Thank you. I didn’t realize this would be such a hotly debated issue…
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FWIW while I grew up in a catch-and-release family (not that I fish any longer), I totally understand why people are against it. But let’s please just keep the temperature of the discourse down.
I do notice you appear to have hidden only the comments suggesting it is problematic, not the comments of people who do it. In any event, the species (well, the species I’m aware of - I’m sure it’s an issue for others) that it’s problematic for where I live (WA) is steelhead, which has been heavily regulated for at least a decade due to catch-and-release mortality.
My father-in-law does catch-and-release, and is resistant to the notion that it may kill some fish. The data indicate otherwise.
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I was going to guess salmon, because studies have shown that catch and release, at least during the run, is not effective, the fish often die. Steelhead are basically a salmon, so this makes sense
The other species I know catch and release has been shown to be ineffective for is hammerhead sharks, IIRC the mortality rate was 50% even with careful handling. There are species that should not be fished with the intent to release them
However there are other species that do quite well when released, though I do think your uncle is wrong if he says any species of fish has a post relese mortality rate of 0%, it may be 0.1%, but never absolutely 0
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As long as we are discussing catch-and-release mortality: there is a reason I won’t work with small mammals anymore. “Live” trapping also has a certain mortality rate, and seeing it was too discombobulating for me to want any part of it. Now, I know that one could argue that live trapping by researchers is not a recreational activity, and therefore does not occur on the scale of catch-and-release angling, but the point is that any time one is detaining and/or handling a wild creature, there is a risk that it will not survive the ordeal. From there on, it’s just a matter of what mortality rate is deemed “acceptable” by those who are not doing the dying.
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As I said earlier, it does vary from site to site, I presume as some function of substrate type, weed type, light and level of other nutrients present, number and skill of the people fishing there, and probably the tackle they use and what they think they are fishing for.
That site isn’t close to being the most degraded by fishing pressure, but it’s one with expansive coverage of mainly very dense weed that’s mostly only interrupted by human activities (the swimming beach just down from there is barren out to the depth people can still stand on the bottom, and there’s scattered holes further out in the bay where boat anchors have torn out the rhizome layer leaving deep depressions where it’s harder for weed to re-establish) so the clear aerial images are pretty unambiguous.
Boats don’t use or anchor near that jetty though, and it’s too deep for swimmers to stand there, so they aren’t at play in the area I showed.
And yes, it was a big surprise for me too when the explanation penny finally started to drop - but as always, it’s the multiplier. Pulling up 1 small piece of weed - no big deal. Pulling one up on even a small percentage of an enormous numbers of casts, along with changing the nutrient load and fauna balance … whole different story.
It’s probably more complex than we’ll ever fully understand, but the distinct boundary seems like a pretty clear chalk outline around the body of the problem.
Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence … I’m not accusing you of being a “denier”, you’re very clearly concerned and curious and seem to have thought a lot about minimising negative impacts - but you do seem to be coming from the belief that these problems do not occur where you fish because you don’t see them.
Which is something you have in common with a large majority of the people I’ve chatted with who are fishing at the sites that I’m talking about which do clearly have these problems…
I don’t know where you’re fishing, how many people are fishing there, or what the other dynamics of those sites may be - but all those rhetorical questions weren’t something I was expecting you could or should answer, or accusations, or some sort of argumentative trap when you could not. They’re just some of the sort of things you can’t know just by looking from the surface, which people I’ve talked to previously have been very surprised by.
Not knowing the answers is the start of all learning. But not even knowing the questions keeps even the people who want to learn in the dark longer than they need to be.
The problem is pretty much everyone underestimates this. Maybe more so in the sort of accessible places where you’ve got a mix of semi-skilled fishermen who’ve learned how to lose less gear, with the people who come out and just cast until all their gear is lost then go home again. (I say semi-skilled because the people actually serious about catching fish mostly don’t fish these places - they’re more likely to go somewhere where every edible fish above legal size hasn’t already learned what a hook is and why not to bite things attached to one).
