Key Alabama scientist says the Gulf red snapper models are wrong… (and theirs are much closer to reality than the models for our South Atlantic stocks.
http://blog.al.com/live/2011/10/feds_underestimate_snapper_rec.html
Research by Alabama scientists suggests that federal regulators may have underestimated the size of the red snapper population due to a longstanding reliance on flawed data collected from commercial fishermen.
For the last several years, federal snapper population estimates have meant tighter and tighter regulation of the Gulfs most important commercial and recreational fishery, with the 2011 season being the shortest on record.
An estimate of how many fish in the Gulf population are more than 10 years old is critical to the calculations that determine how many pounds of snapper commercial and recreational fishermen are allowed to catch each year. More older fish means a healthier population. Too few older fish means a population is being fished too heavily.
The National Marine Fisheries Service data on the age and size of the snapper population known as a stock assessment come from commercial fishing records. The information is fed into a computer model created by the fisheries service. Catch limits are set based on the models results.
All of the NMFS model is driven by the age composition of the population. What the NMFS model wants to see is a lot of fish that are 10 years old, and some that are 15 years old, said Sean Powers, a Dauphin Island Sea Lab scientist studying the snapper population.
Powers is also the chair of the Scientific and Statistical Committee that reviews the fisheries service model and the data that goes into it, putting him in a unique position to review the federal stock assessment.
Bottom line, what his studies show and what the model predicts dont agree.
We are seeing a lot more older fish in the population, he said. We are collecting those fish with greater frequency than the model predicts. We see the population recov