Joe Rogan on ocean: what the evidence says · JRE #2143
SUBJECT: OCEAN
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
A new global study concludes that 90% of all large fishes have disappeared from the world's oceans in the past half century in 50 years.
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
The figure traces to Myers and Worm, Rapid worldwide depletion of predatory fish communities, published in Nature in 2003, which estimated that large predatory fish biomass today is only about 10 percent of pre-industrial levels, with industrialized fisheries typically cutting community biomass by 80 percent within 15 years of exploitation. That maps to the widely reported 90 percent decline over roughly 50 years, so the number is a real published finding rather than an invention. Two caveats matter: the study concerns large predatory fishes (tuna, swordfish, marlin, sharks, cod, groupers) specifically, not all large fish, and the 90 percent is a meta-analytic estimate, not a direct census. The estimate drew methodological criticism (for example over the use of catch-per-unit-effort trends for tuna), but the authors' 2005 follow-up defended the roughly tenfold decline as a general and in many cases conservative figure, noting it is too optimistic for sensitive species like sharks, which have fallen to about 1 percent in some cases. Current status: the 90 percent claim reflects a genuine, influential study, though Rogan's phrasing generalizes predatory fish to all large fish and states an estimate as a settled fact.