished, but in Greece at least there are fewer large boats out simply because there are so few fish left. Octopus, once the mainstay of poor families, like oysters in England, are all but extinct and have to be imported from SE Asia.

The one/two man boats now go for the very smallest fish - 'Gavros' they are called, though they are wrongly named as sardines in tourist restaurants. I avoid these after wondering why local fishermen fished so close to yachts in anchorages, then realised these fish are attracted by human waste. (Yuk!)

There are some signs of recovery. I saw several swordfish jumping last year, some decent sized.
 

DownWest

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Around '87, I was in Athens. Greek friends with us and talking food. I asked why the squid were all the same size in the restaurants, as they were all sorts of sizes back home in Portugal. Answer was that there weren't any about Greece, as fished out, they came from New Zealand .
 

capnsensible

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Thank goodness fish farming is coming into the Med on an industrial scale. The Sea Bass and Bream in your local supermarket have likely come from Greece.

Even so, wild fish are still being overfished, but in Greece at least there are fewer large boats out simply because there are so few fish left. Octopus, once the mainstay of poor families, like oysters in England, are all but extinct and have to be imported from SE Asia.

The one/two man boats now go for the very smallest fish - 'Gavros' they are called, though they are wrongly named as sardines in tourist restaurants. I avoid these after wondering why local fishermen fished so close to yachts in anchorages, then realised these fish are attracted by human waste. (Yuk!)

There are some signs of recovery. I saw several swordfish jumping last year, some decent sized.
Every silver lining has a cloud...

In Lanzarote there has been a big fish farm off Playa Quemada for many years. After continual complaints from locals how the sea bed in the surrounding area has been heavily polluted by uneaten food pellets and excrement, the local government have finally ordered its removal. At its peak there were 58 cages.

This was written before the removal:

Fish farm has “dire” effect on Playa Quemada - Gazette Life

But I suppose with the sea bed in the Med wrecked in so many places, it may do no further harm to install the cages and harvest the result.

However, I don't pretend to be an expert in fish farming.....
 

Kelpie

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What are the farmed fish being fed on?
I only know about salmon farming, in which the pellets are made up of various wild caught fish (including krill) plus some wheat and soy. If the fish content is too low the salmon lacks omega-3 oil.

It's essentially a way of turning 'low grade' fish in to a higher value product.

Environmentally it's pretty questionable. In more enlightened countries like Faroe, the sites are rotated regularly to prevent damaging the seabed in one location. In the UK the sites stay in the same place for decades because it's hard to get permission for a new site. The system is not set up to encourage rotation.

It's not all bad though. Prawns seem to thrive under the fish cages and you'll find fishermen try to shoot their creels as close as they dare to get the best catches, even if that means losing gear when it gets tangled in the anchors. Mmmm, yummy poo-fed prawns...
 

L_555

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The majority of the med in the west is a marinne park- no large scale fishing boats allowed. certinaly the local fishermen around there have seen their catches decrease over the years however.
 

westernman

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The majority of the med in the west is a marinne park- no large scale fishing boats allowed. certinaly the local fishermen around there have seen their catches decrease over the years however.
It is a lot more reglemented and fishing time is limited.

For instance a Rosas marina in the early hours of some mornings a siren will go off signally the start of the allowed fishing time. Then you will see a dozen or more fishing boats heading out a full throttle belching black smoke to get to their favourite spot as quickly as possible to make the most of the limited time allowed.
 

AndrewB

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Every silver lining has a cloud...

In Lanzarote there has been a big fish farm off Playa Quemada for many years. After continual complaints from locals how the sea bed in the surrounding area has been heavily polluted by uneaten food pellets and excrement, the local government have finally ordered its removal. At its peak there were 58 cages. ... But I suppose with the sea bed in the Med wrecked in so many places, it may do no further harm to install the cages and harvest the result.
Whatever the short-term issues, fish farming is ultimately both essential and inevitable. Of course it will have a major impact on ecology, just as land faming has. (Just imagine England without farms). And farmed fish will never taste as good as wild fish, any more than domestic pig tastes as good as wild boar. But without farming, humans will continue to catch and eat their way down the wild food chain, ensuring not only that larger fish are fished out, but that they cannot recover.

