New course, new perspective

This semester one of my courses I chose to take is called 'Fishery Models'. There were four of us in the seminar today, and this lecture was an introduction to, what I like to now think of as, the Norwegian opinion of fishery operations. My lecturer stated that over-fishing should not be taken as a survey from several fishermen because of course as you add more fishermen into the equation, each boat's catch will be smaller. He also stated that we cannot say that there is over-exploitation when we have not yet overexploited the species. If a fisherman was not landing enough catch, then ultimately he would switch to a more abundant and/or profitable fish. (He spent 2 hours talking about this, so I'll leave it here for now)

It was just interesting. There are scientific papers that say we have fished many species to the brink of collapse, but it appears that the Bergen (a major fishing industry area) professors (or at least this one)  are so strongly opposed to the hypothesis that we are depleting the ocean. Coming from NZ, where we were taught the conservation side of the story, to Norway is a big transition.

Another neat thing (Dad, you'd be interested in this) - one of my classmates is doing his PhD on 'catch and release mortality' by angling. I'll ask him more about it on Thursday if there is time.

Today I picked up my IMR access card and tomorrow Leif (my supervisor) is going to show me around the building and get me settled at my desk there. Hopefully we can also discuss more of my thesis, and the parameters that we will be looking at regarding the mackerel summer migration.

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