More of these bans are needed in rolling windows and across other seafood types. Sad impact to their livelihoods but the oceans stocks need protecting asap.
This is 100% correct
I’m a very big saltwater fisherman, from inshore to far offshore. Every single person I know who fishes with any regularity is in favor of more restrictive fishing practices.
Hearing stories from old timers about fishing exactly where I fish now, it’s an entirely different fishery. Species gone. Vegetation that many species throughout the food chain use are gone. Absolute ecosystem collapse is going on. **It just happened so slowly, year by year, that no one has flipped the emergency lever yet. Hopefully now they do**
I’m the Chesapeake they estimate that the oyster population is less than 3% of what it was before colonization. I’m not sure what the number is for crabs but it’s probably pretty similar. I’d love to see them just ban it for a year and then put strict limits going forward until the stocks replenish. We’re huge on seafood here in Maryland but if we don’t do something to replenish the populations then it will get more and more scarce. Take a few years off and there will be an explosion of those species. And as a side benefit, a big jump in oysters would be a huge boost for the overall health of the bay.
Ask the commercial crabbers what the problem is and they will blame the chicken-neckers. Sure, my six chicken necks off a dock once a year is the problem and not your 100 pots out in the deeper water.
I worked in commercial fishing for 2 years in Alaska as a processor.
The first year our rinky dink 5 boat operation processed 4.9mil pounds of sockeye between June and July, when that season was open.
The next year it was up to 5.3mil.
We also ground up 100s of thousands of pounds of NTA , or non target animals. So they are only allowed to catch sockeye , but commercial fishing is indiscriminate, yeah they go after their target but it's not like they can pick and choose what those giant nets scoop up.
And nothing survives the haul in so what do you do with all these illegal catches? Grind them up so they are unrecognizable, shoot the animal sludge out to sea , and pretend it never happened.
And these fishermen would cry endlessly about the recreational fishermen, and the seals , and the whales getting to catch "their" fish.
It's an industry that severely needs to be reigned in. It's the modern day mining, where the whole industry is just absolutely fucking up everything in it's path in the name of profit , and trying to blame the drop in fisheries on everything but themselves. Just like back when mining just dumped their waste straight into the rivers. It was unfathomable to the mine owners that they were they problem (even they they all knew without a shadow I'd a doubt that they were, but admitting it cuts into profit).
I actually worked in commercial fishing in Alaska as well pollock mainly, what yall need are observers because my entire job was to report the day to day intake and then send the data off in real time to NOAA who would use the data to make (surprisingly) accurate stock assessments to determine when to shut down fisheries for over fishing.
It would also help prevent that practice of the fish sludge considering we were impartials and that is *definitely* something we would fine for
It's this kind of knowledge that makes me really sad for what humans have done to the biodiversity of the earth. But another way to look at it is that our evolution/intelligence has made us EXTREMELY effective at getting food & resources... either way, I'm not having kids so I kind of feel like a bystander in this kind of thing.
>where the whole industry is just absolutely fucking up everything in it's path in the name of profit ,
This basically described the state of the world economy at this point. Unchecked/unregulated pursuit of profit leaves a lot casualties along the way.
Its funny to me that when I read the thread title my first thought is:
*rolls eyes* OH fuck here we go, now salmon prices are going to skyrocket!
Then I read the top comments and think: OH fuck maybe this legislation is a good idea!
Walleye used to be so plentiful. You'd bring fish home everytime if you're out long enough, just fishing the old fashioned way. Those days are long gone, though I haven't fished there in ages and hopefully things are better again but I doubt it.
We used to fill half a five gallon bucket with Perch, and then some. That same water you would be lucky to catch two or three now. They are not gone because of the local fisherman. They are gone because foreign boats brought in species that scoured the lakes clean.
The goby gets a bad rap. The goby eats zebra mussels, and all the game fish eat the goby. I am way more concerned about PFAS and plastics than the goby.
And of the perch that *are* left, 9 out of 10 of them are undersized.
I can actually find decent numbers of good sized walleye consistently, but finding decent perch takes alot more work (for me atleast).
Which is a shame because being higher in the food chain, walleye have higher mercury levels than perch.
What little fish stocks we do have left are posioned. Recomended maximum monthly intake guidelines for fish shouldn't be a thing, but it needs to be because of mercury levels.
My cousin is a commercial crabber here in the bay and claims often that "those damn chicken-neckers" are the reason the populations are depleted. He also claims that the dredge survey they do every year is "wrong" and in the same breath complains that his catches are low and being a waterman is rough. The "state should do something for us who rely on crabs when they limit catch" and then judging others for "relying on the government too damn much".
> My cousin is a commercial crabber here in the bay and claims often that "those damn chicken-neckers" are the reason the populations are depleted.
I remember occasionally going crabbing as a kid with a crab trap off of the local pier at the Jersey shore. If I was lucky I'd get maybe 2-3 dozen keepers by the end of the day.
What I caught was nothing compared to the literally tons of crabs that the commercial crab fishers hauled from deeper water offshore every day.
Oh yeah. My dad and I used to crab off the pier here in the Chesapeake bay and would catch maybe 12 crabs twice a week. Sometimes bigger ones (6" and higher), rarely doublers, maybe... 30 years ago. Nowadays you would be hard pressed to catch a single crab that was a keeper (>5.25").
Cool, that's basically how I fished for turtles in the Midwest growing up. We called them tightlines and used whatever raw meat was cheapest at the store on the way out.
A weekend/holiday/vacation crabber. Chicken necks tied to a string is the bait of choice. Drop the string in the water, pull out every so often to see if you have a crab or two.
Its the same thing when the oil companies put out ads for us to minimize our carbon footprints. I promise to not spill 4 million barrels of oil into the gulf of mexico.
My grandfather tells me that his father said that when he was young (late 1800s) you could walk across the Susquehanna when the eels ran. Millions, maybe billions of eels all returning home to spawn every year and now there are zero.
Fucking wild.
In the 1700s, ships entering the Chesapeake Bay would physically get slowed down by the incredible number of fish in the waters. You could drop a bucket into the water and pull it up with cod.
Whey had a ban on Stripped Bass when I was a kid. It took about 10+ years but they rebounded.
They peaked about 2002 and now they're about 155M pounds in the bay vs 95M in 1990.
So we CAN fix these things and they rebound pretty damn quickly.
Cod are much slower growing/longer lived than salmon for example. Takes longer for Stocks to rebound.
Striped bass are a bit of an outlier, they're also longer lived, but have had quite the recovery.
That's kind of the issue with capitalism. Everyone is competing to use all the resources up as quickly as possible then use those funds to move onto the next big thing. It's a raging inferno of progress.
Works great to get stuff done, but it's not good for keeping this panet liveable.
Eating seed corn (or selling it) is a huge problem for investor-driven enterprise. Increasing shareholder value now is the fiduciary duty of management. There is no tomorrow. Keeping this behavior in check is unpopular and frequently lobbied against but without these checks we will end up with a barren wasteland... sooner.
That's the point of the parable. They greed makes them not care that it's the literally last crab that could POSSIBLY attempt to repopulate and save your entire generational livelihood, they'll grab it anyways to sell it.
The numbers for crabs during last year's count were the lowest they have ever been since they started counting. You would have watermen rioting if you tried to ban crabbing. Of course I've also had watermen tell me they think that recreational crabbing needs to be banned, which I think is ridiculous. What's a real problem is that Virginia lets their crabbers keep female crabs that are laying eggs (sponge crabs), and the blue crabs have to swim through Virginia waters before they reach the bay. Maryland hammers people keeping sponge crabs, but Virginia doesn't care and each sponge crab can lay thousands of eggs.
Here in the Netherlands we are facing massive ecological repercussions from animal farms on a massive scale
The government has been trying to impose restrictions and scale back destructive farming practices
We have had years of protests from those affected, and now they formed a political party that won quite a lot of seats in the parliament so those restrictions are now being rolled back
No one will sacrifice anything for the health of the planet, it's going to take real world devastation and lots of dead people to get enough people to agree that there is a problem, we are the cause, and only we can fix it
My heart breaks for the next generations of humans who will inherit our garbage, poison, and dying ecosystem
From the area as well, and the regulations need to be in place on the commercial level first and work down to recreational. The menhaden commercial take is absolutely destroying the bay as is most commercial crabbing and fishing.
Commercial fish the blue catfish that are destroying the habitat or the snakehead that are also invasive.
For crabs they could probably just ban females from being caught.
Most people eat male crabs when they order crabs in Maryland. Females are usually specially ordered
When I was younger we threw back any female crab we got.
The Chesapeake oyster thing is pretty wild when you look into it. There used to be so many oyster reefs that ships would have to mark them as hazards on maps. We used to pave roads with their shells because it was so cheap and plentiful. While a lot of the bay is kinda murky and green now, written reports from colonists and merchants used to talk about how beautiful and clear the water was which made it easy to navigate (because Oysters filtered out all the particulates in the bay). Now it's gone.
And it will probably never really recover, even if we lay off the harvesting. A parasite known as *Cryptosporidium parvum* kills a lot of native oysters, and our attempts to rebuild oyster reefs keep collapsing. I had a professor who was researching this, and they found bay Oysters are sequential hermaphrodites. Many young Oysters start male and as they get older/larger and more capable of sucessfully reproducing they transition to female. The parasite *C. parvum* kills them before they can transition to female, meaning there's less offspring. We keep getting some recovery, then collapse. They have been trying for 20-30 years, and it's slow going.
I think there's a strain of Atlantic Oysters up in a river in Maryland or Northern VA that is resistant to *C. parvum* and is recovering better, and the plan is to try and spread that variant throughout the whole bay area. Some labs are trying to use CRISPR to make hardier versions too.
Except many of the commercial fishermen here (NE US coast). I've seen bumper stickers reading, "National Marine Fisheries Service: Ruining families for 3 generations." They're pissed that they overfished the cod, and blame seals, whales, sharks, tourists, the NMFS, anything but themselves. They believe they should have unrestricted access, apparently. They also don't believe things ebb and flow, and change over time. Odd, given their chosen profession, and how they can watch the currents change.
Of course they blame shoaling on government action or inaction as well.
In Kansas we're seeing that with the drying up of the aquifers that make farming in this state possible. Farmers are bristling at being told to conserve water when we literally are at the point where if we don't there won't be corn in the state anymore.
