I’ve said a few times now that this is in the range of normal site dependent variation - but that is absolutely not evidence of absence for all the other problems I’ve described.
And I don’t at all find that surprising - many fish learn fast and, especially in the sort of clear water you describe, are acute visual hunters. I’ve watched plenty of large schools of fish congregate and shelter in heavily fished locations without any of them ever taking a hook, even when actively feeding.
I wouldn’t expect a fish that was fooled once and is still carrying a constant reminder of that traumatic experience piercing it’s face to be easily fooled again. It’s certainly not rare to see them dead on the bottom, trapped fast circling a snag, or a proportion of the injured but functional cohort at any site where regular fishing overlaps with diving activities.
The horn sharks and rays that we most often see carrying multiple hooks are a bit of a special case - they’re not visual feeders, they hoover up whatever they sense as nutritious from on or near the bottom, so they are especially susceptible to taking baited hooks, particularly in areas where fishing has (deliberately or collaterally) littered the bottom with a high concentration of nutrients and the things that feed on them.
And there’s a subset of fishermen who consider that makes those species a nuisance, so they’re at high risk of not being treated well when caught, especially when they are aggregating in significant numbers during breeding and hatching seasons.
If I stand on the surface in any of the places I’m describing and look out, I usually wouldn’t see much more than what you say you are seeing. I might see a little more because I know the signs of what’s there to be looking for, but still not much. Which especially isn’t really surprising when you think that most fishing gear, and many fish, tend to be optimised for not being easily visible in the water.
So unless you’re going to say you’re fishing some fast flowing back country river, in a place that only three of you ever go only three times a year - I’d consider it extremely improbable
that an in-water survey would see things very different there to what divers are seeing pretty much everywhere else that is popularly fished. Yeah, there’ll be some local flavour to it, and some seasonal variation, but there’s going to be a lot more going on than you’d have ever dreamed of if you’ve never been down there to see it for yourself.
(and even the fast flowing river is just going to move the evidence to some other place, it’s not going to significantly change the rates of creation of it for a given level of human pressure)
Interestingly, we don’t see quite so much of that locally - almost all the common fishing spots have specialised fishing debris ‘bins’ - which function partly as sharps containers and partly to keep that stuff out of general waste so it can be processed specially with reduced risk of it ending up as an environmental hazard somewhere else.
Yeah, forget my “if I dropped a hairball off the jetty example” - that was only relevant to the point that even if I did, it would be extremely difficult to see in most places - it’s not representative of the vast amounts of actual lost line and tackle that are out there in practice.
You don’t say what kind of weed you have, but I’ve collected a lot of line and it’s very rarely less firmly snagged and easier to recover than when it was originally lost.
That wasn’t the crux of what I was saying there. The major difference is Catch and Eat simply removes some proportion of the predatory fish from that environment. Catch and Release however converts some proportion of the predatory fish into excess nutrients in the environment that something else needs to process to create a new balance.
In that respect, it’s like what we’re learning about the importance of minimising farm fertiliser runoff, and “don’t feed the ducks” and the impact those things can have on a healthy ecosystem if we aren’t attentive to them.
And yes, catch and eat generally does release some fish too - but it has some inbuilt governors - once people fishing for food have caught enough to eat, they pack up and leave. And if they can’t catch enough for food there, they won’t keep fishing that place…
I’m not sure I follow your meaning here? Do you mean eventually from old age or natural disease or predation?
And I’m not quite sure I’m following your thinking either? They aren’t usually going to be killing fish, they’re nature’s janitors that process what ends up dead on the bottom.
The problem is that you’re not keeping the biomass the same. You’re converting some proportion of the predators into nutrients for creatures that would not naturally see them as a food source in any significant quantity. And changing the behaviours of the surviving ones.
Eventually, yes. But nature doesn’t always do that smoothly or politely or in the ways that you might hope or expect. ‘Eventually’ in nature’s terms could mean the complete extinction of the currently extant populations and the eventual reestablishment of a completely different habitat filled with completely different species, over the same geological scale timelines it took to establish the current habitat.
And even ‘even out’ is an oversimplification - it’s almost always cycles of boom and bust. When those cycles are stable, they’re like the seasons and tend to repeat much the same. When they aren’t, they’re like the Big Asteroid, or Humans Arriving, and it can take a very long time for another stable cycle to evolve.
That’s a broad approximation of a simplified model of our understanding of some of the processes at play. It’s - and I’m absolutely not directing this at diminishing you! - what we call the “lies for children” version of a very complex process we still don’t understand many things about. It’s not completely untrue, but it’s only part of the whole truth - much like a folk tale can explain important concepts without actually being a literally true story in every detail. It’s the white lie that leads most people to make better decisions even if they don’t know all the details and contradictions and uncertainties.
But if you start from that model, and consider that like “free market” models, it’s built around a hypothetical Rational Predator, that will only kill and eat what it and its offspring need to survive and no more (because all the ancestor predators that didn’t do that eventually died out and were replaced by ones that did).
Now replace the apex predator with a creature that doesn’t depend on this cycle for food, whose only limit on how many prey they take is when they cease to be entertained by catching it, whose prey includes the species that may have otherwise been apex predators, and whose actions (introducing berley, bait, and deceased apex predator carcasses) are creating an abundance of food sources for other parts of the chain that wouldn’t otherwise have them (and pressure on strictly limited resources like space and oxygen as the bottom of the food pyramid flares out in response).
What then keeps that system in balance ‘eventually’? Even if you consider this new ‘apex predator’ to be fully rational and not intentionally out to cause harm, they are acting somewhat blindly - partly because it’s difficult to see the real effect of any action in an environment we are only observing indirectly, and partly because this is a big complex problem where the actions of any single individual are usually relatively inconsequential, but the multiplied effect those same actions have collectively can be significant.
The more you try to properly understand it, the more complicated it gets.
It’s why anyone who says “all fishing is bad” is mistaken. But equally why anyone who says “I’m doing no harm because I release them” isn’t seeing the whole picture either.
Nature will always sort it out. The real trick is to get it to sort it out in a way that still includes us and the things we like to have around us as part of it, over time scales longer than what I’d like to be doing next weekend :)