Tim Smith

Not clear on all the things you mean here. Why do you frame your comments this way if you agree that humans are the main cause of the current rise in global temperatures? If you do agree with that, then what "agenda" exactly do you think climate science has? What past are they "ignorning"? When I read climate science articles they seem to deal in excruciating detail with the past and their agenda seems to be understand the degree and implications of current and future trends. Are you talking about policy agendas related to climate change? I guess there is plenty of room for "agendas" there. Seems to me it would be a big step forward if we could at least agree (as we have not so far on this forum or in many other venues) that the scientists who uncovered these trends are just doing their job (quite well) and aren't out to enslave humanity or some other paranoid or agenda-driven nonsense.

Weedless. Once you scrape all that down to point it looks something like "only things that happened in the past can happen in the future"...which is nonsense. As usual. Here's a guy who agrees with you. http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-october-26-2011/weathering-fights---science---what-s-it-up-to-

I don't think feelings of inadequacy contribute much to a discussion or understandings about climate. Somebody's gotta sabotage the discussion by making it emotional so it might as well be you. You and your straw man can have at it. Climate does cycle (as does weather). Does it cycle for no reason or do specific drivers influence it? Clearly it's controlled by many specific factors. How big are the changes and how will we handle them when they come around? On a fisheries forum, it makes sense to point out that some of our favorite places are going to change substantially and in ways we can't predict. Some of those changes might be fortuitous. Others, probably many more others like losing trout in Colorado, are going to really suck.

And here's one about how "mother nature" is beating the snot out of trout habitat in Colorado. I drive into valleys out here and it's like the freaking apocalypse sometimes...burned out forests and pine bark beetle and warming water and just about every other thing associated with climate change wiping out the habitat as far as you can see. http://www.nrdc.org/globalwarming/trout/trout.pdf Just put the "X" on it. It's getting ridiculous not to talk about this stuff.

This guy has preciptated tightening laws against keeping wild animals in Ohio. For a time keeping wild fish was "illegal" (and widely done anyway) in Illinois. Aquarists are shipping exotic animals to each other IN THE MAIL all over the world. Where do these lines get drawn? Being a baby-killing communist, I naturally want more laws (of any type...doesn't matter what, just sign it and figure it out later) as well as the enforcement officers of united nations checking in on us in our churches, families, and bedrooms and putting microchips in our brains. But I'm not sure how this law gets enforced. Raccoons? Bass? Fledglings that fall out of nests? What should be controlled? What's practical?

Lampropeltis triangulum syspila; red milk snake. Scarlet snake has a black cross bar near the eyes.

Yeah, you're right. I've pulled the secondary references off the website too. I think there are a lot of places like this (remember the scene from True Grit?) if you think about wetland/karst formations there's probably one near you.

It's all on the link, mic. There's a USFS/IDNR sign that name the site at the top and a few pics. I'll add "travelogue" later. I've been wrestling back and forth or whether or not to give the name of the place. It looks a little over-loved already.

I was really hoping for a copperhead, Ham, but we only got this milk snake, 2 ribbons, a garter, a black rat snake and a water moccasin. People scouring the cliff faces were finding more, but the daughter and I had stepped over one of the ribbon snakes before we even got on the road and I got witin 2 feet of the water moccasin before I realized it was a snake. It was a small one deep in the grass and I wasn't in any danger but I didn't want to drag the daughter into harm's way among the confusion of the leaf litter and fallen logs. One group found 16 water moccasins over the afternoon.

Links to pictures today at the snake migration in Southern Illinois. If you can stand the thundering herds of amped up adolescent boys turning over every log in sight on the snake road it's a pretty impressive visit. I suspect there are a lot of karst hills near swamps all over the Ozarks filling up with snakes for the winter right this very minute. It's an interesting outing on an indian summer day.

You have some valid points, and those are good examples of scientists with important discoveries, but there are some big differences between fisheries policy and astronomy in the Galileo's time and 19th and 20th century medicine. Galileo was fighting for the truth of his science, not policy. Heliocentrism never had any policy to influence. He doesn't help your example much. Pasteur and Fleming also lived during a time when science was still a fledgling pursuit and the mechanisms available to take new knowledge and turn it into laws were quite a bit different than they are not. If they didn't do advocacy, who would (although I'm not sure exactly what advocacy they actually did, perhaps you can enlighten us there)? Salk won his battle against the crazies in the first half of the 20th century, although later became a bit of a crazy himself when he side-stepped peer review and decided that megadoses of vitamin C could cure just about everything that ails you. I'm not sure his full career is a positive example about how to apply science. Modern environmental policy is a well developed field with a large number of practicioners. Bob Lackey doesn't have to build the bridge from facts to policy because there are people out there to do that already. His role is to be absolutely certain and honest and careful about the salmon and defend THAT. Similarly, you can squish the more ridiculous denial claims on "the subject which must not be mentioned" without being a champion of carbon credits (for instance). Those are 2 different things entirely.

