Kate Wing's Blog
I like big fish and I cannot lie
September 19, 2007
Posted by Kate Wing in Reviving the World's Oceans , Saving Wildlife and Wild Places
Let's face it, all fish are not the same. When we count fish for management, we lump them all together--quite literally--into pounds or tons but we know in our hearts that a baby fish and a mature fish aren't the same. They don't fetch the same price and they don't play the same role in maintaining the population. Your odds of making it from fish larvae to 3-year old fish are slim, 100,000 to one in some cases. But once you're a big fish, especially a big female, well, you can rule the underwater reproductive world. If you don't get caught first.
Scientists, who are as susceptible to acronyms as the rest of us, refer to these fish as Big Old Fat Females, or Big Old Fat Fecund Female Fish, or BOFFFs (I think each subsequent paper adds an F). The late, sorely missed, Dr. Steven Berkeley found that for Pacific rockfish BOFFs not only had more babies but these baby fish had a better chance of survival than the eggs produces by younger females. Not because they taught their fish some wily tricks but because the babies got a little extra food to keep them going through the rough period of finding a pile of rocks to call home.
As more news comes out about the importance of BOFFFs it is causing some folks to rethink how we manage the sea. After all, I'm not the only one who loves big fish. Maybe we should let some of the big ones go, or better yet, not catch them in the first place.
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