Fish are becoming smaller and growing more slowly in response to pressures introduced by fishing, scientists say. That shift, which new data suggest is hard to undo, creates populations of fish that are poor at reproducing and inefficient at bulking up.
Commercial fishing is generating a “Darwinian debt,” in the form of less valuable fishes, that could take generations to pay off, says Ulf Dieckmann of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Laxenburg, Austria.
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