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America's fishing paradox
America's fishing paradox
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คำบรรยาย (164)
0:00
Heads up.
0:01
This is Andrew.
0:02
He's responsible for releasing fish into this river.
0:05
But there's a catch.
0:06
These fish aren't from here.
0:08
They're not native to this river.
0:09
And until the late 1800s, they never would have been found here at all.
0:13
So why are they being released here by state officials?
0:16
Well, it turns out there's a very real but kind of counterintuitive reason for this.
0:20
There aren't a lot of fish thriving in ecosystems like this one.
0:23
So in order for people
0:25
to enjoy the sport of fishing, they need to put fish into the water.
0:28
It's a process called fish stocking, where fish are bred and released
0:32
into the wild, often for the specific purpose of being fished out.
0:36
It's done all over the country using trucks, hoses and even planes.
0:43
For our trout stocking program
0:44
the goal is for 100% of the fish to be caught.
0:48
So they're being bred in hatcheries to be caught?
0:50
That's right.
0:50
Which does raise a big question for me.
0:53
Is it reasonable to raise fish for the sake of sport?
0:56
And what's the effect on the ecosystem that these fish are dropped into?
1:00
So I came up here to Connecticut to see some fish stocking in action
1:04
and find out more about why this is such a common practice.
1:08
And so there's a little ball at the bottom of the net.
1:10
You can grab that, get close to the water's edge.
1:13
You just kind of toss them out.
1:14
Does that make sense?
1:16
And then we want to keep them out of the air, too.
1:18
Which is why we're running right?
1:20
When I started learning about fish stocking, I was like, wait a second.
1:23
Are states actually just putting invasive species into the environment,
1:27
while at the same time they have programs to fight different invasive species?
1:31
Fishing is very important to conservation funding
1:33
in Connecticut. About 170,000 people participate in fishing each year
1:38
in the state of Connecticut.
1:39
When they buy their fishing license, all of those funds go back to fisheries
1:43
to fund conservation efforts, to fund stocking, to fund fish habitat.
1:47
Nationally, fishing licenses and taxes on fishing equipment like rods, tackle,
1:52
and even boats combined for well over $1 billion in conservation revenue in 2024.
1:59
Ironically, to support all this recreational fishing,
2:02
the state has to manually put fish back into these waters,
2:05
because, well, there's just not enough fish there anymore.
2:09
So non-native fish are bred in hatcheries like this one.
2:13
Connecticut has three hatcheries, but there are hundreds in the U.S.,
2:18
So what kind of fish are we stocking today?
2:20
A few different trout species.
2:22
There's going to be rainbow trout.
2:23
Brown trout as well.
2:25
And that's where this gets tricky, because rainbow trout come from the west coast
2:29
of the US and brown trout actually come from Europe, Asia, and Northern Africa.
2:34
We have been stocking fish in the US for more than 100 years.
2:38
It dates back to the 1800s.
2:40
In the late 1800s as the US built dams and polluted waterways
2:45
native fish disappeared from lakes and streams all over the country.
2:48
So the federal government
2:50
began raising fish in hatcheries and shipping them across the US.
2:53
And they did this using fish cars,
2:55
which is yeah, literally just trains full of live fish.
2:59
And they used horses or mules
3:01
carrying the fish in buckets to get them to the water.
3:04
The term "invasive species" hadn't even entered into like the,
3:07
the conversation whatsoever.
3:09
I'm not even sure there was invasion biology as a science,
3:12
but we were bringing fish both to the west coast, from the east coast and vice versa.
3:17
But today, we have a much better
3:19
understanding of the havoc that some non-native species can wreak.
3:23
And we're still stocking fish.
3:25
Just using trucks and planes instead of horses.
3:28
And humans also play a role in disturbing their natural ecosystems.
3:32
Streams are getting hotter.
3:33
So warmer temperatures,
3:35
it's not great for a cold, a cold loving fish like trout or salmon.
3:39
Dams have been maybe the number one habitat problem
3:44
for these different species, especially migratory species like salmon and trout.
3:47
And here on the Mianus River
3:49
in Connecticut, there are several dams that affect the native fish population.
