We are close to eating Bait Fish and Jelly Fish

jerry

Well Known Member
an average day in the 50s
The video in the story above on the Goliath Grouper is amazing.
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moore_rb

Stay Thirsty My Friends
Hmmm...

I won't discredit the source of the story (I'll simply snicker and move on to the content), but I will post a couple facts about the "smaller and smaller fish" trend that story and the photo sequence is suggesting.

All the B&W photos in the story show tons of monster goliath grouper being hauled in dead, and it is true that the populations of large fish back then were higher than they are today. 100% accurate, and the rates of harvest being practiced back then ABSOLUTELY contributed to the population crash that occured in the 70's and 80's - this is a long-lived species, so the population trends will ebb and flow over decades, rather than over years...

HOWEVER:

The TOTAL population of Goliath Grouper (Epinephelus Itajara) is actually higher today than it was in the 1950's - It is so high, in fact, that Florida is considering revisiting the "no harvest" regulations:

http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/12/25/3837358/ban-on-harvesting-goliath-grouper.html


It is also important to note that just because there are no pictures of any grouper (let alone huge ones) in the later pictures does not mean there are no grouper left out there -- go spend an hour on youtube (search "goliath grouper") and you can see hours of footage, less than a year old, of guys catching (and releasing) 500+ pound fish.

It has been illegal to harvest a Goliath Grouper (or to hang a dead on on the dock and snap photos of it) since 1990... it has NOT been illegal to catch them and release them.

Ditto the harvest of Redfish, Snapper, and other key bottom-species- there are slot limits in place that only permit the taking of smaller fish that are "under the slot", and maybe one or two larger fish that are "over the slot"... The later pictures in the story are showing the quality of the fish that you are allowed to KEEP, not the quality of the fish you are allowed to CATCH.

Notice the subtle difference...?

The pictures, and the story, allow your perceptions (what you see and what you read) to trick your brain into thinking that reality is something different than what it actually is - Psychologists (or Psychotic-logicists) call this condition cognitive dissonance (allowing your mental or cognitive biases to over-rule the input of what your actual physical senses are suggesting to your brain's logic center).

Cognitive dissonance has been a tool of manipulation used by social agenda-pushers for as long as there has been society (and agendas).

If you want to see what Florida Goliath grouper populations are really like, jump on a plane, fly to Florida, and spend a day with a local guide on his boat - you might be relieved to find that there are millions of them out there (albeit the smaller ones outnumber the larger ones by about 500:1) and that the population is actually quite healthy...

If you time your trip right, it might be after they lift the harvest ban, and you might even get to keep one or two 5-pounders for dinner that night.... If they taste anything like Pinto Bass (which is also a member of the same Epinephelus genus) then you are in for a real tasty meal...
 
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