This was one of the ugliest pictures taken while selling calendars. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released a report over a decade ago saying that many fisheries would be mostly catch and release as voluntary and regulatory discards cause some quotas to be met with fish that die from their wounds after being released. Hard deadlines politicians passed for rebuilding mismanaged fisheries are used as an excuse by fishery managers to take drastic measures like completely closing fisheries for a period of time. This starts a vicious cycle of dead discard allocations causing repeated rounds of prolonged complete closures and excessive regulatory discards. A simple solution would be to remove hard rebuilding deadlines and transfer quota currently allocated to assumed dead discards to harvestable quota. This would allow fishermen and consumers to enjoy eating local wild-caught seafood without killing any more fish than we are now. Five MILLION pounds of Red Snapper quota is allocated to assumed dead discards every year as recreational and commercial fishermen combined are only allowed to harvest less than 10% of that for food. Imagine how quickly things would change if all those wasted snapper could be piled high to rot on the steps of Congress. Waste from gross mismanagement is what got me started as an advocate. We should all be offended by the premeditated government mandated wanton waste of our Public Resources.
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