Commercial fisheries in the U.S kill kilogram of fish every four kilos intentionally caught, jeopardizing efforts to restore some struggling stocks, scientist said on Wednesday. A tally of the nation's yearly unintentional "bycatch"-unwanted fist that caught and, in most cases, die before being thrown overboard-was conducted by scientists Jennie Harrington, Andrew Rosenberg and Ransom Myers.
Their peer-reviewed study, sponsored by the environmental group Oceana and published in the December issue of Fish and Fisheries magazine, found that 1.1 million tons of fish annually are thrown away as dead with every four million tons caught in commercial nets.
"We can and should do better," said Rosenberg, dean of the University of New Hampshire's college of life Sciences and Agriculture and member of a federal commission that studied ocean policy.
"This sort of waste undermines efforts to recover those depleted resources." Most of the fish - such as skates, monkfish, swordfish, tunas, sharks, salmon, and halibut - are snared by shrimpers' nets in the Gulf of Mexico or in the huge trawling nets some vessels use to reach the ocean floor. The Gulf's shrimpers, for example, catch 114,000 tons of shrimp a year but discard four times that weight in snappers, mackerel, Atlantic croaker, crabs and porgies.
In response, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries, part of the Commerce Department, said on Wednesday tha federal efforts to use newer fishing gear managing have cut by 50 percent in the Gulf shrimp fishery and by "substantial" margin in virtually all other U.S fisheries.
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