DIRECTOR'S FOREWORD

This document demonstrates the occurrence of the 'fishing down' phenomenon in India's marine fisheries, i.e., the tendency, through time, for these fisheries to rely increasingly on small fishes and invertebrates low in the food webs, due to increased scarcity of large, high trophic-level predatory fish. This demonstration is remarkable for several reasons.

The first is that data were available to document this phenomenon. 'Fishing down' has been demonstrated mainly in developed countries, notably in Europe and North America, while demonstrations from developing countries has been rare. The reasons for this were, perhaps, lack of interest by developing country scientists (but see below) and the absence of suitable data, notably long catch time series of sufficient taxonomic resolution.

In India, however, reasonably detailed catch statistics, covering both the small-scale ('non-mechanized') fisheries and the industrial ('mechanized') fisheries are available for every year since 1950, which make possible an analysis that would not have been feasible for other countries in South Asia.

The second reason why this analysis is remarkable is that, contrary to analyses done elsewhere, where data sets are available which pertain to the whole country, this analysis was performed for each of India's States and Union Territories separately, with each exhibiting the 'fishing down' phenomenon.

This is certainly due to the detailed nature of Indian catch statistics, alluded to above, but also to the pre-processing of these catch statistics performed by Ms. Bhathal. This pre-processing resolved inconsistencies, filled gaps, and reduced the large amount of 'miscellaneous fish' in the statistics, while maintaining overall total catch. The painstaking procedure she employed led to internally consistent data sets, one for each of the States and Union Territories, and these are presented here as Appendix II.

The third reason why this study is remarkable is that it resembles, but still is not inspired from, the account of Vivekanandan et al. (Fishing the marine food web along the Indian coast. 2005, Fisheries Research 72: 241-252). The reason, quite simply, is that Ms. Bhathal, who visited India in July 2003 to gather the data needed for her analysis, innocently told those 'colleagues' of her research question, of which models and literature she was going to use, which temporal resolution she was hoping to achieve, etc.

It was thus easy to 'scoop' her work, especially as she was incapacitated by sickness for several months after her trip, and especially if corners could be cut, e.g., by not subjecting one's data to the same time-consuming data pre-processing that Ms. Bhathal performed.

Nevertheless, I still will encourage my graduate students to be open about their research: a few bad apples should not cause us to become secretive, and cut us off from fair and respectful exchanges.

This episode was a bump in the road for Ms Bhathal, it is true. However, her study, and its follow-up will change the way we view the future of Indian fisheries, and by extension, the fisheries of the developing world.

Daniel Pauly
Director, Fisheries Center

ABSTRACT

Presently, fisheries are in deep crisis worldwide due to overfishing. Increasing intensity of fishing throughout the world has had impacts on the target species and their supporting marine ecosystems. Globally, the total catches are declining by about ½ million t per year since 1988. As well mean trophic level of landings are declining at a rate of 0.1 per decade. This threatens the world's food security specifically its animal protein supply, especially in developing countries.

In order to evaluate the status of marine fisheries in India, the catches were reconstructed over the period of 1950 to 2000. This reconstruction shows marine fish catches increased gradually from 0.6 in 1950 to 3.3 million t in 2000.

To determine if the Indian marine fisheries trends are ecologically sustainable or not, the mean trophic level of landings was analysed over the five decades. It was found that the fishing down marine food web phenomenon is happening all over India, i.e., in each state and union territory, similarly to the rest of the world. This trend, however, was generally not visible when the catches of small pelagics fishes were included, i.e., their variability masked the fishing down phenomenon when this was based on the mean trophic level of all shelf species. On the other hand, application of the cut off trophic level of 3.25 (i.e., excluding small pelagics and most invertebrates) made the fishing down effect visible for all states and union territories.

This analysis thus confirms the potential usefulness of the MTI (Marine Trophic Index), recently adopted by the Convention on Biological Diversity as one of the 8 indicators of biodiversity. It also confirms that the use of MTI, jointly with a TL cutoff point (i.e., 3.25MTI) better reveals underlying trend than overall mean TL.

The time series of Fishing in Balance (FiB) index show an overall increase for all Indian states and union territories, suggesting a geographic expansion of the fisheries. However, in recent years, a stagnation or decline of FiB index is visible in almost all areas. This indicates a serious problem, presumably the end of the expansion phase in Indian fisheries. Overall, this historical review clearly indicates that India has suffered from sequential depletions of coastal stocks.

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