Charles, with you being one of the few folks that attend the SAFMC meetings (Thanks) in defense of our fishing rights…your post seems to give them more ammo to use against us tho.
Btw, I do like how Skinnee makes ya think outside the box, or wreck, as to the other reasons you may not have seen what you wanted…
Glad you had a safe trip…that’s deep!
NN
quote:
Originally posted by DoubleNCharles, with you being one of the few folks that attend the SAFMC meetings (Thanks) in defense of our fishing rights…your post seems to give them more ammo to use against us tho.
Exactly… It doesn’t help us one bit… BTW, I still work behind the scenes, but through a fishing organization that has a bigger voice than mine. Note that the SAFMC gave us a conservative quota which they calculated will keep us from overfishing this stock. They quota was only half filled this past year. They actually considered going up on the grouper limit, but then decided not to so that there is an even bigger buffer against over harvest.
SCDNR tagged THOUSANDS of gag grouper (IN SOUTH CAROLINA) several years ago and 25% of those fish that were recovered were recovered in Florida. This means that they MOVE SOUTH. Grouper spawn at the continental shelf (50-60 miles offshore) and eddies\currents float the larvae into estuaries north of us. An experiment was done several years ago to understand how this happens. They released dozens of GPS enabled floater devices off of SC. Pretty much all of them hit land on NC shore lines or never hit land at all. Following this logic, this means that the baby grouper that we see in our estuaries likely come from places south (like Georgia). Also, there have been several net surveys done in many of our coastal creeks. They have determined exact temperature ranges for which these tiny grouper thrive. If they do make it through the spring, then when the full moon comes in October, they move out to our inshore reefs. So, what happens if a) these currents change for a few years so that no larvae make landfall in NC, and get swept across with the Gulfstream to Europe? or b) The estuarine waters are too cold or too warm for larval survival?
quote:
Originally posted by skinneejquote:
Originally posted by DoubleNCharles, with you being one of the few folks that attend the SAFMC meetings (Thanks) in defense of our fishing rights…your post seems to give them more ammo to use against us tho.
Exactly… It doesn’t help us one bit… BTW, I still work behind the scenes, but through a fishing organization that has a bigger voice than mine. Note that the SAFMC gave us a conservative quota which they calculated will keep us from overfishing this stock. They quota was only half filled this past year. They actually considered going up on the grouper limit, but then decided not to so that there is an even bigger buffer against over harvest.
SCDNR tagged THOUSANDS of gag grouper (IN SOUTH CAROLINA) several years ago and 25% of those fish that were recovered were recovered in Florida. This means that they MOVE SOUTH. Grouper spawn at the continental shelf (50-60 miles offshore) and eddies\currents float the larvae into estuaries north of us. An experiment was done several years ago to understand how this happens. They released dozens of GPS enabled floater devices off of SC. Pretty much all of them hit land on NC shore lines or never hit land at all. Following this logic, this means that the baby grouper that we see in our estuaries likely come from places south (like Georgia). Also, there have been several net surveys done in many of our coastal creeks. They have determined exact temperature ranges for which these tiny grouper thrive. If they do make it through the spring, then when the full moon comes in October, they move out to our inshore reefs. So, what happens if a) these currents change for a few year