Hunting & Fishing Regulations Have Serious Unintended Consequences on Animal Size
by Matthew McDermott, New York, NY 
on 01.14.09
photo: Danielle via flickr
Ask 10 TreeHugger readers their opinion on hunting and you’ll probably get a wide range of answers ranging from enthusiasm to horror. Whatever your beliefs on the matter, a newly published paper shows how current hunting and fishing regulations, which encourage targeting of larger individual animals, is having some serious unintended consequences on those animals not killed. Our colleagues over at Discovery News have the full story, but here’s a snippet to get you going:
"Ironically, many hunting and fishing regulations encourage hunters and fishers to target the larger individuals," lead author Chris Darimont told Discovery News.He and his colleagues analyzed 40 "human predator systems" comprising 29 species that included fish, hoofed animals, and even plants.
The researchers found that in 95 percent of cases, hunting by humans was the cause for decreases in body and horn size seen in many of the animals. In 97 percent of cases, hunting was also responsible for animals reproducing at earlier ages.
Read the full article: Human Hunting Shapes Animal Populations
Hunting
Coal Released Mercury Ruins Fishing and Duck Hunting
Whale Hunting Ban Effective
Sea Hunt Embarrassment To Be “More Humane”
Follow @TreeHugger on Twitter & get our headlines with @TH_rss!
Thirsty for more? Check out these related articles:
- Stop Buying Packaged Cereal! 5 Awesome Granola Recipes to Try Instead
- Is School Food Harming Kids? Enlist a Labor Day Eat-In To Promote Fresh, Healthy Food
- 5 Reuses for Altoid Tins
- Green Glossary: Lyocell
- Trust Stella McCartney: Meat-Free Mondays are Hip, not Hippie!
- Support Obama's Ocean Policy with a Friendly Letter
Pretty obvious outcome to anyone who has studied evolution or say wildlife biology.
Human sport hunters predate most heavily against the fittest animals in a population.
Conversely, wolves and such predate mostly the old, sick, and very young, generally promoting fitness and balance of both prey and predator.
Wildlife biologists have known about this since probably the early 1960's, and develop management plans accordingly. That's what a doe permit is all about, for example. That's also why hunting seasons are short in duration, and during periods when breeding and nursing of young are finished.
Commercial fishing and hunting are far less discriminatory, but are even more potent a force. Take examples as the crash of ocean fisheries and the rapid extirpation of wild American bison.
Once fishing becomes capital intensive and global in scale, with multiple economic interests involved, large scale population collapses are a certainty. I'd be much more concerned with badly managed sport fishing and also with poaching than with well managed sport hunting.
All I have to say to that is
DUH
Yes... this is called genetics. SURPRISE!
When you eliminate the gene pool that produces the larger horns and size you increase the chances of the genes that produce smaller size and smaller horns to procreate and pass along their genes. The next generation will have more of these genes and so will the next and the next.
This isn't a surprise at all.
It certainly is the product of hunting - especially for game, where demand is placed upon the biggest bucks with the greatest rack of antlers. But this is the same story as for any industry, whether we strive for trophies, or food, we take the biggest thing we can get, not fully considering that those grand catches have been torn from the gene pool.
Should it be any surprise that operating with little restraint, or respect of the species we prize for food and display, that we discover their steady decline in both size and number? That the undiscriminating trawlers of the Atlantic can be the unequivocal cause of the Cod fisheries collapse?