Quote:
Originally Posted by fonikoddity
Are you being serious or just adding to the troll factor? I'm legitimately confused.
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Smalls is right. Judging the health of an ecosystem by the number of guide boats is bad science, so bad that it stinks.
There are some things about the ecosystem that show ongoing strength, but there was some luck involved with the closure of the pogey plant and huge increase in the menhaden numbers a couple years after the oyster numbers plummeted.
But in the long run, protecting the habitat is a better plan than raping it. Galveston Bay, Chesapeake Bay, and lots of estuaries along the Gulf coast and eastern seaboard dwindled to a fraction of the fisheries they once sustained after the destruction of the oysters in those systems. Oysters provide a number of very important ecosystem services which improve the habitat of the whole estuary and beyond.
Filtering of large volumes of water to improve light penetration is one of the most important ecosystem services provided by oysters. Why is light penetration so important? In a word:
photosynthesis. The whole food chain depends on primary production through photosynthesis, then the biomass is available to the larger food web. No light penetration -> no photosynthesis -> no food web.
Colleagues and I have correlated the oyster stocks not only to primary production in Calcasieu Estuary itself, but also in a 100 km by 100 km square area in the near shore Gulf of Mexico adjacent to the estuary. It turns out that the oysters in Calcasieu are filtering the water, increasing light penetration, and enhancing primary production in that large region of Gulf water also. Muddier water -> less light penetration -> lower biomass. It's that simple.
The attached map shows the correlations between primary production in near shore Gulf waters and Calcasieu oyster stocks in the 9 years following Rita. This is convincing evidence that harming the oyster stocks in Calcasieu will harm not only the ecosystem in the estuary, but also in a large region of nearshore Gulf waters.
Keep raping the system, everyone is going to get screwed.