LABASH: Instagram Is Killing Fish

I was just reading in the failing New York Times that fishermen, -women, and -other are using Instagram to document their catches. Will they be allowed outside to fish when you send them to Gitmo?

Sean Medlock

Indiana or Iowa or wherever

Sometimes, when I start losing faith in humanity, I cheer myself up by perusing the latest casualty reports that result from people taking selfies at inopportune moments. It’s not that I wish harm on anybody. But so long as the Lords of Karma hold that someone needs to get kicked in the shorts, such a fate might as well befall those who truly deserve it. If you take the Darwinian long view, what could be considered a tragic loss for Mom and Dad and Sis (when Buddy takes an Instagram snap of himself licking the third rail at the Acela station), is probably a net gain for the gene pool. The Idiocracy already suffers enough from overpopulation.

Sadly, not too many people lose their lives by taking pictures of themselves with fish. But after reading the piece you reference—cringingly titled “Lots of Fish On the Screen”—I unwittingly found myself pulling for Poseidon to finish them off with his trident. I don’t begrudge the New York Times writing about something they seemingly know little about (fishing). But they should be more respectful of anglers/readers who don’t try to infringe on their own areas of expertise (championing transgender bathrooms at open-border crossings, for instance).

The piece in question is a celebration of social media and fishing. Two tastes that have no business on the same plate. It’s like celebrating your pepper-crusted Wagyu beef in black-truffle vinaigrette, covered in Skittles.

Fisherpersons worth their salt largely follow in the steps of the late, great John Voelker, who wrote that “most fishermen swiftly learn that it’s a pretty good rule never to show a favorite spot to any fisherman you wouldn’t trust with your wife.” But the Times writer opens by chipperly informing us that “the adage says if you teach a man to fish, he eats for a lifetime. Today, if you teach a man to fish, or a woman for that matter, they’ll end up on Instagram.” In case you’re not yet wincing enough, it gets worse from there.

We are introduced to Nicolle, who is Kardashianizing fishing. A Colorado medical marijuana dispensary manager who is new to the sport, Nicolle has already successfully promoted herself, via social-media harlotry, into a contract with Hardy. The British fly rod and reel maker now sponsors her in exchange for gratuitous mentions to her 21,500 Instagram followers.

Then there is Scott, a West Palm Beach commercial realtor, who follows 2,500 Instagram accounts for fishing intel, just like grandpa used to do when hanging out at the counter down at ye olde tackle shop. Except grandpa couldn’t poach other people’s fishing spots from their tagged locations, as Scott does. Though Scott even having enough time to fish, after all that Instagram monitoring, means the fish are probably safe.

There is Chris, a Wisconsin outdoor photographer, who claims that people tended not to believe fish stories, but now that everyone has a camera on their phone, “it’s definitely a thing in the community to document what you catch.” Thus jeopardizing the fisherman’s fourth favorite pastime behind catching fish, drinking, and escaping their families: lying about what they caught.

Then there’s Daniel, who runs a fishing charter out of Montauk and says “being a captain these days is all about being a good photographer. I know where the light is. I know where they need to stand.” Why, “within two hours of hitting the docks,” Daniel says, “I’ll get five or ten new followers.” In olden days, fishing skippers styled themselves after Captain Ahab or Santiago from The Old Man and the Sea: demented loners who thirsted for adventure. Now, thanks to social media, their job carries all the romance of being an insecure tween-cum-mall shutterbug at Olan Mills.

But what Daniel, as a professional fisherman of sorts, should recognize above even the unseemliness of his new job description, is that Instagram is literally killing fish. To my knowledge, there have been no studies formally establishing it yet. But it irrefutably stands to reason. Here’s why:

Some estimates have it that even cleanly caught and released fish (on flies and non-treble-hook lures) still result in 10 percent fish mortality. About a third of bait-caught fish die after being released, and nearly 60 percent of deep-hooked fish will die*. Add camera-time to this equation, where seconds count, and the numbers must go up exponentially.

