Bycatching Research Paper

Overfishing is a death sentence to the world’s oceans. As technology continues to improve a great deal of fish can be caught quicker; but at what cost? The effects of overfishing can lead to the extinction of not just the animals being fished, but also the predators that rely on fish to eat. Ninety percent of the ocean’s largest animals have been wiped out due to overfishing (“Overfishing- A Global Disaster”, 2011). National Geographic cites the academic journal Science (2006) that predicts by 2048, all fisheries will collapse due to lack of ocean wildlife. Fish are not the only animal caught in the nets used by fishing vessels. Often animals such as dolphins, sharks, turtles, and seabirds are

The same activities are carried out in order to increase the food available for game species, and in turn increase their numbers for hunters. Hunting can disrupt natural food chains as well. It disrupts the natural prey-predator cycles that are so important for the sustenance of the forest. Long term effects of hunting take a toll on forests and they are slowly lost to us. Now let’s learn a little about fishing and how it effects the environment.

Humans fish to survive and in doing so they will target specific species leading to overfishing. Sound pollution is causing issues with the wildlife of the ocean in how they communicate and move around. With human interaction comes trash which gets left in the ocean and affects many different species.

Many anglers catch the wrong type of fish in their drift nets. This leads to those fish becoming endangered and even extinct. For example, "up to 2,000 of the animals

Lost fishing gear in the ocean is also a big culprit to the death of many sea animals. “Ghost fishing” is a cause

Commercial fishing is a reason so many turtles are dying each year and making them become endangered. Duke University found that shrimp trawls and commercial fishing nets have killed over 250,000 loggerheads in the human's lifetime. Lots of the turtles are dying to the actions we make. When you are fishing you

A report from Recovering America’s Wildlife Crisis states, “More than 150 species have already gone extinct and about 40% of freshwater fish species are imperiled.” Animals are being killed off by the minute. Now the wildlife species are going to abolished from Earth.

Trawlers and fishing boats with large nets will skim the ocean bottom breaking up these coral and destroying them (F. Moretzsohn).

Cetacean bycatch in fishing industries has been a highly debated topic for decades and is still considered an ongoing problem(NOAA 8). However, when it is looked at in comparison, the problem of bycatch has already been solved as much as is possible while still allowing fishing industries to fish at all. Bycatch is defined as any marine life that is caught and returned to the sea, whether it is dead or alive(Brooke 2). Therefore, many marine animals that are considered bycatch are not harmed in any way. Including these animals, the national bycatch ratio is still low(Brooke 3). Many actions have already been taken since this has become an issue that has reduced bycatch by an incredibly large amount. In many areas, the amount of bycatch compared to the amount of fish that the fisheries in that area take in is only a small fraction(Brooke 3). There will always be bycatch in fishing, even if a single fisherman is fishing with a single

Commercial fisheries can do tremendous damage to the marine ecosystem if they are not managed properly. This became apparent in Newfoundland and Labrador during the 1990s, when decades of overfishing caused the northern cod stocks to collapse and resulted in a moratorium on the centuries-old industry. These were huge ecological and economic losses, which dictated an urgent need to change fisheries policy and practice in a way that would make the industry sustainable and protect marine biodiversity.

The Atlantic cod fishery collapse left terrible ecological consequences. As mentioned above, the fishing technology was a major destruction to the ecological system by using deployment and draggers. The huge nets that were dropped and dragged along the bottom of the ocean destroyed the underlying eco-system in the process. The effect of selective fishing on spawning grounds – that is, selectively over-exploiting one species in an ecosystem – had disastrous effect on the feeding relationships in that ecosystem. This contributes to the overall reduction of spawning stock biomass of the targeted species, but also an increase in the number of invertebrate and vertebrate predators such as crustacean and fish which will prey on cod eggs, larvae, and younger fish. It is a little wonder that a species like cod, would eventually run into difficulties struggling to survive when its habitat is being continuously destroyed and the balance of their food chain had been wiped out.

Cetacean bycatch is an ongoing problem in the oceans of the world. Cetaceans are defined as whales, dolphins and porpoises(CBRC 1). Bycatch is “marine mammals that are “captured” but discarded”(Read 2). This happens when fishing industries are fishing for a certain type of marine animal and other marine animals are caught accidentally along with the intended catch. Many times, this leads to the death of the animal that was not meant to be caught, and the animal is tossed back into the ocean. This happens with all kinds of marine life, and it has caused the depletion of many different species. However, this is specifically bad for cetaceans, such as dolphins and whales, because they have such a long lifespan(Brown 2). They also take a very long time to mature(Brown 2). These factors make catching these animals very detrimental to the species as a whole because it takes longer for them to reach an age where they can reproduce(Brown 2). The population of many cetaceans have decreased exponentially. When there is someone watching the nets that cetaceans are accidentally caught in, many times they can be saved. However, there are only select few types of fishing methods that do this, and they are not of the prevalent fishing methods that produce cetacean bycatch. This is a problem because there is a connection between most living animals. If a certain part of the connection is eliminated, it will all fall apart. For example, the relationship between

Marine animals are suffering dramatic rises in disastrous illnesses such as nervous and digestive system problems, liver disease, along with growth and development issues. More than 100,00 animals die every year after ingesting/being tangled upon plastic bags, these animals include sea turtles, seals, sea lions, seabirds, fish, whales, and dolphins. The deaths of all these animals impacts the food chain majorly. For example, sea otters eat sea urchin and invertebrate. If the otters went extinct then the sea urchins would devour kelp forests which would affect many marine life from starfish to sharks. Sea otters also help fight climate change by restoring aquatic carbon-fighting plants. Just imagine what the world would be like if out of the

How often do we stop and think about the people that fish to provide the rest of the world with the supply of fish that is in demand. With many fisheries closing down due to poor managing and depletion, anglers are turning to the deep sea to fill their “fish orders”. Large fishing vessels also known as Super Trawlers are dragging fishing nets up to a mile deep. Doing this allows them to catch as many fish as possible, but it is also destroying natural habitat such as coral reefs that have been part of the sea for thousands of years. The effect of this is devastating to sea life.

For the most part, humans get food by either hunting or fishing. Fisherman would originally drop a large net in the ocean beneath them and pull it up with thousands of fish. Now fisherman drop an open net in the water drive miles until they actually catch something. Most of the things that are caught in the net are endangered, but fisherman need to make money so they pull it in anyway. Shark soup is a delicacy in some countries, but in order to make shark soup, there has to be a shark. Wiith the population diminishing it gets harder for the fisherman to find sharks for this soup. Fisherman have found a new way to hunt down these sharks. They throw about a hundred fishing lines into the water with the other end attached to the boat and continue to drive miles and miles, for hours a day. By the end of the day they reel in the lines to not only find a few sharks, but as well as other fish. When sharks get attached to these lines they entangle themselves causing them to stop moving. When they stop moving, they die. Besides the point of how cruel fishing can be, they kill numerous amounts of species that affects the ecosystem. Pulling out all sorts of fish from the ocean makes it very unhealthy resulting in an unhealthy ecosystem, which affects the