Feels like it's been so long since I made a blog post. So I started playing Mola Mola a while back and was watching Bart's Fish Tales, a cooking channel that primarily focuses on seafood based dishes. I happened to be reading up on something on Wikipedia, can't remember what it was but it led me to read about heavy metals and subsequently, heavy metal in fish. I read something about how the mercury levels in a certain fish(I think it was cod) has risen by 10 times in 36 years. This was really alarming to me. Maybe it might be to you after I talk more about it, maybe it might not.
Most seafood remains the only food source that humans cannot produce domestically. The lion's share of our seafood is caught wild from the oceans or rivers around the globe. That means we have no means of controlling the production of fish, it is all down to natural forces that dictate the amount of fish that is available for human consumption. At the moment, most fishing is done at a rate that is unsustainable by the environment. Apart from that, current fishing practices are also changing the way that fish are growing. They are adapting to the doctrines that fishing companies follow in order to survive. Right now, fishing boats can only catch fish that are above a certain size. As a result, smaller fish are able to escape the nets and hence, the smaller fish are able to reproduce to produce smaller fish. See the problem? The more we continue to fish only the bigger fish, the smaller the future generations of fish will be. There was a MinuteEarth video that was talking about this. Heavily fished fish are now half the weight they used to be 40 years ago. This is deeply troubling news to me.
Then the more wider spectrum problem: marine pollution. The pollution that we put out is gobbled up by microorganisms in the water, gobbled up by fish eating these, gobbled up by fish eating those fish and then gobbled up by the apex predators or whatever else in between, seals, sharks, walruses, polar bears. And guess where the pollution is finally deposited? In the apex predators of course. Polar bears have been the victims of years of pollution. Their sexual organs have been reduced in size and males are increasingly becoming hermaphroditic(if I remember correctly). This means that they have both male and female features. This hampers their already low reproductive rate and is driving them towards extinction quicker, with climate change already reducing their habitat to nothing. But I digress, back to the topic of fish. See where I am heading with this? In most cases, the apex predators are us. We are eating the fish and we are where our pollution is being deposited. The heavy metals we put out into the environment is finding our way back to us and not the way we would like it. If the symptoms of the polar bears are any indication, we could be well on our way to our own doom.
This is really just the tip of the iceberg(hehe). There's more in depth(hehe again) stuff that I don't really remember but hey, if you're interested, it's pretty easy to find out.
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