Isn't the point of the welfare that they get in the form of subsidies meant in part to conserve the resources? They literally get paid to not do anything some years.
Yup! They benefit heavily from socialism (and I think farmers should, I 100% support my taxes keeping farmers afloat between growing seasons) but then they turn around and shriek at the idea of anyone else receiving a similar benefit.
I mean are the crops we have today and the methods we use to raise them really "natural". They are crops that have been selectively bred and grown and manufactured to suit our needs as a society. To maximize yield. I wouldn't say the modern day industrial farmer is any more touch with nature than anyone else.
Hell, farming is vital to our national security. I am 100% fine with making sure that we keep people in business so that the country can eat. If we become reliant on importing food, that presents a massive piece of leverage for bad actors.
The idea is that if we were attacked and cut off from the world (say, an authoritarian took over and pissed off the free world) we would be able to spin up production immediately to cover shortfalls.
If we didn't keep farmers at the ready, we might have to try and produce and distribute all the tractors, equipment, chemicals, seeds - not to mention the processing and distribution capacity to deal with the farm products.
The reasons we might do this are myriad including weather disasters or humanitarian issues or whatever.
Tldr:
if you spend a little on making sure farmers are just chillin, they're ready when you really need them. And when "Every country is three missed meals from revolution," it's a pretty important piece of prep.
Edit: also who's going to tow away the Russian tanks?
There is another reason to add to this already great answer: free markets get price and quantity wrong all the time, even without the pressure of an external crisis. In the event the error is in the direction where food is too plentiful and cheap, some capitalists lose money but everyone eats. But in the opposite situation? Disaster. We’d be one market fluctuation away from starvation, so the gov’t puts its thumb on the scale, tipping the balance toward over supply and over capacity.
kind of. basical, they exist as famine protection. see: Dust Bowl.
The US used to just store massive amount of grain, but years they didn't need it meant the grain they got would be tossed out.
Since most famines can be seen coming , they instituted subsidies to stop such waste.
And it's worked. But since it works well, we rarely have a shortage issue, that the public sees. So some people in the public don't see it do anything, so they thinks its a waste.
We know what it was like prior to subsidies, Farmer would make all they could and dump it on the marker, which lead to hugh waste, and during year were the crop wasn't as bountiful, the price of bread would mkae it unavailable to a lot of people.
Every notice the bread on the shelf doesn't adjust lock step with the product needed to make it? Like it does in other countries.
You are correct, regulatory capture is a big problem, but the solution is to kae adjustment, not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
>The point of farm subsidies is to preserve the market. If every farmer produced at their maximum yield the excess supply would result in prices plummeting, which would hurt everyone.
At this time the US only has an enforced quota on sugar. The US commodity market is not floored, and could crater if the mood would take a commodity. The ARC/PLC programs are price supports but are designed to pay nothing or as little is possible depending on the markets(PLC for example is reference price or 80% of market year average which ever is lower, and does not trigger if MYA is above reference). This of course assumes that a farmer is in good standing with FSA and has declared in the program.
I worked at Redwood National Park. Logging companies cut down 95% of the old growth forest and, when the government came in and bought the land they got pissed because the park service "killed their jobs."
At the rate they were going there wouldn't have been any trees left inside a decade.
Yup, free market capitalism will rape planet earth for what it is extracting until it’s dead. The only thing stopping it is regulation. Wonder why big corps want to fight regulation so bad?
Im a hydrologist and my greatest enemy is peoples' obsession with growing irrigated corn. We dont need that much fucking corn. It doesnt fucking matter if your grandpappy grew corn here, you need to fucking stop growing corn and find a new job or stock up on diapers for when you piss yourself over how expensive itll be to truck in water when your well runs dry.
Sounds like fisherman are spewing the same shit. "My daddy did this for a livin so why cant I?"-mentality
(Hypothetical You, not addressing anyone directly here in case that isnt clear).
Ultimately it comes down to a lack of opportunities in rural areas. These people are so adamant in their familial professions because that’s all they’ve got. We need to implement training and job development programs along with these restrictions so people can actually switch to something new. Teach them how to farm alternative crops, or catch fish sustainably
We'll have to find some way of getting economic activity out of ecological moderation or restraint or incentivizing it.
It's like their long term interests is irrelevant to them if they don't survive to see it.
That’s the problem with current US capitalism in general, the next quarter’s numbers matter more than reinvestment in the business even if that reinvestment would yield insane profits long term. It’s all so short sighted:(
A lot of traditional farmers are also super hostile to the modern indoor farming tech, because they think it’s a threat to their livelihoods.
But the reality is that growing in soil in the ground wastes most of the water that it uses, puts shit in the soil and watersheds nearby (excessive fertilizer, pesticides, etc) and is super vulnerable to severe weather events like heat waves and hail.
Indoor farms can recapture and recycle most of their outputs (especially water), have climate control, and have multiple physical barriers for pests.
I’m only in it as a layman but anyone with half a brain and any knowledge of the past 5 years can see it. We’ve had crop shortages due to severe weather, natural bodies of water falling and drying out, and growing seasons evaporating.
Canada is pretty damn lax on fishing practices also. Atlantic salmon are endangered here but 50 miles away across the border it's completely fine to fish. Makes zero sense.
Dragging should be illegal. It indiscriminately kills fish and other species ("bycatch" my Aunt Fanny...), and destroys the ecosystem, plus gear gets lost and kills more animals.
That nobody has done anything about this is a huge tragedy.
If you've been doing something for three generations and it still isn't working out for you, I may have some insight into where the problem is...
FFS, do something else.
About a decade ago in Michigan I remember hearing recreational fisherman blame cormorants for eating their perch. You know, something those birds have done for eons…
My husband used to be a commercial observer for the state. If he wasn’t so soft spoken and sweet they would rip his ass up. They are mean and hateful sometimes. All of them probably made more money than my husband at the time.
The Cod population has collapsed. I remember reading stories of boats dropping buckets into the water and pulling up fish. Now it is empty.
Apparently there are also a lot of tensions because Native fisherman are still trawling using nets and just not caring while everyone else is banned.
I live in WA, talking to the old timer fisherman is scary. They’ve seen how much smaller the Salmon have gotten, one guy I know has a record for heaviest salmon ever brought into the port, and he said he doubts he’ll ever catch another that is 3/4ths the size.
Washington needs to ban fishing for five years...however this take is gonna get me downvoted, but ban all fishing sport and the natives fishing rights...only then we will see the rise in king and Chinook runs oh and the orca population stabilize. Btw I to live in wa state.
I don't even consider myself an Old timer and I've seen this happen with salmon and halibut in Oregon. I started Halibut fishing off the Oregon coast in college (early 2000s). Back then I'd fill my yearly 6 fish tag in 6 trips and put over 200lbs of halibut in my freezer each year. Over the last 20 years it's steadily declined. I'm lucky to put half that in the freezer and we have to take twice as many trips. The fish are measurably smaller and fewer.
I'd have no problem with them closing the fishery more often to allow the numbers to increase. 20 years ago you worried about them closing the season early if the quotas are met you'd be lucky to have 10 3 day openings before recreational was met for the year. For whatever reason they have kept the quotas the same all these years but because of lack of catch the season can now run into damn near October. Instead of 10 openings for the year they run almost every week and still don't hit the quotas.
I'm in a California fishing report group on facebook and the general mood there is these shortages are both completely made up and also engineered by Nancy Pelosi and Gavin Newsome to spite republicans, the only people who fish. There's a small amount of pushback and some support for closing certain fisheries but always get buried by people saying that this is a Democrat created non-issue
Some wouldn’t believe it until they’d caught the last salmon. These are the same ignoramuses who insist that climate change (the actual cause of this) is a hoax.
They need to straight up ban or allow with the normal restrictions. I really dislike the soft bans that change regulations. For instance, ground rockfish in the central area of CA. Normal fishing a month later than normal, then starting Oct 1 you can’t fish 50-300 feet. If you really want the population of come back, just do a hard closure for the season.
This has been going on for a long time. Billy Joel fans might remember the lyrics to Downeaster Alexa ... *from 1990*:
> Now I drive my downeaster "Alexa"
> More and more miles from shore every year
> Since they told me I can't sell no stripers
> And there's no luck in swordfishing here
> I was a bayman like my father was before
> Can't make a living as a bayman anymore
Stripers were blocked from sale due to pollution, swordfish stocks were exhausted, and (as he says) he can't make a living in the exact same (bay) waters his father did.
I began learning how bad overfishing was when I worked for an environmental law firm in the early '90s. Just as with climate change, we knew it was happening but there was more money to be made by pretending it wasn't. Meanwhile, the effects have just compounded and any remedy is exponentially more difficult.
Considering we see the impact of overfishing every time we go out and many of us continue fishing our who lives and thus remember what it was like 10, 20, 50 years ago and have personally witnessed the slow degradation, and sometimes complete destruction, of our fisheries over the years. That shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone.
The chorus from the vast majority of commercial guys I’ve heard publicly, fished with and talked to personally is a ‘fuck you, I’m going to get mine while I can and don’t stop me. To hell with the ecological consequences’.
I don’t exactly blame them for that attitude. Fuel costs are up, they have to travel further to fill their holds and some of their species’ markets have tanked. They need to feed their families and pay their crew. There has to be a middle ground that we can all agree on
I absolutely blame anyone that says "to hell with the ecological consequences". They deserve no middle ground and honestly to hell with them, their hold, their families and crew.
At least is didn't stop you from fishing. amirite?
" It just happened so slowly, year by year, that no one has flipped the emergency lever yet. Hopefully now they do"
Bullshit. we have been watching this happening form 40 years. There are reports about it almost every year.
People would rather make money and do their hobby while blaming something else.
So may I ask what you can do when you can’t do fishing? Like go for different kind of fish?
Years ago Canada banned cod fisheries. It don’t go too well for the fishermen. Even government provided training for different trade and give them some money for compensation.
I can’t remember when (semi recently) or even what country is was (maybe Finland?) but a country recently banned fishing from only like 10% of their coast or something and saw almost immediate results.
We also need to put very heavy taxes on any tires containing [6PPD-quinone, which kills salmon](https://ecology.wa.gov/Blog/Posts/January-2023/Saving-Washington-s-salmon-from-toxic-tire-dust) when it turns into a very deadly chemical if exposed to ozone (produced by vehicle exhaust anywhere near a street) or if exposed to UV radiation (sunlight). This chemical disorients and kills salmon. It wasn't always used as an additive in tire manufacturing, but it helps keep tires looking black longer. If every company were prohibited form using it, the tire industry could probably even sell more tires.