A lot of this boils down to being honest about what you're doing. If your job (like Bob Lackey's) pays you specifically for objective information, he and others like him shouldn't step out of that role. I would say though, that now that he's retired....why not?

I have cited Bob Lackey's work and I have to say I agree with much of what is said here. The proper role of science is to tell society what's true, not to set policy. From the AFS newsfeed:

You boys should leave those poor job creators alone.

Well I'm certainly not going to talk about how I agree with you.

This was a pretty cool hike. Thought some of you might enjoy it. http://brooksmith.blogspot.com/2011/09/colorado-black-bears-acorn-feasts.html

If you're interested in the effect of those little certification labels on the fish you see in the grocery store, here's a short assessment. A major problem seems to be that there is still a big market for damaging fisheries that keeps them viable in the market.

Electrofishing CPUE is higher at night, especially for large fish that more easily avoid the electrical field. It also keeps the public out of your hair a bit more.

That's a fairly tame tirade. I'm sure you're right the oil spill helped the fish size, but the fact that things are just that much better underlines the point that the fishery was over stressed in the first place. Under the restricted seasons the snapper were trending bigger and were more abundant before the oil spill too. Now you have better catch rates and pictures of wicked big fish to show off on the forum and a better fishery in general, just like NOAA said you would have. The system is behaving just the way they said it would. If really would be nice to see you guys admit that NOAA did something right.

Nice photos. This all connects to a hugely controversial management issue that has been going on in the Gulf for a while. The Feds have insisted that by shortening the season and reducing take, the total number and weight of harvest can be increased. They're basing that on estimates of catch from "back in the day" before the fishing pressure was as high as it is now. The commercial fishers have been hysterically opposed to this and insisted that there are already plenty of fish and things can't really get better. The scientists have replied that the fishers have gotten used to a degraded fishery and if they can be patient and let the stocks grow back to historical sizes the pay-off will be substantial. Jane Lubchenko, the head of NOAA has been villified and called everything from a tyrant to....things I can't type here. ..and yet....here the fish are getting bigger and more abundant just as predicted. Seems the scientists knew what they were talking about after all.

Yeah, that's how you can get an actual head count, and it's the preferred way to sample. Unfortunately, it takes a long time plus extra equipment to mark and hold the fish. To avoid those extra labor costs and cover more ground they'll just count how many fish they catch over a designated time period (catch per unit effort or CPUE). CPUE is less accurate but it gives a qualitative measure from year to year of the relative numbers of fish in the stream in a given stretch.

I have less experience with cold water fish, but warm and cool water fish are also at their peak condition during fall, with the highest amount of fat reserves. If memory serves the pattern is the same for trout. Should probably check. Also, once the water cools the DO is usually higher, not lower. DO levels might be low right now, but when the weather turns they will be reliably high enough to avoid stressing the fish. Fall is the time fish handle stress better than any other time of year. Also, if they're doing growth analysis, their scales stop growing about now so if they collect scales now they can back-calculate fish size and see how much they grew during the year (although they might also just compare size distributions from year to year which is cheaper and faster...if less accurate).

I'd like that, Mitch. I'm back and forth across the Ozarks from Colorado to Illinois to Louisiana traveling for work and family. I'm be back in late October.

No content here.

Those crayfish are Procambrus acutus and Procambarus clarkii and the same refuge principle applies. Those crayfish can reach high densities because there aren't any fish predators, and as Muddy says, they can also burrow where they do find predators. Those species dominate in silty low oxygen systems...rice fields and such. The same thing happens with Orconectes immunis in some silty Midwest headwater streams. O. immunis dominates the crayfish assemblage where the streams are slow and shallow with low water quality that fish can't survive. Bigger crayfish species with bigger claws like Orconectes virilis become the dominant crayfish species when predator fish are present because they outcompete the smaller crayfish species for refuge. It's a trade off that plays off between being adapted for systems with and without fish.