That is, losses for the Russian Federation include those from its waters in the Baltic and Barents Seas, as well as its Asian waters (and are estimated from the former Soviet Union records in earlier years). The geographic pattern of losses accumulated by the 1970s (Fig. 1a) reflects the distribution of fishing effort in previous decades. By 1945, fisheries in the North Atlantic and North Pacific were already well-developed and contributed nearly equally

to global catch, while those in the southern areas of these oceans and the Indian Ocean contributed just 7% [22]. During the 1950s, most of the Northern oceans came under exploitation [12], and accordingly, 14 of the 15 EEZs registering top losses in the 1970s were Northern hemisphere countries. The only southern country on selleck inhibitor the list, Peru, whose losses were second only to Norway’s in the 1970s, ranked highest in the 1980s (Fig. 1b), due to the severity of the early 1970s collapse of the world’s largest single-stock fishery, Peruvian anchoveta. As fishing effort intensified and spread southward, catches peaked

in the Atlantic by the early 1970s [22], deepening losses for European countries and the US in the 1980s (Fig. 1b). Peru’s losses from the continued depression of anchoveta mounted as well in this decade. In the 1980s, Namibia and South Africa also ranked in the top 15 country losses (7th and 12th, respectively) due to the depletion of the cod-like hake Cepharanthine and the small pelagic sardine in their EEZs. The greatest global scale expansion of fisheries took place in the 1980s to the mid-1990s [12]. In European waters, losses appear to have leveled off from the 1980s to CX-4945 supplier the 1990s (Fig. 1c), likely due to previous depletion and the shift of fishing in and imports from Southern waters. Although dissolution of the USSR in 1991 led to reduced fishing in the waters of its member countries (notably in the Pacific waters off Russia), catches in

the EEZ of the present-day Russian Federation peaked in the early 1980s [6]. Thus, the catch losses for Russia and other Black Sea countries in Fig. 1c may be overestimated, but not greatly. In the Pacific, landings reached their highest level by the late 1980s [22], and Japan and China, 8th and 17th in losses in the 1970s, jumped to 5th and 8th place in the 1990s—significant movement given the head start in stock depletion in European and American waters. Although Peru’s anchoveta landings recovered in the 1990s, overfishing of sardine in the waters off Ecuador and Chile caused these countries’ losses to rise to 11th and 18th place, respectively. Meanwhile, landings in the Indian Ocean, where many stocks are presently under terrific stress, continue to increase [9] so that large losses to overfishing have not yet been tallied (Fig. 1c). However, high levels of underreporting for East African EEZs [25] may contribute to the low losses estimated for these waters.