Saturday 14 February 2009

fishing stats

Yes, yes, I am obsessed: in a year, the world's sperm whales eat 100m metric tons of fish, which is equivalent to the entire human marine fishery (I am pretty sure from context - Philip Hoare's Leviathan - that both numbers include squid).

Questions I should get answers to:
- what is the by-catch of the human fishery?
- what is the margin of error in the whale number?

(From Nature's Great Events: one colony of guillemots can eat 1.5m tons of arctic fish in 4 weeks. Given the above stats, this is extraordinary. How many fish are there in the sea?)