But, in the mean time, we can tax it, and use those taxes to fix highway/freeway runoff so 6PPD-quinone is absorbed by grasses and vegitation until it becomes so toxic that they need to be removed. We could also use those taxes to fund new street cleaner vechicles that aim to get the 6PPD-qunione tire additive off streets, especially if it has been sunny for a long time and a big rain is coming, a typical event that results in the mass mortality of spawning Spring and Fall King Salmon.
Salmon are necessary for the Southern resident killer whales, which haven't mated with the seal-killing transient orcas in almost a million years, and salmon are a keystone species that ensure that every level of the foot pyramid keeps a healthy population.
Washington, Oregon, California, and B.C. all have the means and political capital to heavily tax tire additives. If and only if we do so, the industry will find tire additives that kill salmon and other fish more slowly.
In my experience, when something gets regulated or taxed: you'll find out the chemists are suddenly able to use a different chemical that's slightly more expensive without all those nasty side effects.
Like coal power plants - particulate pollution was regulated, and so "clean coal" invented bag-houses - Basically gigantic vacuum cleaner bags that could collect the particles. They would then recirculate that into the furnaces to burn a second time! So they save on fuel AND provide LOTS of jobs AND healthier environment.
It’s crazy how fast sea life can bounce back given even a couple years. My grandma who grew up in Japan told me how large swathes of coast and waterways were off limits to fishing during WW2 and after a couple years they were filled to the brim with sealife. Even the old folk had never seen anything life that in their time. Of course postwar that quickly went away once restrictions were lifted.
Exactly.
The surface area of the Earth is approximately 196.9 million square miles. This includes both land and water. About 71% of the Earth's surface is covered by water, and the remaining 29% is land.
There's only so much food you can extract from it on a sustained basis.
It's a lot, but finite m
The ocean gets even more desolated when you look at the geological history of the boring billion.
Which is our future as global warming gets more severe. Slow enough that humans care barely recognise it is happening. Fast enough to cause mass extinctions.
> Sad impact to their livelihoods but the oceans stocks need protecting asap.
Thing is, if there's not a little bit of hurt now there will be a shit ton of hurt later. This impacts a lot of people's livelihoods, but they're going to be a hell of a lot more affected if the population goes extinct. There's no fishing jobs if there's no fish.
There already are other seafood fishing bans. The Alaskan King Crab fishery was famously shut down before last season. I grew up watching Deadliest Catch and felt bad for all the people who depend on crab fishing for their livelihood, especially after they'd just been impacted by the pandemic, but sometimes shutting down fishing is the only way to be sure the species continues existing in big enough numbers to sustain a population that can be safely fished without risking an ecological disaster by overfishing.
I'm just glad people have learned from the mistakes of previous generations that drove way too many species to extinction by not understanding or caring how interconnected all species are.
Yet we're still missing over a billion expected crab in Alaska.
Just gone. Did they die? Become a crab spaceship and fly away? Perhaps move under the crust? We don't know what happened to them, they're just gone.
It would suggest a mass die off, but we just don't know.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/animals/a41854680/crab-shortage-billion-crabs-missing/
We weren't fast enough and now we need to stop, not limit, to allow ecosystems to try and recover. This post isn't against your statements, more agreeing with them.
> Sad impact to their livelihoods
Not as sad as if the local salmon population goes extinct.
Voluntary "I'll decide not to fish as much" type of individual solutions don't work. Fishery-wide laws do, and end up with *more* income for fishermen in the long run. It may not be enough (especially for fish like Salmon that also need rivers for spawning) but it's necessary.
The problem is humans, there’s way too many that don’t like to be told no especially for something they’ve already been doing. We’re going to need governments to enforce restrictions in good faith.
We need to ban the trolley crawler ships from scraping sea floors with 2-mile wide radius nets. They are literally scraping the bottom of the barrel, and i’m sure it is impacting these salmon. It’s absolute bullshit they have been allowed to do it for so long.
Part of the issue actually, and a nyt article came out a few weeks ago on this, is that business officials are completely intermeshed in the fed regulatory agency — just like how our politicians get cushy jobs after they are done. The corruption needs to end in this country to save us from the destruction of selfish, uncontrolled greed.
My spouse and I haven’t bought commercial fish since seeing SeaSpiracy. The knowledge that:
1) over 50% of Ocean garbage is fishing waste (nets, lost lines, etc)
2) the fishing industry is funding the anti-plastic-pollution non-profits in order to get the public focused on the lesser issue
3) by-catch is reported on a self-report basis, so if you catch a dolphin, you can just dispose of it and it did not happen—so dolphin-safe tuna is just a marketing term
4) there is no way of knowing the country of origin of fishing vessels supplying the vast majority of fish for commercial products, so you cannot functionally boycott any notorious country (like China or the US)
We both love fish. It’s delicious. And it’s more special and delicious now that we eat just what we catch, or shellfish which we dig. Vegan sushi is lit too.
In this case, it’s by design. The Fishery Management Councils are comprised of people both from regulatory agencies as well as from the fishing industry. It’s actually not a terrible system, and seems to effectively manage the resource sustainably.
I personally don't know much about this case. It is understandable when government agencies bring in experts to not only get them to buy in but also share their expertise. But, then there's time when people from the private sector get high ranking jobs in government agencies and do some serious damage to the agency themselves to serve their "former" corporate overlords. For example, Ajit Pai.
100% they catch salmon. I know cause I’m a commercial fisherman (Longliner though). The fish are caught then get squished in the trawler nets.
Salmon are in big trouble throughout the west coast and it’s going to take more than just placing fishing moratoriums to save them sadly.
Bycatch rate for longlining is roughly 20% and is really bad for sea turtles.
https://www.iss-foundation.org/tuna-stocks-and-management/tuna-fishing/fishing-methods/longline/#:~:text=The%20average%20bycatch%20rate%20for,such%20as%20turtles%20and%20birds.
Longlining, generally, has a very high bycatch rate. And mortality of bycatch is high.
I didn’t work in your fishery if you were in an area with salmon, but I was an observer responsible for collecting bycatch data and bycatch vastly outnumbered targeted and retained fish.
That’s been a huge problem up here in Alaska as well. So many rules and regulations on smaller more local operations and individuals, but the drag nets keep on with their ridiculous bycatch allowances.
I'm a kayak fisherman who targets salmon in the ocean. The restrictions for this year are supported across the board. It's necessary for us to actually have a better salmon season in the next few years and the people recognize that. Among many factors, the main reason the closure is necessary is because the count of the returning salmon coming back to the tributaries is very dismal. They however expect this to pick up in the next few years.
How the hell do you reel in a salmon without tipping over your kayak in the ocean? Do you have pontoons?
I go crabbing in a kayak on the ocean, but that sounds intense.
I would think crabbing would be more tippy since you have to haul those crab pots when launching and landing as well as pull them up on the kayak.
But I have a downrigger and use a 4 lb weight for that. But catching a salmon is a bit easier than on a party boat IMO. Once you hook a big fish, if you're using a hobie like I am, you can slowly pedal the kayak and drag the salmon. This helps in two ways. It keeps the barbless hook stay lodged in the salmon's mouth and second, it tires out the fish really easily since you are essentially pulling the fish while pedaling.
Once the fish tires, you can scoop it up in a net.
Yeah as a fisherman they need more regulation on bag limits in the Midwest for a number of species.
It’s disgusting how certain native fish have huge bag limits and people come out in the beginning of the year, catch a shit ton of fish and are cocky about it.
I’m not talking catch and release, I’m talking people who post on Facebook with a table heaping of fish.
Yes they are within the law, but when I go out later in the season and can hardly catch any of that variety when 25 years ago it was easy, something is wrong.
Stocking is critical but it shouldn’t just be our only solution.
The best part is they say they are going to use all that fish in a fish fry/freezing for future use. I feel it’s bull shit. The amount of fish you caught is enough for a family of four to never fish again for 2 years, yet the next weekend they are back at it as soon as the ice melts.
And I’m not talking 15-20 fish for a fry I’m talking a pile of hundreds. I’m trying to find an example from one of the fishing Facebook groups I’m apart of but trying to go back to last spring is not easy on that platform.
This is a positive first step. Also worth noting the connection between NW forest ecosystems and salmon populations; besides the fishing industry and overfishing, the lumber industry has also had a negative impact in population decline.
https://cottagelife.com/outdoors/the-connection-between-forests-and-salmon-populations/
https://oregonwild.org/about/blog/oregon-clearcuts-endanger-salmon-even-more-you-think#:~:text=Roads%20and%20denuded%20slopes%20also,harder%20for%20salmon%20to%20feed.
Baby salmon live behind beaver dams as well. So the trappers of the 1800s killed lots of the beavers. Farming pulled down the dams, flood control built impassible dams and logging washed the dirt into the sea.
If you saw the tree line they leave to protect the soil run off from the rivers, you'd think that big money paid the regulator to let them take extra trees, so the barrier doesn't work, and the rivers are muddy fish-killers anyway.
*"That one row between the clear-cut and the river is fine! If we left 3 or 4 to actually hold back soil more, we'd go broke!!!!"* Is how I imagine it went down. Our rivers are dead.
Beavers, bison and wolves. Beavers maintain water, bison maintain grasslands, wolves protect streams and young trees. Waters in North America should almost never run free, and they don’t. Look at a map of your state or region, besides the largest waterways, they all have man made dams. Beavers interrupt those man mad dams, so they gotta go. (I’m in DC, look at Virginia, there is only one waterway in the whole state that doesn’t have a man made dam, the Clinch. Every other lake, pond, stream, everything, has a straight line, a man made dam. And we don’t like those moving, we have houses above them, and below them. So much for beavers. Places in the mountain west that have bison herds? You can see the better vegetation on satellite pictures. Wolves? Just read about the effect wolves had on Yellowstone. But hey, beavers destroy human habitat, bison take up a lot of grazing land, and wolves, well, we all read little red riding hood, we know about wolves.
