February 16, 2016 โ A program used in many U.S. fisheries to protect the marine environment and maintain healthy fish populations may have an immensely important added benefit: preserving the lives of American fishermen.
Thatโs according to a new study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Researchers found that catch share programs (where fishermen are allotted a set quota of the catch) reduce some of the notoriously risky behavior fishermen are known for, such as fishing in stormy weather, delaying vessel maintenance, or heading out to sea in a boat laden with too much heavy fishing gear.
Traditional fishery-management programs open and close fishing seasons on specific days. By contrast, catch shares work on a quota system, under which fishermen have a longer window to harvest their predetermined share. That gives fishermen the luxury (and perhaps the life-saving option) of time.
The findings donโt surprise Scott Campbell Sr., who spent most of his 35-year career fishing the Bering Sea for king crab the way it used to be done: derby-style. Crab season would open, and regardless of weather, Campbell and his crew would be on the water, hoping to nab enough crab during the seasonโs brief window to keep his business afloat.
โIf you can picture a four-day season for crab โ and thatโs the only four days youโre going to get โ and a 50-knot storm blows in for 24 to 48 hours of that four days, well, a lot of boats didnโt stop fishing, because that was their only revenue stream for the whole year,โ says Campbell. โIt forced us to take unnecessary risks for financial survival.โ (His son, Scott Campbell Jr., is a former star of Discovery ChannelโsDeadliest Catch, about the hazards of the fishing industry.)
That kind of risk-taking has historically made fishing one of the nationโs most dangerous professions, with a fatality rate more than 30 times the U.S. average, according to the new report.
Today there are approximately two dozen state and federal catch share programs in the U.S. Most launched in the last decade. However, derby-style fishing still exists in many U.S. regions, including the Pacific and Atlantic swordfish fisheries, the Northeastโs monkfish and herring fisheries, and the West Coast dungeness crab fishery.
Plenty of studies have looked at the environmental benefits of catch share programs โ such as the reduction of bycatch, the ability to maximize the value of the catch, and direct impacts on the way fisheries are managed. But what makes this paper innovative is that itโs looking at actual risk-taking data, says the studyโs author, Lisa Pfeiffer, an economist at the Northwest Fisheries Science Center.
Pfeiffer examined the impact a catch share management program had on fishing safety by looking at the particularly data-rich West Coast sablefish fishery.