Jim Ruhle teams with scientists for better research
Fisherman and fishing industry stalwart Jim Ruhle recently spoke to Saving Seafood about cooperative fisheries research, sector management and his involvement in the Northeast Area Monitoring & Assessment Program, a multi-state and federal effort to collect fisheries data and information for use by government agencies, the fishing industry and researchers.
Captain Ruhle is the president of the Commercial Fishermen of America.
UPDATE: Click here and watch now on Saving Seafood: An informative video documentary on cooperative fisheries research — featuring Jim Ruhle, Scott Lang, Kevin Stokesbury and James Gartland. [Video courtesy of New Bedford Government Access Television.]
by John Lee
Saving Seafood Contributing Writer
A few days ago, in Newport, RI, I caught up with Jim Ruhle in the wheelhouse of his vessel, F/V Darana R., out of Hampton, Va. He had just finished pumping out a load of herring.
The Ruhle family, three generations deep, has been involved in fishing and fishery management for years. Jim’s dad and late brother, Philip, who died at sea in July 2008, set the bar for what fishermen can do within cooperative research.
There was a time when Jim was on the Mid-Atlantic Council and his brother was on the New England Council. Other Ruhles in the fishing industry are Jim’s nephew, Phil Jr., who runs a dragger out of Point Judith, R.I., and Jim’s son, Bobby, who works deck on the Darana R.
When Jim isn’t busy fishing he is busy working for the Commercial Fishermen of America, of which he is the president.
I wanted to talk with Jim about the cooperative research work he is doing through the NEAMAP, the Northeast Area Monitoring & Assessment Program. NEAMAP was set in motion by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission and the National Marine Fisheries Service. The Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS) has taken the concept and made it a reality.
NEAMAP was devised to address age-old performance problems with the survey net used by the NOAA’s research vessel Albatross, whose 44-year survey yield came under intense fire during the now-infamous Trawlgate affair.
After Trawlgate hit the press, a trawl survey committee was formed. Jim Ruhle was named the chairman. A new survey net was to be designed for the new NOAA vessel, the R/V Henry Bigelow. Jim Ruhle was approached by VIMS, who needed a boat to get NEAMAP on the water.
And so it began four years ago.
This coming spring, Darana R. will begin its third spring survey cruise, starting in the mid-Atlantic, off Hatteras, and ending off Martha’s Vineyard. While still a young survey, year three will be critical for NEAMAP’s credibility within the fisheries science community.
The NEAMAP program surveys water between 18 feet and 90 feet. While the R/V Bigelow surveys the offshore grounds. The nets that both vessels use are nearly identical, differing only in the types of sweeps.
Major funding for NEAMAP comes from a mid-Atlantic research set-aside. The set-aside is an allocation of poundage of specific species for approved research.
SAVING SEAFOOD: What is the purpose of the NEAMAP program?
RUHLE: We are trying to do a trawl survey that tells relative abundance of species in the NEAMAP area. When I say relative abundance of species I mean all fish not just large ones. The juveniles are very important to a survey.
SAVING SEAFOOD: It seems that both the New England Fishery Council website and the Northeast Science Center have lots of ideas about cooperative research.
RUHLE: Yeah they do.
SAVING SEAFOOD: Why aren’t more fishermen doing them? Is it a funding thing?
RUHLE: You have to remember that a lot of the projects that New England’s been involved with never materialized, whether it was a lack of a commitment on the academic side or a lack of funding to get a time series. For whatever reasons, the industry is caught in a bad spot here. A lot of people have rolled up their sleeves and jumped in and nothing good has come out of it. So they have a bitter taste in their mouths about the cooperative research process.
SAVING SEAFOOD: Does a species-specific survey make sense, to check abundances on Georges Bank yellowtail and winter flounder on Nantucket Shoals?
RUHLE: It would make sense because there’s no confidence in the scientists’ recommendations on either one of those species right now. The reason there is no confidence is that the fishermen are seeing them in record abundances and yet the scientific recommendation—of what we can catch—is very low.
SAVING SEAFOOD: So how do you change that?
RUHLE: You either prove the science is wrong or you accept it. You don’t have any other choices. That’s it. What should happen is the industry—if we had a deep enough pool of money to work from—should link with an academic partner and design a trawl survey for yellowtail and other flatfish on Georges Bank and southern New England, specific to those species, and designed to consider both migration and abundances.
