I love to fish. Since I was a young boy, it’s been my passion. These days I mostly fish for largemouth bass in local reservoirs, but I have fished all over the U.S., even spending six years in Idaho fly fishing for trout (and sometimes attending classes). Although I prefer fishing with artificial lures or flies, I’m no purist – I’ll drown worms with the best of them. To my three daughters, the worms are more interesting than the fish.
Recently, I fulfilled a life-long dream and went marlin fishing in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. If you like to fish, I can’t recommend this trip enough. In three days we caught seven striped marlin and two mahi-mahi. The waters in the Pacific and Sea of Cortez were gorgeous.
Working in the environmental field, I always find it interesting to see the types of natural resource management conflicts and issues that people around the world deal with. While we were in Cabo, I couldn’t help but notice that most of the charter boat captains in Cabo were wearing t-shirts and sporting bumper stickers that read "No a la NOM-029!" When I asked our friend who lives there what the stickers referred to, he explained that NOM-029 is a new fishing regulation. The problem that the sport fishermen in Cabo have with NOM-029 is that it allows long-liners (commercial fishermen) to keep their by-catch, including the 
prized billfish like marlin and sailfish. In some cases, the amount of "incidental by-catch" that is caught and killed is staggering. The sport fishermen worry, rightly so, that this might impact the resource and in-turn affect their business. The sportfishing industry is almost entirely catch-tag-release (meaning that the sailfish and marlin are released alive). I should point out that even sport fishermen keep a few mahi-mahi and tuna for the table (yum!).
The conservation fight over NOM-029 may seem remote to you – it certainly does to me sitting here in an office 300 miles from the coast. Most of us who live far inland probably don’t feel a big connection with our oceans, even though we may care about them. This fact made me think about another issue I’ve been reading about recently – the so-called "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico. You’ve probably heard of the "dead zone," which is also called the hypoxic zone. This is an area in the Gulf, recently measured at over 7,900 square miles, that is basically devoid of oxygen. The main locus for hypoxia is at the mouth of the Mississippi. However, scientists recently announced the discovery (for the first time) of a zone generated on the Texas coast. Although there is still much to learn about this issue, scientists do have a good idea of what causes it and this is where us landlubbers fit in.
In a nutshell, hypoxia is a result of freshwater that floats on top of the more dense saltwater causing a die-off of algae. The dead algae then falls to the bottom and decays, using up oxygen faster than it can be replenished and brought down from the surface. These lower, oxygen starved layers, simply can’t support sea life. The whole process is sped up and exacerbated by nitrogen, which is washed into the ocean from our rivers, encouraging algae blooms. Sources of nitrogen include lawn and agricultural fertilizers, erosion, and sewage treatment facilities. By not over-fertilizing and better controlling nitrogen from water treatment plants, we can help reduce the size and effect of the "dead zones." The point is that no matter how far we are from the coast, the decisions we make about how we manage our land and water resources have an impact on our oceans.
For more information about NOM-029, check out The Billfish Foundation website: http://www.billfish.org/new/NewsArticle.asp?ArticleID=60 For more information about the "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico, see the following websites: http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science/07/29/dead.zone.ap/index.html http://www.smm.org/deadzone/top.html (more kid-friendly)
posted by RANDY ALEXANDER
Thanks for caring about my country
Posted by: gloria samano | September 20, 2007 at 09:20 PM