Southern Offshore Fishing
            Association

A Little Preamble

I believe fishermen are as smart as any other group taken as a whole but we had a recent comment made in our blog that implied scientific reports might not exactly be our cup of tea. Well, this report is a bit scientific in its lingo, but that is unavoidable, being as how it is in fact a scientific report. I could condense what I believe is the essence of the report, but being as how I'm a fisherman, not a scientist, it is likely over my head and I probably don't really understand everything it is saying anyway.

I am, after all, just a fisherman.

Given that, I'll just point out a few things that jump off the page at me and point you to the rest of the report which you can read if you feel up to it.

• “Management by catch controls (whether bag limits, IFQs or the now-required ACLs) would thus lack any rational foundation - if the assessment is accepted as it stands.”
• “...the entire assessment output would be not merely questionable but wrong.”
• “I argue that that estimate is implausibly low and is not consistent with what is known of the population dynamics of gag grouper.”
• “Hence, the ageing sample appears to have been biased towards larger and older fish, driving up the maximum observed age and making the mortality rate appear lower than it truly was.”
• “too often the weaknesses in the methods are hidden behind a veil of mathematics that offers estimates with implied precisions of three or more decimal places, encouraging far more trust in the resulting assessments than can be warranted.”
• “More immediately, it is clear (from examination of numerical simulations, if nothing else) that the value used for "overall" M in the SEDAR 10 assessment, 0.15, is far too low. It was derived using the Hoenig First Method, which fails to allow for the size of the ageing sample and produces grossly-erroneous estimates (of Z, not M) when used with the maximum observed age in a large sample. Hence the estimate lacks any credible foundation, as well as being itself implausible.”

These are only excerpts from a quick reading by an admittedly biased reader (me). Again, you can read the entire report here and make of it what you will or can. If you find it interesting or compelling, you might consider either speaking your opinion to the Council or supporting our efforts to compel the NMFS to listen to reason and treat all fishermen, recreational, charter and commercial, reasonably and fairly instead of blindly pushing ahead with business as usual, business which seems to be the closing down of all our fisheries in the very near future.

Comments by Mike Athorn: Webmaster and Commercial Fisherman

Entire Report in .pdf format.