Roadtrip anyone?????

[tweedwolfscream]

(08-12-2014 11:53 PM)MuskieBait Wrote:  I would tend to use more common sense than trusting the guide fully...but common sense isn't so common these days.

Question is, unless there's been a recent toxic spill or something, how is "common sense" going to tell you the chemical content of a fish fillet better than labratory testing done 3 or 5 years ago? Plenty of people just going on "common sense" would recoil at the thought of eating a pike from the "dirty" lagoons of the Toronto Islands, but can't wait to go to the cottage up Burk's Falls way every weekend of the summer and catch some big Pickerel Lake eyes for dinner with the family. MOE advises the opposite. Gonna prefer the science on this one.

Not that I take the advisories completely literally either, and we've been through this on the forum before, with various opinions... one of the limitations I see is that the actual number of meals/month are kind of arbitrary, 8 is the highest given only because "eat fish twice a week" is a nutritional recommendation from someone or other, and fractions of that number are assigned to fish with various levels of contaminants... and of course these contaminants are cumulative, so what matters is how much you eat in the very long term, not each month. But they still provide a basis of comparison between species and locations that you wouldn't get if you just went by what the water smells like.