Quote:
Originally Posted by Jim Day
You might find this interesting but I feel the same way about lobsters. Same idea one male can mate with many females. I occasionaly keep smaller females when hooping is very slow but if possible I release all my females and never keep big females over three pounds. The larger the tail the more eggs they can protect and carry. On the other and I have no problem killing big males as larger males are canibilistic and eat their own young.
Jim
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Makes perfect sense to me and I would advocate that as a management technique. That's what they do with Dungeness crab up north. It's illegal to take any females. Every year, they estimate that they have been harvesting ~90% of all the males in the population every year for a LONG time and the Dungeness fishery remains the most sustainable commercial fishery in Nor Cal.
One other point that supports keeping the big sharks. PIER has done recent research on catch-and-release mortality of threshers and they've found that when the fight time exceeds 2 hours, the survival goes WAY down. Those long tail-hook fights are the worst on them obviously. I would venture to guess that fights over 2 hours are mostly on big sharks, at least I would hope so.