It's raining and cold and miserable out there. I've lit a fire for the cats, fed the critters, and am now in my study trying to focus on books. I stopped in with Greg today to try and find James's missing dive mask. No such luck :-(. We discussed the state of crayfishing and the Fisheries regulations. It appears they want to cut the 'recreational' fishers quota -- myself as one - but I prefer to think of myself as a non-commercial diver, from 5 to 3 per day. 'To rebuild stocks' Now this makes slightly less sense than an Emu on Acid... as the entire recreational catch is... 7% of the catch. And, what's more the average daily catch is IIRC less than 3 anyway. And 12% of the total catch is supposed to go to recreational fishing. Commercial fishing already takes 5% more than its share, and at 93% of the catch any restrictions that do not reduce their catch (and none appear to be proposed) are meaningless. How to make Fisheries Scientists look like idiots or political pawns to a powerful commercial fishery lobby.
Anyway, chooks laid another egg, and I have yet to catch more than 2 crays in a dive.
Sadly as crooked regulators they sound like pikers to me. The ICCAT (best known as the International Conspiracy to Catch All Tunas) is the so called regulatory body in charge of maintaining the atlantic bluefin tuna population. They were written up about a year ago in The Economist, after the scope of their prior years shenanigans became clear. It's scientific advisory board said the catch should be limited to X (a reasonable number). The conspiracy leadership set the quota at 2X. The various national fishing fleets of the conspiracy members collectively caught 4X. Not even a slap on the wrist was given. Meanwhile the tuna population itself is tottering just over the threshold that will get them on the endangered species list and a multi-decadal ban on any fishing imposed. As someone who likes tuna I'm apalled.
ReplyDeleteYou're talking about one of my pet bugbears: politicians lie. Scientists (should) deal in as near to truth as they can. Politicians assume Scientist lie. They would. So therefore they assume that 'real' figure the fisheries scientist quotes is orders of magnitude smaller - because that is what they'd do. So they double or quadruple it. And then inevitably you have scientists who try to play politician. And they're bad at it. Then they need cover-up or they discredit it all. And that fails because they're less-than skilled liars... And then because people (not just pollies) assume they lie, they have to or they don't just quadruple the catch... etc. Fisheries is not as bad as some other areas... yet. But it's a slippery slope.
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