farming the sea? or slaughter!

[hembo]

this was on bbc news ; it has most likely been on before but still makes depressing reading ; you can liken it to a dairy farmer killing his cows and bull ; and then killing all the calves as well . then for good measure tear the field up.

AND THEY STILL THINK THEY CAN GET AWAY IT!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3152121.stm

[Leon Roskilly]

hembo:

this was on bbc news ; it has most likely been on before but still makes depressing reading ; you can liken it to a dairy farmer killing his cows and bull ; and then killing all the calves as well . then for good measure tear the field up.

AND THEY STILL THINK THEY CAN GET AWAY IT!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3152121.stm

Until the last, before the collapse of the Grand Banks cod fishery, fishermen were claiming that there 'plenty of fish to be caught'. (survivors tend to shoal together, and modern technology allows the shoals to be found, so catches do not go down, and the fishermen do not see any decrease in their catches, so have the impression that there's still plenty of fish).

 

Haddock and whiting share the same grounds as the cod, and the cod continue to taken as bycatch unless these fisheries are closed too.

 

The fishermen are unwilling to stop fishing these areas altogether, so continue to press to be allowed to fish the whiting and haddock, rather than find another line of work, even if this means sealing the fate of the cod.

 

('Fishermen are a threatened species too', they like to argue!!)

 

Worrying, it seems that cod need to maintain sufficient numbers, to maintain their environmental niche.

 

In the simplest of terms, whiting eat the eggs of cods, cod eat whiting. If the cod can eat enough whiting, sufficient of their eggs will develop into cod to eat whiting to maintain the balance.

 

If too many cod are taken, the whiting population gets the upper hand, and eat enough cod eggs to ensure that there will never be a population of cod large enough to recover their niche, ever again.

 

Substitute polar cod (tiny brown fish) for whiting and that is what seems to be happening on the grand banks.

 

Fishermen do not like what the science is telling them, and to a certain extent fishery science is never exact, so their opinion is that the science is no good, and shouuld be ignored.

 

Exactly as happened with the Grand Banks cod disaster.

 

(see also current situation http://www.number10.gov.uk/files/pdf/curre...t_situation.pdf )

 

Tight Lines - leon

 

[ 28. August 2003, 09:14 AM: Message edited by: Leon Roskilly ]

[ShoreDemon]

I love the way the commercials will quote global warming as a problem even though climate change prediction is even more uncertain than marine ecology predictions. A case of picking the science that suits, they could reduce catching effort but they can't do anything about global warming.

[fishy1]

on tuesday or wednesday caught the end of a tv program about fishermen dumping hundreds of monk-fish, it was a sickening sight,and they were complaining they were not allowed to land them because of quotas. seems mad to me, fishy1 :mad:

[corydoras]

fishy1:

on tuesday or wednesday caught the end of a tv program about fishermen dumping hundreds of monk-fish, it was a sickening sight,and they were complaining they were not allowed to land them because of quotas. seems mad to me, fishy1 :mad:

The quota system is mad. I saw another article somewhere about these Spanish fishermen (it does not matter where they were from, it is the quota system that is wrong) had no quota for cod, but they had a quota for cod roe. This meant that they could fish for cod and take the roe from them but could not land the cod itself.