Posted on 10/14/2014 12:42:46 PM PDT by Brother Cracker
Basket Star
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basket_star
Spent many an hour in the marine bio lab...
OH DANG! I remember that B-movie from ages past!
They were flummoxed? I’m flummoxed too. How about you folks, are you all flummoxed too?
I’m lovin’ it.
Definite flummage here.
Sometimes, you just cut the line and pack up the tackle box and head home and hope that whatever you caught doesn’t crawl out of the ocean and stomp Tokyo into the ground.
Oh he’s flummoxed alright! He’s the most flummoxing flummox I ever flummoxing saw! I move to make ‘’flummox’’ a FR key word or something there of.
Sound advice. The last thing you’d ever want to do it goes pissing off that big ass, ugly, over-grown lizard with the worst case of bad breath in history.
I was thinking "brittle" star.
Checking your link just now brought back to mind having a biologist once tell me "basket" when I said brittle. They were right, being more precise -- but we always called them brittle stars.
Used to get ones similar to the one pictured out deep, 250 to 400 fathoms (possibly more? it's been a while) while bottom dragging off the West Coast.
I can't recall if I've seen them come from shallower depths, but it is possible.
One thing I was correct on once (which I rather regret) when a local marine biologist was wrong -- concerned what are called thornyhead rockfish/hardheads/idiots (yes, the old-timers called those fish "idiots").
Way back when there wasn't recognition that there was two differing species of the thing.
Before I pointed it out to a biologist and had that woman deny it, other biologists had noticed the differences, it just wasn't commonly known (way back then, early 1980's)
After dealing with tons of them at a time for a few years, I noticed they were not the same fish.
That sounds stupid I know...but it can be difficult to tell them apart if one doesn't know what to look for...and even then, when they are small, the distinction isn't always so clear, though usually (once one knows what to look for) the difference can be determined at a glance. I could probably still tell the difference at 20 paces...
None of this would have had much of any real effect on things -- the fish sold for the same ex-vessel price, went across the same cutting/processing tables, went to the same markets in the end (although sorted for size) etc.
What became a problem is there were different catch quotas for each species. And where I (and more than a few others) usually fished -- the quotas were significantly out-of-whack in comparison to what was there and would end up on the back deck.
These bad sets of numbers were then reinforced by yet more erroneous catch data. YEARS of it!
The species with the small quota (short-spine thornyhead), as those would be normally caught and part of the deep-water mix (particularly when one got deep enough to get out of the dover sole) would have large numbers of smallish fish.
The species with the large quota numbers (long spine thornyhead) were significantly less abundant, and those fish were not only small -- but they stayed small, never getting big like the short spines would.
These fish were basically red in color, but the shortspines, though a bit less "red" even when small, would tend to be more orangish color in comparison when they grew to larger sizes.
This led to significant amounts of short spines being landed as long spines when it came to "fish tickets" documentation, a copy of which had to go to the DF&G.
One time a fish cop (DF&G warden) asked me to show him the differences. I could have but wiggled my out of doing so, trying to not raise suspicions. I was successful on the first part, that second part not so much.
Which was a shame, since the fish cop was a generally righteous soul, one of the good guys. I was acquainted with him at that point, for the better part of 20 years. I hated to have to squirm away.
But I had no real choice in the matter, for it would have led to someone getting fined for what I knew to be bad information, which if properly enforced would have led to more needless waste, fines not deserved, and forced reduction in overall fishing efforts (which many forces were committed and aligned to bring about anyway).
There's more to the story of how the West Coast bottom trawl info the Feds (National Marine Fisheries) worked from could be FUBAR --- but that's enough for now.
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