Ownership of Fish

After today’s class I was drawn to think about the great Discovery Channel show “Deadliest Catch” where King Crab fishermen try to catch their quota of Alaskan king crab. This made me think about the viability of putting quotas on the catching of fish that were pointed out in class. This I don’t think would have ant real effects on the dwindling populations. I looked at the populations of the Alaskan Crabs are extremely low. They have been declining since 1980 where fishermen were able to catch 200 million pounds of crab where in the winter of 2006 there was only 14 million pounds harvested. I thought about Kyle’s idea of placing an ownership to the various species of fish and implanting them with a gps system to keep track of the different animals. This seems on the surface to be an easy way to get ownership to the different animals but the hard part would be the getting the gps to the animals. To gain ownership to a fish one would have to catch it to begin with and then release it back into the wild. I don’t know if this would work very well if the fishermen weren’t on board to being willing to release the smaller fish when they are young and I think that the technology that would be created could really easily be beaten by seeing the trawlers that can process the fish on the spot and simply remove the gps and then there isn’t any tracking whatsoever. The gps would have kept in the water where it should be until the rightful owner tried to come and get it. Also the different gps systems that would have to be used couldn’t possibly be that hard to remove because it would be an added expense to the owner when they are ready to process the animal. A person doesn’t want to harm the animal’s meat because that is what is the value to them and it would just be another expense that they would have to take and make the fishermen not willing to make the fish owned. All in all I think that something needs to be done but I don’t know how one would do a productive action that would be accepted by all the countries in the world and who would govern and enforce the various rules and regulations