Ear­li­er this week a 1,005.9lb blue mar­lin was caught in To­ba­go dur­ing the an­nu­al To­ba­go In­ter­na­tion­al Game Fish­ing Tour­na­ment. It set a new record for the largest Blue Mar­lin caught in Trinidad and To­ba­go wa­ters and the South­ern Caribbean.

While the skill of the fish­er­men who land­ed this mighty fish is not in ques­tion, its death most cer­tain­ly is. Ac­cord­ing to es­ti­mates, the At­lantic Blue Mar­lin could be ex­tinct with­in ten years, al­most en­tire­ly be­cause of long lin­ing and oth­er com­mer­cial fish­ing meth­ods; a pop­u­la­tion re­duc­tion of 90 per cent. Oth­er large game fish are in an even worse po­si­tion.

Pho­tographs of this mag­nif­i­cent crea­ture strung up on the jet­ty sur­round­ed by its grin­ning cap­tors ap­peared on Face­book. While most com­ments were con­grat­u­la­to­ry in tone, many were not.When it was point­ed out that a catch and re­lease pol­i­cy should have been in place, I was told that the min­i­mum weight in or­der to bring a fish to the scale is 500+ pounds. All the oth­ers in the tour­na­ment were re­leased. So, the might­i­er the fish the greater its chances of death.

Isn't it time that the T&T Game Fish­ing As­so­ci­a­tion changed its pol­i­cy? No longer should these fan­tas­tic an­i­mals be killed mere­ly be­cause they are huge and need be pho­tographed for the ego­tis­ti­cal plea­sure of their ex­e­cu­tion­ers. This be­hav­iour be­longs to the 19th cen­tu­ry, not the 21st.

Can prizes not be giv­en for catch­ing and re­leas­ing very large fish? A world record size (1,400 lbs) mar­lin was caught, re­vived and re­leased in the Azores in the in­ter­ests of con­ser­va­tion–so why not in T&T? In fact, give them ex­tra mon­ey for keep­ing it alive!When the last great fish is hauled from the ocean to dan­gle life­less­ly on a scale, prob­a­bly with­in our life­time, those in­volved with this in­ci­dent will look back on it with shame. Or at least they should.

Mark Mered­ith,

Auck­land, New Zealand