I stopped fishing off jetties the day I first dived one. Not for ideological reasons, but because I saw the vast numbers of enormous fish that except on very rare occasions nobody was ever catching (and sometimes the vast numbers of tiny fish cleaning people’s hooks with impunity). It turns out you don’t get to become a big fish in an environment like that if you didn’t learn not to bite hooks while you were still a small one … kind of obvious in hindsight - but another Not Even A Question until I’d seen it for myself.
Realistically, unless it was a line snarl someone had cut free on the surface then somehow dropped into the water (which was my example for the ‘could you really see it’ question) - what would be far more probable if your hook caught a tangle of accidentally lost line is that you too would be snagged hard and would ultimately lose your line too to join the growing snarl. If the line could have been easily pulled up. it wouldn’t have been broken and lost in the first place.
AIUI most of the trawling still done by specialised research vessels is “midwater” - they aren’t actually scraping the bottom even when they are trawling very very deep - but they are indiscriminately vacuuming up everything in the layer they are Sampling, kind of per the definition of sampling.
Around here if they want bottom trawl data they’ll more often ‘partner’ with the commercial prawn trawlers - though somewhat amazingly it’s been a long time since those were subject to any greater inspection than Self-Reporting the proportion of protected species in their bycatch.
I haven’t been tagging those sort of obs to make them easily searchable, but at least the last couple of images for this observation show an animal with a hook stuck fast, that had also been finned at some point before being released.
https://inaturalist.ala.org.au/observations/144836073
There were several that were identifiable over longer timespans by the number and placement of hooks in their mouths. On the night of that observation we cut long lengths of trailing line from several animals, though it was impossible to try and remove the hooks without causing them greater injury or distress.
Some friends of mine dived a site on Monday night where numerous small PJ sharks had recently been observed - they only saw two, both dead and discarded under the jetty.
I’ve definitely got footage of a lot more incidents with a lot more species than I’ve uploaded as obs here.
It’s not at all uncommon to find fish that “broke the line” still on the hook and circling whatever the line is snagged on trying to pull free.
We cut a leafy seadragon free earlier this year which had been pinned to the seafloor by a tangle of line attached to a large sinker - it’s hard to say how long it had been there before we found it, but it was in very poor shape and recovered very little buoyancy or attitude control after being freed, so I suspect it didn’t survive long after we stopped nursing it.
Here’s one of many with a prop strike injury:
https://inaturalist.ala.org.au/observations/78491952
Here’s one that was speared, at a location where spearfishing is illegal and signposted as such - that a recreational spearfishing group had been openly encouraging people to fish anyway, and claiming it was ok due to a technicality they’d invented themselves. (which I think is broadly relevant to this discussion because it clearly wasn’t speared by a responsible experienced fisherman - that tiny little fish would have never been a target for one of those, it’s been shot by a novice who themselves was likely a victim of misinformation).
https://inaturalist.ala.org.au/observations/78201452
The bigger problem again are the unexpected multipliers that aren’t instantly obvious.
If you catch and kill and eat 10% of a fish population. it may seem to be reasonably self-evident in a back of the napkin kind of way that this is probably sustainable (if it’s an actively breeding species that doesn’t have a reproductive maturity cycle that’s measured in multiples of decades). And for the sake of the example, let’s assume for the example species it is.
But if you catch and release enough fish that 10% of that same population die after being released, you have quite a different problem. You’ve massively increased the nutrient load for detritovores, with the potential to massively increase the amount of biomass in the habitat, without increasing the other things needed for survival, like the amount of oxygen in the water. Or the probability of disease or harmful parasites etc. etc.
The actual numbers and the actual problems are going to vary by site and species and season and any number of actual things. But unless it turns into an algal bloom and a visibly massive fish die off, the consequences aren’t going to be easy to see and understand if you’re just watching from the shoreline assuming everything is ok, unable to even be sure what the actual proportion of “functionally unharmed” fish really is.
It’s why assuming that if some level of catch and kill is sustainable, then catch and release of the same sort of numbers cannot be doing more harm, is not necessarily the case - even if you ignore or play down the ethical concerns for the suffering experienced by the animals that are caught and not immediately killed for food.
