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Comment by metalman | Hacker News Reader

I occasionaly imagine a satire skit where "The great mistery of the dissapearing Salmon" episode is done on fishing boat decks, fish plants and the super market fresh and canned fish sections, montyesk AMAZMENT! and OUTRAGE!, whilst the whole industrial mining operation goes on around them

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If you’re implying that fishing is the main culprit, I’d invite you to do some further reading. These fisheries are carefully managed to ensure that salmon are able to spawn. Granted, there is the existence of trawling boats which do cause real harm. Yet, almost all commercial fishermen detest the practice of bottom trawling due to the harm it causes.

41 millions pounds of sockeye were caught in Bristol Bay this season. I was up there working on a boat myself. Yet, the rivers were still thick with sockeye at the end of the season. It is not a free-for-all where people are allowed to catch fish in any manner they want, the rules and regulations are there to ensure that fishing is not impacting the long-term viability of these runs.

Well the detesting trawling angle is valid but similar to how you could detect coal mining in West Virginia the mountains/sea bottom is gone either way.

I believe the single most important policy change for fishiers would be to end trawling, second being sort out international regs.

Both very hard, both bad news for kings. But at some point people are going to see the outcomes in their grocery stores and maybe that’ll start change.

Yeah there’s definitely regulatory changes that need to be made, it is insane to see that some practices are still legal. I just disagree with the notion that all fishing is harmful

The fisheries are carefully managed to keep the fishermen happy.

Whether or not that results in collapse of fishing stocks is down to greed and blind luck. When the coin lands heads, you get the Atlantic cod fishery collapse, where all the fishermen were insisting that the existing regulations were already onerous enough, and then one day there was no more cod.

Fisheries definitely can be mismanaged. Furthermore, there are issues like international waters, where regulations are hard to create even when they are desperately needed.

It’s unclear to me what your conclusion is, is it that all commercial fishing is bad? Fisheries are definitely not always managed to keep fishermen happy, they are often frustrated with regulations. If you talk to a crabber, they will complain that they are not aloud to crab anymore due to the biologists saying there is not a sustainable crab population. They might go on to say the biologists are incorrect, but they aren’t able to change the regulations to their liking. Talk to an Alaska salmon fisherman during a poor salmon year and they will complain the biologist is not giving them enough open periods and they are losing make money. Even on a good year, captains will complain about the regulations the biologists set. In general, Alaska fisheries are often regarded as the most sustainably harvested in the world. I’m not saying they are perfect, but that fish can be harvested in a sustainable manner. The biologists DO want to ensure the long term viability of these fisheries.

My point is that: - we should continue to research when and why fish are struggling - forgoing fishing completely is most likely not the solution. As long as it is done in a sustainable manner, wild caught fish IS an environmentally friendly sliver of our food supply.

> is it that all commercial fishing is bad?

Bingo.

Is commercial fishing the only culprit? No.

Should we address all causes of declining fisheries? Yes.

Will we address even a single cause? Nope.

The cash cow cod is gone but small amounts of fishing still take place. Cod still exists but not in large enough numbers to employ 30,000 people.

What moved in was shellfish. Snow Crab...

done my "reading" bub, born,raised, spent most of my life within a short walk to the salt water, known fisherman all my life, friends worke boats, and took jobs as "fisheries observers" in Canadian waters,and I respect most of them, but I also know all about draggers and how in the boom years the Captain would hand the boys there checks as the came off the boat, and the coke dealer standing right next to the captain, would get them to sign them right over, and the total fucked up mayhem surrounding all that, 1 in a hundred end up with anything to show for it. How the gangs have pet drunks who "own" a lobster licence but or course there are a stack of signed documents in a lawyers safe if they get uppity. Dont pretend that it's a decent business, managed,sustainable, or anything but a race to the bottom. If we were talking about the inshore fishery from before diesel engines, and powered winches, that was self regulated and seasonal, then it would be a different discussion, but as one inshore fisherman put it "there's no hungry fish to bite the hooks" we all know it's precarious at best, and NO ONE will be surprised much if the whole thing collapses for real.

Alright bub, I guess the dying Canadian fisheries you have second-hand experience with are exactly representative of everything that’s going on. I’m glad we can give up looking into why fish aren’t doing well, now that you figured it out.

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