Water out of fish
Water out of fish
by Joel Preston Smith (Sound Consumer magazine, 2012)
“Last year I went fishing with Salvador Dali. He was using a dotted line. He caught every other fish.”
— Comedian Steven Wright
There’s more than enough fish in the sea.
The oceans are dying.
Don’t worry.
Panic.
The histrionic debate over whether fish stocks are healthy, or whether they’re on the verge of collapse, has consumers lost at sea. The two most prominent scientists in the controversy stand on opposite shores; Ray Hilborn of the University of Washington argues, in essence, we’re worrying needlessly. For the fishing industry, he’s the patron saint of purse seining.
Daniel Pauly of the University of British Columbia is everywhere (YouTube, The New Republic, NPR, treehugger.com), pleading for reduced harvests, if not outright bans on fishing certain stocks.
How bad is the divide? Trawling Google for “Pauly overfishing collapse destruction apocalypse” nets 45,000 results. A search for the same terms (but replacing Pauly with Hilborn) yields 2,110 results, but that’s because the name Pauly appears in 945 of them.
You probably don’t need a calculator to sum up who’s more popular with Greenpeace.
But who’s right? Who’s wrong? Should we pick a side, blindly (trustfully) throw out another line ... or just avoid seafood altogether? The answer—possibly one of the few times it’s ever been stated publicly by a journalist—is I’m not qualified to say. Few, if any reporters could competently question the findings of either Pauly or Hilborn. To even have an inkling of the science behind their work would require an advanced understanding of statistical analysis, computer modeling, marine sampling techniques, the natural history of each fish stock under consideration, the relative impacts of purse-seining vs. trawling vs. long-line vs. trolling vs. gillnetting ...
In short, the only people imminently qualified to draw us a picture ... cannot agree on what the picture looks like.
And so ... we are worried. We want to do the right thing. Behave in a way that won’t make things worse. If only someone could say what that right thing is.
The furor (and confusion) started in 1998 when Pauly and co-authors published a report in Science, arguing that global fish stocks were in jeopardy; commercial fishing (they said) had depleted larger fish, and as a consequence were targeting lower and lower levels of the marine food chain in order to replace the biomass that used to reside higher in the food web.
It sounded like common sense, but the implication was that the very foundation of the marine food chain was crumbling. Not so obvious (to the general public) was that as older, heavier fish were depleted, and then replaced by younger fish of the same species ... some fish were being netted before they could reach breeding maturity. Meaning that targeting younger, smaller fish could potentially wipe out entire generations of species, leaving few juveniles to reproduce.
The controversy reached a fevered pitch in 2006 when fisheries biologist Boris Worm (Dalhouise University, Halifax, Canada) co-authored a study in Science, arguing that if commercial fishing trends continued unabated, global stocks were doomed to collapse by 2048.
Around the globe, media cited the study as heralding ‘the end of fish.’
Hilborn has been on an anti-Pauly, anti-Worm campaign ever since. He’s the most outspoken critic of the gloom-and-doom camp—if by outspoken we mean ‘given over to invective.’ Which is not to say he’s wrong, just that he sometimes sounds like he’s inviting other biologists to step out back and count knuckles.
Worm’s 2003 study (saying that stocks of tuna on the high seas were 90 percent depleted by 1980) “was totally bogus,” Hilborn says.
“Someone should hold Pauly’s feet to the fire,” Hilborn wrote to me recently. Hilborn says Pauly claims (some) fish stocks are “60 percent deleted,” but has failed to note that those ‘low numbers’ are well within the limits set by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Service.
“The [U.S.] management goal is to reduce fish stocks to 30-50% of their unfished [sic] abundance,” Hilborn argues.
In other words, depleted may not ultimately mean harmed if those reduced numbers are compared against the target goals established by NOAA’s Marine Fisheries Service and the eight U.S. Fisheries Management Councils. The low numbers might mean we’re fishing in a way that (in essence) skims off the ‘surplus.’ If we can accept the concept of a surplus (which most of us who want to eat fish can or do accept).
