Quote:
Originally Posted by NoLimit
So why keep the minimum size and ruin the day for the kids that go home after tossing back all their fish?
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The recreational minimum size was adopted to insure a much greater percentage of the overall stock became the exclusive harvest of the commercial sector as their minimum starts at 14". They still harvest the larger fish to promote higher catch values and kill God only knows how many smaller fish in the process. The recreational sector makes the sacrifices, the commercial sector receives the financial benefits and an extremely high percentage of the stock becomes collateral damage in the commercial sector process of selectively harvesting the more valuable older age classes. Meaning smaller less valuable younger age classes brought up in their nets get shoveled back overboard dead with the rest of the non targeted catch. There's more waste in commercial fishing alone than the entirety of all recreational harvest but fisheries management bases commercial catch numbers for dead discard mortality on bogus data that commercial operators routinely under report on their vessel trip reports which is completely based on the honor system and whatever percentage they arbitrarily want to report which you know is low balled.
Recreational catch statistics, as we know, are based on MRIP numbers which NMFS has already admitted are more than 40% overstated while commercial discard mortality statistics are left up to the discretion of commercial operators. It's a completely rigged system that favors the commercial sector at the expense of the recreational sector and the stock as a whole.
