Butterfish—Little Fish Big Science
For this assessment, scientists developed a new method for estimating fish abundance that takes changing environmental conditions into account, something that will become increasingly important as the climate changes and the oceans warm.,,, Much of that uncertainty was caused by the fact that butterfish shift their distribution in response to changing bottom water temperatures.,, The breakthrough came when scientists devised a way to account for the effect of bottom water temperature,,, Read the rest here 11:09
Duh! Duh! and double freekin’ Duh! The NOAA Fisheries scientists are only about ten years late on this “Stock Assessment”.
Does this mean that they are actually not going to shorten our Squid season for the “endangered” Butterfish in the future? Not until they can dig up some other rationale, anyway.
Fishermen, through testimony and collaborative surveys utilizing John Manderson’s temperature modeling and data from the Butterfish Avoidance Program at The Cornell Extension, have been telling NOAA for years that the Butters are abundant. How abundant are they? Well…if they all decided to surface one could walk on the rafts of butters from Maine to Louisiana!
Oh, and they finally got the message that ocean water temperature affects fish behavior. How long has it taken for the establishment at NOAA to finally listen seriously to John Manderson and his work?
Is this really a breakthrough at NOAA? Will they through some miracle of adventurous and creative thought be able to extrapolate this temperature influence regarding the Butters to the Cod situation in New England and stop talking about “overfishing” when the groundfish allocation has been underfished for several years? Will this inspire them to acknowledge that like the Butters the Cod have responded to warmer water temperatures and that the NOAA reported Cod scarcity might have something to do with the fact that many fish apparently have sought cooler waters and moved into Canada? We’ll see…