If you fish for grouper in the Gulf of Mexico, you WILL be interested in reading an article I found in the St Petersburg Times titled "Data On Grouper Old And Murky". It was written by Stephen Nohlgren and is dated April 5, 2008.
It seems that the Gulf Of Mexico Fishery Management Council, who had plans to whack the gag grouper catch by 45%, are having to re-access the science they are using to make the regulations. With such drastic cuts on the horizon, commercial lobbyist Bobby Spaeth and Dennis O'Hern hired Trevor Kenchington, a scientist from Nova Scotia, to check the grouper data. What he found is that the governments own computer models show that gag grouper populations in the Gulf are healthier then federal scientists had originally thought.
Please click on the link below and read this article for yourself.
Data On Grouper Old And Murky
After reading this article,please leave any questions or comments you may have for the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council by clicking on COMMENTS at the bottom of this post. I will try to forward your comments to them. State your opinion, but please keep them clean, or they will be deleted.
Tony
2 comments:
This is an interesting article, but there is much more to the story than presented and a few things are actually inaccurate. Corrections were printed two or three days later.
Also take into consideration that the new data is preliminary and while it might show that overfishing has stopped, the gag population might now be overfished. In other words, landings are down because the fish are not there to be caught. We'll know more in June when the Gulf Council meets in Houston, TX.
Its is a good article that basically sums up the entire grouper situation right now. This situation i ridiculous. The charters aren't getting booked like they were 3 years ago due to gas prices, now they want to screw us over with the regs?? Thats BS.
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