Many recreational fishermen believe there’s no way a single hook on a line can do as much damage as the sweep of a yawning bottom trawl. Well, when we put 12 million hooks on 12 million lines the equation starts to come a bit more into balance.
Certainly many species of fish are hit harder by commercial fishermen. There aren’t many 25-foot Wellcrafts trolling for pollock in the Gulf of Alaska or longlining swordfish in the Gulf of Maine. And the overall numbers clearly skew in favor of the commercial industry. NOAA estimates anglers caught about 173 million pounds of fish in 2009. Commercial fishermen? Slightly more: 7.9 billion pounds.
But impacts on individual species are sometimes far greater as a result of sportfishing. Again according to NOAA’s landings data, recreational fishermen, for example, landed an estimated 13.3 million pounds of red drum in 2009 while their commercial counterparts caught just 200,000 pounds. That same year in the south Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico, sportfishermen hauled in over 60 percent of the total catch of red snapper, a species classified as overfished and subject to overfishing by NOAA. As a result of these rec and commercial pressures the snapper fishery has undergone multiple closures in recent years.
Read the complete opinion piece from the Center for American Progress.