Posts Tagged ‘fishing’
“Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion”*…
Further, in a fashion, to a post ten days ago...
Arguing for the collection of detailed data in the first U.S. census, James Madison argued that comprehensive information was necessary to ensure legislative decisions were based on, in his words, “facts, instead of assertions and conjectures.” Since then, the importance of data has become obvious across a broader array of government activities (e.g., regulatory and judicial) and has proved a crucial service both to research and commerce. Our government, our economy, our education and research, our agriculture, and so much more depend on government-collected data.
But since the early days of his current term, NOTUS reports, President Trump and his appointees have been systematically eliminating much of that data…
Joy Binion worked for the federal government collecting data on emerging substance abuse trends in emergency rooms across the country. Her work was part of the Drug Abuse Warning Network, which President Donald Trump’s first administration funded at the recommendation of his commission on the opioid crisis.
Six months into Trump’s second term, his administration axed the data collection effort entirely, laying off Binion and her division.
“They flat out eliminated DAWN, which was actually surprising to me, because DAWN was kind of the Trump administration’s baby in 2016 as they really looked toward fighting the opioid epidemic,” Binion told NOTUS, adding that healthcare providers no longer have a comprehensive resource to learn about the new drugs that could require emergency medical responses.
Since retaking office, the Trump administration has transformed how the government collects data, cut access to previously-public data and stopped collecting some data altogether. This overhaul has left significant holes in data on everything from substance useto maternal mortality.
NOTUS spoke to 18 data experts and researchers who rely on federal data who said the breadth of information no longer being collected or distributed by the federal government has been nearly impossible to track. Researchers estimate that well over 3,000 data sets have been removed from public access.
The current reality is that the federal government is no longer a reliable source of widespread data collection… [Here] is only a small sample of the data collection the Trump administration has made changes to:
- The Department of Agriculture terminated a report on household food security in September, claiming it was “redundant, costly, politicized, and extraneous.” Feeding America said it relied on this survey to guide its programs.
- The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stopped releasing data on maternal and infant mortality in April 2025 after the administration placed all of the agency staff managing the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System on administrative leave. The data collection resumed in at least some states in July 2025, but recent data contains gaps.
- Trump directed the Justice Department last year to suspend a Biden-era database tracking misconduct by federal law enforcement officers.
- The administration removed questions on gender identity from the National Crime Victimization Survey, the National Health Interview Survey and other surveys. Homeless shelters, mental health hotlines and substance use recovery programs all used this data for policymaking and planning.
- The Department of Homeland Security ended public access in October to its public safety and infrastructure dataset, called Homeland Infrastructure Foundation-Level Data.
- The National Center for Education Statistics missed a mandated deadline to release its annual report on the condition of the American education system, and the materials released were lacking in data compared to previous years.
- The Health and Human Services Department’s 2024 National Survey on Drug Use and Health omitted information about drug use based on race and ethnicity. HHS laid off the team that collected the data, though the agency is reportedly working with a contractor to resume its collection.
- The Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Education and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration no longer allow researchers to apply to access and study their data.
- The Bureau of Labor Statistics produces fewer calculations for its producer price index program and has cut down where it collects data from.
Some of these cuts were made without any public fanfare, like the administration’s decision to end DAWN. In other cases, agencies slipped the news into routine announcements. And occasionally, like when the White House mandated that questions about gender identity be removed from federal surveys, the administration touted the deletions as quelling “gender ideology extremism.” [See also here and here.]
Researchers told NOTUS that the federal government’s reasoning for terminating data collection is flawed. And in some cases, the Trump administration has run afoul of congressional mandates to produce data, including by failing to publish required reports on time and removing reports required by law…
More at: “Federal Data Is Disappearing” from @notus.com.
Several not-for-profits (the Internet Archive, libraries, and academic groups) are valiently trying to preserve data sets that have been removed. But they cannot of course preserve data that is never collected…
[Image above: source]
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As we drive with our windshields painted over, we might recall that on this date in 2020 ice fisherman Thomas Knight caught a 40 inch, 37.7 pound lake trout on Big Diamond Pond in West Stewartstown, New Hampshire. It is the largest lake trout on record in New England.
