FishNet USA – July 27, 2012 — Why won’t the Pew, Packard, Moore or Walton foundations spend some of their $billions on extending cooperative research, getting more – and more reliable – data on more of our fisheries?
Three weeks ago we took a look at the inflation-corrected values of the total landings from the various coastal regions of the United States from 1950 to 2010. This week we’ll be looking at the landed weight of the 48 major commercial species on the Atlantic coast of the U.S. for the same period. First, however, I thought it would be instructive to look at the total weight of all species commercially landed on the East coast (note that this includes species that didn’t make it into the “top 48,” but the total weight of these other species was/is negligible and omitting them isn’t going to have any appreciable effect on the charts).
All of these data were taken from the NOAA/NMFS Fisheries Statistics – Commercial Fisheries website at http://www.st.nmfs.noaa.gov/st1/commercial/landings/annual_landings.html.
In terms of tonnage the menhaden fishery is easily the largest commercial fishery in the U.S., with annual landings that have ranged from just under two hundred thousand to well over a half a million metric tons a year. It is also a very old fishery and was well established in 1950.
If they include menhaden, commercial landings on the East coast dropped by over 50%, or, exclusive of menhaden, over 30% in the 1950 to 2010 period.
In particular fisheries, the decrease in landings has been much more dramatic. In fact, in 2010 the landings in a surprising number of our important fisheries – winter flounder, yellowtail flounder, weakfish, soft clams, oysters, butterfish, etc. – were less than a tenth of their highest levels in the 1950 to 2010 period.
In the last twenty years, more than three quarters of these fisheries (38 of 48) exhibit what can only be described as plummeting landings, though a few of those have experienced slight upswings recently. The landings of these fisheries are in red. Of the remainder, five – striped bass, American lobster, Atlantic mackerel, sea scallops and skates – have been increasing significantly. They are in dark blue (based on the past 20 years, haddock might have been in this category, but compared to past performance of the fishery it’s difficult to consider that it has improved “significantly.” Five – blue crab, herring, pollock, Spanish and king/cero mackerel – though fluctuating widely, seem to be either reasonably steady or trending up slightly. They are green.
Unfortunately, as a measure of anything beyond the level of economic damage that has been and continues to be inflicted on the commercial fishing industry and those parts of our coastal communities that depend on it by (primarily) the federal fisheries management regime, these charts and data on their own aren’t particularly useful. Without having a fairly accurate idea of the condition of the fish stocks being managed, it’s impossible to put landings data into any useful context.
However, one thing is abundantly obvious; when it comes to managing commercial fisheries on the East coast, if one of the criteria for measuring success is stable landings at or approaching the maximum sustainable yield, our fisheries management institutions at the federal, state and regional levels have been dismal – and expensive – failures.
East coast commercial landings from 1950 to 2010 (as a % of the highest landings during that period
Red indicates decreasing recent landings, blue indicates increasing recent landings and green indicates relatively constant landings. Landings from shrimp, tuna, snapper and grouper fisheries were combined.
(Forty seven charts of species/species groups and accompanying data were omitted. They are all available in the pdf version of this FishNet at http://www.FishNet-USA.com. The chart for yellowtail flounder is included for illustrative purposes.)
Yellowtail Flounder
Covered species/species groups:
Striped Bass
Bluefish
Atlantic Bonito
Butterfish
Surf Clam
Ocean Quahog
Hardshell Clam
Soft Shell Clam
Cod
Blue Crab
Croaker
Summer Flounder
Winter Flounder
Witch Flounder
Yellowtail Flounder
Plaice
Monkfish
Haddock
Red Hake
Silver Hake
White Hake
Atlantic Herring
American Lobster
Caribbean Lobster
Atlantic Mackerel
King & Cero Mackerel
Spanish Mackerel
Menhaden
Striped Mullet
Eastern Oyster
Pollock
Acadian Redfish
Sea Scallop
Scup
Black Sea Bass
Spotted Sea Trout
Skates
Spot
Squid
Swordfish
Tautog
Tilefish
Weakfish
Groupers
Dogfish (Spiny & Smooth)
Shrimp
Snappers
Tunas
You can be sure that the people in the ENGOs and their foundation funding sources who are the bottom-line cause of these plummeting catch levels will assure anyone willing to listen that all of those fisheries with landings that continue to decrease year-by-year aren’t demonstrably “rebuilt” and are thereby still in need of rigorous protection from fishermen and fishing, and that when they are, quotas should be allowed to inch up.
Unfortunately but predictably, that’s nowhere near the whole story. By way of example, let’s look at monkfish – officially known as “goosefish” by NOAA/NMFS.
Monkfish first
There wasn’t a significant directed fishery for monkfish up until the late 1970s, but when Julia Child, one of the earliest celebrity chefs, featured a large and impressive (and ugly) specimen on her television show in 1979, it’s generally agreed that she spurred domestic consumer interest in the fish and the subsequent development of the fishery. This culminated in a maximum harvest of almost 28,000 metric tons in 1997. Since this peak the domestic harvest has been “managed” to today’s level of well under 10,000 mt.
As the chart above indicates, the harvest has declined steadily and precipitously since 2002.
All things being equal, you would probably say that the monkfish stock had been severely overfished, was on the road to recovery but not there yet, so the declining harvest was a good thing.