3:53
And of course, it's important to clarify
3:54
that Connecticut isn't just throwing fish into its water at random.
3:57
If you go back to say the 1870s when the Connecticut Fish and Game
4:02
Commission was first established, and you see those early years of stocking
4:07
there, introducing all sorts of fish into all sorts of places,
4:10
and some of those have had really deleterious negative effects.
4:13
And so there are these potential negative effects,
4:16
but that's why we do monitoring, right?
4:19
That's why we it's an adaptive management process where we're out collecting
4:23
data, following up and doing evaluations to make sure we're not having those issues.
4:28
But even with the most careful approach, things can go wrong.
4:31
When you have a foreign fish that you're putting into the environment that doesn't
4:34
belong there or didn't evolve there, it can displace the native species.
4:39
Non-native stocked fish are raised in hatchery conditions and in a hatchery
4:43
they learn to become aggressive.
4:44
And then when you put those stocked fish into the environment,
4:47
they might be better at finding food or outcompeting the native fish.
4:51
And there are some more complicated consequences,
4:53
like the phenomenon known as hybridization,
4:56
which is when non-native fish breed with the fish that evolved to live there.
4:59
They start breeding with a different species that evolved elsewhere,
5:03
they might lose some of those genetic traits that help them survive,
5:06
and that can actually lead to the declines of those native species.
5:09
And of course, there's a very real welfare concern
5:12
of what it means to be breeding these fish in hatcheries, to then be caught.
5:17
Is this good for the life of a fish?
5:18
Like, definitely, definitely not.
5:21
Like, I think that's pretty clear.
5:23
I know it looks like it's
5:23
just me out here, but reporting stories like this one takes a whole team.
5:27
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5:32
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5:41
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5:42
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5:52
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5:55
Now back to the video.
5:56
Beyond the potential ecological impacts, fish stocking points to a larger problem.
6:01
We're in a moment of compounding climate and biodiversity crises.
6:05
And how we protect wildlife matters more than ever.
6:08
So practices that may have seemed okay historically, like stocking fish
6:12
for recreation, can now critically undermine ecosystem resilience.
6:17
This is really about
6:18
whether our public institutions are set up to protect wildlife for the long term.
6:22
States prioritize non-native fish because fishing is such a big part
6:26
of their revenue.
6:27
It comes down to funding.
6:28
The perception that hunters and anglers are the sole bread and butter creates
6:32
this built in incentive prioritize a few game species and,
6:37
you know, stocked fish species.
6:39
The resources currently dedicated to raising hatchery fish and stocking our lakes
6:43
and rivers with them could be better spent on those other sources.
6:47
It's this strange paradox at the heart of this.
6:50
In order to fund conservation, states end up having to do something that,
6:54
at least in some cases, hurts the very ecosystem
6:58
they're trying to conserve.
6:59
This is ultimately a systems problem. How we fund and define conservation.
7:03
And that's what needs to evolve.
7:05
So diversified funding streams are really important.
7:08
In Oregon, they just passed legislation,
7:11
to increase a lodging tax, and that money would go towards
7:17
their state wildlife action plan and their list of species
7:20
of greatest conservation need.
7:22
And other lawmakers have floated the idea of a backpack tax,
7:26
which would tax outdoor equipment the way fishing is.
7:29
We would support diversified funding streams.
7:32
Absolutely.
7:33
Anything that's going
7:34
to increase our capacity to conserve fisheries would be awesome.
7:38
I do think that states
7:39
are in a tricky position. They have constituents who want to fish,
7:44
and they also have constituents who want to conserve nature,
7:47
which is also part of their mandate.
7:48
I think that there's, a false tension that you can envision there
7:53
where it's as if we are stocking fish and managing sport fish
7:57
instead of conserving species. When we stock fish,
8:01
that gets people to go out fishing to engage with the resource, build political
8:05
will and build the economic capacity to support non-game fish too.
8:09
The point that I think should be emphasized is that getting people
8:14
out into the environment might build an environmental ethic
8:17
or a conservation ethic that ends up providing a net good.
8:21
Ultimately restoring native systems and the fish that live in them
8:25
would be a clear win for everyone.
