Posted on 08/20/2008 11:03:49 AM PDT by cogitator
So I think “acidification” just implies the pH is going down?
The ocean around the Keys is lousy with Goliath Grouper. When they put the ban in, they said it was because they grow so slowly. They said it would take 50 years for Goliath Grouper to reach their ultimate maximum weight of 600-800 pounds.
LOLOL, the damn fish are growing to 600 pounds in less than 8 years. There are hundreds of fishing spots that I used to fish frequently, that I don’t even go to anymore because you can’t get a fish to the boat past the monster Jewfish. I’ve got pictures taken last summer of anchored up on a spot, with 20 of the huge Jewfish coming to the surface when they hear the engine, looking for a meal. The things are so voracious and huge, they would eat a 30 pound dog in one gulp if it fell overboard.
This is not a fish in danger. In fact, they should open season on them before they eat everything else in the sea.
Guess I better stock up on cans of sardines and jars of coelentrates before global warming cooks them off the globe.
“And yes, I have extensive college studies in marine biology.”
Your extensive knowledge means nothing, comrade. Did you know that driving your SUV, raising your children and being a productive citizen who believes in free enterprise, family, liberty and God is causing the polar bears to go extinct?
Ask nobama. He’ll tell you.
;-)
btt
A couple comments on that: one, there have been studies showing that marine reserves work, i.e., if you have areas where species can grow and reproduce without pressure, they rebound fast. The other factor is that if you’ve got a species that is thriving at the expense of others, and which doesn’t have natural predatory pressures — I immediately think of the forest vermin called whitetail deer here in the eastern U.S., which are all over the place, eating everything in sight — then they need to be culled to restore balance. I think jewfish might supply a few nice fillets, eh?
Oops, I though they meant churches were dying off. Mass. Extinction. Or maybe it was end of days for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
Reanalyses of fishery collapses incorporating criteria that included targeting, variability in fishing effort, and market forces discovered many false cases of collapse based simply upon a decline of catches to 10% of previous maximum levels. Consequently, we suggest that the low mean trophic level index calculated in the earlier article for the GOM did not reflect the overall condition of the fishery ecosystem, and that the 10% rule for collapse should not be interpreted out of context in the GOM or elsewhere. In both cases, problems lay in the assumption that commercial landings data alone adequately reflect the fish populations and communities.
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=2268206
Somehow I don't read that as a strikingly good thing. But at least the fisheries could recover with effective management.
More from the article:
The fisheries and ecological literature demonstrates the unintended ecological consequences of fishing and has prompted numerous pleas for a more holistic ecosystem approach to marine fisheries management (1–3). This movement in support of ecosystem-based management has been paralleled by efforts to identify indicators of ecosystem status (4). Among the most high profile indicators of marine ecosystem status is the mean trophic level index (MTLI) (5). This index represents a weighted average of the trophic level of fisheries landings. Pauly et al. (5) initiated the analyses and demonstrated downward trends in the mean trophic level of fisheries landings for a variety of marine ecosystems. Their initial findings have been repeated in subsequent analyses from additional locations (6–8).
{snip}
None of the time series of MTLI exhibited negative trends from a higher trophic level to a lower trophic level. Results of our reanalyses clearly differ from those presented by Pauly and Palomares (6) who reported a negative trend. For the USA only and the GOM (including shrimp and menhaden), indices based upon commercial catches varied around a long-term mean trophic level near 2.5 (Fig. 1). Both slopes were positive (P < 0.001) rather than negative.
The authors maintain that a key indicator of marine ecosystem health, the "mean trophic level index", is increasing slightly (good) in the GOM, not decreasing as prior studies have indicated, which misinterpreted the data, relying as they did on commercial catch numbers. (I think)
Which contradicts Jackson's statement: "All of the different kinds of data and methods of analysis point in the same direction of drastic and increasingly rapid degradation of marine ecosystems".
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