"Dr. Dr. K.aren Smithers" Call180bucme@foragoodtime wrote in message
...
The entire North Atlantic is being so severely overfished that it may
completely collapse by 2010, reveals the first comprehensive survey of the
entire ocean's fishery.

"We'll all be eating jellyfish sandwiches," says Reg Watson, a fisheries
scientist at the University of British Columbia. Putting new ocean-wide
management plans into place is the only way to reverse the trend, Watson
and his colleagues say.

Although I'm the first to agree that we should err on the side of caution
with regard to the environment, you have to take what fisheries scientists
say with a grain (or a bag) of salt. I recently read a great book called
"The Secret Life of Lobsters". There are parallel stories going on
throughout the book, but much of it deals with the fact that scientists were
making all sorts of dire predictions about lobster harvests, and nagging
lobstermen to do something about it. As it turned out, the lobstermen
already had (and still have) a very effective culling process, putting back
certain sizes (too small, lobsters with eggs, large males which they knew
were scarce and had to exist to keep things going). The scientists never
bothered to look at the figures kept by the lobstermen, even though it
represented extremely useful data. It also contradicted their "science",
much of which was based on computer models.

I realize there's a difference between lobster fishing, where the creatures
are hand-selected as they're removed from the traps, and drag net fishing,
where everything in the path of the net is caught. But still.....the
fishermen themselves have a stake in preserving what's left. I wonder what
they're seeing from day to day.