From: SouthCoastToday.com
It’s widely agreed that good fisheries regulation demands good science. We need to know how many fish are out there and what is happening to them.
But gaps in the science have spawned disputes between fishermen and regulators in the Northeast and, in response, fisheries scientists are offering a radically different approach to the way groundfish stocks are evaluated and managed.
Regulation is obsolete as it is now practiced, according to Steve Cadrin, associate professor at UMass Dartmouth’s School for Marine Science and Technology.
“Fisheries management based on single species population dynamics goes back to the 1950s,” said Cadrin, who also serves on the New England Fishery Management Council’s science and statistical committee.
But this fishery is multi-species, and single-species methods miss plenty and can be oversimplified and misleading, he said.
“If you sample the removals from a population and the age structure, you can get a good sense of a fish stock and how hard you can fish it,” he said. “But that simply ignores other species who are eating and being eaten by a single stock. And it also ignores the many environmental variables, such as hot years and cold years and times of high or low salinity.”
As the limitations of single-species plans become apparent, scientists are compelled to include these other factors in their models, he said.
Jason S. Link, a senior research fisheries biologist with the National Marine Fisheries Service in Woods Hole, recently authored a book on this same topic, entitled Ecosystem-Based Fisheries Management, in which he makes the case for adopting the new system.
“Ecologically, socially, oceanographically and technically, with all the various types of fishing gear, there is so much going on in the marine environment,” Link said. “We need to present the range of options that are available, as well as the ones that are going to get us into trouble. There has to be some trade-offs. You can’t maximize everything at once and you can only get so much from one patch of ocean.”
Technological breakthroughs, coupled with the vast quantities of data collected on ecosystems, have now made implementation of EBFM feasible, scientists say. “We couldn’t
have done it 20 years ago,” Link said. “But we know more now. With satellites we can even measure the phytoplankton at the base of the food pyramid,” he said. “That’s incredible. It can even be separated out from some of the other particles in the water.”
Few in the industry would deny that fisheries management in New England needs an overhaul. As long ago as December 2009, the chairman of the New England Fishery Management Council, John Pappalardo, wrote to U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke urgently seeking reform to a system he described as “antiquated and ineffective.”
“Our bureaucracy is often driven by process and protocol rather than by mission and outcome,” Pappalardo wrote. Meanwhile, a federal lawsuit backed by the cities of New Bedford and Gloucester has New England fishermen challenging government regulations in federal court.
An EBFM approach would offer managers more alternatives, Cadrin said. “If we start looking at the biomass as a whole, it may allow the flexibility to remove some of our current regulatory problems such as choke species,” he said.
With so many groundfish species swimming together, catch limits on a “choke” species prevent fishermen harvesting other fish that are far more abundant. George’s Bank yellowtail, currently considered a choke species, is a good example, according to Cadrin.
“That stock has increased more than six fold since its collapse in the ’80s,” he said. “The catch limit remains low because we are behind schedule on the rebuilding program, but there are so many yellowtail out there now that fishermen can’t avoid them. Yet they can’t harvest them.
“It makes no sense. It doesn’t meet our economic objectives or our conservation objectives. We’ve painted ourselves into a corner.”
There is growing acceptance that attaining the maximum sustainable yield on all groundfish species at the same time is unrealistic. Calculating yield from their aggregate biomass would possibly allow taking more abundant species at a higher mortality. Species in low abundance would rebuild more slowly while fishermen harvest abundant species at a sustainable rate.
For some time now, a similar shift has begun to influence the federal government’s planning relative to the ocean waters of the United States and the adoption of a broader view of the ways in which they can be utilized and managed.
A significant milestone was reached last July when a presidential order established a National Ocean Policy aimed at integrating competing ocean uses, such as fisheries, energy development and shipping into a single unified plan.
The new policy is broadly known as ecosystem-based management, or EBM, and is intended to develop a holistic approach to marine spatial planning, The commercial fisheries of the Northeast Continental Shelf occupy a significant place within this larger framework and ecosystem-based fisheries management forms a key part of the initiative, as a means to protect fish stocks and to aid in improving the regulation of fishing effort.
However, even if EBFM becomes the future of fisheries management, it does not mean that catch levels will automatically increase.
“There’s always going to be a single-species floor,” Link said. “And the total cap may even be more conservative than if you took all the single species now and added them up.”
The benefits to fishermen will come from allowing them to target the fish they want, when they want, by fishing on a system-wide basis.
Populations of individual species may rise and fall, but the total fish biomass is very stable, according to Link.
“Whenever we look at it we’re shocked at how stable it is compared to some of the dynamics we see,” he said. “EBFM should allow fishermen to make long-term business plans. Some of the stock ups and downs can be sorted out where, in my view, they should be. In the market place,” he said.