Tourists go out on commercial crab boats in Alaska, paying big bucks to get a personal taste of "Deadliest Catch." It's catch and release commercial fishing, where the ticket price pays the costs and the catch is for the tourists to look and and dump back into the ocean. Is this the future of fishing? Maybe ocean animals are worth more alive than dead. Unbelievable. I guess it just goes to show the power of tv. Tweet
2 comments:
I wonder what the mortality rate is, though. Are those crabs surviving the long journey back down?
I had the same question as Miriam about mortality on the way back down. This is about more than just the physical stress of hauling to the surface and then releasing to depth--there is also the predation risk for benthic creatures adapted for life on the bottom with structure for protection being released to float from the surface back to the bottom. This aspect of catch and release mortality remains poorly studied and is likely greater than other sources of mortality in many cases.
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