Fish priorities

Home Forums Due October 22nd due 11:59pm Fish priorities

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    imatsui
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    Paul Greenberg proposed four priorities to protect wild fish. 1. Reduction of fishing effort. The system of government subsidies encouraging overfishing and making wild fish unreasonably cheap. Even with small changes, I think this is easier action we can take to protect fish. 2. Creating no-catch areas, especially protection of fish breeding grounds and nursery habitat. I was shocked by the fact that there is only 1% of ocean habitat that is protected from exploitation. I think one reason this is difficult to do is that tragedy of commons. What if some countries’ fishing area are heavily based on breeding or nursing habitat for fish. They won’t like the idea of no catch area while other country continue fishing in other area. 3. Protecting unmanageable fish globally. With the example of Atlantic bluefin tuna, there are species that is decreasing its population continuously over long period of time. In that case, only thing we can do to protect it is to stop hunting them. I never really thought about it that there are no fish species that has same kind of protection like tigers, and lions receiving. For some reason, we are not putting much effort to protect wild fish like we do to some other animals. Maybe that is because there is a big demand for fish which tiger or lion don’t have and it is difficult for us to control that demand. But I really agree to this idea. If the fishing is the main cause of decline of population, the only thing we can do is to stop it even if it has huge impact economically. 4. Protection of the bottom of the food chain. Small forage fish support bottom of food chain and very important but we don’t really know how to manage them. Failing of protecting them will be collapse of entire ecosystem and will cause big negative impact.
    I agree all of four ideas Paul Greenberg proposed. And agree non of them are so easy to do. But I feel like building no catch area is one of the most important thing and effective thing we can do. We can start from seasonal restriction or from small area, but I think it is important to give nature a time to recover.

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Fish and Fisheries in a Changing World