Quote:
Originally Posted by seatrout
I am still confused on what you are trying to prove from such little data that you are providing on croakers and menhaden???? The only conclusion i can make from this chart is Populations of species that you took samples of... Heck some days the whole lake is covered in menhaden and some days you cant find one. So what can you prove about that??? Statistically you can "attempt" to prove things with incomplete data. Maybe you have looked at too many numbers or too long of time... haha
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Prove? Not much. Hypotheses can be supported or refuted, but never really proved.
The posted charts are not from our own data, but they are our calculated catch per unit effort from HUNDREDS of LDWF sampling efforts over many months and locations including many thousands of fish caught. Given the effort and volume of the sampling, the calculated CPUE represent reasonable stock assessments.
It is no accidents the stocks of menhaden went up after the pogey plant closed and Omega Protein stopped harvesting millions of pounds of pogeys.
The data in the graphs just represents the best available LDWF stock assessments. The next step is to correlate the stock assessments of different forage species (prey) with accurate measures of plumpness of several predator species (specs, reds, etc.)
The idea is that the higher the correlation between a predator and prey, the more dependent the predator is on that pray. It is a way to determine which forage species are more strongly used by which predators.