Fuckin' A, man. Fuckin' A.

[zotz]

The Lamlash Bay no-take zone's to go ahead. Well, that's good news. It's very small in itself, but it's cautiously expected to make a reasonable difference to nearby waters, and now that the principle's been adopted we can maybe see many more. I spoke to a couple of people from COAST last year - they seem to have worked very hard for this.

The basic idea, if you don't fancy reading the article, is that areas are set aside so they don't get hoovered clean. There should - should - then be a thriving area of wildlife which will not only preserve species but also act as a fertile spawning ground. Obviously one such won't make a vast difference, butif there are signs of it working maybe it'll spread. We certainly need to work on fisheries management. It's been a disaster so far. The Clyde used to be an astonishing place to fish, but now there's only scallops and prawns. The herring fishery collapsed decades ago, and if I remember rightly there's only even one boat doing regular sea angling.

Comments

[steer.livejournal.com]

I dived a marine reserve in the Med last year and it was noticably richer in wildlife than the other two dives I did in the area. It had only been in place a couple of years too. Of course this could be coincidence or just what I'd been told to expect.

It gives me the feeling that undersea ecosystems can be pretty damn resilient if we used farming methods less ruinously damaging. I certainly hope it's the case.

[lsur.livejournal.com]

Good news - every bit counts and it's never clear to what extent all the small areas fit together.

[jgbingo.livejournal.com]

Marine reserves in NZ appear to be extremely successful, if only (as advocates point out) because it tends to highlight horribly large differences between them and non-reserve areas where the open-cast fish miners have been.