Hilborn says that the public (and management agencies) should ignore the (doom-saying) Worm of 2006, harkening instead to the (upbeat) Worm of 2009. In that year, Worm (with Hilborn and others as co-researchers) reported that, “In 5 of 10 well-studied ecosystems, the average exploitation rate has recently declined ...”
That sounds positive indeed. In the abstract for the same paper, Worm and Hilborn add, “63% of assessed fish stocks worldwide still require rebuilding, and even lower exploitation rates are needed to reverse the collapse of vulnerable species.”
A 2009 press release issued by CIRSO Marine and Atmospheric Services in Australia (the employer of one of the co-authors of the study) paraphrases Worm as having said “there is still a troubling trend of increasing stock collapse across all regions.”
The Worm of 2009 doesn’t seem to sound all that different from the Worm of 2006.
Many agencies do fear collapses, and the economic turmoil that comes from fishing closures, given that many stock assessments indeed seem grim; Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick petitioned the U.S. Department of Commerce for $21 million in disaster relief last November, in the wake of low stock estimates for Atlantic cod, and a 61 percent decline in groundfish landings between 2009 and 2010; the outlook for Chilean sea bass, sharks, grenadiers, bluefin tuna, blue ling, and orange roughy is also reported to be grim.
It’s not all dire. The Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife predicted “strong returns” of spring chinook and coho this year, and extended the chinook season in the lower Columbia River by eight days. Halibut fisherman in Puget Sound will get a four-day extension this year, partly because last year’s catch fell short of the quota by about 11,600 pounds. If you troll hard, you can find some positive numbers, but you have to use a long line, and you have to be patient.
It’s an enormously complicated issue, and even fisheries scientists admit they don’t have enough information to made accurate estimates for all stocks (some of which are commercially valuable, some threatened). Rick Methot, who’s been modeling ocean ecosystems for NOAA for more than 30 years, says that of the 230 most important stocks managed by U.S. fisheries agencies, NOAA only has “adequate assessments for about 57 percent of them.”
NOAA’s 2011 Fish Stock Sustainability Index notes that 237 major fish stocks “have overfishing thresholds not defined or applicable, or are unknown with respect to their overfishing status.”
It’s not for lack of willpower, or competence. Methot says it’s primarily lack of funding. The agency currently operates eight vessels to conduct fish assessments for the 18,000 square miles under its purview. NOAA budgeted $62 million this fiscal year for fish counts, says Methot, that will provide current estimates and near-future projections for an industry whose value in 2009 was estimated at $196 billion in sales, income and “value-added impacts,” according to NOAA’s 2013 budget request to Congress.
Consider for a moment, the surreal nature of the dotted line: $62 million to NOAA to tell us how fish are doing, but the U.S. government outlays $162 million in subsidies for one fishing industry alone—high-seas trawlers. And then provides disaster relief when some stocks collapse. It’s a little like getting a handout to buy a nice gun to rob the bank, then going back to the bank and filing for financial relief because the vault is empty. If you’re lost, you’re not alone.
So ... who to believe? What to do? They (the researchers) don’t know—not with a high degree of assurance. The author of this essay certainly doesn’t know. Maybe you don’t know. But Sound Consumer generally advocates a better-safe-than-sorry attitude. If you want some reasonable advice, we recommend turning to (of all places) a living fish museum—The Monterey Bay Aquarium. Since 1999, the aquarium has maintained the Seafood Watch program, which aims to tell consumers how to eat sustainably. Their seafood ap for the iPhone has been downloaded 240,000 times to date—which, ironically, was the projected harvest of chinook for Southeast Alaska in 2008.
“When there is scientific uncertainty,” they note, “we err on the side of conservation.”
05/24/13 | Comments | Water out of fish