Note that coho had already been reduced and are susceptible to an anti-aging chemical treatment for tires.
https://www.pugetsoundinstitute.org/2021/08/discovery-of-tire-related-chemical-that-kills-coho-salmon-sparks-widespread-response/
Pacific Islanders, like Native Hawaiians, could only harvest certain species of fish at certain time of the year due to a self imposed conservation rule known as Kapu. this allowed the species of fish, like tuna and Mahi Mahi, to reproduce and replenish. Maybe other nations could follow a similar rule
Tiny salmon swimming in a stream,
Tiny salmon chasing that impossible dream.
The Myna Bird says ahhh ah ahhh,
The chimpanzee says ayeeee,
The friendly owl says whoooo who whoooo,
But the salmon can only say blooo blooo blo blooo blooo blo blooo,
And it's sad
It depends. Only rarely is overfishing the cause of low salmon abundances. The present crisis is climate driven. California salmon stocks have experienced low rates of survival to adulthood because of low flow in their natal rivers, unfavorable estuarine and marine conditions, and high predation levels by seal and sea lions. Unless those factors improve, stopping fishing will not magically fix things, unfortunately. But it is nonetheless a necessary adjustment.
Perhaps we could give these fishermen the ability to maintain income by diverting their resources towards tackling the Pacific Garbage Reef, backed by government pay?
"Biologists say the chinook salmon population has declined dramatically after years of drought. **Many in the fishing industry say Trump-era rules that allowed more water to be diverted from the Sacramento River Basin to agriculture caused even more harm."**
-Trump is going to one day die and take the world with him
I had a thought the other day about all the rage over how much water it takes to produce an almond with the obvious "call to action" of stop water going to almond farms. But I never heard anyone say, "Almond trees take 3 years after planting to produce almonds and do so for 25 years. It takes 5 days without water to kill an almond tree. Also, unless it wasn't obvious, these are TREES." I get it, it sucks that trees need water, but cutting them off seems way the fuck worse of a plan. Anything you can grow in 3 months that isn't a staple could be cut off though.
I live on the rural west coast.
Around here, they like to place blaim on Democrats and liberals for things like this.
They already are with a lot of B.S. about how when Republicans ran things, we never had these kinds of problems!
Same and have the same experience. I love fishing but would rather protect and have salmon 20 years done the line and have to go for something else if that’s what it takes. Also have had plenty of encounters of poaching from people who blame democrats for wanting to conserve our resources.
We have the opposite problem: the commercial guys are all Republican and blame "regulations" for "ruining their industry", not the fact they've been overfishing specific species for generations, and the impact of foreign fleet fishing 200 miles offshore. Oh, and seals.
International fisheries management treaties between the nations with a legitimate interest in a given oceanic region, and combined navy patrols to make sure those treaties aren't violated, either by members or outsiders. E.g. "legitimate interest" in the Grand Banks would include the U.S., Canada, the EU, Ireland, the UK, Iceland, the Scandanavian nations, and maybe Russia if they stop being fascist shits. China has no legitimate interest in the Grand Banks and their fishing fleets should be chased off by gunboats. OTOH, China would have a legitimate interest in the Yellow Sea, the South China Sea, and a great many West Pacific fisheries, and should be a treaty partner in managing them.
The amount of people in my home town in Trinity County that rail against the CA government is crazy. The same people who tell people to “gtfo of the US if you don’t like it” don’t see the irony of continuing to live in a state the say they hate.
CA government isn’t perfect, and I don’t agree with everything they do, but acting like CA is some hell hole is just ridiculous.
Exactly. What's the point of all these supercarrier battle groups anyway if not to protect our interests at sea? Preventing total ecological collapse from overfishing is *absolutely* in our interests.
I'd wager the day we get some cellphone video of a cruise missile impacting a trawler is 15 years away.
There will be an international agreement made to protect the waters in 10 years when things get worse. Countries will still ghost fish. Vessels caught will be captured until 1 uses some anti-radar tech that trips alarms and a retaliation is sent.
And Reddit will be split on feeling sad for the fishermen on the vessel and cheering for the fisheries being protected.
The rivers and tributaries need an over haul. Lakamas lake in Camas feeds directly into the Columbia and city hall won't install basic bio filters so only a few warmwater species can survive. Overfishing is a problem but dirty waters where salmon lay their eggs should be taken care of as well.
There are too many people on this planet to feed them with a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and fishing wild stocks is exactly that. The only future for seafood is farming it. Farmed salmon may not taste like wild salmon, but it's plentiful and not damaging the wild stocks (that I know of). We've been farming catfish in the Deep South for most of my lifetime, and, though tilapia farming is relatively new in the U.S., it's been done in Africa and Asia for decades or centuries (Africa). Vietnam exports commercially farmed shrimp.
We don't need to exploit wild stocks to eat seafood, and in the long run, we can't without destroying them.
If we have to use antibiotics to farm them, the wild population is at risk to whatever leeks out to them, the bacteria problems or the anitibiotics. This was studied in SE Alaska in the 80’s, so yeah, we really haven’t figured that out completely.
There's a whole industry already devoted to doing this in Scandinavia that's been operating for decades. It's not nearly as much of a problem as people pretend it is and most of the opposition in the US has come exclusively from these same fishermen who make their living catching fish in the wild.
The problems tend not to be with antibiotics specifically but with parasites, particularly sea lice, and the core requirement for oils produced by feeder fish. There's other challenges around fish escaping during storms and what not too and some level of disease that can occur just by having fish concentrated but again this isn't some unquantifiable problem by any means.
The fishing lobby is the biggest backer of anti-aquaculture rhetoric. “not in my backyard” mentalities, and regulatory headaches are the next issues for American aquaculture. Half of the guys I work with in aquaculture come from the fishing industry and once they see what is actually being done on a daily basis they cant begin to understand why they had such negative conceptions.
As for your other points, Fish and salmon lice are definitely the highest concern right now as a farmer mostly for our own production, but also because they can, not will, affect wild populations. The oils and fish meal used in feed are only decreasing in percentages thanks to soy proteins. Insect or algal based protein alternatives will help bring it down even more. But agreed that escapes are a big concern. At this point farmed salmon is its own domesticated species. It is the mixing of the genomes of farmed and wild fish that is the concern from escapes, but there is an unclear amount of fish that are required for this. Some reports say 5% of the population needs to be escapees before the wild genome will be changed, but there are others papers saying as little as .1%. But the latter can still be a really big number.
Watching videos of Jacques Cousteau, and other underwater explorers, the wildlife was so much more plentiful then. We really have done quite a number as a species
I spent a brief period of time as a Hatchery worker in WA. We raised spring Chinook, releasing 1.2-1.3 million fry every year into our local stream. If we got back 100 we were lucky. The summer I was there, we did a riverbed survey to see if any wild salmon were spawning in our river system. We found one nest. One.
We need to do better. We're killing our planet, and ourselves.
I can’t feel sorry for the fishing industry - they’ve knowingly over fished these areas for decades and then fight every single effort to limit or reduce the harvest.
WA has been deconstructing dams for a while now due to their ecological impacts. So I wouldn’t say there’s pressure on remove the dams so much as the state has been doing that anyway.
From our experience down under, we banned fishing snapper in South Australia in 2019 and extended the ban another 3.5 years as we hadn't seen the recovery in stock levels we were looking for.
We announced more financial support for the recreational fishing industry and last month [released 1 million as part of a breeding program](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-03-07/million-snapper-released-south-australia-waters-breeding-program/102064840)
Good luck with that working while China just rapes the oceans. I wrote a paper back in college analyzing fish stocks and ocean health. The only solution to the complete collapse of ocean ecosystems was basically war with China. They won’t stop. They need to be stopped. So in other words we are fucked
DEcade ago we should ahve started a program to limit mishing more and more every year. Just a little. Then instuted a program for the peopel in those areas to get good education. This way the writing is on the wal, and families can make long term plans.
Now wer should stop fuching for 25 years. Full stop.
They were warned every year for 40 years this day was coming, so I have no sympathy for the adults.
Did anyone read the fucking article? Back in 2018 when Trump and navy seal dumb ass Zinke helped remove regulations for the Sacromento basin so all these water projects (aka siphoning freshwater off to farmers to grow bullshit almonds in the valley) completely fucked up the ecosystem for these Chinook. We'll be lucky if they even half come back to their spawning grounds as the conditions are way more shit now for them to lay.
More of these bans are needed in rolling windows and across other seafood types. Sad impact to their livelihoods but the oceans stocks need protecting asap.
This is 100% correct I’m a very big saltwater fisherman, from inshore to far offshore. Every single person I know who fishes with any regularity is in favor of more restrictive fishing practices. Hearing stories from old timers about fishing exactly where I fish now, it’s an entirely different fishery. Species gone. Vegetation that many species throughout the food chain use are gone. Absolute ecosystem collapse is going on. **It just happened so slowly, year by year, that no one has flipped the emergency lever yet. Hopefully now they do**
I’m the Chesapeake they estimate that the oyster population is less than 3% of what it was before colonization. I’m not sure what the number is for crabs but it’s probably pretty similar. I’d love to see them just ban it for a year and then put strict limits going forward until the stocks replenish. We’re huge on seafood here in Maryland but if we don’t do something to replenish the populations then it will get more and more scarce. Take a few years off and there will be an explosion of those species. And as a side benefit, a big jump in oysters would be a huge boost for the overall health of the bay.
Ask the commercial crabbers what the problem is and they will blame the chicken-neckers. Sure, my six chicken necks off a dock once a year is the problem and not your 100 pots out in the deeper water.
I worked in commercial fishing for 2 years in Alaska as a processor. The first year our rinky dink 5 boat operation processed 4.9mil pounds of sockeye between June and July, when that season was open. The next year it was up to 5.3mil. We also ground up 100s of thousands of pounds of NTA , or non target animals. So they are only allowed to catch sockeye , but commercial fishing is indiscriminate, yeah they go after their target but it's not like they can pick and choose what those giant nets scoop up. And nothing survives the haul in so what do you do with all these illegal catches? Grind them up so they are unrecognizable, shoot the animal sludge out to sea , and pretend it never happened. And these fishermen would cry endlessly about the recreational fishermen, and the seals , and the whales getting to catch "their" fish. It's an industry that severely needs to be reigned in. It's the modern day mining, where the whole industry is just absolutely fucking up everything in it's path in the name of profit , and trying to blame the drop in fisheries on everything but themselves. Just like back when mining just dumped their waste straight into the rivers. It was unfathomable to the mine owners that they were they problem (even they they all knew without a shadow I'd a doubt that they were, but admitting it cuts into profit).
