Industrial fishing ships dumped about 80,000 metric tons of fish back into the ocean in the waters of Saint Pierre and Miquelon, a French territory near Canada, over seven decades. This happened between 1950 and 2022, according to a new study in the science journal Cybium. Researchers compared the wasted fish to filling 32 Olympic swimming pools. Almost all of this dumping happened unreported and unmonitored, according to the analysis. The study, led by researchers from the Sea Around Us initiative at the University of British Columbia, found that fishing vessels in the French archipelago caught about 1.2 times more fish than official records indicate. Most of the unreported catch consisted of industrial discards, while a significant portion also came from seafood caught on bait lines in artisanal cod and groundfish fisheries during the 1950s and 1960s. According to a report by website Phys.org, lead author Anna Luna Rossi stated the massive scale of fish dumping was highly unexpected given the region’s history of North Atlantic cod stock depletion and the 1992 Canadian cod fishing ban. Rossi uncovered these findings for her master’s thesis with the Sea Around Us initiative at the University of British Columbia’s Institute for the Oceans...