Science and the MPA's

[Aaron]

Being involved in the academic community requires your attendance at a lot of ridiculous conferences. Typically its a lot of intellectual "chest puffing" with a constant effort played by all to be the smartest person in the room. Usually this involves talking way over people's heads by the speakers followed by the audience trying to stump the speakers with questions based on a 15 minute talk about a subject they have heard for the first time from a speaker in which that area is their expertise. Its like a big game, but its fun from time to time and you get to hear some interesting science.

All of that being said, I am attending a conference tomorrow at CSULA put on by the Southern California Academy of Sciences. They gave me a small grant to do some research stuff and I originally was going just to pick up a check, but I took a look at the program and was pleasantly surprised to see a huge chunk of the meeting is centered on so cal rec fishing and the MPA's. An entire morning session is titled "Sustainable Fisheries" and in the afternoon is "Rocky Reefs: Preparing for MPA’s". These are 2-3 hour sessions each with individual talks going for about 20 minutes with a little time for questions. People directly involved with the MPA's, various universities, and several marine research organizations are all presenting.

I'm really excited about this because its a bit out of my specific field (I am a paleontologist) and I have yet to directly hear some straight talk science on the MPA's in a setting such as this. Everything I hear is so politically charged it makes me sick. As a southern California fisherman, you all know where I stand on the MPA's. I think that we are all being shafted with all of this no matter which map is chosen. As a scientist, I'm looking forward to hearing some straight DATA in a forum where nobody is trying to recruit votes. This will be an interesting setting in that, like I said at the opening of this thread, everyone wants to be the smartest person in the room and skewed/incorrect/incorrectly obtained data will likely get called out. It should be interesting. My guess is that there will be a lot of "end of the world" comments during talks as a means of people making their research significant, but it really will be nice to see some concrete data.

If you're interested in looking at the program or maybe even attending, here is the meeting's website...SCAS annual meeting. I'll post some comments here on what I hear. If you look at the program and have anything specific that you want me to watch for or if you recognize any of the names, post away...I'd love to hear the backdrop! Dr. Pondella is presenting and is actually the person that I have been in contact with and he is on the science advisory committee for the MLPA so it will be interesting to hear what he has to say. Again, this isn't a MLPA meeting that people need to concern themselves with showing up in mass. This is just a science conference that will involve the same people that are presenting the very data that is influencing the decisions being made. The questions asked will not be "so what map do you support in the MLPA process?" Questions will be more along the lines of "what methodology did you use to calculate biomass?" If that makes sense. Just don't want people driving to LA thinking that political trickery is going on!