“My heart & soul care for worms”*…
Last summer we visited the family in the Florida panhandle that has been harvesting worms to sell as bait for generations. Today, Inori Roy takes us to southern Ontario, where worming is an industry. Nearly all bait worms sold in North America are hand-plucked from farmland in this part of Canada. But are we witnessing the final wiggles of a once thriving business?…
To successfully catch a Canadian nightcrawler, you have to approach it a little like you’re a cat. The worm—fat, pink, undomesticable, and anywhere between five and 10 inches long—has made its way two-thirds out of its burrow, taking in moisture from the cool night air and exploring the surface of the soil for food. If it senses your approach, it will hurtle back into its hole with startling, uncharacteristic speed. So, crouched in the dirt, you must reach for it with a quiet, swift confidence. With the pads of your thumb and forefinger, you grasp the worm’s body right above where it disappears into the burrow hole. Gently, firmly, careful not to squish or tear it, you pull.
It’s just past 10 p.m. on a cool, overcast night in early July, and I’m standing in the middle of a field in the heart of southern Ontario farm country—West Perth, population 9,000. Dozens of workers quietly emerge from the three vans that have driven onto the field. In the dim light spilling out of the vehicle interiors, they layer raincoats over hoodies, bracing for the damp and the chill. Then, they accessorize: LED headlamps strapped to their foreheads, two bags of finely ground sawdust at their hips to keep their gloves or hands dry, and large, empty tin cans hooked at their waists. If it’s a good night, they will each harvest thousands, perhaps even 10,000, worms by dawn.
If you’re in the market for fishing bait anywhere in North America, and now even in parts of western Europe, odds are you’re buying a Canadian nightcrawler plucked from this stretch of land between Toronto and Windsor. These wild Canadian worms, who live so far beneath the surface of the soil that breeding or farming them is impractical, are hand-picked by a small army of workers, almost all immigrants from Southeast Asia, including generations of Vietnamese refugees and, more recently, temporary foreign workers from Thailand and Laos. It’s a niche sector of the western economy that’s exclusively sourced from this small corner of the province, and run primarily by family businesses passed from one generation to the next. In a given year, the more than $200 million industry sells between 500 and 700 million worms. But with changing demand, immigration labour policies, and the climate crisis, it’s also at an existential crossroads…
Fascinating: “The Worm Hunters of Southern Ontario,” from @royinori.bsky.social in @thelocal.to.
* Charles Darwin, in an 1880 letter See also here and the earlier (R)D linked above.
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As we wriggle, we might recall that it was at about 2:30 p.m. on this date in 2004, in the village of Knighton in Shropshire (in the West Midlands of the UK), that worms were temporarily unnecessary: it rained fish.
See also: “Ten Times It Rained Animals (Yes, Animals)” (and here).
“The only kind of seafood I trust is the fish stick, a totally featureless fish that doesn’t have eyeballs or fins”*…
A minority opinion, it seems… we’re consuming more seafood than ever, and increasingly from farmed sources, which have overtaken that of wild-caught fish for the first time in history…
At the latest count, the average American was eating ~5 lbs more seafood per year than they had been in the 1990s, and globally the consumption of seafood has been outpacing population growth since the 1960s. But where exactly is all of that shrimp, tuna, and salmon coming from?
When we think of fishing, it’s easy to romanticize weather-beaten boats helmed by wizened sea captains. But, on a global scale, much of modern fishing looks very different. In fact, increasingly, the contents of a seafood tower or “catch of the day” is more likely to have been farmed rather than caught in the wild.
That’s the latest conclusion from The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture, an annual report published earlier this month by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), which revealed that — for the first time in history — the majority of the world’s seafood came from fish farming rather than wild catching in 2022.
The practice of aquaculture — rearing fish and sea plants in controlled ponds, pens, and pools — produced more than 94 million metric tons of seafood in 2022 and is being hailed by some as a means of sustaining seafood production in the face of depleting wild fish stocks. The 2022 tally was double the production figure from 2006 and reflects decades of investment and innovation in the aquaculture industry, which 30 years ago accounted for just 15% of total seafood.
Note: Total aquaculture production, which includes algae and aquatic plants like seaweed, overtook wild fishing efforts more than a decade ago (the more recent milestone excludes sea plants).
