World Renown Scientist Dr Walter Starck PHD.
“Expansion of green Zones is a political cheap shot.”
Dr Walter Starck said today, “The proposed expansion of green zones on the GBR is a hypothetical solution to an imaginary problem. Over 90% of the GBR is already a green zone in that it is rarely visited and fishing pressure is so low as to be effectively non-existent. The claim of over fishing is not simply an overstatement it’s absurd. The total commercial and recreational catch only comes to some 6000 tonns/year or an average of about 17 Kg/Km². This is less than 1% of the yield of beef from good grazing land or of what reefs elsewhere can and do sustain. Extensive and expensive underwater surveys of coral trout populations funded by GBRMPA show no evidence of depletion. Why have these not been published?”
He also stated “Green zones are appropriate where fishing pressure is intense enough to significantly reduce breeding populations. Where fewer juvenile recruits are available than an area will sustain a protected breeding stock can make a significant difference. However, where fishing pressure is low, as on the GBR, reproductive capacity of breeding stocks far exceeds suitable habitat available for new recruits. Increasing this excess capacity by some small amount is meaningless. All that more green zones here can achieve is to increase fishing pressure on the open reefs.”
Dr Starck said, “Expansion of green zones is a political cheap shot.” “ It’s easy, attracts attention, saving the reef is always popular, and with no real problem to begin with everything is in place for it to be declared another shining example of successful reef management. They might as well be managing the moon.”
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Great Barrier Reef threatened: so where is the evidence?
By Walter Starck
Over the past four decades, not a year has passed without news reports of dire threats to the Great Barrier Reef. Some have been new threats, others old ones, refurbished or just reiterated. Typically the source is presented as an “expert”. None of these prophesies of doom have materialised and the GBR has remained a vast and essentially pristine natural region. Of the nearly 3,000 reefs in the GBR complex, only a few dozen are regularly visited, and even these have relatively sparse usage with detectable human effects being rare or trivial.
Not a single one of the thousands of species of reef creatures has been exterminated since European settlement. Not one is endangered. The commercial and recreational fishing harvest is less than 1 per cent of the rate sustained by a broad range of reefs elsewhere. No harmful level of toxins, nutrients or other chemical pollutants has been detected on the reef. Although claims are made of increased sedimentation due to human activity, the evidence for this is indirect and uncertain. In any case such evidence is restricted to near-shore waters and even then there is no indication of increased turbidity between the uninhabited Cape York region and the more populated regions to the south.
The big problem for truth and reality in this regard is that the reef is inaccessible, it is underwater and it is vast. Anyone can claim anything and who’s to know differently?
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Originally Posted by nulla
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.....SIZE limit 
...no problems with a minsize being RELATED to one or 2 previous spawns.
