Watch This Fascinating Video About Why We Should Catch Smaller Fish
By Mack Rawden 1 year ago
Being a politician is insanely difficult because the world is insanely complicated. The solutions that seem obvious and black and white often turn out to be anything but, and this story is a great example of that. For more than seven hundred years, various governments have passed laws related to how large certain types of fish need to be for buying and selling purposes. Until recently, the thought process has always been that we need to let fish grow so said fish can reproduce and make new fish we can catch later. Unfortunately, it now seems like that doesn’t really work.
According to this fascinating video put together by Minute Earth, the size of certain types of large fish have shrunk by fifty percent since 1970, most likely because we continually throw back the smaller fish, which leads to those fish reproducing multiple times and the larger fish either not reproducing or only reproducing once. Smaller fish tend to produce smaller fish, who then tend to produce even smaller fish. It’s a vicious cycle, and it needs to be dealt with now.
The Minute Earth solution is to let fishermen begin taking fish of all different sizes but reduce the numbers they’re allowed to catch. It would likely take years to repeal/ put in place legislation to make that happen, but clearly, something needs to be done soon or we’ll all end up eating little, expensive baby fish in the future.
You can check out another great Minute Earth video below, that one about how to survive a lightning strike…