Fishing and Genetic Drift

Fishing is an activity that millions partake in every year. Fishing is the activity of trying to catch fish in their habitats, including ponds, lakes, oceans and other bodies of water. Fishing is a recreational sport for many of people, and a job for many others. There are about 38 million commercial fisherman and fish farmers, providing jobs to over 500 million people who often catch and sell fish for food supply. Other fishermen are considered recreational fishers who go fishing during their free time. Through these millions of fishermen, fish get removed from their natural habitat and are either moved to different locations, or are killed and processed for food. Like many other animals, some fish are much more popular than others.

Tuna is a very popular, and a very well-known species of fish that many people enjoy eating and/or catching to feed others. Fisheries or other commercial fishing businesses catch and sell thousands and thousands of tuna fish every year. This has brought many changes and consequences, and will continue to if tuna fish are not able to reproduce enough to keep their populations striving. This means that the diversity of tuna fish, or the differences of tuna fish is going to decrease as those different traits get removed from the process, killing off those exact traits from getting passed on to the next generation. Fishermen usually prefer to obtain larger breeds of tuna fish. There are tuna of all sizes, but if fishermen keep only the larger tuna fish, leaving the medium sized and smaller sized tuna which will continue to reproduce, there will eventually be no more large tuna. This is because the diversity of the population of large tuna reduced their ability to survive and reproduce. If the population of the large tuna goes extinct by getting killed off, the traits of the large tuna die off with them, resulting in the future populations of medium and small populations unable to have any of the traits unique to the large tuna.

Another example of what could happen with the tuna is that they would completely change their structures or; ways of living. Some of the large tuna have a beautiful green color to their bodies. If fishermen preferred tuna with the green rather than blue or purple, the green population would decrease, leaving a higher percentage of blue and purple tuna. If the green tuna doesn’t mate faster than the rate of reduction within the population in order to bring up the percentage of green species, the green population will struggle to survive and could possibly go extinct, leaving no green tuna to reproduce anymore, reducing the diversity of the tuna population.

Resources and Citations

"Fishing." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, n.d. Web. 27 Dec. 2012. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fishing.

"Tuna and Mackerel Populations Have Reduced by 60% in the Last Century." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 08 Feb. 2012. Web. 26 Dec. 2012. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/02/120208103226.htm.