A Sea Change Is Needed in Fisheries Management
What makes a good fisherman?
Used to be, it was skill in finding fish. The more a fisherman brought in, the greater his or her perceived skill.
It is time to rethink that standard. The days are over when fishermen could remove as many fish as they could find from the ocean, without regard to other animals caught in the process or to the impacts that their fishing might have on the very animals they depend on for their livelihood.
Increasingly, the ocean is sending signals that industrialized fishing has had impacts whose breadth and depth we are only now beginning to suspect. Leave aside for the moment the disastrous effects of longline fishing on turtles and seabirds or the harm that the lobster fishery may have inflicted on monk seals. Now, the fish themselves cry out for attention.
Old timers will tell anyone who listens how fish these days are smaller and less abundant. Don’t chalk that up just to some rosy recollection of the good old days. Once-plentiful manini are scarce as hen’s teeth in some areas. Populations of yellow tang, a favorite of aquarium collectors and taken by the tens of thousands in years past, are slow to bounce back. In deeper waters, ever smaller yellowfin tunas are being hauled in, prompting some fishermen to wonder whether enough youngsters are being left in the water to produce the next generations of fish. Lobsters in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands have been all but fished out. And as for depleted populations of bottomfish around the Main Hawaiian Islands, given what is being learned about how such fish reproduce, it seems almost certain that the state’s bottomfish recovery plan is doomed to fail.
Fishing crises are nothing new. On both coasts of the United States, fisheries management has largely been an oxymoron. For years, important stocks of fish have been pumped to the point of crashing. Summer flounder, swordfish, dogfish, scallops, cod, and other fish too numerous to count are the poster children of poor fisheries management. As one scientist has put it, managing fish is like measuring the height of a skyscraper by jumping from the top. By the time you get the answer, it’s too late to avoid catastrophe.
Are the same crises going to hit the middle of the Pacific as well? Almost certainly. And sooner rather than later. Already the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council is trying to win federal assistance for holders of lobster permits. If areas closed to longlining are further curtailed, in the wake of a recent government finding of its impacts on protected species, and bottomfishing is reined in by federal court action because of its potential to harm monk seals, expect to see more of the same.
Actually, the surprising thing about the crises in Hawai`i fisheries is that they have taken so long to develop. Part of that is a result of relatively recent onset of heavy fishing pressure. The dramatic developments in the longline fishery over the last few months must be seen in the context of the fishery’s own rapid growth. As recently as 1987, just 37 longliners were based in Honolulu. The number swelled to 80 by 1989, and to more than 150 in 1990. By the time the Western Pacific said enough in 1991, 172 longline vessels held permits to fish in Hawai`i waters, nearly a five-fold increase in a span of less than four years.
Today, the number of permits stands at 164, with about 114 of those active. If one considers an even more precise measure of fishing effort – the number of hooks set – longline fishing was at its record high in 1999, when 19.1 million longline hooks were dropped into the water.
Why should anyone be surprised that this geometric growth should have as its outcome the sudden depletion of ocean-dwelling animals?
After all, it is sheer folly to believe that the ocean’s wealth can be mined indefinitely, even as the fishing industry’s technical skill in finding and capturing fish increases exponentially. Yet this is almost exactly the premise on which management of the nation’s fisheries are based. That premise supposes that there is some volume of a given fish stock, called maximum or optimum sustainable yield (the two figures may differ, but both are equally vague), that can be removed from the ocean while still allowing the population of remaining fish to reproduce at a rate equivalent to some percent (about 50 percent, usually) of the reproductive rate of a “virgin” (unfished) population of the same species. Such calculations are routinely made for fish whose life histories are all but unknown.
This is nothing new. The council’s earliest approved pelagic fishery management plan, published in 1986, stated: “In summary, the ‘best scientific informative’ [sic] is of limited value in practical terms, although both the Plan Development Team and the SSC [Scientific and Statistical Committee] both certified that the best scientific information available was usedÉ There are not many proofs in the whole subject of fisheries science.”
If fishery managers were absolutely honest, the statements made so confidently as to the health of so-called “managed” fish stocks would have to be surrounded by error bars so large as to make their plans to manage these wild animals utterly meaningless. And yet the industry-blinded Western Pacific Fishery Management Council and its overseer, the National Marine Fisheries Service, press forward, denying that lobsters are in trouble, allowing juvenile fish to be captured in horrendous numbers (the minimum size for yellowfin tunas – an animal that can grow to be 300 pounds or more – is just 3 pounds), positing a management scheme for bottomfish based on wishful thinking more than evidence É
So, what makes a good fisherman? No longer can it be skill at catching fish, or fighting weather, or even scrupulously obeying rules and regulations set forth by government management agencies. A good fisherman today can only exist in the context of a well managed fishery. And if fishermen won’t stand up to the council and fight for this, difficult though it may be, to the same extent they fight for their fish, then the search for a good fisherman, like Diogenes’ search for the honest man, is going to be eternal.
Will the fish last that long?
No.
Volume 11, Number 10 April 2001