SAVING SEAFOOD: What if the stock assessment used nothing but NOAA vessels?
RUHLE: That’s what you’re living with now. I don’t know if the data could be utilized with any credibility or industry faith because of past performance. The Bigelow only has one year of surveys and the Albatross has just about zero credibility with the industry. We are still living with Albatross data and that hurts.
SAVING SEAFOOD: What about the Bigelow and a NEAMAP boat? Would that raise industry confidence in the stock assessments?
RUHLE: If you took the Bigelow and a NEAMAP boat I would say that we could make this work—I’d feel much better about how quotas are set. A lot of industry people helped design the Bigelow net: fishermen, net designers, academics, people from the Science Center. A whole trawl committee was formed to design a new trawl survey net. It took over three years.
SAVING SEAFOOD: About the Science Center, what would you like their role to be in a future stock assessment program, in a future NEAMAP program?
RUHLE: I would want them to have a role—wouldn’t want them not to be involved. I would like to see them conduct the peer review. We give them a stock assessment and they review it. Not: we give them raw NEAMAP data and they form their own stock assessment based on NEAMAP data.
SAVING SEAFOOD: What about the cut in cooperative research funding?
RUHLE: The recent cut? Lubchenco put money in and now she took it back out. But she is taking it out for the wrong reasons. The agency is pushing catch shares. If you want to push catch shares, make damn sure you have good science to support it. Removing the $6 million from cooperative research is basically disallowing good science to be collected.
SAVING SEAFOOD: And we are going to go forward with a management method based on what?
RUHLE: Based on what, exactly. Based on what? Why bother putting money in cooperative research when it will challenge the estimates on abundances —it is in the agency’s best interest not to have cooperative research—they don’t want the truth.
SAVING SEAFOOD: Much of the data used in Amendment 16 was obtained on the Albatross—what would someone at NOAA say about this?
RUHLE: They are totally convinced that everything that the Science Center has done with the Albatross survey is accurate. They are convinced that the Science Center is right—and I am convinced the Science Center is wrong. Remember, the flaw is with the survey, not the people doing it.
SAVING SEAFOOD: And your confidence in the Northeast groundfish Albatross survey is…
RUHLE: I have no confidence in the Albatross survey. None.
SAVING SEAFOOD: How long was that survey’s time series?
RUHLE: 44 years.
SAVING SEAFOOD: And these rebuilding dates are based on…
RUHLE: Albatross data. Now show me an example—in the last ten years—of one time the Albatross survey has benefited our industry? Show me one? There are none. But if you throw in other information, other data—state surveys, SMAST, NEAMAP, cooperative research—then you see an increase in benefit.
SAVING SEAFOOD: Do you think the bureaucracy buys into cooperative research?
RUHLE: Part of it does—part of it. There’s reluctance on the part of some of the people embedded in NMFS and the Science Center to utilize cooperative research, especially on the East Coast. This doesn’t apply to the West Coast. Here, there has never been a time until NEAMAP—other than state surveys—that cooperative research was a must and was strongly considered in New England. On the West Coast there was never a time when they didn’t have cooperative research. The West Coast uses both industry boats and NOAA ones to conduct their surveys. Which Coast do you think has got industry confidence in the science? They do. We sure don’t. It’s apples and oranges…
RUHLE: So cooperative research in New England should be expanded?
SAVING SEAFOOD: It’s a must. We need to know how many fish we should catch and not affect optimum yield. We need to know what to fish on and when to fish it. We need to know what optimum yield is of every species in a timely manner. Because too much of anything is trouble—bad news…
SAVING SEAFOOD: Like dogfish?
RUHLE: Yes, and winter skate. These are having a negative effect on other species. What the dogfish are doing, from my expertise as fishermen, is they are negatively affecting the Science Center trawl surveys. And I’ll tell you why: Dogfish pack in dense schools and if they are in a dense school the good fish—the market fish—are not going to be with them. Scup, sea bass, fluke—because of competition for food, they are going to get pushed out. The abundance of dogfish has changed the schooling habits of other fish. Now take your stratified survey tow; say you got ten places to tow, if eight have dogfish and only two are clear of dogfish, as far as I’m concerned the two are more important than the eight. Because if the dogfish weren’t there, the scup and fluke would have been spread out in those areas. You need to have that concept in your mind—that a population of one species affects the movements of other fish. Dogfish displace other fish. That creates a bias in the trawl survey.