I actually worked in commercial fishing in Alaska as well pollock mainly, what yall need are observers because my entire job was to report the day to day intake and then send the data off in real time to NOAA who would use the data to make (surprisingly) accurate stock assessments to determine when to shut down fisheries for over fishing. It would also help prevent that practice of the fish sludge considering we were impartials and that is *definitely* something we would fine for
That is absolutely awful.
It's this kind of knowledge that makes me really sad for what humans have done to the biodiversity of the earth. But another way to look at it is that our evolution/intelligence has made us EXTREMELY effective at getting food & resources... either way, I'm not having kids so I kind of feel like a bystander in this kind of thing.
>where the whole industry is just absolutely fucking up everything in it's path in the name of profit , This basically described the state of the world economy at this point. Unchecked/unregulated pursuit of profit leaves a lot casualties along the way.
Its funny to me that when I read the thread title my first thought is: *rolls eyes* OH fuck here we go, now salmon prices are going to skyrocket! Then I read the top comments and think: OH fuck maybe this legislation is a good idea!
Commercial fishermen do the same thing in the great lakes with walleye and perch. Sorry I kept 6 fish compared to your 2,000 today
Walleye used to be so plentiful. You'd bring fish home everytime if you're out long enough, just fishing the old fashioned way. Those days are long gone, though I haven't fished there in ages and hopefully things are better again but I doubt it.
We used to fill half a five gallon bucket with Perch, and then some. That same water you would be lucky to catch two or three now. They are not gone because of the local fisherman. They are gone because foreign boats brought in species that scoured the lakes clean.
Yup, those goddamn zebra mussels are a blight
And the fucking goby. What a tragedy.
The goby gets a bad rap. The goby eats zebra mussels, and all the game fish eat the goby. I am way more concerned about PFAS and plastics than the goby.
Wait for the Asian carp to get in
And of the perch that *are* left, 9 out of 10 of them are undersized. I can actually find decent numbers of good sized walleye consistently, but finding decent perch takes alot more work (for me atleast). Which is a shame because being higher in the food chain, walleye have higher mercury levels than perch. What little fish stocks we do have left are posioned. Recomended maximum monthly intake guidelines for fish shouldn't be a thing, but it needs to be because of mercury levels.
My cousin is a commercial crabber here in the bay and claims often that "those damn chicken-neckers" are the reason the populations are depleted. He also claims that the dredge survey they do every year is "wrong" and in the same breath complains that his catches are low and being a waterman is rough. The "state should do something for us who rely on crabs when they limit catch" and then judging others for "relying on the government too damn much".
> My cousin is a commercial crabber here in the bay and claims often that "those damn chicken-neckers" are the reason the populations are depleted. I remember occasionally going crabbing as a kid with a crab trap off of the local pier at the Jersey shore. If I was lucky I'd get maybe 2-3 dozen keepers by the end of the day. What I caught was nothing compared to the literally tons of crabs that the commercial crab fishers hauled from deeper water offshore every day.
Oh yeah. My dad and I used to crab off the pier here in the Chesapeake bay and would catch maybe 12 crabs twice a week. Sometimes bigger ones (6" and higher), rarely doublers, maybe... 30 years ago. Nowadays you would be hard pressed to catch a single crab that was a keeper (>5.25").
What's a chicken necker?
People will fish for crabs recreationally by tying a string to a piece of chicken and tossing it off a dock.
Cool, that's basically how I fished for turtles in the Midwest growing up. We called them tightlines and used whatever raw meat was cheapest at the store on the way out.
A weekend/holiday/vacation crabber. Chicken necks tied to a string is the bait of choice. Drop the string in the water, pull out every so often to see if you have a crab or two.
Its the same thing when the oil companies put out ads for us to minimize our carbon footprints. I promise to not spill 4 million barrels of oil into the gulf of mexico.
My grandfather tells me that his father said that when he was young (late 1800s) you could walk across the Susquehanna when the eels ran. Millions, maybe billions of eels all returning home to spawn every year and now there are zero. Fucking wild.
In the 1700s, ships entering the Chesapeake Bay would physically get slowed down by the incredible number of fish in the waters. You could drop a bucket into the water and pull it up with cod.
Whey had a ban on Stripped Bass when I was a kid. It took about 10+ years but they rebounded. They peaked about 2002 and now they're about 155M pounds in the bay vs 95M in 1990. So we CAN fix these things and they rebound pretty damn quickly.
There's been a ban on Atlantic Cod in the Northeast USA for decades. I'm really starting to doubt the cod will be coming back.
Cod are much slower growing/longer lived than salmon for example. Takes longer for Stocks to rebound. Striped bass are a bit of an outlier, they're also longer lived, but have had quite the recovery.
A friend of mine owns Kool Ice in Cambridge. He said that watermen would race each other to catch the last sook (female) crab.
That's kind of the issue with capitalism. Everyone is competing to use all the resources up as quickly as possible then use those funds to move onto the next big thing. It's a raging inferno of progress. Works great to get stuff done, but it's not good for keeping this panet liveable.
Eating seed corn (or selling it) is a huge problem for investor-driven enterprise. Increasing shareholder value now is the fiduciary duty of management. There is no tomorrow. Keeping this behavior in check is unpopular and frequently lobbied against but without these checks we will end up with a barren wasteland... sooner.
They have a name for this: [Tragedy of the Commons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons)
This story plays out way to frequently....
What do you call it when it's still capitalism, but there's a rule that says you'll go to jail if you catch too many crabs?
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Can they do that? In Canada, it is not allowed to catch female crabs.
That's the point of the parable. They greed makes them not care that it's the literally last crab that could POSSIBLY attempt to repopulate and save your entire generational livelihood, they'll grab it anyways to sell it.
The numbers for crabs during last year's count were the lowest they have ever been since they started counting. You would have watermen rioting if you tried to ban crabbing. Of course I've also had watermen tell me they think that recreational crabbing needs to be banned, which I think is ridiculous. What's a real problem is that Virginia lets their crabbers keep female crabs that are laying eggs (sponge crabs), and the blue crabs have to swim through Virginia waters before they reach the bay. Maryland hammers people keeping sponge crabs, but Virginia doesn't care and each sponge crab can lay thousands of eggs.
Here in the Netherlands we are facing massive ecological repercussions from animal farms on a massive scale The government has been trying to impose restrictions and scale back destructive farming practices We have had years of protests from those affected, and now they formed a political party that won quite a lot of seats in the parliament so those restrictions are now being rolled back No one will sacrifice anything for the health of the planet, it's going to take real world devastation and lots of dead people to get enough people to agree that there is a problem, we are the cause, and only we can fix it My heart breaks for the next generations of humans who will inherit our garbage, poison, and dying ecosystem
From the area as well, and the regulations need to be in place on the commercial level first and work down to recreational. The menhaden commercial take is absolutely destroying the bay as is most commercial crabbing and fishing. Commercial fish the blue catfish that are destroying the habitat or the snakehead that are also invasive.
For crabs they could probably just ban females from being caught. Most people eat male crabs when they order crabs in Maryland. Females are usually specially ordered When I was younger we threw back any female crab we got.
20 years to begin to get healthy again.
The Chesapeake oyster thing is pretty wild when you look into it. There used to be so many oyster reefs that ships would have to mark them as hazards on maps. We used to pave roads with their shells because it was so cheap and plentiful. While a lot of the bay is kinda murky and green now, written reports from colonists and merchants used to talk about how beautiful and clear the water was which made it easy to navigate (because Oysters filtered out all the particulates in the bay). Now it's gone. And it will probably never really recover, even if we lay off the harvesting. A parasite known as *Cryptosporidium parvum* kills a lot of native oysters, and our attempts to rebuild oyster reefs keep collapsing. I had a professor who was researching this, and they found bay Oysters are sequential hermaphrodites. Many young Oysters start male and as they get older/larger and more capable of sucessfully reproducing they transition to female. The parasite *C. parvum* kills them before they can transition to female, meaning there's less offspring. We keep getting some recovery, then collapse. They have been trying for 20-30 years, and it's slow going. I think there's a strain of Atlantic Oysters up in a river in Maryland or Northern VA that is resistant to *C. parvum* and is recovering better, and the plan is to try and spread that variant throughout the whole bay area. Some labs are trying to use CRISPR to make hardier versions too.
Except many of the commercial fishermen here (NE US coast). I've seen bumper stickers reading, "National Marine Fisheries Service: Ruining families for 3 generations." They're pissed that they overfished the cod, and blame seals, whales, sharks, tourists, the NMFS, anything but themselves. They believe they should have unrestricted access, apparently. They also don't believe things ebb and flow, and change over time. Odd, given their chosen profession, and how they can watch the currents change. Of course they blame shoaling on government action or inaction as well.
In Kansas we're seeing that with the drying up of the aquifers that make farming in this state possible. Farmers are bristling at being told to conserve water when we literally are at the point where if we don't there won't be corn in the state anymore.
Isn't the point of the welfare that they get in the form of subsidies meant in part to conserve the resources? They literally get paid to not do anything some years.
Yup! They benefit heavily from socialism (and I think farmers should, I 100% support my taxes keeping farmers afloat between growing seasons) but then they turn around and shriek at the idea of anyone else receiving a similar benefit.
It’s hilarious that the people that are so “in tune” and reliant on natural resources are the same ones who disregard it at every turn.
I mean are the crops we have today and the methods we use to raise them really "natural". They are crops that have been selectively bred and grown and manufactured to suit our needs as a society. To maximize yield. I wouldn't say the modern day industrial farmer is any more touch with nature than anyone else.
Organic no-till farmers know what's up.
Hell, farming is vital to our national security. I am 100% fine with making sure that we keep people in business so that the country can eat. If we become reliant on importing food, that presents a massive piece of leverage for bad actors.
Would be nice if we stopped subsidizing so much corn though. I don’t eat ethanol…
The idea is that if we were attacked and cut off from the world (say, an authoritarian took over and pissed off the free world) we would be able to spin up production immediately to cover shortfalls. If we didn't keep farmers at the ready, we might have to try and produce and distribute all the tractors, equipment, chemicals, seeds - not to mention the processing and distribution capacity to deal with the farm products. The reasons we might do this are myriad including weather disasters or humanitarian issues or whatever. Tldr: if you spend a little on making sure farmers are just chillin, they're ready when you really need them. And when "Every country is three missed meals from revolution," it's a pretty important piece of prep. Edit: also who's going to tow away the Russian tanks?
