Fishes make up more than half of the 55,000 species of living vertebrates. Along with this remarkable taxonomic diversity comes an equally impressive habitat diversity. Today, and in the past, fi shes have occupied nearly all major aquatic habitats, from lakes and polar oceans that are ice-covered through much of the year, to tropical swamps, temporary ponds, intertidal pools, ocean depths, and…
According to the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), there was a steady increase of fish catches until the middle of the 1990s when the catch began to level off (Fig. 1.1). Recent work by Watson and Pauly (2001) has shown that in reality the total marine catch of fish has been declining by some 10% a year since 1988. The apparent continued increase until the mid1990s was du…