LOS ANGELES: Industrial fishing fleets have systematically stripped 90 per cent of the giant tuna, swordfish, marlin and other big fish from the world’s oceans, according to a new study that suggests the virtual collapse of these stocks — such as happened to the cod off New England — is a distinct possibility.

Fishing fleets are now competing for the remnants — about 10 per cent — of the biggest fish in the oceans, concludes a 10-year research project reported in the science journal ‘Nature’.

“Fishermen used to go out and catch these phenomenally big fish,” said Ransom A. Myers, a fisheries biologist at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. “But they cannot find them anymore. There’re not there. We ate them.”

Myers’ study, with Dalhousie University colleague Boris Worm, is the third in a series of recent scientific papers that challenge the notion that the oceans are so resilient they can provide an inexhaustible supply of fish to feed the world.

The first study, by Jeremy Jackson of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, looked at the decline of many ocean species over several centuries and documented how it set in motion the collapse of kelp forests and coral reefs.

The second study, by Daniel Pauly of the University of British Columbia, focused on how the worldwide catch of all seafood has been on the decline since the late 1980s, as evidenced by the ever-dwindling catches of an expanding global fishing fleet.

Myers’ study focused on the demise of what was once considered “the blue frontier,” caused by the introduction of industrial fishing in the years immediately after World War II. It was then that most of the biggest fish were pulled from the sea, never to rebound because of continuing fishing pressure. These oceanic giants are now mostly memories, romanticized in novels such as Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea,” or in yellowing photos of fishermen beside their enormous catches.

In the study, Myers and Worm analyzed 47 years of detailed fishing records kept by the Japanese long-lining fleet, in which ships unfurl baited hooks from lines that stretch up to 50 miles off their sterns.—Dawn/The LAT-WP News Service (c) The Los Angeles Times.