Revkin and Safina Fish For Fluke Off Montauk
Andy Revkin took a break from covering global warming to go fishing off Montauk with Carl Safina (it’s a tough job, but someone’s got to do it), and wrote up a Q&A with him in today’s Times.
It’s short but packed with good insights:
Q. What most discourages you related to the trends you see in the oceans?
A. That it’s so easy to see what we need to do, it’s so easy to see how things can be so much better and yet it’s taking so much time to come around to it.
Q. What are some of those improvements?
A. We need to just set fishing quotas and adhere to them, and make them realistic, and listen to what the scientists say about how many fish can come out of the ocean. And if we do that, we will get more of what we want.
… Q. And what’s one of the most encouraging things you’ve seen?
A. That fish are recoverable. Many of the fish that we have here were much less abundant 15 years ago than they are now. We did get some good regulations passed, and the fish began recovering right away. They know what to do. If you just don’t kill them as fast, they start coming back. So the most encouraging thing is that it works, but a lot of that could be much more widespread throughout the country and the rest of the world.
It’s short but packed with good insights:
Q. What most discourages you related to the trends you see in the oceans?
A. That it’s so easy to see what we need to do, it’s so easy to see how things can be so much better and yet it’s taking so much time to come around to it.
Q. What are some of those improvements?
A. We need to just set fishing quotas and adhere to them, and make them realistic, and listen to what the scientists say about how many fish can come out of the ocean. And if we do that, we will get more of what we want.
… Q. And what’s one of the most encouraging things you’ve seen?
A. That fish are recoverable. Many of the fish that we have here were much less abundant 15 years ago than they are now. We did get some good regulations passed, and the fish began recovering right away. They know what to do. If you just don’t kill them as fast, they start coming back. So the most encouraging thing is that it works, but a lot of that could be much more widespread throughout the country and the rest of the world.
posted by Tom Andersen at 9:26 AM
1 Comments:
I thinks that's the right way to think about it. Look what happened when trawling was restricted ... some fish started coming back. This would be a blessing for the hook & line and recreational industry.
Let's do a quick comparison here. A large trawler might have a permit for "x" amount of days, or pounds, but can bring in like 15,000 to 60,000 pounds. You might as well said "tons" because that's what they do - and everything caught as by-catch usually dies.
The hook & line industry is limited to less than 1000 pounds, generally speaking. Some can only catch a few hundred pounds per crew member, of which there are generally only 2 or 3 at most. Any by-catch has a better chance of survival. And of course, which recreational fishing there are stringent limits on the species take.
I rest my case. Factory ship trawling is the problem. /Sam
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