What Will Be the Catch of the Day?

By Peter Benchley

If we continue, at our present rate, to strip-mine the sea of its living resources, 25 years from now we'll be lucky to find a seafood menu that offers a rock sandwich with a side order of kelp. Consider the swordfish: angler's prize, gourmet's delight, fisherman's livelihood. In the mid-'60s, when I was in my mid-20s, I caught a swordfish off Long Island. I wasn't trying to; it took bait meant for sharks. The fish was weirdly, atypically lethargic. It didn't struggle much, didn't leap at all, just tugged for a while, then gave up.

It died quietly, and I watched (with some, but not enough, regret) its gleaming gun-metal skin fade swiftly to death's dull gray. It wasn't a particularly big swordfish; it weighed only 247 lbs. A big swordfish would weigh more than half a ton.

Had I been able to know back then that what I had just caught was one of the last stragglers of a vanishing species--that within 35 years a 247-lb. Atlantic broadbill swordfish would be as rare as a tyrannosaur--I would have set it free, administered CPR or, if all attempts at resuscitation had failed, I would at least have had the carcass of the mighty fish gilded and sent to the Smithsonian.

Today the average Atlantic swordfish caught weighs 90 lbs., and the figure drops by a pound or two every year. Because swordfish don't breed until the female is five years old and weighs 150 lbs., we're killing and eating the teenagers before they can reproduce. And though the U.S. is trying, at last, to lead a campaign to stop the slaughter, the effort is too little, too late. Swordfish, like tuna and the other pelagic (open-ocean) fish, roam far from American jurisdiction. There have been reliable reports of commercial fishermen in the Mediterranean routinely landing swordfish weighing between 10 and 15 lbs.--the babies, less than a year old.

Granted, swordfish are an especially vulnerable target, being prized as both game fish and food fish. But they're hardly the only victims of the current global lunacy, of which the motto seems to be: if it swims, hook it, stab it, poison it or blow it up.

Consider too the sharks: apex predators, lords of the food chain, inspiration for scary stories. A few years ago, I dived off the coast of Costa Rica in a marine preserve where, supposedly, all life was protected. Every day, looking down, I saw the sea bottom carpeted with the corpses of whitetip reef sharks, grotesquely stripped of their fins by poachers who had slashed them off to sell to the soup markets of Asia and had cast the living animals back into the sea to die. Around the world, the numbers of some shark species have declined as much as 80%. Some may already be practically extinct; the survivors in the current generation may be too few to replace themselves.

Modern technology has given us the tools to extinguish entire fish populations, and because man is a can-do critter, that's what we're doing. After climbing steadily for the past 50 years, the worldwide catch of seafood has begun to drop. We're fishing out the oceans, at the same time that the need for seafood is soaring. Of the 6 billion of us on the planet, 1 billion rely on fish as their primary source of protein.

Daily, weapons of mass destruction are deployed in seas the world over: long lines spanning up to 80 miles, dangling scores of thousands of baited hooks; enormous nets, nearly invisible in water. These indiscriminate killers drown everything, including birds and mammals, that takes the bait or blunders into the mesh. The unwanted--a quarter of everything caught--is discarded, left to rot or, sometimes, taken aboard to be ground into meal and fertilizer.

We know we have already wiped out--and by that I mean driven nearly to commercial extinction or, in a few cases, the brink of biological extinction--more than 100 popular species of food fish, including Nassau groupers, Chilean sea bass, orange roughy and cod. What we don't know, what we'll never know, is how many undiscovered species have been eradicated along the way. What creatures, great and small, might have contained genetic or chemical secrets that could have saved lives or improved them, conquered diseases or averted them?

The seas make up 95% of the planet's biosphere--the realm where all living things exist--and we are stripping and poisoning it, depriving it of its ability to sustain life. Jacques-Yves Cousteau once predicted that unless we--not the editorial or royal we but the universal we--changed our ways and stopped treating the oceans as an infinite resource and a bottomless dump, there would someday come a moment of no recovery. Overwhelmed at last, the resilient seas would no longer be able to cleanse or restock themselves. From that moment on, the oceans--and with them nearly all life on earth--would embark upon a slow, irreversible descent into the darkness.

Is that it, then? Are we there? Have we slipped, silently and unaware, into our death spiral?

No one can know. Perhaps our grandchildren, or their grandchildren, will know. But I, for one, decline to accept the end of the oceans, for to do so would be to accept the end of humanity. I see signs that we are starting to alter our course--laboriously, yes, barely perceptibly, like a supertanker beginning a slow turn in a heavy sea, but changing direction nevertheless.

More and more nations are establishing marine reserves, where sea creatures of all sorts and sizes can mate and bear their young free from the menace of man. Just as important, funds are being found for enforcement of limits, restrictions and bans. Personnel are being hired and trained; boats and planes are being deployed to monitor compliance.

As rivers are cleaned up, dams removed, pollutants flushed away, salmon are returning to waters everywhere from California to Germany, where no salmon had been caught since 1947.

Aquaculture--fish farming--has established beachheads from Maine to the tropics, from the South Pacific to the North Sea. Raising fish in enclosed pens is a complex and controversial process that can pose enormous environmental problems, but if done right, it holds great promise for feeding millions of people and providing vast numbers of jobs.

Where fishing in the wild has been banned outright, fish stocks are starting to come back. Where "street-sweeper" trawls that devastate the seabed have been prohibited, nurseries and habitats are beginning to recover.

Still, the days of abundance are gone. The image of cheap and wholesome seafood available to everyone is fading into memory and myth. Already a single tuna can cost more than most automobiles. Soon some oysters may be as rare and costly as pearls.

I often wish that back in the halcyon '60s, I had had the wit to release my swordfish. Its kind will not come our way again.

Known for the novels and screenplays that have spawned such movies as Jaws and the TV series Peter Benchley's Amazon, the author has narrated dozens of films on ocean conservation. Join TIME.com to talk to Peter Benchley on Thursday, Nov. 4, at 8 p.m. E.T. at chat.yahoo.com/time