Writing in National Geographic, Drs. Carl Safina and Andrew Read accuse Northeast Fisheries Service Regional Administrator, John Bullard, of not enforcing regulations on harbor porpoise by-catch.
by Saving Seafood staff
WASHINGTON (Saving Seafood) November 5, 2012 — In a recent National Geographic post "As Fisheries Service Dithers, New England Porpoises Drown," Carl Safina, founding president of the Blue Ocean Institute at Stony Brook University, and Andrew Read, the Stephen Toth Professor of Marine Biology at Duke University, accuse NOAA's new Northeast Fisheries Service Regional Administrator, John Bullard, of not enforcing regulations on harbor porpoise by-catch. But Drs. Safina & Read fail to mention the analysis that was the underpinning of Mr. Bullard's decision, and fail to give credit to the commercial fishing industry for recent efforts at improving compliance and making the by-catch avoidance devices – known as "pingers" — more effective.
Writing that, "new regional Fisheries Administrator and former New Bedford mayor John Bullard just gave those fishermen a free pass to ignore the law for another four months," Drs. Safina & Read failed to mention NOAA's rationale behind the movement of the two month closure from October 1 – November 30, 2012 to February 1 – March 31, 2013. The decision was not an arbitrary move by Mr. Bullard; it reflects the findings of an in-depth analysis performed by NOAA comparing the benefits of an October closure and those of a February shut down. The results of the analysis indicated that the February closure would likely be more effective in preventing excess harbor porpoise by-catch than the October closure. In his subsequent comments, Dr. Safina clarifies his concerns that the analysis was not peer-reviewed, but in the original article he and Dr. Read make no mention of the analysis, instead making an ad hominem attack on Administrator Bullard.
Drs. Safina & Read point out that Mr. Bullard is a former mayor of New Bedford, which led commenters from New Jersey and Florida to question Mr. Bullard's credentials and to suggest a conflict of interest. The authors failed to note that Mr. Bullard has not served as mayor of New Bedford for two decades. It was, in fact, a pro-environment decision — to build a secondary wastewater treatment plant, bringing the city into compliance with the Clean Water Act, that cost him re-election to a fourth term. The authors also failed to note that Mr. Bullard has significant qualifications for his current position. He led NOAA's first Office of Sustainable Development and Intergovernmental Affairs under President Clinton, and is the immediate past President of the Sea Education Association in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. He holds degrees from Harvard and M.I.T.
While NOAA's analysis showed that moving the closure from October to February would not affect harbor porpoise conservation, it is greatly helping New England fishermen, who fish extensively in the fall and would have been significantly harmed by the planned October closure. By moving the closure from October to February, Mr. Bullard was not rewarding fishermen for non-compliance, as Drs. Safina & Read suggest. He was acting as a fisheries manager should, by weighing environmental and socioeconomic concerns and reaching a resolution that avoids inflicting heavy economic losses on an already-struggling industry, while still managing to produce the conservation measures that the area closure was designed to achieve.
Writing that Mr. Bullard made this decision "mainly to save New Hampshire fish processors income in the crucial fall season," Drs. Safina & Read, dismiss economics as a valid reason to move the closure. Like many ecologists and conservation advocates, they forget or ignore that the law governing fisheries clearly states: "Conservation and management measures shall, consistent with the conservation requirements of the Magnuson-Stevens Act (including the prevention of overfishing and rebuilding of overfished stocks), take into account the importance of fishery resources to fishing communities…"
Drs. Safina & Read also overstate harbor porpoise mortality. They begin their article by writing, "every twelve hours in the Gulf of Maine, a porpoise swims into a net it cannot see, struggles until it runs out of breath, and drowns." This metric, however, exaggerates the most recent statistics by 40%. A death every twelve hours would mean two harbor porpoise deaths per day, or 730 a year. The most recent data available on actual number of harbor porpoises harmed by gill nets is 516, not the 800 annually that Drs. Safina & Read claim. This means that the entire gillnet fishery harms 516 harbor porpoises out of a total population of almost 80,000 (at the most recent estimate). In a perfect world, no porpoises would be harmed, but it is important to note that far from the implication of mass slaughter that Drs. Safina & Read's post suggests, current statistics show that gillnets harmed only 0.6% of the estimated total population.
Drs. Safina & Read are critical of moving the dates of the harbor porpoise closure, partly because they see it as rewarding an allegedly noncompliant commercial fishing industry, writing, "New England gill-net fishermen simply refuse to use a proven solution that they helped develop." The referenced solution, an acoustic device called a "pinger", which deters harbor porpoises, has actually been used extensively by fishermen. NOAA's most recent observer data on the devices' use showed that the compliance rate was at least 90%.
But the devices have not always performed perfectly. For many fishermen, noncompliance has never been an issue. Doing so isn't always easy, however, because of difficulties with determining if and when the device has failed In actual fishing conditions, it is nearly impossible to hear the sound emitted by pingers (and thus to know that they're working) amid the ocean sounds and engine noise, and almost impossible to tell if they are properly working when they are deployed underwater.
Drs. Safina & Read mislead their readers when they write, "New England fishermen have exceeded federal limits on porpoise mortality in six of the past seven years, simply because they are unwilling to use the technique that virtually ends porpoise deaths." Members of the fishery, working through the Northeast Seafood Coalition in Gloucester, Massachusetts, have made a concerted effort to improve the pingers'effectiveness. In the near term, fishermen have agreed to mitigate the problem by making efforts to double the amount of required pinger coverage, hoping that doing so will make up for any that might fail. They have worked with a pinger manufacturer to develop and distribute new pingers equipped with an LED indicator so that there is a visual indicator of whether the pingers are working, increasing their ability to ensure that the units are functioning properly.
Read the complete post by Carl Safina and Andrew Read
Read an opinion piece about the Harbor Porpoise decision and the Safina / Read criticism by Steve Urbon of the New Bedford Standard-Times
Read a Saving Seafood special report on the harbor porpoise issue from May 2012