Fur seals, endangered Steller sea lions, and sea birds are starving in the Bering Sea because their food supplies of Alaskan pollock fish are being depleted.
Pollock is the world's largest food fishery. Used to make McDonald's fish sandwiches and frozen fish sticks, the population has decreased by a stunning 62 percent since 2003. Factory fishing trawlers take over a million tons of pollock out of the ocean each year. The fish cannot reproduce and recover as quickly as they are being fished.
Multi-national corporations are making a billion dollars a year by overfishing pollock, while local wildlife face extinction. About a million tons of pollock are dragged out of the Bering Sea every year.
For years, Greenpeace has warned that industrial fishing would destroy this fragile environment, but the fisheries managers have buckled under pressure from industry.
When Canadian policy makers ignored the warning signs about declining cod populations, the resulting collapse put 40,000 fishermen out of work and caused far-reaching changes to the ecology of the northwest Atlantic. Today, this same scenario is possible in the Bering Sea. The repercussions of this could be disastrous not only for local communities and economies, but for the many wildlife who call this area home.
Thank you for helping the Bering Sea ecosystem survive.
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