I realized that MPA discussion was “heating up” again, but I just took at look at the new map. They are literally aiming to close off pretty much EVERY fishing spot on the “ledge”, “60 fathom curve”, “continental shelf” in South Carolina from the ledge as far south as the 226 hole all the way up past the Winyah Scarp. Yes, that’s pretty much all of the reachable “ledge” from Charleston unless you plan on zipping 70nm to catch your 1 gag grouper.
I will let the picture do the talking!!!
My source: http://www.safmc.net/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=OO%2BA%2B1yy52E%3D&tabid=797
To translate:
- “Edisto Reconfiguration” includes the ENTIRE Edisto Banks area as well as the royal terrace area almost up to the SW Banks! This also includes the “Outcrop” area which has been closed for a while.
- “Charleston Shelf” is the area we refer to as the South West Banks!!!
- “Devils Hole 3” is the George Town Hole and surrounding areas. As you can see the “Devil’s Hole 2” encompasses even more live bottom.
- The “Mid-SC” and “Northern SC Ext” shut down the most productive areas of the Winyah Scarp and leave a tiny % of less productive ledge.
(**()…may have been raping that northern MPA without even knowing it…I don’t know that 1/25th of the fishermen I know realize it. I will send the letters, the money, the e mails, etc. Its criminal.
You guys want to see what “best available science” looks like? Read this discussion from the minutes. To summarize. It basically says, “How did you come up with the proposed areas for GT Hole”? The scientists then proceeds to discuss an online google book that he stumbled across from an unknown author who mentioned warsaws he caught at the GT Hole. WOW!!!
http://www.safmc.net/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=wTYfYRNWqHA%3D&tabid=766
Context: “Dr Farmer” is a “scientist” who is helping to put together the suggested MPA areas. “Mr Hudson” is well respected fisherman who is trying to make sense of some of the fluff and is asking questions to push for clarification…
http://www.safmc.net/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=wTYfYRNWqHA%3D&tabid=766
Page 31
MR. HUDSON: On Slide 24 you had the Georgetown Hole, and you have at least two gold stars
for spawning Warsaw grouper inside of the Georgetown Hole. Do you have any information,
male, female, size, anything that goes with the gold star?
DR. FARMER: No, there is a question mark next to that in the legend, and the reason for that is
that is anecdotal information. I believe that it is based on a book. I have a citation for the book
in the notes on the slide, but it is actually a really kind of fascinating book from this fisherman I
guess who wrote up some of his experiences in a much longer, kind of personal autobiography of
his life, but it was a Google book that I found while searching online. You can see I pulled a lot
of data sources into this analysis. He provided some coordinates. and then there are some maps
and unique sites that we were able to pull together and then some sites from MARMAP and
things like that to figure out kind of where those locations were.
MR. HUDSON: Yes, can you send me the title of that book? I love to archive that stuff. But do
you have anything at all on Warsaw grouper as far as male, female, size, how the gonads were or
anything?
DR. FARMER: The only information that I?ve come across in the scientific literatu
Page 36-37
Here are their independent fishery observations of Speckled Hind and Warsaw Groupers:
“MS. HARTER: For those of you who don?t know me, I?m Stacey Harter. I?m with NOAA
Fisheries Lab in Panama City. Myself and Andy David have been doing annual surveys on these
MPAs for a while. We had two weeks out on the Pisces this past summer in July. We did ROV
operations during the day and then we did multi-beam mapping at night.”
<< omitted some text to get to the numbers >>
“Now the numbers were very, very low; again, this is preliminary. A lot of this is just based off
of observations that we made on the cruise, because I haven?t analyzed all the dives yet. I would
say it was probably total, maybe half a dozen speckled hind and less than a handful of Warsaw
grouper that were observed over the entire 37 dives.”
“Even though we didn?t observe very many Warsaw and speckled hind, I thought you might find
it interesting of other snapper and grouper species that we did find aggregations of. I don?t know
exactly how many there needs to be to consider it an aggregation, but these are basically groups
of the same species in large numbers that we found in one area.
If you look just north of the Florida MPA, Dive 34, we observed ten scamps and some juvenile
blackfin snapper there. That was the same dive where we also saw the speckled hind and the
Warsaw grouper. That seems to be a very productive area. If you look all the way north into the
Snowy Wreck MPA, the dive that is filled in is the actual Snowy Wreck., and I?m happy to
report that is just absolutely covered with snowy grouper at this point.”
So, they saw SIX speckled hinds and THREE OR FOUR warsaws on 37 ROV dives inside of the MPAs that have been around since 2009, yet somehow MORE MPA’s are going to save the population???
More fisherman comments:
“MR. FREEMAN: I went through logbooks and fishing areas and I didn?t count them. I brought
two books with me if somebody wants to count those while we?re here, but I?m going to guess
upwards of 5,000 numbers. That is collected over 35 or 40 years. Some of the numbers aren?t
even converted from the Loran numbers; only one of them is not converted.
The rest of them I have fished within the last 30 years. From my brain works and Loran
numbers, so from the 880 line to probably the 380 line might be a 50 mile long stretch of bottom.
I found 19 places that we had caught a speckled hind at some time or other. I tried to remember
the best I could and collected the chronology of when that actually occurred. Most of them are
ten years or more ago, none within five years.
The significant thing was to me, three out of those nineteen places were actually in one of these
proposed MPAs. That northern MPA that encompasses the Big Rock, the way I see this venture
we?re on here, there are three endangered species; the speckled hind, the Warsaw and the
fisherman.
The fishermen have been using that particular area to fish big triggerfish, red porgy and B-liners
as you are on the edge of that big rock, top of the Rock and all that kind of stuff. The fact that
out of 19 spots that I personally had landed speckled hind, then only three of them are
encompassed in a proposed area says are we really hitting the target?”
