In Sojourn in Leisure the Qing dynasty playwright Li Yu noted that because water animals breed so easily they comprise a seemingly inexhaustible resource. He compared the thousands of eggs that each fish lays to grains of sand in the Ganges that might clog up the river if not removed. Hence, Chinese have traditionally had little guilt about eating seafood.

Li was right-and wrong.

Following technological advances in the fishing industry, the worldwide consumption of seafood rose and then peaked at 100 million tons in 1990. The UN's Food and Agriculture Organization has stated that one-fourth of the sea creatures that constitute the world's top 20 sources of seafood are already suffering from severe overfishing, requiring cuts in total yearly hauls of 30%.

Tuna blues

Like Li Yu, most people have long thought fish and other sea creatures are such prolific breeders that they truly represent an endless resource. But not all fish are so prolific. Sharks, whose meat is now much favored by Chinese, must reach 15 years of age before they can breed, and a female shark can give birth to no more than 14 babies at once. Similarly, bluefin tuna can not give birth until they are eight.

In a 1997 report about saving the bluefin tuna, the World Wide Fund for Nature noted that the southern bluefin tuna, as a result of overfishing, was already facing "commercial extinction" (meaning that commercial fishing of it was no longer viable). As a result, the International Convention for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) requires all signatory nations to cut their tuna hauls in the Atlantic by one-fourth. Taiwan, which ranks fifth in its take of Atlantic tuna, formally joined ICCAT last year.

There have also been the controversial recent drops in the annual hauls of mullet, larval fish and small squid. The yearly catch of mullet peaked in 1979 at more than 2.5 million, and since 1986, the yearly total has never exceeded 1 million. Old fishing boat captains who work out of Hsingta fishing harbor can remember when boats would enter the harbor proudly flying eight ROC flags (each of which represented 10,000 mullets). Yet the entire national catch for the recent winter season was only some 156,000. The fishermen have been raising a chorus of laments, accusing the fish of "defecting to the mainland"-in other words complaining that mainland fishing vessels have beaten them to the punch.

What good folk won't eat

Explaining this sudden drop in catches of mullet and larval fish, Lee Kuo-tien, dean of academic affairs at National Taiwan Ocean University and an expert on ocean climatology, notes that changes to the ocean ecology are usually the result of a complex web of factors and that it would be wrong to blame everything on overfishing. For instance, because the two main harvested varieties of larval fish-anchovies and silversides-have very short life spans and produce eggs when just six months old, fishing may help to provide some balance in marine environments that might otherwise be quickly burdened beyond their carrying capacity.

From many years of research, Lee has determined that El Nino in combination with the earth being at the high point in its cycle of absorbing the sun's radiation has caused ocean temperatures to rise, which has in turn caused fish to disperse that previously would gather and wait for a suitably high temperature before producing eggs. "Mullet used to come south with the northeast monsoon, but now, after three warm winters in a row, they are staying as far north as Ilan Bay." This northward shift not only means that the mainland Chinese fishermen will have first crack at most of them, it also means that survival rates have probably plummeted for the mullet fry in the rougher waters of Ilan Bay.

With Taiwan's coastal fishing hauls clearly dropping for a decade and more, we have come to rely on long-distance fishing and "other people's fish." Locally caught Ranina serrata crabs were replaced by Thailand's, which were in turn replaced by Australia's. Fortunately, Australia has strictly enforced crabbing seasons and minimum size rules, so that it always has more than enough crabs.

The truth is that similar restrictions could be adopted on catching mullet, larval fish and small squid in Taiwanese waters. If fishing was only allowed when prey was mature, and nets with larger holes were used to allow young fish to escape, then, even with smaller hauls, the price would rise with a smaller supply of higher quality, more mature fish, so that the fishermen's livelihood would not be threatened.

Small squid, which are about the size of a finger, follow the isotherms south, arriving in Taiwan to lay eggs in the warm summer when their eggs sacks are nice and plump. At this time of year they are particularly tasty and nutritious and worth 150% more than the small squid that fishermen take in the early spring near Tiaoyutai off the east coast of Taiwan. Lin Ming-su, a reporter whose love of seafood led him to study marine biology, notes, "Any so-called gourmet should have the wisdom to know what should and should not be eaten." Lin makes a point of not buying the small squid put on the market in the early spring.

A model: the banded coral shrimp

Banded coral shrimp, known in the Far East as "cherry blossom shrimp" for their bright pink color, breed only in Japan's Surugawan Bay and in the sea off Tungkang, Taiwan. Because the Japanese regard these shrimp, which are rich in calcium and phosphorus, as a natural national treasure, the Taiwanese have started to catch them as well.

In Tungkang, the local fishermen's association has organized the 120 boats that specialize in catching banded coral shrimp into a marketing group. It is prohibited to catch shrimp from June to October when they produce eggs, and from November to May shrimping is allowed only four days a week. Hence, from Friday to Sunday you never see the shrimpers' boats out at sea. Each time a boat returns from the sea, its haul cannot exceed 200 kilos, or the surplus will be turned over to the group.With these strict conservation measures, the total yearly catch has dropped from nearly 2,000 tons five years ago to 800 or so tons last year. But because the price has risen with a smaller supply-from NT$1,400 for a 20-kilo box to NT$4,500-gross yearly sales have risen to NT$250 million. The result is that the shrimp can breathe easy about their survival as a species, and the fishermen needn't worry about their livelihoods.