RE: NANFA-- Helpful vs. harmful-how do we know?

Doug Dame (dameda_at_shands.ufl.edu)
Mon, 29 Jan 2001 18:26:35 -0500

Ty Hall wrote:

>> ... someone posts that they saw a commercial
>> hatchery harvest wild native fish ...

Well, surprise, surprise, it seems I might have been the person who put this buzz in your head. El whoops !!! I didn't make the connection.

Actually, the Richloam Hatchery to which I referred is a state facility ... primarily raising game fish, that's where most of the political support and funding comes from, but there were soon-to-be-released sturgeon in residence when we visited ... and the flagfish I saw them get from traps were coming out of one of their many multi-acre fish-raising ponds.

I'm not saying that's their only source of fish-for-forage, cause I don't know that, but that's what I saw, and given their scale of operations, it's hard to imagine they could harvest wild-fish in sufficient quantity to meet their needs without totally depleting the local wild supplies. And they sent us collecting in a (main-made) pond 1/4 mile or so from their main facility, and fish were plentiful there, so manifestly they have not raped & pillaged their own backyard.

But even if the thread started due to something of a mis-understanding, I still found it interesting.

I guess when you "grow your own" live foodstuffs, you have direct observable evidence about whether your level of production is sufficient and sustainable. However, if you adopt a hunter/gatherer model rather than an agricultural one, your environmental feedback on what is a sustainable harvest is much more indirect (and subject to misinterpretation due to lack of experience/knowledge.) And when other people rely on wild harvesting, you hope their intentions and judgement are good ... but in the back of your mind you know that, with all human activities, there's an absolute minimum quota of two fools per hundred. And so it's kinda worrisome.

.02

Doug Dame
Interlachen FL

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