Quote:
Originally Posted by Broad Bill
In one breath you're saying commercials prime size fish to target are over 4 lbs. and then you say a majority of the biomass is made up of fish under 18 inches. How many 4 lb. 18 in fluke have you caught in your lifetime?
The people saying larger fish while having more eggs are less fertile than younger age classes are the same guys harvesting those older breeders to rationalize their catch. The juvenile female fluke when they first attain sexual maturity are said to produce approximately 400,000 eggs a year. Large breeders can produce up to 4 million a year.
There might be some truth to the fact that larger breeders on a relative basis are less fertile but there's no science that suggests that differential in fertility comes close to mitigating the incremental eggs a larger breeder is capable of producing.
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Commercial guys don’t care what the largest part if the biomass is . They care about filling their nets with the most profitable fish .
Instead of fishing with the minimum size net , they bump up the net size to target larger fish .
Bigger 7 day boats are making long steams to get to areas holding the biggest fish . It makes them an extra 30 grand a week to do so .
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