I'm surprised that people are not more aware of the extent of fish farming already in the Med. The east coast of Italy for example, from Venice down to Ancona, is one massive fish farm - which incidentally is quite an obstacle to cruising the Adriatic.
 

capnsensible

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Whatever the short-term issues, fish farming is ultimately both essential and inevitable. Of course it will have a major impact on ecology, just as land faming has. (Just imagine England without farms). And farmed fish will never taste as good as wild fish, any more than domestic pig tastes as good as wild boar. But without farming, humans will continue to catch and eat their way down the wild food chain, ensuring not only that larger fish are fished out, but that they cannot recover.

I'm surprised that people are not more aware of the extent of fish farming already in the Med. The east coast of Italy for example, from Venice down to Ancona, is one massive fish farm - which incidentally is quite an obstacle to cruising the Adriatic.
Please don't miss understand.... in principle I agree. So if the water is good and the seabed is already knackered, it's to me, logical.

I'm a bit out of date for the area but I recall a big fish farm up past Marbella and a huge one near La Linea. The last one I think is now gone, but I may be wrong. InGibraltar Bay not-quite-the-Med there are mussel farms in Getares Bay. They don't seem to be killing punters so I guess the water is clean enough.

Actually, for me it was great whatever the weather to get my sea school students to do laps around it to learn tacking, gybing and sail trim. But thats drifting th thread a lot.... :)

What bothers me are the reports from people like Rod Heikel who do the research and what I've seen delivering yachts to the Eastern Med. The Arab countries are, it seems to me, less careful of their environment and the impact on the Med.

As I've mentioned, there's stacks of interesting (to me) sites on the Web written by active researchers. I put we8ght on their knowledge.
 

Daydream believer

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We waste £bn in this country on so called green enery c..p. Electric cars , windmills & efforts to reduce emissions etc. All of which are a waste of time to me.
Leave me alone in the way I run my life. But you can ask me to be careful in what I recycle & what I do that effects what ends up in the sea. Yes, I still have to go to the loo, but I would happily pay to have it properly treated prior to it getting into the oceans.
I would not complain about paying more for food, if it did not poison our rivers. Farmers have plenty of land to grow less efficient crops, if we paid them the proper rate. They have been growing stuff for centuries & should know how by now.
I would have no objection to the govt. WEF et alia spending the money they steal from us on stupid carbon policies, on cleaning up the oceans. It would be something that I could see having an effect, possibly even in my limited lifetime.
 

Bouba

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We waste £bn in this country on so called green enery c..p. Electric cars , windmills & efforts to reduce emissions etc. All of which are a waste of time to me.
Leave me alone in the way I run my life. But you can ask me to be careful in what I recycle & what I do that effects what ends up in the sea. Yes, I still have to go to the loo, but I would happily pay to have it properly treated prior to it getting into the oceans.
I would not complain about paying more for food, if it did not poison our rivers. Farmers have plenty of land to grow less efficient crops, if we paid them the proper rate. They have been growing stuff for centuries & should know how by now.
I would have no objection to the govt. WEF et alia spending the money they steal from us on stupid carbon policies, on cleaning up the oceans. It would be something that I could see having an effect, possibly even in my limited lifetime.
To quote what the wife always says to me...’did you enjoy your little rant ?’
 

Daydream believer

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With all the plastic that reaches the oceans, have any animals learned to adapt to it? For instance, some crabs move from shell to shell as they grow. Has there been any instances of crabs using, say, plastic bottles. I am sure David Attenborough would be mortified to see a Coke bottle crab. But is such a thing a possibility? How about eels & other fish hiding in bottles or containers? I have seen pictures of a seal with a plastic ring round its neck so I assume they have been nosing around in containers. Possibly after prey. Unless they have learned how to play hoopla :rolleyes:
Any divers seen evidence of such events?
 
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