February 3, 2020 — The volume of fish caught recreationally more than tripled in the 60 years to 2014, and a recent uptick in recreational shark hunting is damaging fragile populations.
The United Nations agency that documents fishing statistics almost exclusively monitors commercial fisheries. To quantify the impact of pleasure fishing, Dirk Zeller at the University of Western Australia in Crawley and his colleagues reconstructed the amount of fish caught annually in 125 countries. The researchers analysed reports from events such as fishing jamborees and gathered data on factors such as the number of licensed recreational fishers per state to scale up to a global estimate.