Meet the Rockfish Expert Dr. Milton Love

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In today’s podcast, we meet Professor Milton Love from the UCSB Love Lab. He’s an author of many books on fishing and specializes in Rockfish.

This is a great one!

In this episode we cover:

00:30: How he got into fishing 

• Party boats
• Pier fishing

5:00: What they’re focused on in their lab

• Looking at if oil platforms are beneficial to fishes
• Using ROV for fish population research
• Off-shore wind farms off California – what does the electromagnetic field from the power cables do to the animals?

8:30: What are oil platforms to fish?

12:00: Why it’s hard to generalize fish

15:36: Do fish feel pain? 

• The research isn’t convincing either way.

17:17: What is the state of our fisheries.

• Positive signs on the west coast of the US for rockfish

24:14: How do you catch and release rockfish

• Why you can put rockfish back down quickly they can survive
• What device you can use to get them back down
• Watch: Rockfish barotrauma

27:44: How to catch the rarer rockfish

• Why you should use sabikis
• 20lb test custom sabikis

32:25: Other tips for fishing

• Why the skippers of back in the day were AMAZING

37:59: Who is Oren Winfield?

• Some of his stories

41:00: Why those running the party boats now a bit different from the old-timers

46:53: The El Nino of 57-58

50:38: What fish should you target?

• General rule: bigger the fish and longer it lives the higher the methylmercury

53:34: Milton’s thoughts on Global Warming

• Why it comes down to politics
• Global Warm is real and it’s happening
• Why we need to work together to tackle it

55:35: What Milton would want on his World Billboard 

57:27: How people can find Milton

• Search Love Lab UCSB
• love@lifesci.ucsb.edu
• Books: Certainly more than you want to know about the fishes of the Pacific Coast

1:01:00: If you’re thinking about being a marine biologist – Do it!

• How to get into it in your thirties
• Why it’s never too late to chase your dreams