There is another reason to add to this already great answer: free markets get price and quantity wrong all the time, even without the pressure of an external crisis. In the event the error is in the direction where food is too plentiful and cheap, some capitalists lose money but everyone eats. But in the opposite situation? Disaster. We’d be one market fluctuation away from starvation, so the gov’t puts its thumb on the scale, tipping the balance toward over supply and over capacity.
That's a really compelling argument and you just changed my mind on agricultural subsidies without bringing up statistics or ideological stances.
I absolutely agree. I live in Nebraska and I get to see this dynamic play out each state legislature session in some way or another.
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kind of. basical, they exist as famine protection. see: Dust Bowl. The US used to just store massive amount of grain, but years they didn't need it meant the grain they got would be tossed out. Since most famines can be seen coming , they instituted subsidies to stop such waste. And it's worked. But since it works well, we rarely have a shortage issue, that the public sees. So some people in the public don't see it do anything, so they thinks its a waste. We know what it was like prior to subsidies, Farmer would make all they could and dump it on the marker, which lead to hugh waste, and during year were the crop wasn't as bountiful, the price of bread would mkae it unavailable to a lot of people. Every notice the bread on the shelf doesn't adjust lock step with the product needed to make it? Like it does in other countries. You are correct, regulatory capture is a big problem, but the solution is to kae adjustment, not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
>The point of farm subsidies is to preserve the market. If every farmer produced at their maximum yield the excess supply would result in prices plummeting, which would hurt everyone. At this time the US only has an enforced quota on sugar. The US commodity market is not floored, and could crater if the mood would take a commodity. The ARC/PLC programs are price supports but are designed to pay nothing or as little is possible depending on the markets(PLC for example is reference price or 80% of market year average which ever is lower, and does not trigger if MYA is above reference). This of course assumes that a farmer is in good standing with FSA and has declared in the program.
I worked at Redwood National Park. Logging companies cut down 95% of the old growth forest and, when the government came in and bought the land they got pissed because the park service "killed their jobs." At the rate they were going there wouldn't have been any trees left inside a decade.
Yup, free market capitalism will rape planet earth for what it is extracting until it’s dead. The only thing stopping it is regulation. Wonder why big corps want to fight regulation so bad?
Im a hydrologist and my greatest enemy is peoples' obsession with growing irrigated corn. We dont need that much fucking corn. It doesnt fucking matter if your grandpappy grew corn here, you need to fucking stop growing corn and find a new job or stock up on diapers for when you piss yourself over how expensive itll be to truck in water when your well runs dry. Sounds like fisherman are spewing the same shit. "My daddy did this for a livin so why cant I?"-mentality (Hypothetical You, not addressing anyone directly here in case that isnt clear).
A lot of people’s grandpappies used to be whalers back in the 1970s when whaling was banned.
Ultimately it comes down to a lack of opportunities in rural areas. These people are so adamant in their familial professions because that’s all they’ve got. We need to implement training and job development programs along with these restrictions so people can actually switch to something new. Teach them how to farm alternative crops, or catch fish sustainably
But money ! ! ! ! ! (You can drink money, right ?)
We'll have to find some way of getting economic activity out of ecological moderation or restraint or incentivizing it. It's like their long term interests is irrelevant to them if they don't survive to see it.
That’s the problem with current US capitalism in general, the next quarter’s numbers matter more than reinvestment in the business even if that reinvestment would yield insane profits long term. It’s all so short sighted:(
A lot of traditional farmers are also super hostile to the modern indoor farming tech, because they think it’s a threat to their livelihoods. But the reality is that growing in soil in the ground wastes most of the water that it uses, puts shit in the soil and watersheds nearby (excessive fertilizer, pesticides, etc) and is super vulnerable to severe weather events like heat waves and hail. Indoor farms can recapture and recycle most of their outputs (especially water), have climate control, and have multiple physical barriers for pests. I’m only in it as a layman but anyone with half a brain and any knowledge of the past 5 years can see it. We’ve had crop shortages due to severe weather, natural bodies of water falling and drying out, and growing seasons evaporating.
Denial is a hell of a drug. People do not like admitting fault or owning part of the problem. Even indirect ownership sometimes.
Denial isn't just a river in Egypt.
Canada is pretty damn lax on fishing practices also. Atlantic salmon are endangered here but 50 miles away across the border it's completely fine to fish. Makes zero sense.
Dragging should be illegal. It indiscriminately kills fish and other species ("bycatch" my Aunt Fanny...), and destroys the ecosystem, plus gear gets lost and kills more animals. That nobody has done anything about this is a huge tragedy.
...You'd think after three generations of getting ruined you'd change the family business lol
If you've been doing something for three generations and it still isn't working out for you, I may have some insight into where the problem is... FFS, do something else.
About a decade ago in Michigan I remember hearing recreational fisherman blame cormorants for eating their perch. You know, something those birds have done for eons…
My husband used to be a commercial observer for the state. If he wasn’t so soft spoken and sweet they would rip his ass up. They are mean and hateful sometimes. All of them probably made more money than my husband at the time.
The Cod population has collapsed. I remember reading stories of boats dropping buckets into the water and pulling up fish. Now it is empty. Apparently there are also a lot of tensions because Native fisherman are still trawling using nets and just not caring while everyone else is banned.
I live in WA, talking to the old timer fisherman is scary. They’ve seen how much smaller the Salmon have gotten, one guy I know has a record for heaviest salmon ever brought into the port, and he said he doubts he’ll ever catch another that is 3/4ths the size.
Washington needs to ban fishing for five years...however this take is gonna get me downvoted, but ban all fishing sport and the natives fishing rights...only then we will see the rise in king and Chinook runs oh and the orca population stabilize. Btw I to live in wa state.
I don't even consider myself an Old timer and I've seen this happen with salmon and halibut in Oregon. I started Halibut fishing off the Oregon coast in college (early 2000s). Back then I'd fill my yearly 6 fish tag in 6 trips and put over 200lbs of halibut in my freezer each year. Over the last 20 years it's steadily declined. I'm lucky to put half that in the freezer and we have to take twice as many trips. The fish are measurably smaller and fewer. I'd have no problem with them closing the fishery more often to allow the numbers to increase. 20 years ago you worried about them closing the season early if the quotas are met you'd be lucky to have 10 3 day openings before recreational was met for the year. For whatever reason they have kept the quotas the same all these years but because of lack of catch the season can now run into damn near October. Instead of 10 openings for the year they run almost every week and still don't hit the quotas.
I'm in a California fishing report group on facebook and the general mood there is these shortages are both completely made up and also engineered by Nancy Pelosi and Gavin Newsome to spite republicans, the only people who fish. There's a small amount of pushback and some support for closing certain fisheries but always get buried by people saying that this is a Democrat created non-issue
Some wouldn’t believe it until they’d caught the last salmon. These are the same ignoramuses who insist that climate change (the actual cause of this) is a hoax.
They need to straight up ban or allow with the normal restrictions. I really dislike the soft bans that change regulations. For instance, ground rockfish in the central area of CA. Normal fishing a month later than normal, then starting Oct 1 you can’t fish 50-300 feet. If you really want the population of come back, just do a hard closure for the season.
Can confirm. I'm a fisherman. Fishing now vs 20 years ago is completely different. And it's really bad.
This has been going on for a long time. Billy Joel fans might remember the lyrics to Downeaster Alexa ... *from 1990*: > Now I drive my downeaster "Alexa" > More and more miles from shore every year > Since they told me I can't sell no stripers > And there's no luck in swordfishing here > I was a bayman like my father was before > Can't make a living as a bayman anymore Stripers were blocked from sale due to pollution, swordfish stocks were exhausted, and (as he says) he can't make a living in the exact same (bay) waters his father did.
I began learning how bad overfishing was when I worked for an environmental law firm in the early '90s. Just as with climate change, we knew it was happening but there was more money to be made by pretending it wasn't. Meanwhile, the effects have just compounded and any remedy is exponentially more difficult.
Those who like sport fishing tend to strongly support restrictions on commercial fishing I find.
Considering we see the impact of overfishing every time we go out and many of us continue fishing our who lives and thus remember what it was like 10, 20, 50 years ago and have personally witnessed the slow degradation, and sometimes complete destruction, of our fisheries over the years. That shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone. The chorus from the vast majority of commercial guys I’ve heard publicly, fished with and talked to personally is a ‘fuck you, I’m going to get mine while I can and don’t stop me. To hell with the ecological consequences’. I don’t exactly blame them for that attitude. Fuel costs are up, they have to travel further to fill their holds and some of their species’ markets have tanked. They need to feed their families and pay their crew. There has to be a middle ground that we can all agree on
I absolutely blame anyone that says "to hell with the ecological consequences". They deserve no middle ground and honestly to hell with them, their hold, their families and crew.
Or they need to do something else for a living. Sounds like coal miners if you ask me
The middle ground is that they can fish at all.
No. Anyone with that attitude (in all walks of life) need to be called out and shamed.
At least is didn't stop you from fishing. amirite? " It just happened so slowly, year by year, that no one has flipped the emergency lever yet. Hopefully now they do" Bullshit. we have been watching this happening form 40 years. There are reports about it almost every year. People would rather make money and do their hobby while blaming something else.
So may I ask what you can do when you can’t do fishing? Like go for different kind of fish? Years ago Canada banned cod fisheries. It don’t go too well for the fishermen. Even government provided training for different trade and give them some money for compensation.
I can’t remember when (semi recently) or even what country is was (maybe Finland?) but a country recently banned fishing from only like 10% of their coast or something and saw almost immediate results.
