At the regional level, recreational catches for these species of concern made up 64% of landings in the Gulf of Mexico (west coast of Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas), 38% in the South Atlantic (North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and the east coast of Florida), 59% along the Pacific Coast (California, Oregon and Washington), and 12% in the Northeast (Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia) in 2002.
"With over ten million saltwater recreational anglers in the U.S., and recreational fishing activity growing as much as 20% in the last 10 years, their aggregate impact is far from benign," says co-author Will Figueira of Duke University, currently at the University of Technology Sydney in Australia. "Recreational anglers are operating below the radar screen of management. While the individual may take relatively few fish, we show that a few fish per person times millions of fishermen can have an enormous impact."
"The large impacts of recreational fisheries surprised us, and they may startle many people, including fishermen, concerned about the health of our oceans. But if anything, our results likely underestimate the true impact of recreational fishing because we did not include fish that are discarded at sea or die from the effects of catch-and-release fishing," says co-author Larry Crowder of Duke University.
There is a long held belief that the individual catches of recreational fishermen could never take a significant bite out of the ocean's bounty. Most people picture recreational fishing as a Norman Rockwell image of father and son in a dinghy, each with a single hook and line. But many recreational fishermen today are equipped with sonar devices and
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Contact: Jessica Brown
jbrown@seaweb.org
202-497-8375
SeaWeb
26-Aug-2004