So long and thanks for all the bottom-trawling

Source: GOOD magazine

I went to see ‘The End of the Line’ at the RSA recently - a screening in advance of the film being shown on More4 as part of the True Stories series (though it seems the listing is not yet publicly available).

At first, I bridled a bit at the inevitable Celebrity Serious Voice Narration (nature documentaries suffer as much as Shakespeare plays do: producers assume that gravity requires ponderousness?). But once I had made my peace with Ted Danson, I found the film to be an excellent introduction to a pressing and weirdly under-reported environmental crisis. In brief:

• Global fishing capacity is around four times too big, made worse by techniques such as bottom-trawling (in which an enormous net is dragged across the sea floor, catching and/or destroying everything from the seabed up).
• If we keep on fishing as we do now, we’ll catch all of our favourite fish before they have the chance to breed, destroying a vital source of food and changing marine ecosystems in ways that we can’t possibly predict.
• We are already pushing a number of formerly abundant species to the very brink. While many Brits are familiar with the demise of cod (and if not, why not?), the most immediate danger is that faced by bluefin tuna, a problem exacerbated by the recent travesty of a decision by the EU over fishing quotas.

Source: The Sea Around Us, Dr D Pauly

Enough drumbeating. From a research perspective, two moments in the film that stood out:

1. Dr Boris Worm’s (borrowed) phrase describing the difficulty of measuring fish stocks: “counting fish is a lot like counting trees, except that they’re invisible and they move”. After harping on about the tyranny of the measurable in previous posts, I’ll keep this brief: it’s easier to protect something that you can physically see disappearing (remarkably, even deforestation pales by comparison with what we’ve done, and are doing, in the oceans).
2. The revelation that we only realised the global catch was going down when Dr Daniel Pauly undertook a global study, and found that China was massively misreporting its data. This single calculation changed the figures for the entire world, and consequently made it a lot harder for anyone wishing to suggest that we could carry on with business as usual.

Both of these moments reinforced to me the problem of what Tom Ewing has called ‘the dark matter of research’: you know it’s there, but that’s all you know. I suggest that the above examples provide us with three categories of this dark matter:

1. The invisible: Anyone who dislikes surveys is invisible to surveys, unless (as in, say, a census) you can somehow force them to participate. This group can also include those without documentation, without good English and / or without an internet connection.
2. The mobile: This category includes all opinions that change with great ease. The ‘dark matter’ in this case is the elusive “unbiased response”. Would you recommend this product? What if I put it next to a similar, smellier one? What if I asked you again on a rainy day after you’d fought with your wife?
3. The falsified: A researcher only has so much time so if the problem is, like Dr Pauly’s, one of a national government not being entirely honest, there is very little you can do. Global oil reserves are a great example of this: we have no idea how extensive they are, despite the incalculable effect this information has across the world. 

Read more here

• Overfishing: are there really plenty of fish in the sea?
• Global economy is the world’s biggest ponzi scheme
• A future without fish: End of the Line casts scary forecast for the sea

About the author

Dave Bevan is an Interim Analyst working mainly in the Education Team at FreshMinds Research. He previously worked for the G77 (group of developing countries) at the Rome Chapter of the United Nations, and before that was a dessert chef, a tour guide on London’s open-top buses and an inconsistent stand-up comic. Dave’s interests include this, this and this.