no matter what happens with the peer review in June
the board needs to remember that weakfish is in a
depleted condition, a depressed state. We can’t agree
with that particular panel on why it is there. One of
the main things that they said was that predation may
be maintaining the population at low levels without
having contributed to the original decline in the
stock.
We agree that overfishing was the problem in the
eighties. We have used management to get the stock
started back in an increasing mode during the early
nineties and mid-nineties, and then all of a sudden it
dropped back down. Now, we definitely agree that it
was overfishing early on. We’re saying the split
happened in the early thousands that predation is the
main focus of a problem out
out there, and it is
continuing to maintain those levels and we can’t
seem to break through it to move forward. That’s it
for me. Like I said, I tried to do this real quick.