The Wild Side for Jan. 29, 2012
Will feds new models work here?
More than four years after Congress mandated, the National Marine Fisheries Service has come up with more accurate methods of estimating fish stocks in federal water.
The wonder here is whether the Internal Revenue Service would have given a taxpayer that leeway when it comes to paying taxes.
The new methods announced last week will take common folk weeks to figure out the right questions to ask to determine if our federal fishery managers, controlled by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, finally have discovered that recreational fishermen have a stake in this game.
NOAA, NMFS and, for us, the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council have been playing this game for many years.
Our federal managers often complained that the biggest problem in managing near 500 species under their purview was counting recreational anglers’ catch.
NOAA’s Eric Schwaab, who has the lengthy title of “acting assistant secretary of commerce for conservation and management,” told the press in Washington, D.C., that the new method gives managers a better way to account for catches in their statistical models.
“Better, more accurate estimates of anglers’ catch are important to sustainable management of fisheries,” Schwaab said.
Why the four-year delay?
“We didn’t want to rush into something that would not fully address the problems,” Schwaab said at the same press gathering.
Granted the new models had to be tested, but Schwaab need not worry because NOAA certainly didn’t “rush into” anything while the recreational fishermen were left wondering if we’d run into the same bureaucratic edicts that have, in those same four years, doubled the price of hunting ammunition and forced boaters to use corrosive ethanol in the gasoline that powers their boats.
What is sure is that the new statistical measurements will have an impact on the hundreds of thousands of Louisiana recreational fishermen, if only because NOAA noted red snapper estimates it uses focuses on the Florida’s Gulf of Mexico catch, numbers that don’t have any relationship to what’s caught here.
The fact that Louisiana catches are seldom mentioned is an indication that the federal folks still don’t understand they have a problem, a big problem.