Sorry for the silence over Halloween. Posting will now hopefully return to normal with at least one post every or every other day. This first post will be somewhat of a link post catching up on some of the fishy news that happened last week.
First of is an update on the Atlantic Blue fin Tuna. Despite good signs going into the Marrakesh tuna conference the outcome was very bad with the quote for eastern blue fin tuna being set to 22,000 tons, 50 per cent higher than scientific advice. Last years quota was 29,000 tons but it is believed that a total of 61,000 tons were brought ashore when counting illegal catches. These levels are unsustainable and the blue fin tuna populations are near a collapse. You can read more about this here
Another Tuna news. A fisherman out of San Diego is believed to have caught the largest yellow fin tuna ever caught. The tuna weighed in at 381.1-pound. View a video here.
Time to stop talking about tunas and start talking about something completely different, snakeheads. A new study has shown that snakeheads are proving much less damaging to the native fauna than expected. They do not seem to be destroying populations of native fish such as largemouth and peacock bass. The scientist examined the stomach content of 127 snakeheads and found one of the most common pray to be other snakeheads. They found 13 snakeheads, one bluegill, 11 mosquitofish, seven warmouth, two peacock bass, several lizards, bufo toads, small turtles, a rat and a snake. No remains of largemouth bass were found.
Another interesting article posted this last week is this one that tells the story of the mass gharial die of that happened last winter when half the worlds population of this once common animal. Scientist finally thinks they know why this happened. Something that might help save the worlds last 100 specimens.
That is it for this time but I might post more post like this during the week if I decide that there are more news that are to important to miss.