Narrated by actor and conservationist Ted Danson, a passionate advocate for the world’s oceans, AN OCEAN MYSTERY: THE MISSING CATCH premieres on Earth Day, Saturday, April 22, 2017 at 8 p.m. ET on Smithsonian Channel.
Around the world, millions of people depend on fish for food and livelihood. But what if official government data is drastically underestimating how many fish are being caught? How close are we to a global catastrophe? Government and industry regulators track the quantity of fish caught and claim the oceans can handle it, but global fish numbers have dropped significantly in recent decades. A new Smithsonian Channel special showcases an exhaustive 15-year investigation – from the Atlantic coastline to the reefs of the Bahamas and the shores of Senegal – to reveal stark new findings about our marine ecosystems.
AN OCEAN MYSTERY: THE MISSING CATCH follows Dr. Daniel Pauly and an international team of scientists as they embark on the world’s largest fishing investigation to determine how much fishermen may be overfishing, and just how close we are to a global crash in fish populations. The hour-long film was recently awarded Best Conservation Film at the 2017 International Ocean Film Festival in San Francisco.
The film highlights a pilot study in Honduras by Dr. Stephen Box, Vice President of Global Fisheries Solutions at Rare, who created a cellphone app that makes it possible to collect comprehensive fishing data as it happens. It allows even the most remote fishermen to send information about how much and what kind of fish they are catching to their national government.
