The Seaspiracy documentary has rightly taken the Netflix crowd by storm ever since it came on stream by virtue of its compelling footage and doomsday scenarios for fishing stocks worldwide. It has managed to connect to the public in a strident way, which is unprecedented for any previous digital production, bridging the emotional deficit marine conservationists lament so much about as the cause of the public feeling disconnected from marine conservation efforts.

This despite the sensationalist timbre of the production which latches on to misconstrued statistics and which takes aim at the wrong targets and peddles the wrong kind of recommendations.

Seaspiracy, for instance, has been taken to task for the 2048 apocalyptical scenario which they depict - that, by the year 2048, the seas would have been completely depleted of fish - by misquoting a scientific paper which had concluded that, by that year, commercially-exploited fish species would be so depleted that their fisheries would collapse. This is a far cry from what the documentary is actually claiming.

There are other serious flaws in the scenario portrayed within the documentary, such as the actual contribution that discarded fishing gear makes to global marine litter (which is still considerable, mind you). A number of marine conservation groups, most notably Oceana, which are deemed too moderate in their approach, are taken to the cleaners within the production by cornering them through awkward questions and this is counterproductive, given the sterling work conducted by the same NGOs.

By attacking these environmental advocates, the documentary is basically shooting the marine conservation movement in the foot. The documentary’s producers also muddle the distinction between by-catch and discards, with the former consisting of non-target fish species which are still sold on the market while the latter are not and are simply tossed back into the sea.

The presumptive solutions fielded by the documentary’s producer, which basically consist in customers giving fish the cold shoulders and, instead, embracing veganism, have also come under fire for a number of reasons. These include the fact that at least 20 per cent of the world’s population relies on fish as their primary source of protein, the fact that eating fish is generally part of a healthy lifestyle and that the livelihoods of full-time fishers are at stake here.

Putting it crudely, you cannot simply ask full-time fishers to earn their livelihoods in any other way given the intricate bonds, woven over successive generations, that fishing families have with the sea. The documentary also makes no nod to small-scale, artisanal fisheries as a sustainable alternative to large-scale, industrial fishing, which is rightly rebuked for its wasteful exploitation of global fishing stocks.

For all its warts, especially scientific ones, however, Seaspiracy has managed to stir things and to draw the limelight, albeit briefly, on to the sea, where pillages of the worst type take place on a regular basis without anyone really batting an eyelid. Despite almost 95 per cent of the local fishing complement belonging to the small-scale one, operating from boats which do not exceed lengths of 12 metres and, thus, engaging mainly in low-intensity fishing due to the inability to spend protracted periods of time away from land, we do witness wasteful fishing here on our shores as well.

While we take umbrage at the pillage of fishing stocks in seas beyond our shores, we are turning a blind eye to what’s happening just under our noses- Alan Deidun

The fish species which bear the greatest brunt from such wasteful practices are the cartilaginous ones – sharks, rays and skates – and the undersized ones. While many might be aware of the copious volumes of discarded by-catch generated by the trawling industry, few are actually aware of the wasteful practices of a small minority of fishers who regularly discard large numbers of rough rays, common stingrays, spiny dogfish.

And the rub in it all is that the same individuals, with a sense of impunity, do not seek to hide their tracks, dumping the hapless dead fish within frequented coastal areas, such as the nearshore areas fringing the promenades at Marsaxlokk, Marsascala and at St Paul’s Bay. The photo accompanying this column has, in fact, been taken at a water depth of just a couple of metres. Consistent with this trend, a couple of presumably six gill shark heads were dumped unceremoniously along a thoroughfare in Mistra.

This wasteful and sickening pillage is all the more nefarious given that the fish species taking the toll are cartilaginous ones, which reproduce at a much slower rate than bony fish, both in terms of the number of offspring they release and also in terms of the duration of the development of the same offspring. For instance, a rough ray releases a maximum of 150 egg cases per year, which blinks when compared with the thousands (sometimes tens and hundreds of thousands) of eggs released by bony fish.

In addition, fertilisation is internal within most cartilaginous fish, with females being generally larger than males. As a consequence, females are more susceptible to exploitation, being hauled on board along with the developing embryos within their belly. Bottom line is that such species do not take kindly to exploitation and any sustainable fisheries based on the same species do not exist, given that exploitation leads invariably to population crashes. We should not be catching such species, period, given the role they play in maintaining the fitness of marine ecosystems.

People in the know assert that, while such a wasteful practice of dumping shark and ray by-catch in Maltese waters has been ensuing for some time now, given their low commercial value, it has surged during the COVID-19 pandemic, given that local fish catch consumption has plummeted, presumably due to restrictions on and the public’s misgivings with open-air markets and fish hawkers but, possibly, due to financial reasons as well (given that fish is relatively expensive).

The irony of it all is that while we take umbrage at the pillage of fishing stocks and of vulnerable species in seas beyond our shores, as depicted in Seaspiracy, we are turning a blind eye to what’s happening just under our noses. This wasteful discarding of vulnerable marine species should stop through the right mix of financial incentives, policymaking and enforcement by all relevant stakeholders.

alan.deidun@gmail.com

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