Posted by Brad on January 11, 2002 at 15:39:55:
In Reply to: Hmmm. BBS comments requested here. posted by seahunt on January 11, 2002 at 13:06:50:
Seahunt, your knowledge is a huge asset to these discussions and i appreciate your input very much!
I understand that the general recession of kelp from a scientific standpoint will be attributed to a number of factors, many of which have been described here. I brought up kelp as another example of how the environment has been degraded by our presence. This is every bit as much a political issue as it is a scientific one. You or i could hire experts to argue either side of the issue: declining kelp is a natural cycle/phenomeon VS a man made problem. In that regard, Wayne made good arguments for natural causes of decline.
I mentioned the back side of Catalina as a place that has lost most of it's kelp. I have a friend who has been fishing that island for 50 years, and in all of those intervening years (elnino, etc) he has also watched the kelp make its most substantial decline in the last 15 years.
Here is my point, the places that you find the most human activity coinside with the places that have suffered the greatest decline. Not a hard and fast rule, but a very accurate generality.
(how did we get off the subject of reserves?)