May 15, 2014 — Stopping the unnecessary squandering of nontarget fish in many U.S. fisheries and reducing the needless incidental killing of untold seabirds, whales, and other marine life by indiscriminate fishing gear is central to a new, national approach to ecosystem-based fisheries management.
Fish have few natural refuges from today's trawlers and industrial fishing fleets. Our modern, high-tech ability to find and catch fish has compounded an age-old problem—the incidental catching and killing of ocean wildlife while fishing for popular sport and commercial species. This waste, also known as bycatch, is widespread in U.S. waters. In fact, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, estimated in 2011 that "17 percent of fish caught commercially [in U.S. waters] were harvested unintentionally." This has serious economic and ecological consequences.
Economically, bycatch equates to lost opportunity—precluding potentially more valuable uses of fishery resources and reducing future productivity by killing juvenile fish before they can mature and reproduce. In a recent review of NOAA bycatch data, researchers at Oceana found that "bycatch in the U.S. could amount to 2 billion pounds every year, equivalent to the entire annual catch of many other fishing nations around the world."
The ecological costs of bycatch are just as devastating. Off the California coast, for example, gill nets—often as long as a mile—are submerged for hours at a time to catch swordfish and thresher sharks. These nets also entangle and kill other animals the fishermen never intended to catch, including whales, turtles, sharks, dolphins, and many species of fish. In other words, bycatch is bad for those who fish and even worse for the environment.
Read the full opinion piece at the Huffington Post