Todd Masson's article today on upcoming speck assessment

[Speckmeister]

Todd Masson had Randy Pausina today hinting that all may be well regrading the upcoming speckled trout assessment that will be delivered to the commission as promised by the LDWF staff.

Here's a link to Todd's story: http://www.nola.com/outdoors/index.s...kled-trou.html

Now then, I hope Randy Pausina is correct.

However . . . I do have some concerns and would love feedback from Smalls and Mathgeek.

#1. I hope Randy Pausina will include the results of gill net and trammel net sampling data since 2011 when the presentation is made about this. There still could be a problem . . . With improved catch/harvest rate data due to LA Creel, the LDWF could have underestimated such data in prior years. Also, with no biomass indication, we still can't compare even LA Creel data to the biomass. Harvest/catch data is not necessarily positively correlated with indicators of biomass of speckled trout populations. In fact, we could be actually over-harvesting speckled trout if we don't have a good estimate of the biomass. Let's hope we get real data about biomass as well.

#2. By the way, this type of differences in data collection is a common statistical phenomenon whenever better sampling takes place of whatever we measure . The better and more samples taken - a clearer representation of the population occurs. But in this case, they may have considered LA Creel data only - and that's harvest/catch rate only. This could just be an artifact of improved sampling. And that still doesn't have anything to do with sampling the biomass of speckled trout out there. Catch/harvest rate data is an apple, and biomass indicators arising from gill and trammel net sampling are oranges as far as what is measured here statistically.

Hope to get some feedback from the Salty Cajun crew since this is so important for Big Lake anglers.