Guys.. If U can NOT make it?? Not a problem... Every commission member has a contact email.. U can email everyone of them ur thoughts and opinions.. Just go to WL&F home page.

EVERY OPINION COUNTS. Get INVOLVED....

Don't know that I agree there. Plenty of people e-mailed their thoughts and opinions to the commission, and plenty more spoke out through the surveys. Yet, a vocal minority that showed up at the meeting was able to sway the commissioners to change the season dates proposed by Mr. Reynolds.

Sure you can. People here do it all the time.

So, the marsh can be the lifeblood of the estuary, but it can't affect fish all over the estuary? Isn't the marsh a foundation of the estuary? A nursery ground for the nekton that live in the entire estuary?

Come on, DB. You want to call MG out for not using common sense. Well, you need to do it yourself. Go read up on estuary ecology again. Pretty sure there is a good read on this website somewhere that talks about the trout move throughout the estuary.

On what planet does it make sense that a weir being open ("lifeblood of the estuary") make fish skinnier? It deoesnt. I would bet the fish that are caught at the weirs are significantly fatter than fish caught elsewhere in the estuary Those weirs affect one very small portion of the entire estuary that is Big Lake. There is a large portion of marsh on the west side as well

I aint complaining one bit so far my blind has killed 367 ducks. I am 18 behind from last year but I had serveral days which I had 3 people instead of 2 but hey yall can have your late season hunting

That is not the point I was making, try to keep up. You said:

"Those "thin" fish may have been caught miles away from the weirs at black lake or prien lake. They may have not even swam within miles of the weirs."

I'm not arguing whether the weirs make the fish skinnier or not. Hell, there is only one person in this thread that has anything to back up that argument, so you argue that until you are blue in the face and it won't make a difference. No data equals no foundation.


So do you believe that the west side of the lake affects a majority of the lake, considering the east marsh only affects "one very small portion of the entire estuary that is Big Lake"? What is your basis? That whole marsh on the west side is not feeding into Calcasieu Lake, mind you, considering Sabine Lake is to the west.

For what its worth, I will agree with you on the effect of the weirs on the entire lake. You are doing a fantastic job of arguing a point I've long made here--that those weirs don't have near the effect on the lake as some on this forum would lead people to believe. Hell, even the negative correlation in MG's study does that. I could look at that opposite of the way you are. To me it says those weirs being open doesn't do a damn thing for the fish.

"The more he weirs are open the skinnier the fish are" is what MG said. That is laughable. On what planet does it make sense that when there is more food (weirs open) that fish would be skinnier? It doesn't. He tries to overanalyze things. In any organism, the more food available = healthier (fatter) organism whether it a fish, bird, earthworm, etc

They can only gain weight if they are consuming more calories than they are burning. Imagine all the calories they are burning while swimming in that current and eating all that food. That's a lot of tail movement and jaw movement in unison, burning the candle from both ends.

amiright amiright?

Fishing success probably drops off too when the weirs are open. All those fish getting that lock jaw after eating that much.

In the limit that the coupling between the marsh and lake were zero, you are right.

But think of the analogy with pasture rotation of cattle. Restricting access part of the time leads to more beef per acre than allowing complete access all the time.

Could it be that reducing the feeding pressure of finfish on the bait for part of the time allows the system to produce a larger total quantity of forage and the finfish get fatter because the bait has a chance to grow up before getting eaten?

Which goes back to the original point. How can you say a fish brought into heberts or call point has ever swam in the current at the weirs?


And do you think the fish caught at the weirs are skinnier or fatter than a fish caught anywhere else in the lake? They are fatter because of te buffet of good coming out of them


Unless the fish are bulimic

You are overthinking this. If you want to produce bigger deer, bigger fish, bigger pigs, you feed them more. It's that simple.

So data that shows "fatter" fish with less openings is just all wrong? Where is your data to support that, huh? You want to discredit someone else's work with nothing but "common sense" to back it up.

Not saying science is always right, but you can't just go around discrediting stuff because it goes against "common sense". The earth as the center of the universe was once "common sense".

You are also assuming that there are more food sources in the lake when the weirs are open, which is not necessarily true either. The weirs are opened for ingress and egress. If the bait population is traveling into the marsh, there would inevitably be less in the lake, correct?

You've never been to the weirs, but yet know, without a doubt, that those fish must be fatter because of the "buffet coming out of them"?

How else would you explain low BMI then? Take away the weirs?

The fact that you want to argue that MG's stats are wrong because there is no way the weirs could be making the rest of the lake skinnier, but then you argue that them being open would make the entire lake fatter is asinine. Correlation does not indicate causation anywhere in this. That estuary is very complex, and no one factor can be pointed to as the cause for any one thing, because very few relationships in that estuary are linear.

By the way, what about that "west side of the lake" theory you threw around? Care to elaborate on that?

You know its not that simple. Genetics, nutrients, environmental all play a role. More food also equals more competition, which can decrease fitness as well.

The weirs are a buffet of everything. Throw a castnet by one and see. If you eat at a buffet everyday you get fatter than someone who eats a Subway sandwich everyday😄

Thought you've never fished at the weirs? How would you know this?

I guess the lake gets choked off when the weirs are "closed" huh? No input of food whatsoever?

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There is no good science in his dataset. Sitting at a ramp collecting data only does so much because you are only getting a sample of fish (fish that are susceptible to being caught) which is simply a creel survey. A true survey of what is actually there is done by shocking and gillnetting it's a creel survey only. You can only infer so much with a creel survey

I've been to plenty of weirs and you catch a variety of everything in a castnet. I guarantee you hthe fishing is better beside a weir that is open than weir that is closed I know they aren't completely closed Some bait gets through.

This is true. No argument from me, but that doesn't change the fact that he at least has some data, while you have none. You are essentially no better than any other person who has ever questioned the validity of scientific data while holding none themselves.

You have no proof to argue what you have, yet do so with authority.

"There is no way that fish caught while the weirs are open could be thinner than those caught while they are closed."

Where is your data? While his may be a creel survey, it is a sampling method. While not as intensive as shocking, it is an acceptable method. Shocking would still only be a sample, and it would take a considerable amount of time and money. What if the data still showed the same thing? Would you discount it then?

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Inferring anything based on a handful of structures doesn't make sense when the lifeform is affected by so many variables. This isn't grass we are talking about, which is affected by a handful of variables that can be quantified or qualified and manipulated quite easily. This is a highly mobile population that is affected by competition, predation, salinity, tides, moon phase, prey abundance, weather, etc. Unless you can eliminate or control all other variables, it is impossible to say that one factor alone contributes to the BMI of a species.

You can control the weirs, but can you control prey abundance, predator abundance, moon, sun, weather, tides, salinity, competition? No. So how do you know that the weirs are responsible, even partly, for the condition of the fish.

My thesis was heavy on statistics, so I know all about what they can and can't tell you. The difference is, I could quantify or qualify ever variable I dealt with. You can't do that here. You miss half the picture because of that. It's not a linear relationship, and will never be a linear relationship.

Weir openings alone do not equal thin fish or thick fish. They may correlate, but again, correlation does not necessarily equal causation.

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I have been feeding deer at my lease all year round for the last 4 years and now that I think about it, they have gotten skinnier. I am going to stop feeding them now so they will get back fatter again. You guys are saving me some money

If someone tells you they did a study and found out that the moon is made out of cheese, do you really need to do a study on it yourself? Or are you just going to discredit that person?