Fisherman needs to evolve

The primal urge to jam metal hooks into sea creatures, suck out a prawn’s guts or break a crab’s legs and swallow like there’s no tomorrow, is bewildering.

Naturalist Charles Darwin was no slouch when it came to the curious sport of fishing. In his book Darwin’s Bass: The Evolutionary Psychology of Fishing Man, he declared “I am willing to accept that … setting steel in the jaw of a big fish is what life is truly all about”.

He described the fishing fascination as “the delicious tension that fills the body with hope and anticipation,” an “ancient excitement” that “answers one of the whys of angling”.

But Darwin’s later description of “fishing man” as a “knuckle-dragger with long reachers and a fly rod”, may have been more apt.

Alas, fishing man has not substantially evolved since Darwin’s days. He remains a knuckle-dragging, bottom-dwelling predator that is primed to stalk the oceans until they’re empty of life, after finding the evolutionary process (upwards) tricky.

Each weekend, television news captures clichéd images of children and adults parading freshly killed, quivering fish in a gruesome fish pageant. Little Johnny smiles pleasantly as he clutches his huge dead bream or flathead. If that parade included whales, would these same exhibitionists drag their slain giants in front of the TV lenses? I wonder at the sympathy and emotion for whale massacres when human slaughter of other marine species proliferates.

Australian fish species such as orange roughy (sea perch) and dory are near extinction due to overfishing. Swordfish was added to Australia’s overfished list last year and locally caught eastern gemfish (hake) and school shark (flake) are now rarely available at the seafood counter. School shark has been declared overfished since records began 16 years ago, yet its status remains unchanged, its population left to evaporate.

Fathers and grandfathers lament the old days when catching a fish in Australia was fast work. Today, fishers must inhabit the piers longer to hook a decent catch.

Frustrated recreational anglers are now common.

And so are beached, half dead turtles, as the fingers of fishing contaminate other marine species.

After fishing for about 20 years, a Brisbane fisherman I know said he had never seen so many dead or dying turtles as in the last five years. “They come bum-up from the water, they’re bloated, starving, exhausted and can’t dive for food.”

It happens, he said, after turtles swallow plastic waste, get stuck in old fishing lines and crab pots or get run over by boats. He said since last January he had rescued about one turtle a week, last month it was a half-metre-long turtle in Queensland’s Raby Bay.

He said “Because they’re bloated and worn out, they can’t get away from the boats fast enough. I grab their front flippers, cover them in a wet towel and take them to a wildlife rescue station.”

He said dugongs were also being “hammered” and that “it’s up to the recreational fisherman to pull their finger out and do their bit”.

I’ve never been for or against fishing. I’ve never thought much about it. But after watching Japanese whale hunts, listening to Australian authors plead for fishing sanity, and doing a little work for a marine conservation group, I’m totally turned off food from the sea, and fishing, for life.

It is fairly certain that overfishing, global warming and boating are changing the fate of marine species. Human liability is clear. But perhaps some humans assume that, like us, fish, dugong, sea turtles, whales and other magnificent marine species are somehow resilient.

And as for the alleged health benefits, I’m healthy and I don’t eat seafood.

I thank the land for its abundant food. There is no need to empty the oceans.

Hundreds of years ago it may have been appropriate to hunt and kill fish, but the steady attachment to the slaughter is wrong, especially after the litany of curious sea shifts we experience but lightly disregard.

Cease overfishing. That was the Howard government’s message last year to Australian commercial fisheries in its 2007 Fisheries Status Report. According to the report the number of overfished species has multiplied by four since the 1990s.

The report found that in 2006 a ministerial direction was issued to the Australian Fisheries Management Authority to reduce overfishing, but the implementation of that direction “presents a significant challenge, particularly for some trawl fisheries”.

Are the political and commercial fishing waters too charged to say the words, cease all fishing?

Watershed decision-making vis-à-vis fishing and whaling is now imperative, as the ancient rhythms of the deep shatter and slow.

It’s time for fishing man to evolve.