Oceans

Fishing & the Oceans

Trillions of lives, vanishing reefs, and an industry that hides its scale beneath the surface.

What 'sustainable' really means

There Is No Sustainable Way to Eat the Sea

Fish are the most heavily harvested animals on Earth — and the least counted. The standard unit in fisheries data is the tonne, not the individual life. By the most careful estimate, between 1 and 2.7 trillion fish are killed for food every year, plus hundreds of billions of crabs, squid, lobsters and shrimp.

Aquaculture — fish farming — was sold as the answer to overfishing. It now produces more fish than wild capture, but most farmed fish are carnivores: salmon, trout, sea bass, tuna. They are fed wild-caught fish, ground into pellets, at a ratio of three or four kilos of wild fish for every kilo of farmed.

And the science on whether fish feel pain is no longer in serious dispute. They have nociceptors, they exhibit pain-avoidance learning, and they produce opioids to dull suffering. They are not vegetables that swim.

~0%

Of ocean plastic by mass is discarded fishing gear (Lebreton, 2018)

Of global catch is bycatch — wasted, killed, dumped

~0%

Of large predatory fish populations gone since 1950

Health

The Mercury, the Microplastic, and the Omega-3

Pregnant women are told to limit tuna because of mercury — a heavy metal that bioaccumulates up the marine food chain. A 2024 study found microplastics in 99% of seafood samples tested. The fish are not the problem; we are.

Omega-3 (EPA and DHA) is the one nutrient seafood is rightly associated with — but fish do not produce it. They get it from eating algae. Algal-oil supplements deliver the same omega-3 directly, without the mercury, microplastic or marine life lost.

If a single fishing trawl can level a forest of cold-water coral that took 8,000 years to grow, the question isn't quotas — it's continuing at all.

Human cost

Slavery, Debt Bondage and Death at Sea

The distant-water fishing fleets that supply most of the world's canned tuna, shrimp and squid have been repeatedly documented by the ILO, the AP and the Guardian to rely on trafficked labour — men held for years on vessels that never dock, in conditions the US State Department classifies as modern slavery. Thai shrimp, Chinese squid and Taiwanese tuna have all been sanctioned in recent years.

The industry is also, on a per-worker basis, the deadliest on Earth: the FAO estimates over 100,000 fisher deaths a year. There is no version of a supermarket fillet that comes without this cost priced in — no matter what the label says.

What to do

What Helps, Honestly

If everyone in a high-fish-eating country (Spain, Japan, Norway) swapped one weekly fish meal for a plant-based version, the impact on bycatch and reef stress would be vast.

Plant-based 'seafood' has improved dramatically: jackfruit fish tacos, chickpea 'tuna' salad, banana-blossom 'fish' and chips, marinated tofu sushi. None of them are pretending to be fish — they're just doing the same job on the plate.

Oceans

One meal at a time, the ocean recovers.

Find your fish swap

But fish don't feel pain, right?

They do. A consensus of behavioural, anatomical, and pharmacological evidence has established that fish are sentient and capable of suffering. The European Food Safety Authority and the UK Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act both formally recognise this.

Isn't farmed fish better than wild?

Often worse. Farmed salmon are kept in dense pens where sea-lice outbreaks devastate wild populations, antibiotics are routine, and the feed is wild fish ground into pellets. The wild fishery still happens — just to feed the farmed fish.

What about traditional, small-scale fishing?

It is genuinely a different story — and represents a small fraction of global seafood. The vast majority of the fish you can buy in a supermarket or restaurant comes from industrial fleets, not from a person and a line.

Don't I need fish for omega-3 during pregnancy?

You need DHA — the omega-3 fatty acid — not fish. Fish get DHA from the algae they eat; algal-oil supplements deliver identical DHA (often at higher, more consistent doses) with no mercury, no PCBs and no microplastic. Most prenatal DHA supplements sold worldwide are already algae-derived.

Isn't MSC-certified fish sustainable?

The Marine Stewardship Council certifies that a species can be caught at current rates without collapsing — not that the fishery avoids bycatch, seabed damage or labour abuse. Investigative reports by the BBC and the New York Times have documented certified fisheries killing endangered dolphins, sharks and turtles as bycatch.

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