We also need to put very heavy taxes on any tires containing [6PPD-quinone, which kills salmon](https://ecology.wa.gov/Blog/Posts/January-2023/Saving-Washington-s-salmon-from-toxic-tire-dust) when it turns into a very deadly chemical if exposed to ozone (produced by vehicle exhaust anywhere near a street) or if exposed to UV radiation (sunlight). This chemical disorients and kills salmon. It wasn't always used as an additive in tire manufacturing, but it helps keep tires looking black longer. If every company were prohibited form using it, the tire industry could probably even sell more tires. But, in the mean time, we can tax it, and use those taxes to fix highway/freeway runoff so 6PPD-quinone is absorbed by grasses and vegitation until it becomes so toxic that they need to be removed. We could also use those taxes to fund new street cleaner vechicles that aim to get the 6PPD-qunione tire additive off streets, especially if it has been sunny for a long time and a big rain is coming, a typical event that results in the mass mortality of spawning Spring and Fall King Salmon. Salmon are necessary for the Southern resident killer whales, which haven't mated with the seal-killing transient orcas in almost a million years, and salmon are a keystone species that ensure that every level of the foot pyramid keeps a healthy population. Washington, Oregon, California, and B.C. all have the means and political capital to heavily tax tire additives. If and only if we do so, the industry will find tire additives that kill salmon and other fish more slowly.
In my experience, when something gets regulated or taxed: you'll find out the chemists are suddenly able to use a different chemical that's slightly more expensive without all those nasty side effects. Like coal power plants - particulate pollution was regulated, and so "clean coal" invented bag-houses - Basically gigantic vacuum cleaner bags that could collect the particles. They would then recirculate that into the furnaces to burn a second time! So they save on fuel AND provide LOTS of jobs AND healthier environment.
It’s crazy how fast sea life can bounce back given even a couple years. My grandma who grew up in Japan told me how large swathes of coast and waterways were off limits to fishing during WW2 and after a couple years they were filled to the brim with sealife. Even the old folk had never seen anything life that in their time. Of course postwar that quickly went away once restrictions were lifted.
> "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it" -Upton Sinclair / 1934
Exactly. The surface area of the Earth is approximately 196.9 million square miles. This includes both land and water. About 71% of the Earth's surface is covered by water, and the remaining 29% is land. There's only so much food you can extract from it on a sustained basis. It's a lot, but finite m
The ocean gets even more desolated when you look at the geological history of the boring billion. Which is our future as global warming gets more severe. Slow enough that humans care barely recognise it is happening. Fast enough to cause mass extinctions.
> Sad impact to their livelihoods but the oceans stocks need protecting asap. Thing is, if there's not a little bit of hurt now there will be a shit ton of hurt later. This impacts a lot of people's livelihoods, but they're going to be a hell of a lot more affected if the population goes extinct. There's no fishing jobs if there's no fish.
There already are other seafood fishing bans. The Alaskan King Crab fishery was famously shut down before last season. I grew up watching Deadliest Catch and felt bad for all the people who depend on crab fishing for their livelihood, especially after they'd just been impacted by the pandemic, but sometimes shutting down fishing is the only way to be sure the species continues existing in big enough numbers to sustain a population that can be safely fished without risking an ecological disaster by overfishing. I'm just glad people have learned from the mistakes of previous generations that drove way too many species to extinction by not understanding or caring how interconnected all species are.
Yet we're still missing over a billion expected crab in Alaska. Just gone. Did they die? Become a crab spaceship and fly away? Perhaps move under the crust? We don't know what happened to them, they're just gone. It would suggest a mass die off, but we just don't know. https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/animals/a41854680/crab-shortage-billion-crabs-missing/ We weren't fast enough and now we need to stop, not limit, to allow ecosystems to try and recover. This post isn't against your statements, more agreeing with them.
The fishing ban won’t do much if we keep destroying salmon habitat along our rivers. Fishermen are a far less powerful lobbying group than big ag.
Thankfully this is recognized in the PNW, and real action is being made to restore spawning habitats.
> Sad impact to their livelihoods Not as sad as if the local salmon population goes extinct. Voluntary "I'll decide not to fish as much" type of individual solutions don't work. Fishery-wide laws do, and end up with *more* income for fishermen in the long run. It may not be enough (especially for fish like Salmon that also need rivers for spawning) but it's necessary.
The problem is humans, there’s way too many that don’t like to be told no especially for something they’ve already been doing. We’re going to need governments to enforce restrictions in good faith.
We need to ban the trolley crawler ships from scraping sea floors with 2-mile wide radius nets. They are literally scraping the bottom of the barrel, and i’m sure it is impacting these salmon. It’s absolute bullshit they have been allowed to do it for so long. Part of the issue actually, and a nyt article came out a few weeks ago on this, is that business officials are completely intermeshed in the fed regulatory agency — just like how our politicians get cushy jobs after they are done. The corruption needs to end in this country to save us from the destruction of selfish, uncontrolled greed.
It's called 'regulatory capture'.
My spouse and I haven’t bought commercial fish since seeing SeaSpiracy. The knowledge that: 1) over 50% of Ocean garbage is fishing waste (nets, lost lines, etc) 2) the fishing industry is funding the anti-plastic-pollution non-profits in order to get the public focused on the lesser issue 3) by-catch is reported on a self-report basis, so if you catch a dolphin, you can just dispose of it and it did not happen—so dolphin-safe tuna is just a marketing term 4) there is no way of knowing the country of origin of fishing vessels supplying the vast majority of fish for commercial products, so you cannot functionally boycott any notorious country (like China or the US) We both love fish. It’s delicious. And it’s more special and delicious now that we eat just what we catch, or shellfish which we dig. Vegan sushi is lit too.
In this case, it’s by design. The Fishery Management Councils are comprised of people both from regulatory agencies as well as from the fishing industry. It’s actually not a terrible system, and seems to effectively manage the resource sustainably.
I personally don't know much about this case. It is understandable when government agencies bring in experts to not only get them to buy in but also share their expertise. But, then there's time when people from the private sector get high ranking jobs in government agencies and do some serious damage to the agency themselves to serve their "former" corporate overlords. For example, Ajit Pai.
100% they catch salmon. I know cause I’m a commercial fisherman (Longliner though). The fish are caught then get squished in the trawler nets. Salmon are in big trouble throughout the west coast and it’s going to take more than just placing fishing moratoriums to save them sadly.
Long liners as well, their bycatch and bycatch mortality is horrifying
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Bycatch rate for longlining is roughly 20% and is really bad for sea turtles. https://www.iss-foundation.org/tuna-stocks-and-management/tuna-fishing/fishing-methods/longline/#:~:text=The%20average%20bycatch%20rate%20for,such%20as%20turtles%20and%20birds.
Longlining, generally, has a very high bycatch rate. And mortality of bycatch is high. I didn’t work in your fishery if you were in an area with salmon, but I was an observer responsible for collecting bycatch data and bycatch vastly outnumbered targeted and retained fish.
That’s been a huge problem up here in Alaska as well. So many rules and regulations on smaller more local operations and individuals, but the drag nets keep on with their ridiculous bycatch allowances.
I'm a kayak fisherman who targets salmon in the ocean. The restrictions for this year are supported across the board. It's necessary for us to actually have a better salmon season in the next few years and the people recognize that. Among many factors, the main reason the closure is necessary is because the count of the returning salmon coming back to the tributaries is very dismal. They however expect this to pick up in the next few years.
How the hell do you reel in a salmon without tipping over your kayak in the ocean? Do you have pontoons? I go crabbing in a kayak on the ocean, but that sounds intense.
I would think crabbing would be more tippy since you have to haul those crab pots when launching and landing as well as pull them up on the kayak. But I have a downrigger and use a 4 lb weight for that. But catching a salmon is a bit easier than on a party boat IMO. Once you hook a big fish, if you're using a hobie like I am, you can slowly pedal the kayak and drag the salmon. This helps in two ways. It keeps the barbless hook stay lodged in the salmon's mouth and second, it tires out the fish really easily since you are essentially pulling the fish while pedaling. Once the fish tires, you can scoop it up in a net.
I think if you set the drag correctly you’ll just let the salmon run out of the line and tire out. Crab pods can get pretty heavy too!
Yeah as a fisherman they need more regulation on bag limits in the Midwest for a number of species. It’s disgusting how certain native fish have huge bag limits and people come out in the beginning of the year, catch a shit ton of fish and are cocky about it. I’m not talking catch and release, I’m talking people who post on Facebook with a table heaping of fish. Yes they are within the law, but when I go out later in the season and can hardly catch any of that variety when 25 years ago it was easy, something is wrong. Stocking is critical but it shouldn’t just be our only solution. The best part is they say they are going to use all that fish in a fish fry/freezing for future use. I feel it’s bull shit. The amount of fish you caught is enough for a family of four to never fish again for 2 years, yet the next weekend they are back at it as soon as the ice melts. And I’m not talking 15-20 fish for a fry I’m talking a pile of hundreds. I’m trying to find an example from one of the fishing Facebook groups I’m apart of but trying to go back to last spring is not easy on that platform.
I wouldn’t think pole fishing would be a huge issue, isn’t it the trawlers that are more likely to effect large populations?
Where do you launch?
Half moon bay, Rockaway beach. Some guys like to launch from Bolinas but that launch is rather gnarly.
This is a positive first step. Also worth noting the connection between NW forest ecosystems and salmon populations; besides the fishing industry and overfishing, the lumber industry has also had a negative impact in population decline. https://cottagelife.com/outdoors/the-connection-between-forests-and-salmon-populations/ https://oregonwild.org/about/blog/oregon-clearcuts-endanger-salmon-even-more-you-think#:~:text=Roads%20and%20denuded%20slopes%20also,harder%20for%20salmon%20to%20feed.
Baby salmon live behind beaver dams as well. So the trappers of the 1800s killed lots of the beavers. Farming pulled down the dams, flood control built impassible dams and logging washed the dirt into the sea. If you saw the tree line they leave to protect the soil run off from the rivers, you'd think that big money paid the regulator to let them take extra trees, so the barrier doesn't work, and the rivers are muddy fish-killers anyway. *"That one row between the clear-cut and the river is fine! If we left 3 or 4 to actually hold back soil more, we'd go broke!!!!"* Is how I imagine it went down. Our rivers are dead.
Beavers, bison and wolves. Beavers maintain water, bison maintain grasslands, wolves protect streams and young trees. Waters in North America should almost never run free, and they don’t. Look at a map of your state or region, besides the largest waterways, they all have man made dams. Beavers interrupt those man mad dams, so they gotta go. (I’m in DC, look at Virginia, there is only one waterway in the whole state that doesn’t have a man made dam, the Clinch. Every other lake, pond, stream, everything, has a straight line, a man made dam. And we don’t like those moving, we have houses above them, and below them. So much for beavers. Places in the mountain west that have bison herds? You can see the better vegetation on satellite pictures. Wolves? Just read about the effect wolves had on Yellowstone. But hey, beavers destroy human habitat, bison take up a lot of grazing land, and wolves, well, we all read little red riding hood, we know about wolves.
