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Politics : The Environmentalist Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: neolib who wrote (20560)	2/20/2008 5:43:37 PM
From: greenspirit	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 36921

Sea Lions are smart and love Salmon. Sea Lion populations off the west coast have grown from 10 thousand in 1950 to over 300 thousand today. Hundreds of sea lions follow salmon and steelhead runs up the Columbia River. They feast on Salmon and swallow as many as 13,000 returning salmon each spring in the Columbia River, nearly 3,000 a year at Bonneville Dam. The U.S Army Corps of Engineers has been working with Oregon and Washington fisheries experts to reduce the number of fish eaten by Sea Lions. They've tried every trick in the book, but nothing has worked. Each year the Sea Lion population increases by five percent. NOAA Fisheries Services wants permission to kill some Sea Lions before the runs are wiped out. Sea Lions are protected by the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

To: neolib who wrote (20560)	2/20/2008 6:12:30 PM
From: greenspirit	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 36921

Al Gore must be in hiding.

To: neolib who wrote (20560)	2/20/2008 6:23:17 PM
From: Hawkmoon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 36921

Neo, I don't disagree with you about Salmon populations. There's considerable evidence that damming rivers has consequences to denying spawning sites to that particular species. However, depletion of fisheries involve the whole gamut of commercial and sport fish that have no interaction with freshwater bodies of water. And it logically follows that the dual pressures of overfishing and depletion of their primary food sources (phytoplankton > Zooplankton > and on up the food chain) must be considered equally. And blaming GW for changes in nutrient flow is a chicken-egg argument. There is clearly a symbiotic relationship between atmospheric replenishment of mineral nutrients to the oceans and the health of the phytoplankton blooms that make up the foundation of the food chain. They can not be analyzed separately, but must be analyzed as a whole in any models. I know I harp on this issue a bit too much, but the logic seems so very clear to me (as marine biology has always held a bit of fascination for me) that I find it difficult to believe that more educated, and allegedly informed, scientist can't perceive the implicit correllation. I just find myself attributing this disconnect between the sciences to over-specialization of scientific fields and de-emphasis on collaborative research. After all, there's really no incentive for these various "experts" to share the limited pool of financial resources available for studying GW (or anything else).. Every expert has a particular bias towards their own research and it's relative importance (even oceanographers).. And as a result, they often can't see the forest for the trees when it comes to fully understand the dynamic forces at work in nature. Finally... research on phytoplankton is a relatively young (and mundane) field. Only with recent advances in satellite geo-surveying technology have oceanographers been able to properly track annual changes in phytoplankton populations. Thus, accumulating accurate data prior to the advent of satellite imagery might be difficult to achieve. This would negate our ability to properly assess the unforseen consequences of decades of soil conservation efforts and how it has deprived the oceans of critical nutrients. Hawk