Week 4 Cooper

One of the words that stuck out to me that Jonathan Safran talks about was the word bycatch. Right before he explains to us what bycatch means he gives us the definition for bullshit, therefore he is already creating an image into our head that bycatch might mean something totally different then what we may have originally thought it meant. In the section that is labeled bycatch he explains to us that just because fisherman are fishing for one particular fish that doesn’t mean that they aren’t catching other fish as well. I have never really thought about how other fish may be affected by fishermen fishing for a particular fish. Later on in the section he starts to list a bunch of different fish that are killed by the fishermen because they are the unwanted targets they were trying to acquire. What shocked me the most by that list was the amount of large fish that were killed. For example he list off numerous different kinds of sharks and I always thought that sharks ruled the seas and nothing bad could ever really happen to them. He also uses a great example to show how many fish are killed by using a sushi reference. If you have ever had sushi you know how little those pieces are, but when he says if you were to add up all the fish that were killed in order to get that piece of sushi our plate might be five feet across.