17,000 to One!Robert Gregory, director of the Centre of expertise for aquatic habitat research with Fisheries and Oceans, Canada (DFO) says that the removal of eel grass reduces the number of age zero cod by some 80 per cent. And Other Canadian cod researchers put it thus: "Research has concluded the [eelgrass] habitat is an effective refuge from predators, where the 90-day survival rate of juvenile cod in eel grass compared to coarse/barren bottom was 17,000 to 1."
17,000 to One!
For Maine's transportation secretary David Cole , for State Senator Dennis Damon, both of whom surely know better, in company with Sierra Club (Maine Chapter) leaders, to be comfortable with a project that would take away Penobscot Bay's eelgrass and would degrade many acres more....Uh uh!
The wiliest most successful predator of age zero cod - those just out of the egg - are other cod, those a year and more older. Juvenile cod are habitat-limited populations, when insufficient weedy refuge exists for age zero codfish, still clutching their yolk sacs, to hide , they succumb to their hungry elders.
Baldacci's consensus pact w/ MCHT, Sierra Club and the shipping industries would allow mitigation off site , replacement of Sears Island's eelgrass meadows and shoals by wetlands protection or creation elsewhere. . Basically allow payment of a wergild to compensate for killing the nursery shoals off Sears Island. Taking out the eelgrass and kelp mud and cobble habitat structure to pave the way for a container port would set cannibal fish loose in Wasumkeag's maternity ward! Shan't happen!
Seems pretty conclusive: For a myriad of reasons - scientific, ecological, esoteric, and economic... ANY development to the area on or around Sears Island would be destructive rather than constructive. Why is it so hard for elected representatives of OUR lives and OUR environs to see something so clearly obvious?!?
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