The ocean abyss shines with moonlight, stars, and bioluminescent creatures – an underwater fireworks display anglers can capitalize on with fluorescent monofilament fishing lights illuminating fluorescent lures and monofilament.
As flashlight fish and other organisms powered by light-producing bacteria can use their “flashlights” to signal, attract prey, or avoid predators, some even possess anatomical structures to focus or regulate bioluminescence.
Reduce Bycatch
Bycatch is a complex issue concerning harvesting technology, biology, behavior, and decision-making among producers and consumers. Mitigating bycatch, therefore, involves multiple drivers: fear of regulatory sanctions, social norms, and peer pressure, economic costs relating to forgone target catch and revenue avoided through avoidance, skill sets of individual fishers/captains, as well as motivation (Booth et al. 2019a). All these elements may influence compliance with bycatch reduction regulations, whether these regulations are direct or incentive-based;
Regulation can play an integral part in bycatch reduction efforts, with its nature often depending on factors like vessel count, firm scale, and structure of industry organization. Larger and more commercialized seafood firms tend to comply more readily with bycatch reduction regulations than their less-commercialized counterparts, likely due to regular contact with regulators and advocacy groups as well as more significant brand reputation considerations and using market forces such as pricing to promote bycatch reduction (Coase, 1937).
Indirect incentives tend to be more suitable for small-scale fisheries as they don’t entail the complexity of mandating specific technology standards or production processes on producers. But even indirect incentives have their drawbacks: bycatch reduction incentives may not provide strong enough incentives to offset foregone target catch, and revenue from avoidance, and monitoring/enforcement requirements could make these measures cost-effective in terms of time/effort for producers.
Policy designs with differing outcomes on equity and fairness in process and distribution can significantly affect monitoring, compliance, and enforcement efforts. Avoidance-based policy instruments may decrease local and low-income fishers’ productivity disproportionately and result in food insecurity, undermining compliance with bycatch-reducers or offsetting and compensation programs. These types of impacts can be mitigated by considering equity considerations when designing and implementing bycatch mitigation strategies. For instance, fishers can be compensated for reducing bycatch by purchasing LED nets from non-profit companies specializing in green-lighted traps.
Enhance Nighttime Vision
Fish use their eyes to navigate in the darkness, from hunting prey or avoiding predators to searching for food or avoiding danger. Light can disrupt this navigation by altering wavelengths of incoming light, potentially disorienting or damaging retinas in fish eyes. Fireworks or passing cars may trigger flashes of bright illumination that affect their vision in ways that may disrupt fish vision altogether and alter wavelengths, disorienting or damaging retinas over time.
Fish’s natural environment and the type of light they’re used to will impact how well they see in low-light environments, including deep-sea fish. Deep-sea species, for instance, can detect even in darkness due to absorbing blue light quickly through water; blue wavelengths are absorbed more readily than other colors by seawater and thus are the only ones capable of reaching even deep depths of ocean environments.
These fish use large eyes with tapetum lucidum layers to enhance their night vision, reflecting light onto photoreceptors in their retina and increasing how much it reaches their brain to be processed as vision.
Fish eyes are typically more spherical than birds or mammals, enabling them to gather more light from more expansive areas. Like bird retinas, theirs contain rod and cone cells; most species possess color vision and dark vision capabilities, although, in the case of trout species, more rods than cones exist to allow them to see in low-light environments.
Not only does absorbing light influence how well fish see, but their environment can also affect how easily they detect different color wavelengths. Red light sensitivity depends on their habitat and on which genes contain red-sensitive properties – for instance, some fish possess Cyp27c1 genes, which allow them to see red more readily than other fish species.
An unexpected flash of bright light, such as fireworks or passing vehicles, can disrupt fish’s nighttime vision and cause permanent eye damage – so it is best to keep lights off on your boat when fishing at night.
Reduce Stress
As with humans, fish are susceptible to stress. Too much tension can make them run down, hide away from people, become sick, or even die. Maintaining an aquarium can be an excellent way to reduce this tension for both yourself and your aquatic companions – the visual stimulation provided by aquariums helps distract both parties, while the sound of bubbling water helps relieve anxiety. Furthermore, disconnecting from digital devices for some time helps promote relaxation and ease stress levels significantly.
Anxiety is a natural response to everyday living that various triggers, such as financial woes, relationship difficulties, or the fear of failure at work, can bring on. One effective way of relieving anxiety is viewing live fish tanks – an enjoyable yet low-commitment activity likely to have similar benefits as seeing real pets can buffer an individual’s stress response – this effect may extend itself when viewing fish tanks as well.
Results from these experiments align with predictions derived from the biophilia hypothesis in that enhancements were seen for self-report measures of mood and anxiety, but not HR or HRV measures, in aquarium conditions when compared with empty tank and plant-only conditions. According to this theory, the presence of fish could draw participants’ attention away from perceived sources of stressors, thus accounting for any observed positive impacts only seen with self-report measures rather than physiological ones.
Avoid sudden environmental modifications to help your aquarium residents cope with stress-reducing changes more quickly. Loud noises like basslines or banging against glass surfaces or floor vibrations may startle them, while sudden temperature shifts may be unsettling and abrupt light on/off cycles that cause over-stimulation. To create the least stressful environment possible for their residents, it’s best to gradually turn lights on/off rather than rapidly switching them on and off as this may over-stimulate them.