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@tiwane My apologies if you’ve read things I wrote in that way - it’s certainly not a topic I’m “angry” about, and I see absolutely nothing to be gained by attacking other people over their current beliefs - and thought I’d been pretty clear that the problem I see is limited awareness, not “evil people” …
It’s hard to win someone over to your side of an argument if you can’t see and argue their side of it at least as well as they can.
I might have been a little short on the sugar coating in the response to raymie’s claims (though I stand by the point that funding the management of hunting grounds for the benefit of the hunting industry is commerce, and is not the same thing as funding, or promoting, or being essential to, conservation) - but I thought it was pretty clear that my discussion with insectobserver123 was mutually civil and pretty focused on trying to address each other’s points and questions in the best way we could and and not about “scoring” points or attacking each other?
Their (and apologies if you prefer him or her) response showed me they read it in the spirit intended, even if it maybe wasn’t quite as clear as I’d intended that the some of the rhetorical questions indeed couldn’t be answered with just what you could know from looking from the surface. The whole point of those was to enumerate some things that do exist as real problems which no amount of looking from the surface with even the best of intentions is likely to see, not to put them on the spot for not being able to see them.
So if there’s something in particular you feel I’ve said in an especially clumsy or inconsiderate way, please always (anyone) feel free to point privately and I’ll happily try to reword the idea I was trying to convey in some better way.
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Absence of evidence is evidence of absence if you are looking where the evidence would be and still not seeing it. The pier I fish has a visible mat of weeds right up to it, so in that case I do have evidence that the weeds are not stripped in the manner you have seen at other jetties. It is extremely rare that I will encounter a fish with someone else’s tackle in it, and I encounter a lot of fish
I think me and you are in very different waterways, encountering very different levels of environmental impact from fishing. I believe you about what you are seeing, it just sounds very different from what I am seeing.
I do see environmental problems related to fishing, but different ones than what you describe, and the problems I see I think can be mitigated without stopping fishing. What I see is 100 meter line tangles left on shore after respooling reels (easy fix, dispose of line in receptacle or trash) and injured fish (the injuries I see could be prevented with changes to tackle and better handling of fish)
If there was 100 meters of line in the 1 meter deep water right off the pier, it would have a lot of slack in it, and I have reeled in others lines and disposed of them, sometimes one end is snagged, but I can pull up a lot of it and cut that loose.
I think the idea is that catch and release kills far fewer fish than catch and kill, and if that is not the case either people shouldn’t be catch and release fishing that species, or they are mishandling the fish they release
Also, even a catch and eat fishery has a lot of caught and released fish, as regulations require the release of undersized, oversized, out of season, or endangered fish. or if there is no size limit, then the small ones get released because they are impractical to fillet and cook
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I understand your point to a degree but can I ask a (potentially dumb) question?
aren’t the fish going to die anyway? And who says it’s from detrivores specifically (I only ask that because I got the impression that them specifically would be the catalyst for the further problems you mentioned-- if thats wrong lmk)? I know there are plenty of videos of fish getting eaten by predators after getting released.
I guess I’m still a little confused as to how effectively keeping the biomass in the ecosystem the same can lead to a problem. I mean eventually would the population not even out? If there are an excess of prey and lack of predators, my understanding (from ecology class) is that the predators will increase and as a result the prey will decrease, until there are too many predators and not enough prey, and then the predators die leading to an excess of prey, so on and so forth. Is there a reason why nature will not eventually sort itself out?
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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 :)
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I was only talking about that in context of the specific issue of weed damage, nothing else. I was confused by some of your comments about that, and I unfortunately can’t look back since they are hidden, but think we both agree that this happens in some places and not others.
I considered the possibility that I just don’t catch the fish with hooks left in them because they have learned to avoid hooks, but I do catch fish with injuries from poor handling by other anglers, so I do not think learned avoidance of hooks can explain why I don’t see fish with hooks in them.
