Interesting Article - Forums Archive

Kelper

2014-04-23 04:55:26

Any truth to this?

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/376258/pacifics-salmon-are-back-thank-human-ingenuity-robert-zubrin

fveureka

2014-04-23 13:11:11

Interesting article, are we really catching Canadian pinks? The take away for me is politically there is much more money for global warming than methods that would seemingly promote fish production and a healthy ocean.

Kelper

2014-04-23 13:57:29

We had a different water color in front of Craig this last summer. It's hard to describe the color it was, but it was almost a neon color. Wondering if that was psytoplankton?

fveureka

2014-04-23 19:03:18

Kelper, Haida Guii is not very far from your area and if the bloom could be seen by NASA then probably so...

Kelper

2014-04-23 19:45:07

POWHA hatchery had a huge return on Coho too..

akfish1

2014-04-23 20:53:52

Hidden Falls was down I believe but Deer Lake/Mist Cove got back very large numbers two years in a row.

Drew

2014-04-23 23:06:13

Interesting indeed. Thanks for posting.

Benmar

2014-04-29 18:32:41

Interesting and hopeful concept, but the article is one sided and polarizing. In the end, the author argues, our actions are either creative or destructive. This bypasses any science or reason and attempts to make it a moral issue (wtf?). In reality almost nothing we do as humans has a purely positive or negative effect. Often we fail to even produce the desired effect lol. The mechanisms at work in the ocean care little for our ideals (as every fisherman knows).

Take the invention of the microwave oven for example (source wikipedia)

It was in 1945 that the specific heating effect of a high-power microwave beam was discovered, accidentally. Percy Spencer, an American self-taught engineer from Howland, Maine who worked at the time for Raytheon was working on an active radar set when he noticed that a Mr. Goodbar he had in his pocket started to melt: the radar had melted his chocolate bar with microwaves. The first food to be deliberately cooked with Spencer's microwave was popcorn, and the second was an egg, which exploded in the face of one of the experimenters.

They didn't expect the heat, or the egg explosion.

We'll never be able to foresee with 100% clarity the outcome of our actions, nor will we be able to stop interacting with the environment. In a changing environment, adaptability is the key to success, but we must be careful in adopting new strategies if we want to improve our world, particularly those strategies which are likely to have consequences far beyond our understanding. Hopefully Iron fertilization can be a tool in our toolbox, sequestering carbon and feeding the ocean. (Who doesn't want more salmon?) However we have to remember that anything we do to promote a monoculture decreases genetic diversity and opens that species up to bacterial and viral risks. If we increase the concentration of diatoms through iron fertilization, what happens when something unintended starts to dine on them? What happens when something else adapts to dine on the iron and cuts out the diatoms altogether? What happens?

The microwave ended up being a pretty profitable and popular mistake, but nobody's selling hot egg exploding in your face...

more info:

https://www.whoi.edu/oceanus/series/ocean-iron-fertilization

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization

John Murray

2014-05-30 15:16:06

That was a good article thanks for pointing it out.

One thing I didn't get was the comments on the Gulf of Alaska being "nutrient poor""a virtual desert dominated by jellyfish".I'd like to know where that researcher got the info.While on a very small scale I see the coastal area I fish in as being very productive last season and it looks good this year.The needlefish are back big time,a lot of krill seems decent to good.Then in 2013 the numbers of salmon in the Gulf was amazing.Its hard to fathom the productivity in the ocean to feed all those fish in 2013.

It a stretch to connect the dots with the deal in BC in 2012 for me.