Thoughts on CCA meeting tonight on state of Calcasieu fishery

[T-TOP]

Originally Posted by MathGeek

It was not my intent to prioritize issues. Each angler has their own priorities in what they see as the most important issues facing the lake. All the issues discussed belong in the top 5.

Basing limits in sound science is an important conservation issue and only those ignorant of how food webs work would portray a call for scientific management as a selfish concern for how many fish an angler gets to take home. There are far fewer natural predators of specks, reds, gafftops, and drum than there used to be. In the absence of sufficient fishing harvest, each of these species has the potential to become overpopulated which would overly stress food supplies and lead to an unbalanced ecosystem.

If you disagree and think channel dredging and spoils are the most important issue, you should try and make a well-informed case that perhaps the ship channel should be rocked to prevent ongoing erosion and the spoil used to build up a land barrier between the channel and lake. To me, all the issues are important, and I have not seen enough data to definitively rank order them. However, CCA and LDWF both need regular feedback regarding establishing new limits without a sound scientific basis. Otherwise, we can expect this bad behavior to continue.

This is one of the topics top be discussed.