Asia, which has long been at the center of the world of commercial fishing and seafood more generally, is driving much of the aquaculture boom. In fact, the FAO attributes more than 90% of total global aquaculture production (including aquatic plants) to the continent, helping to secure fish farming’s spot as the “fastest-growing food production system in the world”…
Read on for more about aquaculture– it’s history and practice– and for the rise of U.S. seafood imports and the fall of shrimp: “We now farm more fish than we catch,” from @sherwood_news.
* Dave Barry
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As we reach for the ketchup, we might send aquatic birthday greetings to Frank Rattray Lillie; he was born on this date in 1870. A zoologist, he was an early pioneer of the study of embryology (making key discoveries about the fertilization of the egg (ovum) and the role of hormones in sex determination).
But he is probably better remembered for his role in building the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Lillie formed a lifelong association with the laboratory, eventually becoming its director in 1908, then turning it into a full-time institution.
Sadly, Lillie was also involved in the American eugenics movement at several levels: he was member of Chicago’s Eugenics Education Society; he was a committee member of the Second International Eugenics Congress; and he served on the advisory council for the Eugenics Committee of the United States. His status as a leading scientist likely helped to legitimize the movement.
“It may be doubted that there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world as have these lowly organized creatures”*…
Michael Adno on the third generation of a Florida family that coaxes earthworms from the forest floor…
A hint of blue on the horizon meant morning was coming. And as they have for the past fifty-four years, Audrey and Gary Revell stepped out their screen door, walked down a ramp, and climbed into their pickup truck. Passing a cup of coffee back and forth, they headed south into Tate’s Hell—one corner of a vast wilderness in Florida’s panhandle where the Apalachicola National Forest runs into the Gulf of Mexico. Soon, they turned off the road and onto a two-track that stretched into a silhouette of pine trees. Their brake lights disappeared into the forest, and after about thirty minutes, they parked the truck along the road just as daylight spilled through the trees. Gary took one last sip of coffee, grabbed a wooden stake and a heavy steel file, and walked off into the woods. Audrey slipped on a disposable glove, grabbed a bucket, and followed. Gary drove the wooden stake, known as a “stob,” into the ground and began grinding it with the steel file [each pass of which is a “roop”]. A guttural noise followed as the ground hummed. Pine needles shook, and the soil shivered. Soon, the ground glowed with pink earthworms. Audrey collected them one by one to sell as live bait to fishermen. What drew the worms to the surface seemed like sorcery. For decades, nobody could say exactly why they came up, even the Revells who’d become synonymous with the tradition here. They call it worm grunting.
Audrey and Gary Revell took to each other in high school. In 1970 when Gary graduated, he asked Audrey to be his wife, and they married at his grandfather’s place down in Panacea, about thirty miles south of Tallahassee. For his entire life, he’d lived on an acre six miles west of Sopchoppy, Florida, in an area known as Sanborn. The place is set deep in the heart of the Apalachicola National Forest, a vast expanse of flatwoods and swamp that covers over half a million acres struck through with rivers. It’s where he and his siblings grew up in an old church building, where his great-grandfather had settled after finding his way up Syfrett Creek into the wilderness. It’s where Audrey and Gary settled after their wedding. “I was only sixteen, so I feel like I grew up here,” Audrey told me. Soon after, they started looking for ways to make ends meet, and Gary suggested, “We might ought to look into that worm thing.”
His family was already deep into worm grunting. Three generations preceded him, and by 1970, his uncles Nolan, Clarence, and Willie weren’t only harvesting the worms to sell as bait but were working as brokers with their own shops that distributed the critters throughout the South. It didn’t hurt that Audrey fell in love with it immediately. The work was seasonal, busiest in spring. During other parts of the year, their family trapped for a living, dug oysters, logged, raised livestock, and set the table with what they grew in their yard or caught in the water or in the forest. “That’s how we learned the woods,” Gary said. “We went in every creek, water hole, pig trail. You name it.”
