Bet you never thought you’d read those three words in a sentence, eh?
Climate Change May Bring the Nassau Grouper’s Moonlit Orgies to an End
Just before a full moon ascends over the Caribbean, Nassau groupers congregate by the thousands in winter and early spring to lace the water column with eggs and sperm. One such bacchanalia in the Bahamas in 1971 included an estimated 30,000 to 100,000 of these four-foot-long, brown-and-white-striped fish getting their freak on. Bull sharks visit this spawning frenzy too, in the hopes of an easy meal, as do gigantic whale sharks who can’t resist all that fresh caviar. (snip)
Trouble is, after decades of overfishing, just 10,000 mature Nassau groupers remain, and their spawning spectacles can’t occur just anywhere. The fish, which can weigh as much as a bulldog, breed only in a narrow band of temperatures, from about 74.2 to 80.6 degrees Fahrenheit (24 to 27 degrees Celsius). According to a study published by Erisman and lead author Rebecca Asch in the journal Diversity and Distributions, climate change could cook the Nassau grouper’s orgies out of existence.
Through computer modeling, Erisman and Asch dialed up all the Caribbean habitat currently conducive to grouper sexy times and then projected how much would remain over the course of the next century if current carbon pollution rates continue as expected. The findings were bleak: Some 82 percent of the Nassau grouper spawning habitat found between 1981 and 2000 could disappear by 2081. Most of this lost habitat would be in the waters surrounding Cuba, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and Central America’s Mesoamerican Barrier Reef System.
Did you catch the flip from “overfishing” to AGW doom? In fact, much of the rest of the article, and others if you look them up, discuss the issue of overfishing. It’s like they threw ‘climate change in there for the hell of it.
“Pollution”, LOL. They don’t even make an effort to sound scientifically ethical.
“as expected”. Yeah they’re using warmist projections that have never been right to determine future weather in a small area of the planet. Yeah, that’s believable!
The real problem with Nassau grouper population is that commercial fisherman pounce on the spawning aggregation sites and take the mature spawning adults like fish in a barrel. Even though the fish have been protected and listed as endangered, and are well protected in the United States waters, there are mixed regulations and lack of enforcement in island nations and Mexico. Fishing for them is allowed in most places, with restrictions. Residents are allowed to fish for them in spawning aggregation sites, seasonal rotations, line fishing allowed but not gillnets, etc.
Protection of these fish is spotty at best, half-hearted, and not well enforced. Work on these real problems that would directly impact fish populations rather than waste energy and resources trying to make sacrifices at the altars of climate change to appease doomsday prophets. Might as well throw virgins into Montserrat’s volcano to bring the fish back.
This, in a bit shell, is what the problem is with our science at many levels. A hoax of an issue is established, then it must be repeated constantly and incorporated into all serious discussion.