Sports fishermen better known for battling marlin with rod and reel now are defending their beloved game fish by launching a high-profile campaign to convince diners not to order marlin at restaurants, under the slogan: "No Marlin on the Menu!''
With stocks of the spike-nosed marlin becoming smaller and harder to find even in the Pacific, many anglers have turned to keeping only one fish per day, per boat, to preserve the population and are now focusing on commercial fishing of the species.
"We have decided to take it to the next level, an aggressive, proactive stance where we will have a lot of media brought to the attention of the status of the species, and then start with mailings and advertisements," said Ellen Peel, president of the Billfish Foundation, a Miami, Florida-based anglers group.
Previously confined to pressing individual restaurants to take the fish off the menu, Peel expects the broader public campaign to get in gear by summer.
But it is already being taken up by fishermen in Cabo San Lucas, considered by many the marlin capital of the world, after sportsmen here waged a bruising battle to limit commercial shark-fishing boats that scoop up marlin, Dorado, swordfish and sailfish, all of which are reserved by law in Mexico for anglers within 80km of shore.
They say the biggest threat to the marlins' home turf -- the wild blue waters off the southern tip of the Baja California peninsula -- are commercial boats that say they're going after low-value, increasingly rare shark, but actually scoop up marlin and other game fish as so-called accidental "by-catch."
"We all know there are hardly any sharks left in this area, so they're going to come in with shark permits and the incidental [by-catch] becomes their objective," sports fishing boat operator Tracy Ehrenberg said.
Sportsmen realized that in order to limit "accidental" catches of game fish, they had to eliminate the incentive to catch them, by making the fish unsellable.
But Raul Villasenor, a director of the national fisheries commission, said that between 2005 and last year two commercial boats had been found carrying high percentages of game fish.
He said an estimated 1,200kg of game fish were found on one of the boats.
Besides pressing local restaurants not to serve Pacific marlin and diners not to order the dish, the activists are also seeking a ban on the sale of Pacific marlin, similar to one in place for years in the US for Atlantic marlin.
The Baja California state government has endorsed such a ban, and some restaurant owners are in agreement.
Mauricio Sevilla, who runs Cabo San Lucas' iconic The Giggling Marlin Bar & Grille, said he never has sold marlin, and never would.
"Here, people leave marlin for the sports fishermen, because they're the town's attraction," Sevilla said.
To save game fish, Baja California Senator Luis Coppola has proposed a ban on all fishing for sharks.
While data shows that Atlantic Marlin are seriously overfished -- White Marlin are at about 13 percent of population levels considered healthy -- much less is known about Pacific Marlin.
But fishermen say they are becoming scarcer.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
China would train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction,” its minister for public security has said. “We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (王小洪) told an annual global security forum. Wang made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organizations such as Interpol. The forum is part of ongoing