SAVING SEAFOOD: And what does a fishery scientist say about this?
RUHLE: You might have something, you might not…
SAVING SEAFOOD: What are some of the benefits of starting a trawl survey—a new stock assessment program with (obviously) a young time series?
RUHLE: There’s the magic word, young. People here at VIMS have come in with no baggage. They don’t have an agenda. Every scientist I’ve seen on this boat has one thing in mind—collect the best data they can and do the best job they can.
SAVING SEAFOOD: And the Science Center?
RUHLE: Whereas at the Science Center they’ve been saying this species or that species has been in trouble for ten years, and we come along with something that counters that– there’s a resistance for them to accept that new information.
SAVING SEAFOOD: Is there still a lot of resistance on their part?
RUHLE: Maybe they listen to us more. But not much more. They really need to listen to the experts, the fishermen, what are we “seeing” on the fishing grounds. To me, one of the most dangerous people [to the management process] is a fisheries scientist with an agenda, an agenda of what the end result should be—it doesn’t matter what we are seeing or saying…
SAVING SEAFOOD: What about money? Could the NEAMAP way be more economical as a survey?
RUHLE: I’d love to see a cost-benefit analysis of the Bigelow against a NEAMAP boat—find out what that is. I expect we can do it for a tenth of the operating costs. If that is the case and the budget is going to determine how much science is going to get done, you have to put your money where it’s going to get you the most bang for your buck. I understand that this wouldn’t be an easy thing to determine because the Science Center doesn’t pay for the operating costs of the Bigelow.
SAVING SEAFOOD: What is your future forecast? What is your hope?
RUHLE: With cooperative research: science working with industry?
SAVING SEAFOOD: Yes.
RUHLE: I think it can be done. And it has the potential to become a reality if we can find long-term funding. Right now we have funding through December 2010. But nothing after that. We need a place in the President’s budget that designates funding for this NEAMAP project for years to come. A trawl survey is a long-term project. It needs to get funded as such.
SAVING SEAFOOD: I have heard it said by fisherman, “Of course he catches fish, he’s a fisherman.”
RUHLE: I have to educate them a little about that. I have to say when I’m working for NEAMAP I’m not a fisherman. The point isn’t to catch fish, the point is to tow the net the same every time. That’s what I do: I make sure the net behaves the way we designed it to, every time, all the time. That gives us the best available data. I don’t go looking for flounder or scup. We tow in sampling sites that have been pre-selected by a random design process.
SAVING SEAFOOD: How does this tie in with the larger picture?
RUHLE: If NEAMAP existed ten years ago and was integrated into the process, none of what we are facing now would exist because there would be challenges up and down on winter flounder and summer flounder, yellowtails—we’d be challenging the Science Center’s estimates of abundance…
SAVING SEAFOOD: That brings up the idea of credibility of NEAMAP with the fleet.
RUHLE: Remember this: Ninety-percent of fishermen I know aren’t going to be pleased when a quota is reduced. But they will accept it if they know it to be necessary–if they believe in the process that caught that data.
SAVING SEAFOOD: What are some of the problems with the trawl data from the Albatross?
RUHLE: If the gear preformed consistently it wouldn’t be a problem. But the gear never performed consistently, primarily the bottom contact of the trawl. The industry has no confidence in the old surveys and it is going to take a long time for fishermen to have confidence in the Bigelow surveys, simply because of the past performance of the Albatross.
SAVING SEAFOOD: What would someone at the Science Center say to that question?
RUHLE: They would say they did the best that they could with the gear they had available to them; and the time series demonstrates the performance of the trawl package over the years. And I would say that’s pure bull. Look at it this way—it’s not the performance of the scientist I question, it’s the performance of the gear: Door spread, wing spread, headrope height and bottom contact all need to be exact. For over 30 years they weren’t. We’re all going to be living with the Albatross for awhile. Quotas are all driven by scientific recommendations, and these recommendations have been wrong. The problems with the Albatross gear is exactly why NEAMAP is here. And the purpose of NEAMAP is to create best available data—with industry confidence—and to augment, not replace, the surveys of the Science Center.