Whaling City Information - - Our Fishless Future

Nov 09 2006

Our Fishless Future

Written by Mitchell Anderson; Introduction by Dave Gould

Thursday, 09 November 2006

NEW BEDFORD, MA - “By-catch” is the quaint euphemism used by both industry and government to describe the enormous volumes of unwanted marine life dumped overboard, which can make up over 90% of the catch. It is akin to picking apples by first cutting down the tree.

Canadian blogger and professional writer Mitchell Anderson has noticed that the reaction to the Scientific American: Overfishing Could Take Seafood Off the Menu by 2048 study regarding the soon be collapse of the worlds oceans life content has been dismal at best. He has written a wonderful piece regarding this very issue.

For years, Ottawa has consistently opposed restrictions on the use of dragger technology, a widely used fishing method that is so wasteful and destructive that our fishless descendants may well marvel at our collective stupidity.

Read his Blog

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Comments

Written by Thor on 2006-11-09 16:32:17

Absolutely!!! when I was in the industry in AK we had observers. It was mandatory and we paid to have them onboard. Their responsibility was to take basket samples of targeted species and untargeted alike. They weighed, measured probed each unit in their sample basket and then dumped the basket overboard.

The collected data would be transferred to a frequency table, GPS positions of the tow (path of the net) recorded and the time was noted. Finally when your co-ed returns to shore, NMFS adds in the standard deviation, plugs the numbers into a formula, and merges the data with other kids reports. Next a graph of the area gets printed and a bunch of pins pushed into that….see where I’m going with this ???
Scientist makes recommendations to NMFS Administration based on forecast projections. I do not know if it is a weighted average forecast, or your basic moving average forecast…I guess they guess because forecasts are not accurate that is why they are called forecasts…dummy

The Catch ???? This was done accurately only if the tree hugging college co-ed was not sea sick, boinking the cappy, or too lazy to do what they were paid to do!!!!! Those loafers waited until we were on the way in from a trip to plug in fictitious numbers into their data tables....Gotta love the Gov!! If I had to put an average on
inaccurate/ fictitious data sampling, I would put it at a 30% occurrence,,,,, +/- 3 %

Meanwhile there was and still is no effort to successfully market the accidental
by-catch specie’s or donate what can be put on a table somewhere without me being arrested.

"...our collective stupidity."
Written by Jlnewbdford 1 on 2006-11-09 11:00:45

There is no doubt that with generations soon coming the expression "our collective stupidity" will be the one question haunting their memory of our attitude towards the Fishing Industry.

Our heirs will look back at the leaders of the Fishing Industry and even more so at the Governing bodies and laugh at the inconsistent ineptitude of their constant conflicting regulations. It has never made sense to restrict fishing with quotas which required the dumping back into the ocean of already captured and mostly dead unwanted species.

What idiot in his right mind thought they would survive after the horrendous trip up to the surface, the dumping on the deck of the vessel and then the suffocating out of water experience? Man and his inevitable "we know better" has in essence done more damage to the "survival of the species" with those unconscionable attempts to save that so called endangered species.

If they weren't in danger in the first place they certainly became prime candidates once the National Marine Fisheries made their first suggestion at saving them! Without doubt, all those now disappearing species would most likely have recovered with much less damage if "we" collectively had allowed OUR fisheries to regulate itself and instead MOVED on those ocean traveling Foreign Fish Manufacturing Plants which invaded our waters. The one question standing in my mind is still there... Why did it take so long to extend our Territorial Waters?

Mankind... While trying to build that better mousetrap, keeps letting the prey die of natural causes!

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Last Updated ( Thursday, 09 November 2006 )