Quote:
Originally Posted by FISHIONADO
A smaller thresher would get fully respected, meaning it would get fully consumed. I haven't taken one, and only had to release a couple. I don't care for shark myself but I've been prepared to consume one if it was by-catch and couldn't be released healthy.
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Well it's a given that fish should never be wasted, in fact it's law, but you still usually have a choice whether to keep it or not.
If we had lots of baby Marlin around would you be tempted to keep them?
Striped Marlin are good to eat. If you kept one it would probably not be wasted, but it is still better to let them go, because it's a better precedent for fishing in general. People do not let small Marlin go because they taste bad, people let them go because they want a healthy population of adults to fish for. People should release Ts for the same reason.
Sharks have always kind of got a bad rap as far as killing them goes, like it's no big deal to kill a shark or that it does not matter. When you kill a forty pound T it's just the same as killing a 400 pound T because if you think about it you'll quickly realize that if released that shark it would almost certainly grow to full size if not killed by man.
It's an adaption of mentality. If the majority of recreational fisherman just need to get that fact that we are the top predator of these sharks, that we are the only thing that kills them on a regular basis. Then perhaps they would realize that even killing the smallest T shark has a impact on the fishery, and if we just released those pups we'd have a lot more 400 lb T's around, and more pups and higher population numbers in general.
Jim