Posted by Steve Clark on March 12, 2001 at 19:10:09:
In Reply to: Be Careful - You could loose all diving access posted by Eric Frasco on March 12, 2001 at 13:18:15:
Have you even been to one of those meetings? It has never been proposed that diving would be restricted or banned mainly because it has no adverse effect upon the health of the marine environment. There needs to be a promt action that protects habitat and sealife from further predation by us so that the whole ecosystem can rebalance and flourish. Fish just outside the boundries of a "no take zone" and you'll catch more fish than you can catch inside them right now. Fish not caught reproduce. The increased bounty spreads well outside of the boundries. Why let the Channel Islands become another Grand Banks? There are commercial fishing boats from Alaska, Canada, Russia, Japan, Taiwan, Washington, Oregon, Northern California PLUS the local boats all putting enormous pressure on the biomass of the relatively small Channel Islands Preserve. We tend to think of "maximum sustainable yield" when discussing the resiliance of an ecosystem but we only consider this yield in terms of ourselves without considering that other creatures depend on this biomass to survive. Much of what is caught here goes overseas. We could be starving out the very creatures that make the Channel Islands so vibrant. Declining fish populations are a fact of life in the modern world and there is a lot of good scientific data that supports the concept of localized "no take zones" as a way to prevent further decline in both the number of fish and the amount of healthy marine habitat.