The exploits of Greenpeace & Kat

They play on the general publics knowledge of fish...that being that all fish are like salmon or cod, breeding easily and all over the place...sad.
 
Note to the obviously Greenpeace affiliated guy pictured in the story from the second link.... its called shampoo.....

“Don’t do drugs, because if you do drugs, you’re a hippie, and hippies suck.”
- Eric Cartman (Trey Parker) from South Park

:smile:
 
Jean said:
"Orange roughy stocks were sustainable"


Since when can a fish that lives at depth until the ripe old age of 150, not breeding until 30 or 40 years old with low fecundity be part of a sustainable fishery???????????????? :shock:



J

The fisheries "management" argument goes like this: it takes 3-4 years fishing to reduce orange roughy stocks on a seamount to 10- 20% of the original stock, then the vessels move on to target the next seamount(s). As there are over 500 seamounts that have been located to date within the NZ fishing zone, this will allow 100-120 years recovery period before the seamount is fished again....simple eh?
 
Clear as mud M, if there was a single fishing boat out there, and New Zealand 'seamounts' were true oceanographic features rising in excess of 1000 metres from the seabed (and not breaking the sea surface) - not the 100m as defined by NZ MFish (instead of being hills and knolls, most of our seamounts would be pimples, on internationally recognised scales that is).

All rather bizarre.

Of course you'd have to sample/fish the 'seamounts' in a haphazard manner to enable stocks to replenish (lateral migration; if in fact they do this, because we really don't know a lot about their biology/migratory behavior); serial depletion along 'seamount' chains serves only to wipe a fishery out, from the coast to the distal-most part of earth. Also, I don't really think those lovely little benign trawlers sit above one of these features for 3-4 years, smashing, smashing, pummeling, crashing and smashing (did I say smashing?) the seabed fauna (that is intuitively linked via some coupling to benthopelagic roughy stocks) with a declining CPUE.

I don't know what we're all worried about. :heee:
 
Steve O'Shea said:
.
All rather bizarre.



I don't know what we're all worried about. :heee:

Dang it Dr O - those fishing people think its a really good conservation strategy and you go spoiling it by adding some facts. (Incidentally, some of those 'hills' are artifacts on the echo sounder caused by the vessel rolling as it undergoes a 180 degree turn to survey the next section - thats why they're all in a regular pattern) :bugout:
 
Lordy Lordy Lordy Be
Neil must have been blasting on the stereo last night when this one was sent.
..............

I got a squid I got a squid I got a squid I got a squid

.. guess what?! ...

Yep. We put the net in (ring net, Roger's is good but mashes stuff a bit) at about 2.5 knots at dawn this morning, and got the usual - big orange-eyed polychaete, some salps, some red mysids... and a CRANCHIID!! It's about 10 mm ML, eyes on stalks, arms very short (almost not discernible) and tentacles very long, teeny-tiny round fins - similar to the one on the poster but not quite the same, I think - the eyes are teardrop-shaped, not round. I haven't looked at it under the scope yet. But it's beautiful. :smile:

Will put the net in again at dusk this evening, weather permitting - it's full moon tonight so I think things might be a little deeper than they otherwise would be.
...................
Kat's in squid heaven right now. Sigh. Why am I here pushing paper?
 
Keep the home fires burning Dr. SOS !
give our best to the brave lady !
and hey, WK, have you gone right wing on us with Tony? :biggrin2:
 
Here she goes again.........
..............
Hi, gang!
After a week at sea (which you can read about on the blog), with some delays due to rough weather, we are finally getting near where we want to be. And last night the weather gods were so kind as to calm the raging seas long enough for me to drop a net in, at long last! Because there was still a little wind and swell, we gave it a go with a net designed to catch debris rather than animals - the mesh is coarser (about 1.5 mm) and a bit rougher, and a it's a sturdier construction in general - didn't want to risk blowing out the good net and losing the catcher-bucket on the first go! So we did two 10-minute tows, and pulled in a few krill, some brilliant blue copepods, a few startling deep-water fish (up to about 4 cm), a bluebottle jelly, a couple of isopods, some polychaetes and a few mangled salps, but no squid. There were a few mangled gelatinous masses in the folds of the net, but the abrasive mesh made them pretty well unidentifiable. This morning, though I got up to try again at dawn, this time with the magic fine-mesh ring net. Just as the sky was beginning to lighten in the east, we put it over the side, crossed our fingers, pulled it in, and... bingo! There, swimming around at the top of the sample (put into an acrylic cylinder for easier viewing) was a beautiful, tiny, perfect cranchiid squid! Its mantle is about 10 mm long, its eyes are out on stalks, and even now (that it has sadly perished), it is almost entirely transparent except for the digestive gland and eyes. When it calms down a bit (the weather was too good to last) I'll put it under the scope and do some sucker- and photophore-counting, and see whether I can give it a more definitive name. In the meantime, hopefully conditions will allow a few more tows at dusk this evening (that's one benefit of it getting dark by 5.30).
I'll keep you posted! I hope to have some pictures soon to send through to Steve, so he can post those as well. Also, if he tells you I'm green around the gills, it's all lies - I would like to state for the record that I have not yarfed ONCE, and that's more than I can say for some of the other crew. Who's a salty dog NOW, aharr?!
............

There's more about to happen, but I'll post no details. Can't afford to give anything away online ... you know ... just in case there are spies out there. :wink:
 
.... and here are a couple of pics of the baby squid in question (remember, difficult to photograph such small things on a moving (rolling) ship). These pics are taken by and courtesy of Roger Grace.

I'll not try an identification until I have the specimen before me; tricky things these cranchiids!

download.php


download.php
 
Jean said:
BTW are you gonna make it down south for the NZMSS conference and symposium this year??? Should be interesting we got Dr Sylvia Earle speaking!!!!!

Afraid not Jean, have 3 public speaking engagements here in Auckland & Tauranga over the same time period. It's feast or famine; afterwards things will wind down for a few weeks (until July).
 
There's more ....
......

This morning's tows were fruitful! Funny, as it gets light, different animals dominate the tows, even if they only differ by 15 mins. The first one was mostly krill, although we got two largish portuguese man o'war (shudder), then came the really beautiful one (tell you about it in a minute) - again, mostly krill but with some polychaetes and other stuff - and then one with much less krill but about 30 pteropods (two kinds, brown ones (which is most of them) and some delicate pink ones).

But the middle tow... I emptied it into the acrylic cylinder and peered into it, disappointed not to see any squid at the top, and then I noticed a euphausiid dragging a little squid around (the [Ed] Custard!) - only about 5mm, I thought it was another cranchiid at first (like the one on the poster) but now that i look at it it might be an onychoteuthid. Anyway, more exciting was that I saw a little tiny orange one that looked like an octopus, so I decided in the interest of time to save the whole sample - and there were six of them!! Argonauta sp., I'm pretty sure, in perfect condition and all under 2 mm ML. You excited yet? :smile: I also saved some fish from the sample, and good specimens of the other interesting bugs - a few of what we think are Phronima, a couple polychaetes and some other stuff. I've also got the leftover sorted-through krill.

Roger discovered that he can take pics through the scope with his digital camera, so hopefully I can send you a better one of Leachia, and a few from today.

Getting better and better!!!

:biggrin2:
..............
 

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