Rules that allow only the catching of larger fish may encourage their replacement with slower growing, more timid varieties. That, at least, is the concern of researchers who studied test populations in two artificial lakes and report their findings in this week’s edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
the opposite population pressure is operating within Western human societies.  O! the rape.
No shit.
Yeah well if you follow the theories of evolution that makes sense: big, impressive fish dying means adaptation to be smaller and slow growing. Right?
Eh, nothing a little DNA tinkering won’t fix…
Oh. Mostly we need to develop aquaculture more better. We don’t really do a lot of that. Fisheries are sort of getting this anachronistic feel anyway I think. Thar she blows and all that. Just get me my sushi, people.
Well, they’re working on culturing meat, or meat-in-a-(really big)-test-tube. Maybe that would work with fish, too.
Wouldn’t THAT drive the “Frankenfood”-haters around the bend!
That sounds perfect cause sushi is rolled anyway.
…one type was known to be aggressive in seeking food and to grow rapidly, while the other grew more slowly and tended to take fewer risks in foraging.
The first type also aggressively eats the second type, and will destroy that population if left unchecked. If your harvesting method takes more of the first than the second, as the example, then the remaining aggressive fish will just have an abundance of fodder. If it is a balanced system, it will recover quickly.
What? You didn’t know there were fishing geeks?
Of course, since people have been trying to catch the biggest fish and throwing back little ones for … well as long as people have been fishing something fishy is up with the whole process. So to speak.
What happens to western human societies when we practice ‘catch & release’? ‘8^}