“Hero shots,” as they’re called in the fish-bragging business, take time. Time to pull fish out of the water. Time to unhook them. Time to keep them from wriggling out of your hands. Time to fumble around in your pocket, then to choose the “vivid warm” filter on your iPhone, as the fish attempts to avoid slow suffocation. And even though many of Daniel’s charter-fishing customers have gone to catch-and-release, instead of reflexively filling the meat bucket, time is something fish don’t have a lot of if they’re to live to see another lure or fly, or even just to get on with their lives with the residual fish PTS.

Put yourself in their place. Imagine if you were about to feed on a Delmonico, or spawn with your favorite lady friend, and all of the sudden a fish hooked you, pulled you underwater, and fought you until you quit resisting. Traumatic enough. But to cap it off, what if he had to de-hook you, hold you with his pectoral fins, then take a picture for posterity so he could boast to his fish friends, or possibly garner a few more followers on Fishtagram, before letting you return to shore.

Understand that I’m no crusading PETA moralist. I have blood on my hands, as well. I fly fish like I suffer from a fishing disorder, catching well more than 1,000 fish every year. I haven’t deliberately killed a fish since I was a kid. Yet any fisherperson being honest with themselves understands that catch-and-release fishing is something of a cheat. We congratulate ourselves that we’ve allowed the fish to be fruitful and multiply. But we’ve still tortured it for our own entertainment, however much we like to couch it in the language of “communion with nature.” (Many of us have also taken communion at church, but don’t make a habit of hooking our minister in his upper lip with a Clouser Minnow, playing him until he tires.)

The best method I’ve found to deal with this moral dilemma is denial. A distinctly human capability that separates us from the animals. I have abiding affection for fish, and as ridiculous as it sounds, I don’t love them any less for hooking them in the mouth with sharp steel. (Tough love, some might call it. Ours is a bit of an Ike’n’Tina dynamic.) I often kiss them after catching them, and even apologize to them if they’ve deep-throated my fly when I’m slow on the trigger, as I gently dislodge it with hemostats, attempting not to do any damage. But if I didn’t catch them, I wouldn’t see them, or hold them, or release them—the best part of all, when you watch them swim away freely, making you feel like a governor commuting the sentence of a death-row inmate. Sick power games aside, as a lukewarm Christian, I buy into amazing grace: the revelation that we didn’t get what we thought we had coming to us. If you spend any time in nature, you know that such acts of mercy are rare. It’s generally the law of fang and claw out there. Eat or be eaten.

But at least in the animal kingdom, there is nutritive value in it for the vanquisher over the vanquished—they gain the sustenance that helps them complete the circle of life. Unlike their human counterparts, they’re not merely ego stroking, accidentally killing because they couldn’t get their iPhone out of their pocket in time, all for no greater good than inspiring envy in their social media followers, which is the most unattractive and prevalent human instinct of all.

I won’t fib and say that I’ve never taken a hero shot, even if I’m not on social media. I have, to my shame. And if you’ve caught that once-in-a-lifetime fish (which I didn’t)—the goliath Tigerfish in the Congo River, the monster arapaima in the heart of the Amazon jungle—go ahead and take your hero shot. You’ve earned it. Those fish could put a hurting on you, as easily as you could on them. But when you put a two-pound largemouth bass’s life in jeopardy with your photoshoot, just to prove it looks like all the other two-pound largemouth I’ve caught, and if I went ahead and liked it on Instagram, we should both wallow in mutual shame. We’ve earned it.

Several years ago, Field and Stream’s Kirk Deeter put it plainly, while giving catch-and-release tips. Aside from always wetting your hands to make sure you don’t rub off the fish’s protective slime, and cutting off a deep-set fly instead of performing surgery, which gives a fish a fighting chance, he said that if you must take a happy snap of your fish, keep this in mind: “Hold your breath as you photograph a fish out of water … as you feel uncomfortable, odds are, the fish does also.”

Though maybe better still to not photograph your fish at all. Just catch it, and let it go. You have the mental picture. Which is what matters most, anyway. Experience usually trumps the evidence of experience. Maybe it’s a little less “social.” But so what? If you fish like I do, you don’t fish to earn validation from other people, but to free yourself from the kind of people who need the validation of likes and followers. As Voelker put it, fishing is “a way to recapture the rapture of solitude without the pangs of loneliness.”

* (These numbers come from the Stonefly Society of Utah; they vary by species, as academic studies bear out.)

Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at [email protected].