Egyptian fisheries must be better managed to secure the overall health of the Mediterranean Sea’s marine living resources, new research has found.
Egyptian fisheries must be better managed to secure the overall health of the Mediterranean Sea’s marine living resources, new research has found.
In a new paper in the journal Ocean and Coastal Management, researchers with the Sea Around Us initiative at the University of British Columbia and the Arab Academy for Science, Technology and Maritime Transport reconstructed Egypt’s marine fisheries‘ catches from the Mediterranean in the last 100 years and found strong evidence of resource overexploitation. Such overexploitation has pushed fishers to go farther and deeper, increasingly resorting to species lower in the food chain.
„The Egyptian Mediterranean marine fisheries consist of a century-old, predominantly trawl fishery as well as other fisheries, such as longlining, purse-seining and multi-gear traditional fisheries,“ said Dr. Myriam Khalfallah, who led the study as a post-doctoral fellow with the Sea Around Us. „From 1920 to 2019, 3.8 million tons of fish and invertebrates were removed from Egypt’s Mediterranean waters. We identified major peaks in catches followed by drastic declines caused by various external events and increased fishing pressure.“
Decreased landings and fishing of juvenile fish in shallow waters were identified as early as the mid-1920s, as the trawl fleet and the duration and number of its fishing trips grew.
