2/11/2024 0 Comments Flat fish with eyes on top![]() ![]() Some individuals may be better able to cope with less food than others, some may be more resistant to a disease, and some may be able to cope with slightly warmer waters than others. Why is this a problem? The ability of an individual to survive and reproduce under different conditions is partly the result of its genetic makeup. Because every individual has a slightly different genetic makeup, the overall population eventually loses genetic variability. ![]() Essentially, the more individuals you remove from a population, the less there are to have babies and pass on their genes. Finally, years of overfishing had impacts on genetics. ![]() Sea temperature increases caused by the climate crisis may be making some of the areas winter flounder used to favour increasingly too warm. For example, some of their habitats may have been lost of heavily degraded by fishing (notably bottom trawling) and human activities in estuarine and coastal areas. There are many reasons why recovery may not be as good as we would like. Just to make it more complicated, increases and decreases can vary from one year to the next! This is why NOAA and other fishery managers look at many years’ worth of data and information to get the big picture and decide how well each of their stocks is doing. In some stocks, we have seen some increases, in others not so much. With overfishing no longer occurring in NOAA’s stocks*, we would hope to see some signs of recovery… right? ![]() Time-area closures essentially block fishing during the time and in the places where the fish spawn. For example, they have reduced the amount of winter flounder (the quota) fisheries are allowed to take and introduced time-area closures. In the USA, NOAA has been working hard to try to ensure fishing for these flatfish is more sustainable. Sadly for winter flounders, they are rather tasty for us humans and has suffered massively from overfishing, which means that their numbers are much lower than they used to be. Some like the ‘summer flounder’ have them on the left, and some like spiny turbots can have their eyes and mouth either on the right or the left! Not all flatfish have their eyes and mouth on their right-hand side. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |