Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Why overfishing is bad for... well, fish

Overfishing 101: the importance of rebuilding our fish populations without delay

Turns out that if you catch the bigger, older, sexier, smarter, stronger fish, that the younger and less mature fish do not have the same reproductive capacity, which means that it takes longer to recover any fishery that managers are trying to recover. So the solution is an upper size limit, like they do for the Maine lobster fishery. The sexy (and also large) survivors live to produce lots and lots of offspring.

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