The longspine thornyhead is ugly. Mostly head and bone with large and bulbous eyes, its coarse and ungainly fins make it even less graceful than the ubiquitous rockfish that inhabit BC's coastal waters. The bright orange of its scaly hide is its only semblance of elegance — and it quickly fades to a dull white shortly after it is caught.

But the longspine thornyhead is also a kind of biological wonder. Living nearly a kilometre below the surface in a narrow band off the west coast of Vancouver Island, it can withstand crushing water pressures, zero light and almost no oxygen. It can also survive for five months without eating. In addition, it lives to an age of 50 years or more and has probably survived as a species for at least 10 million years.

Unfortunately, the longspine thornyhead has suffered three recent misfortunes. First, it became a target species to serve the specialty fish market in Japan and Korea. In the great scheme of global fisheries, a quota of 425 tonnes per year for an obscure and ugly fish doesn't seem important — the longspine thornyhead would think otherwise.

Second, it was being caught by bottom-draggers that pull weighted, cavernous nets for 30 km or more along the ocean floor — this most destructive form of fishing is described as a kind of clearcutting of the benthic environment. "Between April of 1996 and May of 2007, more than 15,000 trawl tows [covering nearly 500,000 kilometres] were directed at longspine thornyheads..." (Globe & Mail, July 31/08). As a result of this intensive targeting, the fish's population plunged by more than 50 percent and the catch quota wasn't being half met. But the fish may be saved from commercial extinction by the prohibitive cost of diesel fuel which has forced down the number of trawlers targeting this unique fish from 12 to just one. Nevertheless, the longspine thornyhead is now being considered for listing under the federal Species at Risk Act.

The fish's third misfortune happens to be its large and bulbous eyes. Although they seem to serve it well, this gawky feature has inspired us to nickname it the idiotfish.

Aside from the unjustified disrespect, the obvious ignorance on our part contradicts the significance of the fish as one of the biological wonders of nature. So the nickname idiotfish is not as much a reflection on the fish as on humans, a species that is itself a biological wonder of a very different kind. Not only are we in the process of bringing the longspine thornyhead to near extinction but we are doing the same to practically every other fish of commercial value in the world's oceans.

Locally, almost every species of salmon in the northwest Pacific coast is in decline in both number and size. Habitat destruction, badly managed harvesting, changing sea and river conditions from global warming, and sea lice and diseases from fish farms have all contributed to dwindling fish stocks — the whole ecology founded on pink salmon in the Broughton Archipelago and Knight Inlet areas is in near collapse because of probable damage from open-net fish farms. Evidence suggests that sea lice, also from fish farms, are likely infecting herring, sockeye and other salmon in the Strait of Georgia. The situation is moving from serious to dire. Idiocy.

Local salmon are also getting smaller — the one exception is chinook, probably because of fishing restrictions on this species. But all others — sockeye, coho, pinks, chum — are 0.5 to 1.0 kilogram smaller than they were half a century ago (Globe & Mail, Sept. 15/08). Coho are now 33 percent smaller.

The same statistics on the size reduction in salmon are coming from Europe. Eight studies from various centres confirm the trend for both Pacific and Atlantic species in Ireland, Norway and Russia (Ibid.). The cause? We catch the big fish, remove their characteristics from the gene pool, then leave the smaller ones to reproduce. This downbreeding of the species to an inferior commercial and survival attribute is apparent within 10 or less generations of fish. The same trend can now be measured in other ocean species. Idiocy.

Even more dismal is the overall prospect for world fisheries if we don't reduce our global catches and establish one-third of the oceans as marine reserves where no fishing can take place. Major predator fish such as bluefin tuna, marlin and sharks are approaching extinction levels. Almost all fisheries on the planet are either in decline or crisis, and large commercial fish species have been depleted to 10 percent of their historical numbers in the last 50 years. On this present course of industrial capture, if we don't revolutionize the way we manage global fisheries, the seas are expected to be empty of fish by 2048. Idiocy.

To make matters even worse, we are poisoning the marine food chain with pollutants such as mercery — large, top-of-the-food-chain fish are no longer recommended as food for children or pregnant women. Industrial chemicals, plastic compounds and medicinal residues are contaminating seafood products. The massive run-off of agricultural fertilizers have created 405 dead zones in the world's oceans, thousands of square kilometres that are so depleted of oxygen that nothing lives in them. Idiocy, idiocy and more idiocy.

We have an idiotfish on the planet. But it's not the longspine thornyhead.