Tag Archives: discard mortality rates

Red Snapper: management of a public resource gone completely haywire. And we’re paying to have this done to us.

NOAA ScientistIt’s important to note here that the total allowable take isn’t based solely on the feds’ vague guesswork on the number of landings. No, they add in what they believe to be the discard mortality rates — that of fish released and dying sometime later, predominately because of barotrauma. That occurs to differing extents when fish are brought up from depths and their air bladders expand too quickly — and don’t return to normal quickly enough when released. The federal scientists use a number to determine how often this happens. In the case of snapper, they speculate that 40 percent of all released fish die in the recreational sector and 60 percent in the commercial sector. Read the rest here 09:33

Bucking conventional wisdom, researchers find black sea bass tougher than expected – discard mortality rates

The researchers had put the fish in the experimental group into one of four categories: those without visible injury; those with visible barotrauma; those with hook trauma (meaning the hook had caused significant internal injury); and “floaters” – those that couldn’t swim down into the water at all. To their surprise, the researchers found that approximately 90 percent of the fish,, Read more here phys.org  09:57