Artificial Reefs

[CBulla]

Well, anything that I would have to say has already been said by FredT.

Personally, tires aside, I'm all for the artificial reefs. There are quite a few that my county has put out for people and there appear to be no adverse effects from them at all. IMHO, take all the derelect vessels, concrete demolition debris and excess contruction materials, removed rock from building sites, etc, and make it all into reef.

The tires seem to make a better additive to asphalt (its been an ongoing study here) and for use shredded for making areas on playgrounds softer (under jungle gyms and such).

 

[Genesis]

Fishermen and divers get along fine, so long as neither is acting like a jerk. I do both and don't mind either.

 

[CBulla]

The local rag and sciensts here interact about artificial reefs and jewfish:

http://news-press.com/news/environment/p_030826grouper.html

http://news-press.com/news/environment/p_030826groupersider.html

St Petersbergs daily rag:
http://www.sptimes.com/2004/01/23/Sports/A_giant_rebound.shtml

Course I remember the days when my grandfather in his second career as a Commercial Fisherman (he wanted something to do after retiring from 30 years military) would have several of these big beasts in his ice box for sale at the local fish docks along with 1200-1500lbs of assorted other fish such as black grouper and red snapper.

 

[Rickg]

1. Here is the URL with lots of good gouge about artificial reefs and a very interesting company that is making a commercially-manufactured reef product specifically designed to rehabilitate damaged coral reefs.

http://www.ecoreefs.com/home.shtml

2. Also if you go the the following URL and scroll to pg 6 of the.pdf file you will find some discussion about several types of artificial reefs.

http://www.ncups.org/files/upsjun03.pdf

Rickg

 

[archman]

Here's a cute article fresh from CDNN. The title is rather sarcastic.

http://www.cdnn.info/industry/i040204a/i040204a.html

Concrete's great stuff. Maybe they could dump this stuff near one of the dozen sunken Liberty ships. Whatever happened to the coal waste concrete balls experimentally used in artificial reefs in the mid-'90's? A barge of those things was placed somewhere along the upper Texas coast... I forget the reason why.

 

[archman]

I scrounged around to find an easy to read management report that covered most of the "bases". Ended up with the Sanctuary Program's policy statement, small surprise. This is actually rather well written.

http://www.sanctuaries.nos.noaa.gov/library/national/arpolicy071503.pdf

Most of the useful information starts on page 26 ("An Analysis of Artificial Reef Development to Guide Decisionmaking"). Amongst the numerous positive effects noted, it also lists the potential negatives. Stress on potential, very little hard science has been done on artificial reefs. This is what keeps us lab folks from giving much endorsement for these things.

Socioeconomics is the primary driving focus now. As a diver and with a lot of fishing pals, I love artifical reefs. As an ecologist the jury's still very much out.

 

[Don Burke]

If you two (and anyone else with some observations) could spare a few moments to skim through this report, see if you find anything that you disagree with and please post it. In particular the sections on diet (p.28), migration (p.32), abundance (p. 39-40 & Table 11, figure 27 on page 41), population dynamics (p.43-44), fishing types (p.44-45, tables 14 &15), fishing by area (tables 17 & 19), depth ranges (p. 49), and regulatory measures (p. 56).

http://spo.nwr.noaa.gov/tr146.pdf

A lot of what I'm now hearing isn't tracking with the party line, and I'd like to figure out why. Call it a hobby... or something less appealing. Maybe these silly little sanctuaries really ARE working... beats me.

I haven't been able to get this to download. Is the NOAA server just having a bad day?

 

[quimby]

I haven't been able to get this to download. Is the NOAA server just having a bad day?

I had no problem @ about 9:25 on RR(cable modem)
Added later but the pdf is about 1.5meg 48 pgs

 

[archman]

Hopefully you're saving it to your hard drive first, and not opening it directly online. PDF's are a real memory bear to deal with, and government reports tend to be HUGE overflowing affairs.

 

[Don Burke]

I got it this morning. One of the servers in the line must have been in a bad mood.

TNX