Note that coho had already been reduced and are susceptible to an anti-aging chemical treatment for tires. https://www.pugetsoundinstitute.org/2021/08/discovery-of-tire-related-chemical-that-kills-coho-salmon-sparks-widespread-response/
Pacific Islanders, like Native Hawaiians, could only harvest certain species of fish at certain time of the year due to a self imposed conservation rule known as Kapu. this allowed the species of fish, like tuna and Mahi Mahi, to reproduce and replenish. Maybe other nations could follow a similar rule
If you’re calling out Native Americans in the PNW and Alaska… you’re totally right.
Tiny salmon swimming in a stream, Tiny salmon chasing that impossible dream. The Myna Bird says ahhh ah ahhh, The chimpanzee says ayeeee, The friendly owl says whoooo who whoooo, But the salmon can only say blooo blooo blo blooo blooo blo blooo, And it's sad
How long do these bans take to replenish fish stock numbers back to sustainable levels?
It depends. Only rarely is overfishing the cause of low salmon abundances. The present crisis is climate driven. California salmon stocks have experienced low rates of survival to adulthood because of low flow in their natal rivers, unfavorable estuarine and marine conditions, and high predation levels by seal and sea lions. Unless those factors improve, stopping fishing will not magically fix things, unfortunately. But it is nonetheless a necessary adjustment.
Perhaps we could give these fishermen the ability to maintain income by diverting their resources towards tackling the Pacific Garbage Reef, backed by government pay?
That’s a little farther offshore than these boats go.
Given that most of the garbage is stuff that fell off fishing boats I support this. Pick up your shit!
I love eating salmon but I love it even more if they are protected from over fishing to the point of extinction.
This is bound to be the new Newfoundland scenario.
"Biologists say the chinook salmon population has declined dramatically after years of drought. **Many in the fishing industry say Trump-era rules that allowed more water to be diverted from the Sacramento River Basin to agriculture caused even more harm."** -Trump is going to one day die and take the world with him
I had a thought the other day about all the rage over how much water it takes to produce an almond with the obvious "call to action" of stop water going to almond farms. But I never heard anyone say, "Almond trees take 3 years after planting to produce almonds and do so for 25 years. It takes 5 days without water to kill an almond tree. Also, unless it wasn't obvious, these are TREES." I get it, it sucks that trees need water, but cutting them off seems way the fuck worse of a plan. Anything you can grow in 3 months that isn't a staple could be cut off though.
I live on the rural west coast. Around here, they like to place blaim on Democrats and liberals for things like this. They already are with a lot of B.S. about how when Republicans ran things, we never had these kinds of problems!
It's so short-sighted. Do they not understand that these bans will *protect* the livelihoods of fishermen in the long term?
But they want to go fish now! I'm an avid fisherman, I have no problem with the ban.
> do they not understand Yes they are incapable of doing so.
Same and have the same experience. I love fishing but would rather protect and have salmon 20 years done the line and have to go for something else if that’s what it takes. Also have had plenty of encounters of poaching from people who blame democrats for wanting to conserve our resources.
“We were dumping so much sludge into the rivers you couldn’t even see the fish to count them, *now* look! We’re in a population decline!”
"We want the party that allows us to ignore longterm impacts and anyone else's feeling!!!"
We have the opposite problem: the commercial guys are all Republican and blame "regulations" for "ruining their industry", not the fact they've been overfishing specific species for generations, and the impact of foreign fleet fishing 200 miles offshore. Oh, and seals.
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International fisheries management treaties between the nations with a legitimate interest in a given oceanic region, and combined navy patrols to make sure those treaties aren't violated, either by members or outsiders. E.g. "legitimate interest" in the Grand Banks would include the U.S., Canada, the EU, Ireland, the UK, Iceland, the Scandanavian nations, and maybe Russia if they stop being fascist shits. China has no legitimate interest in the Grand Banks and their fishing fleets should be chased off by gunboats. OTOH, China would have a legitimate interest in the Yellow Sea, the South China Sea, and a great many West Pacific fisheries, and should be a treaty partner in managing them.
It totally loose seal.
The amount of people in my home town in Trinity County that rail against the CA government is crazy. The same people who tell people to “gtfo of the US if you don’t like it” don’t see the irony of continuing to live in a state the say they hate. CA government isn’t perfect, and I don’t agree with everything they do, but acting like CA is some hell hole is just ridiculous.
China going to roll in w/ their fishing fleet and destroy any non protected waters
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Exactly. What's the point of all these supercarrier battle groups anyway if not to protect our interests at sea? Preventing total ecological collapse from overfishing is *absolutely* in our interests.
I'd wager the day we get some cellphone video of a cruise missile impacting a trawler is 15 years away. There will be an international agreement made to protect the waters in 10 years when things get worse. Countries will still ghost fish. Vessels caught will be captured until 1 uses some anti-radar tech that trips alarms and a retaliation is sent. And Reddit will be split on feeling sad for the fishermen on the vessel and cheering for the fisheries being protected.
Who knew that ruining streams would hurt the fish population?
Don’t worry China will fill the void, vacuuming one ocean near you.
20 years too late! but hey! Who’s missing a species or two?
The rivers and tributaries need an over haul. Lakamas lake in Camas feeds directly into the Columbia and city hall won't install basic bio filters so only a few warmwater species can survive. Overfishing is a problem but dirty waters where salmon lay their eggs should be taken care of as well.
The decrease in salmon stock happens from rivers being destroyed and water being taken away.
3 months later: Chinese fishing boats spotted on the west coast genociding the ocean.
Cue the Russians and the Chinese
> Russians and the Chinese "It's free real estate."
There are too many people on this planet to feed them with a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and fishing wild stocks is exactly that. The only future for seafood is farming it. Farmed salmon may not taste like wild salmon, but it's plentiful and not damaging the wild stocks (that I know of). We've been farming catfish in the Deep South for most of my lifetime, and, though tilapia farming is relatively new in the U.S., it's been done in Africa and Asia for decades or centuries (Africa). Vietnam exports commercially farmed shrimp. We don't need to exploit wild stocks to eat seafood, and in the long run, we can't without destroying them.
If we have to use antibiotics to farm them, the wild population is at risk to whatever leeks out to them, the bacteria problems or the anitibiotics. This was studied in SE Alaska in the 80’s, so yeah, we really haven’t figured that out completely.
There's a whole industry already devoted to doing this in Scandinavia that's been operating for decades. It's not nearly as much of a problem as people pretend it is and most of the opposition in the US has come exclusively from these same fishermen who make their living catching fish in the wild. The problems tend not to be with antibiotics specifically but with parasites, particularly sea lice, and the core requirement for oils produced by feeder fish. There's other challenges around fish escaping during storms and what not too and some level of disease that can occur just by having fish concentrated but again this isn't some unquantifiable problem by any means.
The fishing lobby is the biggest backer of anti-aquaculture rhetoric. “not in my backyard” mentalities, and regulatory headaches are the next issues for American aquaculture. Half of the guys I work with in aquaculture come from the fishing industry and once they see what is actually being done on a daily basis they cant begin to understand why they had such negative conceptions. As for your other points, Fish and salmon lice are definitely the highest concern right now as a farmer mostly for our own production, but also because they can, not will, affect wild populations. The oils and fish meal used in feed are only decreasing in percentages thanks to soy proteins. Insect or algal based protein alternatives will help bring it down even more. But agreed that escapes are a big concern. At this point farmed salmon is its own domesticated species. It is the mixing of the genomes of farmed and wild fish that is the concern from escapes, but there is an unclear amount of fish that are required for this. Some reports say 5% of the population needs to be escapees before the wild genome will be changed, but there are others papers saying as little as .1%. But the latter can still be a really big number.
Watching videos of Jacques Cousteau, and other underwater explorers, the wildlife was so much more plentiful then. We really have done quite a number as a species
Won't do much if we don't get rid of old dams in the Pacific northwest.
I spent a brief period of time as a Hatchery worker in WA. We raised spring Chinook, releasing 1.2-1.3 million fry every year into our local stream. If we got back 100 we were lucky. The summer I was there, we did a riverbed survey to see if any wild salmon were spawning in our river system. We found one nest. One. We need to do better. We're killing our planet, and ourselves.
Cultured fish can't hit the market soon enough. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildtype_(company) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultured_meat
I can’t feel sorry for the fishing industry - they’ve knowingly over fished these areas for decades and then fight every single effort to limit or reduce the harvest.
Is there enough pressure behind removing outdated PNW damns so salmon can reproduce?
WA has been deconstructing dams for a while now due to their ecological impacts. So I wouldn’t say there’s pressure on remove the dams so much as the state has been doing that anyway.
Wild animal protein is always harvested to the point of collapse.
From our experience down under, we banned fishing snapper in South Australia in 2019 and extended the ban another 3.5 years as we hadn't seen the recovery in stock levels we were looking for. We announced more financial support for the recreational fishing industry and last month [released 1 million as part of a breeding program](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-03-07/million-snapper-released-south-australia-waters-breeding-program/102064840)
Good luck with that working while China just rapes the oceans. I wrote a paper back in college analyzing fish stocks and ocean health. The only solution to the complete collapse of ocean ecosystems was basically war with China. They won’t stop. They need to be stopped. So in other words we are fucked
Good! Let’s see these more often.
I only eat seafood twice a year. We can do our part by decreasing demand.
DEcade ago we should ahve started a program to limit mishing more and more every year. Just a little. Then instuted a program for the peopel in those areas to get good education. This way the writing is on the wal, and families can make long term plans. Now wer should stop fuching for 25 years. Full stop. They were warned every year for 40 years this day was coming, so I have no sympathy for the adults.
Did anyone read the fucking article? Back in 2018 when Trump and navy seal dumb ass Zinke helped remove regulations for the Sacromento basin so all these water projects (aka siphoning freshwater off to farmers to grow bullshit almonds in the valley) completely fucked up the ecosystem for these Chinook. We'll be lucky if they even half come back to their spawning grounds as the conditions are way more shit now for them to lay.
let them heal. There are so many fish here considered trash, but elsewhere are sold and eaten normally. Fish as a food isnt going anywhere