Oh God! Look what we have done now!!

Twister_Ken said:
Govt minister - Richard Clayborne? - was on R4 today programme this morning at about 0630(?) being grilled over the decision to only institute 30-something of the 100-something zones proposed. He was quite robust on the lack of evidence for many of them. R4 interviewer suggested that it has been suggested that divers and anglers were gonna be the main beneficiaries and that an academic study had concluded that they might contribute - was it £1.7bn - to the cost of the exercise. That seemed to justify the description 'ivory towers' to me.

Spokeswomen from the Marine Conservation Soc. was treated rather more gently by Ms R4 but seemed to be struggling a bit although she wasn't challenged on the evidence question.

No doubt the intrepid can find it on iPlayer.
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The interview on Radio Cornwall had no negatives, left you with the felling that it was the best thing since sliced bread, everyone was in favor of there introduction, and as a added bonus it would put £3.5 billion into the local economies. Though half the income was the value people put on saving the environment for there children, not actual money, but then it was not challenged.

Brian
 
oldharry said:
Well as a first step, Telegraph's Editor has promised to publish a letter tomorrow from BORG and SBPA strongly objecting to the article.

Nothing they like more than a nice bit of controversy! All good copy....
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Glad to see the letter has been printed in today's Telegraph.
 
SAPurdie said:
Just a simple question or two... Do seahorse eggs stick to anchors? Were there seahorses in the channel before anchored boats?
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Seahorse eggs are actually nurtured by the male in a pouch. So if you look at Seahorse sites and see pics of pregnant males , its not a typo! Your second question - nobody knows. Until Neil Garrick-Maidment arrived, nobody bothered to study them. What is known is that they have been in Studland bay throughout living memory, and there are accounts from before the war of their presence there. By the early 1960s their presence in the bay was well established. Inshore channel fishermen report seeing them daily in their catches, often hanging on to pots and pot lines . They just 'throw them back' and keep their mouths shut. To the pro fishing community they are not a rarity in the channel or the Solent, and they do not see why there is so much fuss about them.

Which is what makes such nonsense of all this fuss about 'destruction of habitat'. We have been there with our boats and anchors for over 100 years. So have they. So has the eelgerass, which has even recovered from a disease that nearly eliminated it right across Europe in the 1930's.
 
sighmoon said:
Can anyone tell me if the no-anchor zone is still in force?
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The no anchoring zone was part of an experiment to see if anchoring (or lack of it) had any impact on eelgrass. Although funded by government, it was not supported by NGM - mainly because he and his mates did not get the contract. However the published findings showed that impact of anchoring was minimal, and as this was NOT the result required to meet NGM's halfbaked theory it was quietly buried. It was, however not a good experiment as the no anchor zone was in an area where few anchored anyway.

Now confined to the dustbin of history.
 
Tranona said:
The no anchoring zone was part of an experiment to see if anchoring (or lack of it) had any impact on eelgrass. Although funded by government, it was not supported by NGM - mainly because he and his mates did not get the contract. However the published findings showed that impact of anchoring was minimal, and as this was NOT the result required to meet NGM's halfbaked theory it was quietly buried. It was, however not a good experiment as the no anchor zone was in an area where few anchored anyway.

Now confined to the dustbin of history.
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It was also rubbished by Nat England because it didnt confirm their stand on eelgrass: they claimed that the controls were not properly set up so the findings were invalid. Seeing as they in fact were directly involved insetting it up, and part funded it (£24k of tax payers money, out of a total of about £125k. How can they just write that off?) this seems highly questionable. BORG raised this in our Commons Select Committee presentation last Autumn.
 
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