Quote:
Originally Posted by bloocrab
...but are you people that ignorant to believe that there could ever be a system that would even come close to keeping track of the number of fish...legal or not, that are caught by both commercial and recreational fishermen???? The number of fish that actually die after a non-successful release??? Or get discarded as bycatch ...or whatever/etc///.......most of the analytical numbers are bogus in my opinion. :
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Yikes, this is heading downhill fast. Every striped bass fisherman, commercial and recreational (including catch and release guys), kills fish.
Habitat degradation, forage depletion (of which other commercial fisheries are a major factor), disease, and natural predation kill fish.
Nobody expects to be able to "keep track" of each fish caught. They only want to improve the accuracy of their estimates, which are then used in an overall model to predict current and future fish populations. Those predictions are then tested against real world catch numbers, sampling results, and anecdotal experience. Like it or not, managing a resource requires this. That the numbers are "bogus" and too easily manipulated for alternate agendas is a fact of life. Better data can help improve that. The alternative is no fishery whatsoever.