Canalman, fact, yes Virginia they did weigh 25 ( 22 to 25 on average)pounds if you have no personal experience in the recent ( last 30 years) then you wouldn't know. No I am not a googan, googans only make statements like yours. Now that being said, the tremendous influx of baby pogies that happens to coincide with the study would only serve to show that that was what school fish are and were eating. Duh! am I the only one that remembers the giant schools of baby pogies we were infested with 3-4 years ago?MikeP.,I am sure you must remember in the sixties all the harbors of the cape had large pogies, the canal was inundated with whiting, especially in June, unfortunately we don't get those runs anymore. Every year the squid run on Billingsgate and Cape Cod bay was tremendous. ( I have seen a resurgence in Squid in Barnstable in May these last two years) Noting that in this study was started, as usual, by the feds, when the problem was already well under way. Of course they are eating lobsters and crabs, first off lobsters are everywhere in rocky terrain, hell they even inhabit channel walls in sand and mud having burrows such as line Nauset inlet and Barnstable harbor channels. But pogies are, if they are available in sizes other than peanut, thier preferred food.
Studys done on the low end of bait cycles will only show what is self evident. If there are only peanut bunker then that's all your going to find in thier stomachs. Remember these are done by grad students not someone who spends most of his life on the water. They have only the data they collect there and then and can only postulate a thoery from that. History rarely gets involved though it should. Kinda like the seal population problem we have now. They are protected but no one on the federal scientific side can say for sure 100% what the historical population was.
I love it.