It is possible I am greatly underestimating lost tackle, but I do know that I would see major weed damage or items dropped off the pier from the surface
They installed those a few years back, they quickly filled up and were removed
I’m no good at plant ID, but usually if the line is in weeds and you pull hard enough (with your hands, not the rod) the weed will rip loose, usually the hard snags here are on rocks, and even then you can pull in some of the line and cut it free from the rest
I agree with this 100%
Ah ok, in that context then I suspect the difference we’re seeing in this is probably more related to the number of fish that break the line before the hook can be extracted - and maybe types of hook and determination to retrieve it at Any Cost - and probably also to species. Fish that have potent weapons of their own and tend to fight back with them when handled tend to get cut free with the hook still in place more frequently.
Even the Port Jackson sharks have venomous spines, which probably doesn’t help their survival rate as bycatch in some circles.
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Also some people who do catch and release for sharks (at least the big ones) deliberately cut the line or the hook itself, cut hooks likely fall out, but I still don’t think this is a good idea, and I’m surprised that catch and release fishermen would think intentionally leaving a hook in a fish is OK, I use a tool to handle the hook when dealing with toothy fish like pickerel, I know these fish are only half a meter, but if fishing for 3 meter toothy fish you should have a tool six times the size of mine instead of planning to just cut the line
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Yeah, if recreational catch and release was doing what some of the people tagging sharks are doing this might be a very different conversation. I’ve deliberately avoided conflating that can of worms with what you’re doing…
Oh, yes that’s among the other possibly notable differences for this one, which I mentioned earlier but I keep forgetting too, most of the recreational angling here is catch to eat (or more accurately for most, cast until all your gear is lost, or your family is getting restless, and never catch anything edible), so the damaged returned fish are generally those that were lost without landing, not legal size, a bycatch species, or (illegally but very commonly) the entrails and discards of kept fish that were filleted on site. Nobody is throwing back their target species and the kindest are killing them immediately on landing them before trying to retrieve their tackle. Tall jetties mean a lot of larger fish get lost between the water’s surface and getting them onto the jetty.
So probably few if any of the people at these places are thinking about returning many fish with the hope of them staying healthy and maybe catching them again later. For some its hard enough to just get them to return their bycatch to the water instead of leaving it to die on the surface for being a nuisance … but again that’s individuals behaving badly, not something unavoidably inherent to what they are doing.
I’m sure pretty much none of them would be cutting off hooks if they thought they could remove them, but the intent they should be easy to remove is probably not high on the list of what they’re focused on, and I’ve definitely seen cases where it’s probably more humane to just cut the line than tear the hook free without proper surgical care. The bottom feeding sharks and some fleshy lipped fish can be hard to cleanly get a hook out of. The turtle we cut free at depth would have taken brutal damage if we’d tried to get that hook out of its fin instead of just cutting the line from it. And I think I’d still rather see people cut the line on a 4m smooth ray than cut off its tail so they could get their hook back, if I can’t have my first preference there.
This is definitely true, tearing out hooks is responsible for most of the major injuries I see to fish, if you plan to release fish pinching down the barb thoroughly helps to avoid this situation
I think I’m missing something, how does cutting off the tail help them get their hook back?
I’m sorry if I sound dense here but I really don’t know what this paragraph means, specifically I don’t if when you say “what some of the people tagging sharks are doing” you are saying shark catch and release is not recreational but only done for research purposes (recreational shark fishing does exist and is what I was referring to, not tagging), or if you are saying things would be different if recreational anglers took care of their catch as well as scientists tagging do?
And I don’t know what “that can of worms” or “what you’re doing” refer to?
Wait. People went to the effort of noticing the problem, finding a solution. Installing bins.
The fishers co-operated and the shiny new bins filled.
And then? No wonder people are the problem all the way.
They were a great idea, but they were like 18 inch sections of PVC pipe, so they filled up quick, and then disappeared for some reason. There was a time tackle shops had these too, but they don’t now. I wish these were made larger instead of being removed
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That is what they did here - but haven’t walked that bit for years. I hope that with sea animal NGOs like Shark Spotters and SANCCOB (sea and coastal birds esp penguins) that ours are maintained.
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Well, we’re all mortals, but we do want to enjoy life. I think this can extend to fish.
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On the bureaucratic logic of “If it works, get rid of it”?