By the 1970s, the cottage industry had reached its peak. Then Charles Kurault arrived in 1972 to film a segment for his eponymous CBS show, On the Road with Charles Kurault. The attention led the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. Department of Agriculture to start regulating the harvest of worms, investigating unreported income, and implementing permit requirements. Back then, the sound produced by grunters in the first hours of daylight was as common as birdsong in this forest, and hundreds of thousands of worms were carried out in cans. Folks who once turned to grunting to make ends meet seasonally were soon in the woods year-round during that decade, competing to summon the bait to the surface and sell to brokers among the counties set between the capital city and the Apalachicola River. Millions of worms left those counties bound for fishing hooks across America. Money followed the pink fever, but as with any rush, the demand eventually dimmed as commercial worm farms caught on and soft, plastic lures became popular.
By that point, Audrey and Gary had decided to shape their own outfit. His uncles had told them, You ought to just think about keeping all that money to yourself. The couple had grown tired of depending on others for work. So, they set up their own shop full time, cultivated clients as far away as Savannah, and delivered bait all over the South, driving it themselves, or sending it north in sixteen-ounce, baby blue containers via Greyhound buses. “All the money was coming our way, what little we made,” said Gary. “We struggled with it for a long time, because when you get off the grid like that and try to do it for yourself and you’re young, it’s hard.”
I wanted to know what spending their life in the woods hunting for worms meant, but I also wanted to know where this mysterious, artful tradition came from. In the UK, there are a handful of worm-charming competitions and festivals in Devon, Cornwall, and Willaston that began in the 1980s and another in Canada that started in 2012. I’d heard of similar events in east Texas, of people using pitchforks and spades as well as burying one stick in the ground and rubbing it with another to coax worms up to the surface. Later, I even found a newspaper clipping from 1970 reporting on the first International Worm Fiddling Championship, in Florida. I searched for a deep well of literature on the practice but found nothing. Certainly, worm grunting predated the Revells. But why did rubbing a stick stuck in the ground with a metal file conjure earthworms? The only way to understand was to follow the Revells into the woods…
A fascinating profile: “The Worm Charmers,” from @michaeladno in @oxfordamerican.
(In his childhood in a different part of Florida, your correspondent employed a variation on the techniques described and can testify that they do, in fact, work.)
* Charles Darwin, The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms
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As we grunt, we might recall that it was on this date in 1939, at Hyde Park, that President Franklin D. Roosevelt hosted a luncheon for King George VI and Queen Elizabeth of England. Despite his mother’s horror, FDR wanted to show the King and Queen an old-fashioned, American style picnic– featuring hot dogs. In the U.S. to raise support U.S. for Britain’s cause in World War II, the royal couple at least appeared to enjoy the meal.
“Food is culture, habit, craving, and identity”*…
Brian Fagan is an archaeologist, a profession that we associate with dust and soil and stone, but here he attempts to capture the history of fishing in ancient civilization. It is not just fish that elude the historian: fisherfolk have always lived on the margins — of land and in recorded history (and still do). ‘To a scholar,’ writes Fagan, ‘the illiterate fishing people of the past are elusive, and their trade is a challenging puzzle of clues.’ So assembling a history of fishing means, well, fishing among archaeology, anthropology, history, marine biology and oceanography and paleoclimatology — ‘to mention only a few’.
Fagan has to fish deeply sometimes and into unexpected places. He investigates the ears of several-thousand-year-old men buried in what is now Israel, which show damage consistent with diving in cold, deep water. He uncovers the giant middens of mollusc shells that appear all over the planet, because though molluscs yield a tiny amount of protein — they are ‘small meat packages sealed in heavy inedible shells’ — they are easy to catch. ‘To knock a limpet from a rock,’ wrote Darwin, ‘does not require even cunning, that lowest power of the mind.’ Darwin was wrong: the ability to subsist on shellfish allowed humans to live through the lean seasons. It enabled survival.
Fishing, writes Fagan, “has created the modern world”…
The ways in which fishing– more than agriculture and husbandry– were central to the rise of civilization, from social organization to technology: “Holy mackerel! Civilization begins with fishing.”
* Jonathan Safran Foer
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As we spread our nets, we might recall that it was on this date in 1910 that French chemist, engineer, and inventor Georges Claude switched on the first public display of neon lights– two large (39 foot long), bright red neon tubes– at the Paris Motor Show. Over the next decade, Claude lit much of Paris. Neon came to America in 1923 when Earl Anthony purchased signage from Claude, then transported it to Los Angeles, where Anthony installed it at his Packard dealership… and (literally) stopped traffic.
Claude in his lab, 1913
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