Quote:
Originally Posted by biggun
If we all banded together, We can EFFECT Chance..
Thks
Biggun
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Maybe change too.
The red snapper issue is probably my area of greatest agreement with CCA. However, not that the issue seems bound up in the courts, it's going to be driven by what expert witnesses say on the stand rather than by what citizens say at meetings. Citizen pressure is best applied to Congress to get laws changed and to get the new boundary approved. The Gulf council is deaf, deaf, deaf to both citizens and science. Their scientists are deaf, deaf, deaf.
Results and data from as yet unperformed and not yet funded studies is unlikely to be complete and published in time to impact the outcomes of ongoing red snapper court battles. Fortunately, there is plenty of data in the GMFMC data bases, in the SEAMAP data, in published theses, in the LDWF data, and in the data compiled by Alabama based scientists (Szedlmayer, Shipp, etc.) already in hand to make these main points:
1. The unit stock hypothesis is wrong. This was the original justification for federalizing red snapper management in the Gulf of Mexico.
2. Current red snapper populations in the northern and western Gulf are abundant and will support much higher harvest levels.
3. The models used by GMFMC result from cherry picking the data most favorable to Crabtree and Cowan's viewpoints and excluding the data supporting points 1 and 2 above.
4. Mathematical models better designed to produce probabilistic projections accurately reflecting the uncertainties in the underlying data have been ignored in favor of models producing overly confident projections better suited to manipulating regulations.
Discrediting Cowan, Crabtree, and their co-conspirators handling of the data would be much more productive than the expensive and time consuming process of designing new experiments and collecting additional data.