Page 66
MR. DeMARIA: I think one thing to keep in mind ? and Gregg or Ben can probably explain it
better ? that whatever the council brings out to the public hearing they could always scale back
from it, but they can?t ask for more. If they bring out like a hundred square mile area, they could
always come back and decide on ten square miles, but they can?t go with 200 unless they have
another public hearing. Whatever we ask for is probably going to get scaled back. I doubt that
it?s going to be raised.
what a shame. So sad to see that laws being considered have nothing to do with protecting the fish - but furthering an agenda.
THE REAL AGENDA… It’s not just about Speckled Hind and Warsaw:
pg 129
DR. KOENIG: Conceptually I think we ought to review something. What we?re trying to do
here is more than just reduce bycatch on Warsaw and speckled hind. No species live in isolation,
right. They live in an ecological system, an ecosystem. The habitat is not just the rocks. The
habitat is all those other species that are associated with the rocks.
When you close an area to fishing, what you?re doing basically is restoring an ecosystem, an
ecosystem that has been altered by targeting certain species in that system; some top predators,
some medium predators and so on, which alters the structure of that system. If you want to make
a habitat for these species, you have to consider all those other species with it, the entire complex
from the invertebrates to the top.
One of the reasons for making a larger reserve is to protect all those other species as well,
because they all have different home ranges and they all have different ecologies. Basically what
we?re doing is establishing ecosystem reserves in my mind, and that is the point. In other words,
let?s take an extreme, let?s just say we narrow it down right to where these speckled hind were
caught, okay, just a half mile wide, that little strip.
We are not going to accomplish anything; we really aren?t because the ecosystem will not
recover. We?re focusing on those two species. Those two species don?t live in isolation. They
live in an ecological community. They can only survive in an ecological community. When
Nick first said in his presentation that larger is better; that is the concept that should be firmly
established in our minds.
There is obviously a limit to that, but if you get so small in these things that you don?t reestablish
an ecological system, it is not going to be protected. Now, the exception to that is if you have a
spawning aggregation, where fish come from far and wide to this spot, that can be small, because
basically you?re protecting that
Skineeej = Please PM me your contact info - Carl
Wonder when they are going to ban surf fishing?
“Watch what we do, not what we say.” John Mitchell
Sea Hunt Triton 202
Yammy 150
Its in the plan. Start following EDF and PEW’s web pages. The objective is to STOP FISHING!
quote:
Originally posted by sternline
Wonder when they are going to ban surf fishing?
“Watch what we do, not what we say.” John Mitchell
Sea Hunt Triton 202
Yammy 150
I am going to add a few of my favorites and things to consider as I sift through this document.
But I think that these graphs that I?ve shown you and these GIS plots have shown pretty compellingly that these stocks are heterogeneously distributed. Thus if you protect 20 percent or some other percent selectively, the amount of the stock that you are going to protect will probably be much higher than the percent of the habitat that you protect.
www.JigSkinz.com
You want to impact the fisheries as little as you can, but one thing that you have to keep in mind that one of the ideas behind these MPAs is to displace bycatch mortality or remove bycatch mortality on the stocks. If you protect a place where they are not actually fishing right now, then you are not actually doing anything more really for the fish.
www.JigSkinz.com
quote:
Originally posted by natureboy
Skineeej = Please PM me your contact info - Carl
Done! Give me a shout today if possible.
Courtland, don’t forget to put your page numbers or some quotations! I almost thought those were your personal thoughts for a moment.
Just to re-iterate, this is one of my top 5 reasons AGAINST MPA’s of this nature\configuration:
“When we create these MPAs, what we are
going to do is force them to fish adjacent to that area and create a biological desert out of them.
The fishermen are trying to hang on and have been mommaking ? a North Carolina term ? the
triggerfish, because that is all they are allowed to keep now”
I like how on page 34 they admit to not follow protocol.
because we?re violating a lot of the protocol and the literature by not having management plans for our existing MPAs, by not having research plans for these MPAs, by not having outreach plans and not having enforcement plans.
I was real please to see that you recognized that. Perhaps the council, as this process moves forward, could create a mechanism to develop some sort of management planning process; because until we have management plans for these MPAs, we?re contradicting the consensus in the literature on how you do MPAs. I applaud the council for what it has done, but this is something that we want to do in order to finish zipping up this package.
www.JigSkinz.com
I saw that as well. It’s an interesting read. You can definitely tell who is there to get the facts and who is there to sell MPA’s. Ironically enough, I have talked to TWO of the expert fishermen on the panel and they both pretty much explained to me that they felt duped after the meeting. It was sold to them as them being there to talk about the history of warsaw and speckled hind as well as possibly shrinking some of the existing MPA’s. But, as you can see from the notes, it was basically a meeting to steal their knowledge and close off NEW areas and expand the size and shape of the existing MPA’s.
You know, those scientists always know better than guys with 40+ years of experience on the water, because the scientists read a paper in 1983 from data that was collected in 1972.
As you can see from my previous quote on “THE REAL AGENDA”, Koenig is pretty clear that these MPA’s are not just about Speckled Hind and Warsaw, but about connecting a large highway of MPA’s up and down the continental shelf for all species. In other words, in the words of Rahm Emanuel “Never let a good crisis go to waste”…
Wonder if the MPA’s are protecting the species they were put in place to protect. How about this data from p.36.
Now the numbers were very, very low; again, this is preliminary. A lot of this is just based off of observations that we made on the cruise, because I haven?t analyzed all the dives yet. I would say it was probably total, maybe half a dozen speckled hind and less than a handful of Warsaw grouper that were observed over the entire 37 dives.</font id=“Arial”>
This was 37 dives, in and around the MPA’s they put in place 5 years ago.
www.JigSkinz.com