Food
The seas and oceans contain vast natural resources that are increasingly available to humans as technology and scientific understanding improve. Humans have long exploited living resources such as fish and shellfish, often with devastating results as over-exploitation since the advent of industrialisation has decimated wild populations. Today, almost half the value of the fisheries industry in some countries is through aquaculture of finfish and shellfish, and as human population grows worldwide the proportion of ‘farmed’ marine protein will increase greatly. In the UK, shellfish production is moving into deeper offshore waters and new species of finfish are starting to be farmed. NOC has contributed to the EU’s consultations on reforming the Common Fisheries Policy along ecosystem-management principles, and in providing advice to protect fragile deep-sea ecosystems.
Living resources include proteins and genes from creatures that are not fished for food, but which inhabit extreme environments such as hydrothermal vents. The idea isn’t that you capture the animals to extract their genes on a commercial scale, but rather that by sequencing proteins and genomes they can be synthesized ashore. NOC researchers play a leading role in understanding deep-ocean ecosystems.
Fish have historically played highly significant roles in satisfying the protein requirements of large fractions of humanity since the earliest periods of recorded history. Originally fisheries were low intensity, low technology industries that likely exploited fish stocks at a sustainable rate. However mass fishing, facilitated by technological developments including ship building and fishing technology, lead to alterations in fish stocks (size and demographic) and the subsequent closure of some fisheries. In parallel, technological developments have allowed the associated aquaculture industry to flourish to the point where it is comparable in size to traditional open water fisheries.
The economic importance of large-scale fisheries meant that most countries with heavily developed fishing industries developed strategic research programmes in fisheries ecology, the numerical modelling of fish stocks and the prediction of sustainable fisheries yields. In the UK, bodies inolved in this research include the Centre for Environment and Aquaculture Science in Lowestoft, Marine Scotland in Aberdeen and AFBI, in Belfast.
Fundamental research of relevance to fisheries was greatly stimulated by the IGBP programme GLOBEC, which focused on the small crustacean zooplankton known as copepods that are important foodresources for the juvenile stages of many important fish stocks, including cod. The NOC contributed heavily to the physical oceanography and lower trophic level components of the the NERC programme Marine Productivity, the UK contribution to GLOBEC. This focused in the Irminger Basin between Iceland and Greenland and obtained some of the first information on the seasonal demography of calanoid copepods in the region.
More recently NOC research on fisheries has focused on the physical processes underpinning the intensively productive regions in the Celtic Sea. This work, lead by Professor Johnathan Sharples has shown that mixing by the breaking internal tide leads to enhanced nutrient fluxes at the shelf edge. This then increases primary production and shifts the phytoplankton community structure away from cyanobacteria-dominated populations on the shelf and in the open ocean to larger-celled species such as diatoms. These large-celled species are required by fish larvae. Consequently the shelf edge is a site of enormous fishing activity, either targeting spawning stocks (e.g. mackerel) or the predators that are preying on the spawning stocks (e.g. monkfish).
Reference
Simpson, J. H., and J. Sharples. An Introduction to the Physical and Biological Oceanography of Shelf Seas, Cambridge University Press, 2012.
