Posted by seahunt on December 18, 2003 at 08:57:53:
In Reply to: Re: Peter makes a good point Sonke posted by Sonke on December 18, 2003 at 07:44:17:
I am rather critical of game management policies for self evident reasons. Their results. I'm well trained as an ecologist with a lot of focus on marine life. It seems quite evident that a wild crop can be harvested at maintainable levels or overharvested to reduction of stocks. Why aren't fishery policies designed to fit that model? Instead, the fishery laws have been basically designed to always allow destructive over exploitation of crops. It seems that what has happened is that a business model has been applied to wild crops. An ecologically based model would be based on yearly sustainable harvesting with dock limits. (A dock count could have made for more discriminate take of larger individuals instead of everything near legal size). It seems that you are now (quite late) doing that with some of the fish species, but it could be more widely used. That model could have prevented what happened to the abalone as well as other species. Even with diseases, there was no excuse for the abalone population to be wiped out.
Any comments on that?
Enjoy, seahunt