Here is the fish market in Puerto Lopez, Manabi, Ecuador. This small fishing village (my favorite place in the world) is essentially populated with independent fishers yet they avoid the Tragedy of the Commons through community agreements.
This is a fantastic Prezi reviewing the causes, effects and solutions to overfishing. Use it as a study guide.
Damming rivers affects the migratory patterns of fish species. A fish ladder may be installed to allow these species to migrate upstream to their breeding waters.
The Arctic is home to several of the world’s largest fish stocks that support valuable commercial fisheries. Unlike other ecosystems, the Arctic has relatively few species, but conversely it has large quantities of each species.
Temperature is one of the most important factors determining the extent of large fish stocks and their access to food and spawning areas. As the Arctic gradually warms, the sea ice will melt faster and over greater areas of the continental shelf during the spring and extend towards the deep sea in the central Arctic. Moderate warming would result in better access to food for species such as cod and herring because higher temperatures and less ice would probably result in higher productivity of their prey. However, since the Arctic is experiencing the strongest and fastest warming on the globe, these temperature increases would no longer be moderate ones, and there are no guarantees that warmer arctic seas - with depths of up to 4,000 metres - would be a suitable habitat for fish such as cod.
Ocean plastic pollution is a major environmental problem. The United Nations Environmental Programme "estimate(s) that more than 8.3 billion tonnes of plastic has been produced since the early 1950s. About 60% of that plastic has ended up in either a landfill or the natural environment."
Some of this plastic pollution comes from ghost nets, which are fishing nets that have been abandoned, lost or discarded at sea, on beaches or in harbors. These cause a greater loss of biodiversity like whales, sharks, turtles, seals and birds.
United Nations Environment Programme. (n.d.). #BeatPlasticPollution This World Environment Day. Retrieved from https://www.unep.org/interactive/beat-plastic-pollution.
