Turtle Deaths

[sharkymark2]

Some time ago I was sick of hearing about the turtle kills we fisherman did with our boats. I rang up the relevant government body and made some enqiuries only to find out that out of the large number of deaths only one was attributed to prop strike and there was no others. I was then told that our good scientific fellows had "ass-umed" that there would have been more and therefore adjusted the number for probability. I would just like to say to the radical greens and scientific community and our media to be honourable in dealing with the truth.
This video shows some real threats happening around the world. Not pretend ones.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiQZK3A3vq0

[Richo1]

There was a photo posted on here recently that was removed very quickly, showing a dead turtle trapped in a crab pot. Why was it removed? Fishermen need to be aware of what damage their equipment can do to the environment. Go for a dive off a popular land based fishing spot and see the tangled mess of fishing lines over the seafloor.
However you are right, greenies and scientists need look at the big picture more before fiddling with their reports so they have more impact!

You only need to visit the Toress Straights and see what happens to turtles up there by 'local' fishermen in high powered out boards and government funded fuel cards.

I am a super keen fisherman and believe our fishing rights need to be protected, however all fisherman must do their bit to minimize our impact on the environment.

Regards
Richo

[cormorant]

Check snopes but from memory there is a proper story behind the above video as well.

There must be prop strikes, ones caught in pots , on line but guessing is a dumb idea to create a statistic. Facts are so much better . I had em when they make it up.

Edit - here is the snopes link- knew I'd seen it before


http://www.snopes.com/photos/animals/seaturtles.asp

[oscarbyron]

Biggest killer to them is our plastics that end up in the waterways, keeping any plastic bags, bait bags, braid offcuts etc secure will do wonders

[Matthew Thompson]

Also commercial netting kills a huge amount more so than prop stike, idiginous people and rubbish combined I would say!

[oscarbyron]

That is true, I meant in relevance to us fishoes

[danryan75]

http://www.snopes.com/photos/animals/seaturtles.asp

[trymyluck]

The future son in law has rescued a few turtles up in the Sandy Straights over the years, not sure why it happens but his theory is that they get caught in the mangroves and when the tide goes out they are left high and dry. When they free themselves they end up with air caught under their shell and cannot dive. They jump in and turn the turtle upside down and push it under to get the air out and roll them back over and off they swim. I wonder if this contributes to turtles being struck by boats.


Mark

[chris69]

Also commercial netting kills a huge amount more so than prop stike, idiginous people and rubbish combined I would say!

Hi there matthew how many is a huge amount can you give me some figure on this huge amount of turtles being killed by commercial netting.

[Moonlighter]

Matthew

You "would say",would you?

Well, you would be wrong.

When I was representing rec anglers on the MBAA during the Moreton Bay marine park rezoning a couple of years ago, I found out some truths about the distortions spread by the Govt spin doctors and their greeny mates in the (then) EPA.

The truth is that TEDs (Turtle Exclusion Devices for the uneducated) were introduced many years ago and are compulsory, and have all but eliminated turtle deaths in commercial nets. That's a fact.

Commercial fishers have no interest in catching turtles in their nets. It takes time and effort and is dangerous to remove madly struggling turtles, and that is time and affort diverted froom productive fishing. So TEDs are welcomed by the pros.

And turtle numbers have significantly increased and staged a remarkable recovery in the Bay over the past 20 years, even using the EPAs own dodgy estimates on numbers. By the way, with the assistance of the pro netters from the Bay, it was proved that the EPAs "world-leading methods" of estimating turtle numbers in the Bay under-estimate real numbers by a multiple of about 8. Yep, that means 8 times more turtles than their official calculations.

And there is more - the majority of turtles struck by boats are already sick and dying from floating disease. Proven by EPA autopsies some years ago, which they no longer routinely do because they don't get the answers that suit their eco-political views that seek to blame us fishers and boaties for all the woes and justify them further restricting our fishing and boating activities.

The same BS was being said about recreational fishermen running over dugongs, until we again got hold of their own data which showed that to be a load of bull, too. The problem always was the 8m and bigger cruisers in the southern end of the Bay travelling fast at low tide thru the narrow channels between the islands, the dugongs had nowwhere to go to escape. And even then, the numbers struck were very small each year, only one or two on average, and nowhere near enough to threaten the population's sustainability.

The biggest threats in the Bay are natural events like floods, which deposit masses of silt on the seagrass beds that turtles and dugongs need for food. The seagrass dies, but eventually recovers, but in the meantime the turtles and dugong either have to move to areas unaffected by the floods or they die. The source of the silt? In last years floods, a lot of it it came from the Lockyer Valley and other upstream areas of the Brisbane and Logan river catchments. So, whats being done to address the real threats to the survival of these species??? More no-fishing zones certainly dont do anything to solve that little problem, do they!

It was amazing that once we pointed out those facts, the horror stories about turtles and dugongs disappeared from the media during the rezoning debate.....

ML

[chris69]

And to add a bit more to moonlighters responce in the decade i was a commercial fisher not one dead turtle did i see dropped out of the nets, they can hold there breath for a very very long time over 3hours, i wish teds were around when i was doing it less work.