clipped from: www.independent.co.uk Starving sea life – from whales to puffins, tuna to seals – is being found all over the world's oceans, as the food on which it depends is being fished out, startling new evidence shows. And much of the depletion, ironically, is caused by raising captive fish – for the table.
More than four-fifths of this catch does not go directly to feed people, but is ground up into fish oil and fish meal and increasingly used to raise carnivorous species such as salmon in fish farms. A captive fish needs up to 11b of food to put on a single pound in weight. And, as a result, there is less and less left for its natural predators.
"We have caught most of the big fish and are now going after their food," says Margot Stiles, a marine scientist for Oceana, the leading international sea protection pressure group.