As can be said of so many situations in our domestic fisheries, all things aren’t anywhere near equal. On page 16 of the report of the most recent monkfish stock assessment is a table listing, among other things, monkfish landings, monkfish bycatch and monkfish biomass for the years from 2000 to 2009 (http://www.nefsc.noaa.gov/publications/crd/crd1009/pdfs/monkfish.pdf). They are reported separately for the Northern and Southern Management Areas – for simplicity I combined them.
The table shows that from 2000 to 2009 the combined monkfish biomass went from 158 thousand metric tons to 197 thousand metric tons, an increase of 25%. In the same period the monkfish removals (landings and bycatch mortality) went from 31 thousand metric tons to 10 thousand metric tons, a decrease of 66%.
To make perfectly clear what’s happening in this fishery, in 2000 the monkfish fishery was the most valuable finfish fishery on the East coast. Since then, as the biomass of monkfish was increasing by 25%, total removals were reduced by 66%, all in a fishery that hasn’t been overfished since 2007.
Then Summer Flounder
Summer flounder – also known as fluke – was the fourth most valuable East coast fishery in 2000 (after monkfish, cod and menhaden).
(Graphics omitted)
The above is from the report of the 2011 Summer Flounder Stock Assessment Workshop.
As the chart below indicates, as the (spawning stock) biomass has been increasing steadily since 1990, from a low of under 10,000 metric tons to almost 90,000 mt, landings have hovered around 40% of their maximum for the period.
Just over a decade ago summer flounder and monkfish, among the most valuable East coast finfish fisheries, generated $75 million in landings. In 2010 their combined landings were $48 million, a decrease of almost 40%. This decrease was in spite of dramatic increases in the biomass of both species. And these two fisheries aren’t the only ones which exhibit increasing natural production coupled with declining landings.
A rational person might ask how this can be possible. As we’ve been told by any number of self-congratulating NOAA/NMFS leaders, we’ve turned the corner on overfishing. If so many of our fish stocks are thriving, if there are more fish in our coastal waters, why aren’t our fishermen thriving as well?
Blame most of it on the precautionary principle
A great deal of the blame lies with the overenthusiastic application of the “precautionary principle” by our fisheries managers, with the overenthusiastic support of the ENGOs and of the Members of Congress who accept whatever they say as gospel. The precautionary principle as applied to fisheries management means that the less sure you are about the conditions of a fishery, the fewer fish you can let the fishermen catch. Of course about the only conditions of any fishery that we’re anywhere near sure about is the commercial harvest. We don’t have a clue about the recreational harvest. We don’t have a clue about natural – that would be non-fishing – mortality. We don’t have a clue about the impacts of rising ocean temperatures on various fish stocks. We don’t have a clue about the impacts of millions of gallons of oil or oil dispersants or household chemicals or recycled – from us to our estuaries – pharmaceuticals. We don’t have a clue about the impacts of interspecific predation. In fact we don’t have much of a clue about just about anything that impacts fish stocks – except for commercial fishing.
And the rest of it on a lack of research funds
More and better research is needed, but that costs money, and research money seems to be in short supply at NOAA/NMFS. In part that’s due to declining budgets, but it’s also due to the funds NOAA/NMFS has to commit to defending against a seemingly endless stream of lawsuits and petitions and other bureaucratic roadblocks by the foundation-funded ENGOs because fishermen are allowed to catch too much – in essence the fish aren’t being managed with enough precaution – and at a much lower level by fishing-funded fishermen because they aren’t allowed to catch enough – the fish are being managed with too much precaution.
The mega-foundations spend hundreds of millions of dollars on fisheries-related “research”
Now floating around in there seems to be an obvious solution, though it’s apparently not obvious enough to whoever decides what the various “save the fish and save the fishermen” foundation’s funds will be spent on every year, and these funds must be approaching a billion dollars by now (two years ago a partial listing of fishing oriented grants by a handful of the largest foundations totaled almost two thirds of a billion dollars – see http://www.fishtruth.net and follow the first link on the intro page).
Why wouldn’t whoever runs this handful of foundations mandate that a significant part of the funding that they are ostensibly devoting to “saving fish and fishermen” (as the latest Pew promo on National Public Radio states) be used to improve the level of knowledge we have of the actual condition of our fish stocks? The surer we are of how many of a particular species are swimming around out there, the more precise our catch setting mechanisms for that species can be. That would generally mean increased landings. The foundations – and the ENGOs they control – would be much surer that the managers were setting accurate catch quotas, as would the fishermen.
So why won’t these foundations devote some of their dollars to improving the scientific underpinnings of the management system they are so unhappy with?
Up and down all of our coasts commercial fishermen have already made commitments to cooperative research – real fishing boats operated by real fishermen with real scientists and technicians on board doing sampling and providing data that is acceptable to everyone. But available funds are severely limited. Why won’t the Pew, Packard, Moore or Walton foundations spend some of their $billions on extending cooperative research, getting more – and more reliable – data on more of our fisheries?
If these foundations were really intent on saving the fish and saving the fishermen, this would be a no brainer. And it would be the most effective way of getting the harvest levels of our various fisheries more in line with the abundance levels of the fish. If they continue to ignore the tremendous benefits that their supporting real fisheries research could provide to the fish and the to the fishermen – and to the businesses and the communities that depend on them – I’d think it would be impossible not to suspect their motives for making so many hundreds of millions of dollars of fisheries related grants, virtually all devoted to demonizing our traditional fisheries and our traditional fishermen.
Read the story at Fish Net USA.