GCRIO
Home  Library Consequences
Vol. 2, No. 1, Winter 1996 How Bountiful are Ocean Fisheries? The Case of the Orange Roughy |
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| GCRIO
Home Library Consequences
Vol. 2, No. 1, Winter 1996 How Bountiful are Ocean Fisheries? The Case of the Orange Roughy |
| Search |
Updated
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 Consequences Vol. 2, No. 1, Winter 1996 |
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The orange roughy, about 12 inches long, is found in waters off New Zealand and was in recent years extensively exported to the U.S. Unlike many fish that appear on menus or market shelves it comes not from surface waters but from darker and colder depths of the ocean--as much as a mile down--and is harvested by technologies that have recently come into greater and greater use. The species is also longer-lived than we: those that survive reach maturity in their 30s and have been found to live 150 years or more. Their slow rate of growth and development make the orange roughy particularly susceptible to overfishing, and within the last year, the catch has fallen to but a fraction of what was harvested earlier in the decade. |
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