[MathGeek]

Originally Posted by Duck Butter

Again, RITA is probably the MOST important influence here. You give those numbers to any statistician, ecologist, biologist, in the world, and show them those very numbers. They will look at them and see that 'something' seems to be happening without even knowing where Big Lake is and could not point out Big Lake on a map of Louisiana. Well, if you give them a little more information such as:

1. the limit was dropped from 25 to 15 during this time
2. a guy fishes the lake a lot and said its because the weirs are blocking off one little bayou into the marsh (that supposedly feed that entire lake even though the entire west side of the lake is marsh)
3. Obama got in office in 2008
4. Osama bin Laden was killed in 2011
5. A freaking Category 4? hurricane came right thru this area in 2005 and completely destroyed and transformed this area and has taken its toll
6. BP Oil spill in 2010
7. A guide that fishes here a lot says their isn't as much pressure on the lake, yet there are twice as many guides on the lake now

Seems pretty obvious to me?

One more thing to add:

People always look for just one answer to a complicated problem, sometimes there isn't just one thing, its a combination of many factors. Maybe the STAR shows the biggest fish caught has gone down, but maybe overall the average weight of the average fish caught has gone up? This can be debated over and over and will never be settled. Just look at duck hunting in the last few years - some people have had the best seasons of their lives recently, whereas others are having terrible seasons, and those people will try and put blame on one particular thing whereas its many things working together.

Great points. Let me add the over harvesting of the oysters.

Determining what is happening with the fish stocks is generally much easier than ascribing causal factors definitively. Yet, the Callihan thesis seems to indicate that a stock assessment would be determining the impact of the change to the limits rather than any of the possible confounding factors that have been suggested:

Interestingly, Louisiana recently adopted (in 2006) a spatially-explicit management plan for Calcasieu Lake. The premise of this management decision, which included a reduction in daily bag limits and imposition of a slot limit, was to ‘preserve’ the renowned trophy-fishery for spotted seatrout in Calcasieu Lake. However, the decision to enact this regulation was based exclusively on socio-economic factors, rather than the biological status of the subpopulation. In fact, no formal stock assessment was conducted as part of the decision-making process. Thus, the status of the subpopulation (stock) was largely unknown (i.e., overfished or not?) at the time regulations were changed. While perhaps setting a bad precedent for fisheries management (i.e., making a decision based purely on socioeconomic reasons), this situation affords a unique opportunity to evaluate the response of spotted seatrout to a spatially-explicit (estuarine-scale) regulations change (i.e., adaptive management, sensu Hilborn and Walters 1992).

from Callihan PhD thesis LSU 2011 p. 182