Reduced catches of the Atlantic menhaden could result from a regional fishery managers’ agreement reached last March, setting that more of the fish spawning population should be granted protection.About damned time.So they only allow 9% of the stock to survive until spawning? It's amazing they survive at all
The current management strategies of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) include allowing 9 per cent of the spawning stock to remain free until they can spawn. The Commission Menhaden Management Board has requested changing this amount to 15 per cent.
A draft amendment including the management options to reach the 15 per cent goal will be presented at the ASMFC meeting in August and released for public comment in late summer if approved.
Safeguarding more spawning adults does not ensure that their numbers will rise, but it could spur an increase if greater egg production melds with positive environmental conditions that support larvae survival, said Rob Latour, a fishery scientist with the Virginia Institute of Marine Science and outgoing chair of the ASMFC Menhaden Technical Committee.So a bad year could result in a flat line or a decrease even with the cuts, but it would still be better than a bad year without the cuts. Yep, variability happens; you have to build some slack for annual variability into the allowance; maybe we should argue for 25%.
He added that meeting the new 15 per cent goal would necessitate about a 10 per cent cut in fishing.
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if the math interests you, you can find the fish mgt equations online from the asmfc website, amdts etc.
ReplyDeletethe math does get a little hairy, don't let it bother you. keep breathing gently and carefully read.
no one knows how many fish are out there, how many spawn, how many make it through 1st year, die of natural disease, fishing, predation, how many of the survivors will successfully spawn each following year etc..
but with a minimum of actual data and a ton of assumptions, the numbers are plugged in here and there and then functioned to death - F(x)'d for short. and that's how they determine spawning mass,...
what i take from this is there may be a cut in the menhaden catch but the actual numbers are hypothetical. at the end of the day, it wouldn't surprise me if the catch wasn't going to reduce itself without intervention,...
and in any case, i'm glad someone's looking at the situation and 'something' is being documented.
Math doesn't make me breathe one way or the other, but as you point out, the math is being made with numbers that are largely hypothetical. To call it actual math is a stretch. Yes, imaginary numbers are being subjected to mathematical manipulations, but to confuse that with reality is to grant the exercise more than it's worth. It is, admittedly, better than letting the watermen take them all now (as they happily would given the opportunity, a fish in the net and all that), but we need to act to best preserve the resource, and to do that we must make considerable allowance for the known problems with the data, the potentially unknown problems with the fisheries models used to crunch the vague numbers, and the year to year impacts of annual variability which are not predictable by those models.
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