Want to invite good luck for abundance year after year? Eat these fish

Eating white pomfret during the New Year expresses the wish for prosperity ("chang wang") in the year ahead, and if you want "abundance year after year," you should eat yellow croaker. But did you know? For decades these fish species have been overfished, and they are now rarely seen in the waters around Taiwan, China. Fishermen sigh that they "can't catch any fish," and international scientists even predict that in 16 years humans will have no fish to eat. So how can we eat sustainably?

Experts say that when choosing fish, it is not only about freshness. If you want to eat wild fish, choose seasonally migratory species that are small to medium in body length and silvery-white in color, such as largehead hairtail and Pacific saury, so that there can truly be "fish every year." For farmed fish, it is better to choose grey mullet, milkfish, and tilapia (Taiwan tilapia) raised on plant-based feed. Small fish species from the lower layers of the ocean, such as Taiwan's Japanese scad, round scad, flying fish, and rabbitfish, are also very suitable. For cephalopod seafood, you can choose squid, cuttlefish, and similar options. In addition, Penghu wild Spanish mackerel is abundant in production, delicious, and can help fishermen have a good New Year, making it a good choice as well.

Overfishing of species means bans may not bring recovery

In recent years, fish shortages have become a common global phenomenon. Tuna, salmon, scallops, sea urchins, and other regulars of Japanese sushi all face the same problem. Overfishing has caused an oceanic catastrophe. In 2006, scientists from the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) revealed in the international journal Science that by 2048 humans would have no fish to eat. In the middle of this year, a team led by Shao Guangzhao, a research fellow at Academia Sinica, further found that over 30 years the number of fish species off Taiwan, China's north coast had plummeted from 120 to 30, leaving only one quarter. Compared with other countries, Taiwan, China may face a "fishless era" earlier.

The National Taiwan Museum recently launched a "Sustainable New Year's Eve Dinner" event and invited Liao Yunzhi of the Exhibition and Education Section of the National Museum of Marine Science and Technology to share secrets about choosing fish at the fish market.

Liao Yunzhi followed Shao Guangzhao, chief executive of the Biodiversity Research Center at Academia Sinica, for many years in documenting the current status of fish species off the north coast. In 2011, he and Shao Guangzhao jointly compiled the "Taiwan Seafood Guide." He said bluntly that as marine resources decline, many wild fish species have gradually been replaced by farmed ones. In the early period, 80% of fish at fish markets were wild-caught and 20% were farmed. Now the situation has reversed.

The frightening thing about overfishing is that even if fishing is banned, resources may not necessarily recover immediately. Liao Yunzhi cited Atlantic cod as an example and mentioned that hundreds of years ago the number of cod in the Atlantic Ocean was once so large it was unimaginable. Europeans even had a saying: "You can walk across the channel on cod." In addition, cod can reproduce millions of eggs at a time, and humans caught them in large quantities without restraint.

"It was not until 1996, when fishermen found they could no longer catch cod, that European governments decided to ban fishing. But even today the number of Atlantic cod still cannot recover. Some studies show that cod's role in the marine ecosystem has been replaced by other organisms, which shows the severity of overfishing," Liao Yunzhi said.