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SUBJECT: Did any of you Floridians see this?
Submitted by MrDo from TEXAS on
TALLAHASSEE, Florida (Reuters) -- Recreational anglers may be responsible for landing nearly 25 percent of over-fished salt water species caught off U.S. coasts, a study released Thursday suggests.
Citing federal data from the Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico and the U.S. Pacific coast, researchers at Florida State University said the impact of 10 million U.S. recreational anglers was far more significant than previously thought.
Across the country, recreational and commercial fishers have been pointing fingers for decades over which group is responsible for dwindling stocks of sports fish. In Florida, anglers successfully backed a 1994 constitutional amendment severely restricting commercial fishing in coastal waters.
Overall, recreational fishers were responsible for 4 percent of the U.S. take in 2002. But when researchers removed from the statistics commercially fished species such as pollock and menhaden that have no recreational value, the percentage of catch from recreational fishers jumped to 10 percent.
Further, the recreational catch of over-fished species jumped to 23 percent. In the Gulf of Mexico, it accounted for 63 percent of landings.
FSU researcher Felicia Coleman said the findings showed that the increasingly popular sports fishing industry had a major impact.
Bob Jones, lobbyist for the Southeastern Fisheries Association, a group of commercial fishing interests, welcomed the study. He said commercial fishers -- battered by years of adverse publicity -- have known, but could not prove, that they were not solely responsible for dwindling fish stocks.
"Just drive down the coast and tell me how many marinas you see and then tell me how many commercial boats you see," Jones said. "There are a million of them."
Karl Wickstrom, editor of Florida Sportsman magazine, said researchers included data on species like red fish in which there is no commercial interest and failed to take into account limits already in place on catches of certain species.
"This study is designed to obfuscate the fact that industrial level over-fishing is the cause of the global fishing crisis we have," he said. "There is a mountain of information saying commercial fishing is the cause of fish depletion."
http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/science/08/27/environment.fishing.reut/index.html.
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Reeeelmadnezzzz (24.144.77.12) from VIRGINIA says one boat with 5 miles of line
takes more fish than 50 boats with 4 anglers a piece on them. The liners have more shorts, that usually end up dead than most recreational fishermen cath in a month of sundays. It's the commercial representatives on the marine panels that tend to distort any study they are presented with. Since the nets got banned, there have been many instances where the law gets stepped on and juxaposed to suit the use of gill nets which was outlawed in 94 I believe.