Thank you to the chairman and the committee for having us here.
I would like to make the point that we have been exploiting ocean resources for centuries. It's not the first crisis, maybe, that we're in today. For many centuries, it was done in a sustainable way. Most depletions and collapses and extinctions have occurred over the last 200 years.
In the 19th century it was mostly mammals and birds we were over-exploiting and driving to collapse. In the 20th century, that shifted also to finfish species. Today, especially in coastal regions, which I have studied most--estuaries and coastal bays--about 7% of the species that have historically been fished or hunted have been driven to extinction, and about 36% have collapsed, meaning that they're below 10% of what there used to be. What we can learn from history is that it's not just the magnitude of the declines. Over historical times--and for fish it has mostly been in the last 50 to 100 years--most species that have been very valuable and heavily exploited have been driven to around 10% of their former biomass. So there has been a 90% decline.
As I said before, for mammals and birds, a lot of these changes happened near the turn of the 20th century. In the early part of the 20th century, we started conserving those species. We started bringing in legislation and protection laws to help those species survive and eventually recover. We have a number of marine mammals and birds from which I think we can learn, when we're dealing with fish, in terms of how to recover them. Many birds and mammals that have been driven to below 10% of their former abundance are now back up to 40% of their former abundance. They're not back to their original levels, but at least they are on their way.
What has mostly helped to turn things around for those mammals, birds, and some fish, as well, is of course reversing the two or three main drivers that depleted them in the first place. Exploitation is one main factor that has caused extinction and depletion of more than 90% of the species that have been depleted. The second most important one is habitat loss or habitat degradation. In many cases, it's not just one factor. It's not just exploitation. It's the combination of exploitation and habitat loss that has driven these species to low levels.
In turn, to recover those species, we would use these two factors: reduce exploitation and provide protection for important breeding, spawning, foraging,and nursery habitat. This has been, through legal protections and through the enforcement of management plans, really effective, at least for mammals and birds. That's what we can learn about recovery from history, in my perspective.
Another point I would like to make is that what's actually going on right now in Atlantic Canada, but also around the world, is a shift from finfish fisheries to invertebrate fisheries. Boris will talk about finfish more.
In Atlantic Canada, for example, since the 1990s, catches of finfishes have really declined, and emerging invertebrate fisheries have really increased in volume. There has been a tenfold increase in invertebrate catch in volume and about a thirteenfold increase in the value of these species.
These fisheries, in many regions, are seen as kind of a new fisheries frontier, as new species we can fish. They have increasing value in the global market. A lot of these species are marketed to go to Asia. More and more small communities depend on these invertebrate fisheries to make a living. But at the moment, from my perspective, we're not doing a very good job helping the sustainable development of these species, and we see more and more patterns of boom and bust--rapid expansion of these fisheries and rapid depletion of these fisheries.
What we have done recently is look into all the stock assessments or available data on these invertebrate species and basic knowledge on the population--how much is out there, how do they respond to fishing, what's the distribution. These basic knowledge parameters that we always acquire for finfish species are not even collected for these invertebrate fisheries. There is a new opportunity for markets, for jobs, but we're not really taking a good way to develop these resources in a sustainable manner.
Those are my points.