Les Jones

Environment > Trends in Seafood Harvesting, Economics, and Depletion

Marginal Revolutions points to this history of seafood trends based on restaurant menus. As one species is fished out, other species - often previously considered "trash fish" - replace them until they, too, are fished out. (And at one time lobster was considered a trash fish that was fit only for servants.)

"In the 1970s and 1980s, orange roughie starts showing up on menus," Jones said. "But it's a very slow-growing species and they were harvesting it much faster than the species could replace itself so it's becoming commercially extinct"

Fishing boats simply shifted from chasing roughie in waters around New Zealand and Australia to pursuing Chilean sea bass in the southern Pacific and southern Indian oceans.

"They just moved on to another species," Jones said, citing catch statistics. "Now, the same thing is happening with the Chilean sea bass"

The Wildlife Conservation Society has a printable wallet card showing which fish are endangered and which aren't. These are the threatened species in increasing order:

• Yellowfin and bigeye tuna steak (Ahi), longline-caught
• Atlantic flounders and soles (incl. grey sole)
• Atlantic cod
• Groupers
• Shrimp
• Skate
• Monkfish
• Sharks
• Farmed salmon (incl. Atlantic)
• Chilean seabass (toothfish)
• Snappers
• Caspian Sea caviar (beluga, osetra, sevruga)