Fishing tournaments are held, and caught fish are sometimes kept long-term as preserved or living trophies. In addition to being caught to be eaten for food, fish are caught as recreational pastimes. Nor is it normally applied to hunting aquatic mammals, where terms like whaling and sealing are used instead.įishing has been an important part of human culture since hunter-gatherer times, and is one of the few food production activities that have persisted from prehistory into the modern age, surviving both the Neolithic Revolution and successive Industrial Revolutions. The term is not normally applied to harvesting fish raised in controlled cultivations ( fish farming). The term fishing broadly includes catching aquatic animals other than fish, such as crustaceans ( shrimp/ lobsters/ crabs), shellfish, cephalopods ( octopus/ squid) and echinoderms ( starfish/ sea urchins). Fishing techniques include hand-gathering, spearing, netting, angling, shooting and trapping, as well as more destructive and often illegal techniques such as electrocution, blasting and poisoning. Fish are often caught as wildlife from the natural environment ( fresh water or marine), but may also be caught from stocked bodies of water such as ponds, canals, park wetlands and reservoirs.
Fishing is the activity of trying to catch fish.
