The commercially important barndoor skate — once the subject of a controversial scientific study that found it to be "close to extinction" — has been taken off the list as a "species of concern," the federal government has announced.
Responding to two formal petitions to add the barndoor skate to the endangered species list, which could have limited commercial fishing in the locales of the skate, NOAA determined in 2002 that the skate was neither threatened or endangered, the "Changing Tides" report noted. The skate was left on the list of concern.
But NOAA's position did not prevent some environmental groups from holding Casey and Myers' findings to be fact. Even today, nine years after NOAA said no to the requests to put the barndoor skate on the endangered species list, the Swiss-based World Conservation Union — which describes itself as the world's "oldest and largest environmental network" — reports that "as a result of overfishing," barndoor skate is listed as "endangered."
Now, even NOAA officials concede otherwise.
In its report announcing the decision to remove the barndoor skate from its "Species of Concern" list, NOAA explained that Casey and Myers, lacking "necessary life history information on the species, had substituted for modeling data from a close relative to the barndoor skate, the common skate."
NOAA went on to explain that the two species had telling characteristics that biased the study, leading to incorrect conclusions. New research, meanwhile, was gathered in 2009.
"This information suggests that Casey and Myers (1998) may have overestimated the risks to barndoor skates," NOAA concluded. "Due to the increase in abundance, size range or the animals and known distribution as well as a decrease in mortality in areas were barndoor skates are present in high concentrations, there does not appear to be cause for concern over the status of barndoor skates."
NOAA is hardly first to that conclusion.
In November 2006, academic research scientists Ray Hilborn denounced what he described as a "faith-based fisheries movement" that produced in "Science" and "Nature" magazines "a long string of papers on the decline and collapse of the fisheries that have attracted considerable public attention, occasionally gaining coverage in the New York Times and Washington Post."
Hilborn asserted that the peer review process "has totally failed," conquered as it were by the anti-fishing imperative that worked backward from conclusions to findings.
To support his argument, the first paper Hilborn cited was Casey and Myers' which had been featured in the Washington Post under the headline "Barndoor skate near extinction."
Into the same category, "agenda-driven" science he also placed another Myers collaboration — this one with Boris Worm — which purported to prove that large pelagic species, the alpha predators, had been fished down to 10 percent of their historic abundance.
"Widely cited in the scientific and popular literature, this paper raised a furor among many scientists specializing in pelagic fisheries who knew the same data, knew it was being misinterpreted and knew there was a large body of other data that contradicted Myers and Worm's results," Hilborn wrote in the November 2006 Fisheries Magazine.
The decline of the alpha predator report was not easily diminished, and remains a near ubiquitous citation in policy papers by the Environmental Defense Fund and other groups.
Myers, who had been at Dalhousie University with Worm, died in 2007. Casey could not be located.
Read the full story in the Gloucester Daily Times