From the article: Is the science about Gulf of Maine cod wrong? Probably, if one is talking about any kind of precision. Population models are now being asked to look into biological territory that the people who build these models have never seen before. Peter thinks we need a little more we-ness, and less me-ness. I’m thoroughly entertained with that notion! Read the rest here 16:59
NILS STOLPE: The New England groundfish debacle (Part IV): Is cutting back harvest really the answer?
While it’s a fact that’s hardly ever acknowledged, the assumption in fisheries management is that if the population of a stock of fish isn’t at some arbitrary level, it’s because of too much fishing. Hence the term “overfished.” Hence the mandated knee jerk reaction of the fisheries managers to not enough fish; cut back on fishing. What of other factors? They don’t count. It’s all about fishing, because fishing is all that the managers can control; it’s their Maslow’s Hammer. When it comes to the oceans it seems as if it’s about all that the industry connected mega-foundations that support the anti-fishing ENGOs with hundreds of millions of dollars a year in “donations” are interested in controlling. Read the article here
I was posting a whopper comment and hit a button, and its gone. I’ll be rewriting it. Feel free to have your say! I’ll be back.
Shelley: That still-true ancient line, penned by Tamil poet Avvaiyar some two thousand years ago, reminds us all that while it is worth paying attention to what we see, it is often critical to be seduced by our convictions about what it means. And so it is that recent reports from the Portland waterfront of bountiful cod can neither be ignored nor fully credited.
Peter Shelley. Renaissance Man. Reads thousands of years old poetry that I’m certainly not inclined to read, but then, I’m basically a savage incapable of understanding it! Peter might have been the man that read the Playboy Advisor, while I opened the centerfold. I’m thinking a bunch of you guys can relate to that.
As difficult as it is for him, he cannot ignore the fact that some fishermen have caught some codfish in the Gulf of Maine, a barren cod wasteland where there supposedly are none, according to the science.
Shelley: They are what they are: observations. While a lot of cod have apparently been landed in Portland compared with recent years—and when was the last time anyone heard good news from the Portland Fish Exchange?–and while everyone hopes for good news about cod and a future for cod fishermen in New England, a couple of hundred thousand pounds of landed cod hardly leads to the conclusion than the recent scientific stock assessment update is wrong indicating that Gulf of Maine cod populations are in extremis.
In extremis, a Latin phrase meaning “in the farthest reaches” or “at the point of death”
“At the point of death”! Its so friggin dramatic but the cod are hardly at the point of death, while our man of the world, Peter, the ancient poetry enthusiast ignores the “farthest reaches”.
Like Canada. A far away place where cod have been known to exist, and are existing quite nicely, according to Canadian fishermen, and that’s a tough pill to swallow when your convictions tell you in your activist crusader lawyer gut that hey only exist in the Gulf of Maine!
To be continued.
Shelley: This situation brings to mind the experience several years ago when fishermen from Gloucester were reporting that they had never seen so many inshore cod while the scientists concluded that cod prospects were terrible and getting worse. As it turned out then, they both were right in their own ways. An unusual and concentrated burst of the sand lance populations off Cape Ann had attracted cod from far and wide but that random feeding frenzy that the Gloucester fishermen were seeing in such great abundance. But those high catch rates were not representative in any sense of a recovery of cod in the region, as the scientists knew.
Those several years ago found CLFs lawyer Shelley sitting beside the NMFS and doing all the talking about the ram rod job of Catch Shares with the twisted logic that by calling it sectors, it removed the 2/3 majority vote required by the law he uses when convenient, AND it removed the effort controls of conservation allowing for 100% of quotas to be landed. So much for conservation, right? Its also when the realization that there would be no rebuilt cod stock that Steve Murawski said was right around the corner in 2014. How soon he forgets.
A couple of things come to mind about this newly discovered shift in culinary preference of eat anything they could fit in their mouths cod. I slit a lotta throats in my day, and they had all kinds of stuff inside. Shrimp, herring, whiting, anything. They were the ultimate opportunist when it came to eating, and I’m sure they don’t exclusively dine on sand lance, and the value that the renaissance man installs it in this paragraph is retrospect fantasy. They knew something was wrong, but, they didn’t know what! Still don’t a little, cause they can’t include for lack of a better term, climate data.
I could be wrong, but I doubt I am.
To be continued
“This situation brings to mind the experience several years ago when fishermen from Gloucester were reporting that they had never seen so many inshore cod while the scientists concluded that cod prospects were terrible and getting worse. As it turned out then, they both were right in their own ways.”
aka days at seas restrictions and 800 pounds a day was working, the sacrifices the locals made resulted in a light at the end of the tunnel. Then along came the Catch Shares scam. And all of a sudden green useful idiots with zero catch history at Stellwagen came along with massive ENGO funded allocations. And they hoovered up all that cod, as the guys with a long history of fishing there had to sit back and watch all their sacrificing go down a big green drain.
Soon to be followed by the Empty Net NOAA SURVEY. Talk about a BAG JOB. Janie made sure the Safe was empty before the Audit.
Shelley: That was the year when almost 50 percent of all the landed Gulf of Maine cod were caught within just a 100-square-mile hot spot off Gloucester. The abundance of cod that Gloucester fishermen were seeing did not reflect the larger condition of the stock. Even then, old timers at the St. Pete’s Club in downtown Gloucester were no doubt snorting that these “young guys” had never seen the abundance of cod that Gloucester boats once fished in earlier times.
Pete, you don’t really wanna know what the old timers are spitting out when these issues are discussed. I’d bet there’s plenty of scornful commentary about you enviro phony bastards that jump more fences than a beagle in heat when you couple with whom ever you can get something out of. You should be ashamed of yourself for even thinking about these fishermen at the St. Peters Club. Its not the St Pete’s Club.Show some respect, you concubine bitch.