When I was a senior in high school, my German class trekked into
Manhattan to attend a play based on the Franz Kafka novel, Der Prozess.
I didn’t have a clue about
what was going on. Kafka’s work can be difficult enough to understand, even in
translation. I had been taking high-school German for less than two years; my
vocabulary was far too limited to follow the action on stage.
I suspect that many fishermen
experience something similar when they attend a management meeting.
They’ll hear the scientists
talking about “biomass,” “spawning potential ratios” and “fishing mortality
thresholds,” and struggle to understand what’s going on. When agency staffers
join in, and start referring to “rebuilding deadlines,” “frameworks” and the
“scoping process,” they might just toss in the towel and go home, believing the
process to be too arcane to comprehend.
That’s unfortunate, because
their input is needed. Fishery management, like any other activity, relies on a
unique vocabulary, words that precisely express concepts needed to make the
management process work. To understand fishery management, a fisherman must
understand that vocabulary, along with some basic fishery management
principles.
The best place to start is with Understanding Fisheries
Management, a guide prepared by the Auburn University Marine
Extension & Research Center and the Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant Legal
Program.
Understanding
Fisheries Management is somewhat dated. It does not address any changes to the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery
Conservation and Management Act (Magnuson-Stevens) that were
made after 1996. Even so, it remains the clearest guide to the language and
process of fishery management process that is readily available to fishermen.
Fishermen need such a guide,
and they need to become better informed if they are to provide meaningful input
to fishery managers. Because so many are not better informed, the same comments
and criticisms always arise at fisheries meetings, no matter where they are
held or what species are involved:
“How do you count
recreational catch? I don’t believe your numbers, because I’ve been fishing for
forty years, you never counted mine.”
“How can the
scientists really know how many fish are out there?”
“The fish aren’t
getter scarcer; it just takes a fisherman to know where to find them.”
“There are more
fish out there, but recruitment isn’t increasing. The population must be as big
as it can get, so we don’t need more rules.”
By reading Understanding Fisheries
Management, fishermen could find answers to many of their questions,
and shed many of their misconceptions, before they ever enter a meeting room.
Still, it’s impossible to
learn everything about the management process from a 50-page booklet. Those who
want to become seriously involved in fisheries issues, as well as those who
merely want a better idea of how the management process works, ought to dive in
a little deeper, to expand their knowledge beyond the basics.
The same general principles
of limiting harvest to sustainable levels and maintaining or, if necessary,
restoring healthy fish stocks are equally applicable to both commercial and
recreational fishermen, but the methods used to estimate commercial and
recreational catch are sharply different.
Commercial fishermen in
federal fisheries, and in most state fisheries as well, are required to report
their landings within a very short time after returning to port. The fish
houses that buy their catch are often also required to file independent reports
that corroborate, or sometimes question, the fishermen’s filings. Thus,
commercial landings estimates are generally both accurate and timely.
Things aren’t that neat in
the recreational fishery. There are far more recreational anglers than
commercial fishermen, they sail out of far more ports, and they normally have
no reporting requirements. Even when mandatory requirements are imposed, they
are often ignored.
People working for the National Marine Fisheries
Service’s Highly Migratory Species office have told me that
only about 20% of recreational Atlantic bluefin tuna landings are reported, a figure that has been
confirmed by other writers. Yet that 20% reporting level, while
disconcertingly low, dwarfs reporting compliance in Alabama’s recreational red
snapper fishery, where a mere 7% of anglers reported their
catch during the 2016 state season.
Fishery managers, unable to depend on anglers to consistently
and reliably report their catch, must rely on an angler survey to estimate
landings. The accuracy of such surveys, including the current Marine Recreational Information
Program (MRIP), are consistently questioned at fishery
meetings, as anglers predictably claim that regulations are too strict because
MRIP consistently overestimates anglers’ catch.
Most of the fishermen making such comments have no knowledge of
how MRIP works, and it is that lack of knowledge that gives rise to their
criticism. They owe it to themselves to read the Marine Recreational Information Program Data User Handbook(Handbook),
available online.
There, they would learn that
“The size of sampling error depends upon the sample size, the sample design and
the natural variability within the population. As a general rule, increasing
the sample size reduces the sampling error.” That might help them realize that
when fishermen ask managers to adopt regulations that differ from state to
state, and from month to month within the waters of a single state, they are
increasing the likelihood of error. That in turn, could lead to the
understanding that many inaccuracies that do appear in the data are not the
fault of MRIP, but of the fishermen themselves, for seeking regulations that
inject greater uncertainty into the system.
The Handbook also provides
information on how MRIP is structured, how survey locations are selected, and
why relatively small samples can provide reliable catch estimates for the
entire coast, all topics that frequently cause confusion when anglers address
management issues.
Yet MRIP is only a very small
part of fisheries management, and comprehending the rest of the process requires
a bit of work. I regularly buy various texts, used to teach college and
graduate-school courses, when they become available on outlets such as
ebay.com, in an effort to gain a greater understanding of the science side of
the process. They’re not easy reading, and I’ll be the first to admit that some
of the math presented is well beyond me, but it’s not necessary to solve the
equations to get a better understanding of how the process works.
For those looking for their first book on the management
process, I recommend Marine Fisheries Ecology, by Simon Jennings, Michel
J. Kaiser and John D. Reynolds. While not the most recent work in its field,
the text is easy to read, and provides a broad survey of the topic, including
socioeconomic issues, surveys, fishing gear, fish biology, stock assessments
and related matters.
Marine
Fisheries Ecology casts light on the survey processes used to estimate the
size of fish stocks. In addressing the error that inevitably affects any
estimate, the text notes that “the precision needed is generally better than
[plus or minus] 20% rather than an order of magnitude,” and explains that
greater precision, while theoretically desirable, is often not a practical goal
due to the level of labor and expense involved, because “the reduction in error
is proportional to the square root of sample size, meaning that a fourfold
increase in sample size is necessary to reduce the error by half.”
Thus, it teaches that when
fishermen ask, “How can scientists know exactly how many fish are out there?”
the answer is that “They don’t know, exactly, but they can come reasonably
close. And that’s why they need to be cautious; stocks might be smaller than
they believe.”
It also explains why trawl
surveys often reveal a depleted population even when fishermen are still
landing large numbers of fish, noting that “fishers target ‘hot spots’ where
abundance remains high regardless of overall stock size,” while biologists
sample a larger and more randomly selected expanse of ocean that provides a
more accurate estimate of fish abundance.
Marine
Fisheries Ecology gives readers similar insights across a broad spectrum of
management measures.
For more technical information on fisheries management, my go-to
reference is Fisheries Ecology and Management, by Carl J. Walters and
Steven J.D. Martell. It’s more advanced than Marine Fisheries Ecology, and
places a lot of emphasis on various forms of population modeling and its
relation to fisheries management strategies. I won’t say that it’s an easy
read, but the text is readily understandable with a little effort.
Because Fisheries Ecology and Management places
such emphasis on modeling approaches, it also serves to dispel many of the
false notions that fishermen hold with respect to how fish populations respond
to various conditions.
It makes it clear that in the
case of most species, under most conditions, spawning success is not directly
linked to the size of the spawning stock. Instead, “spawning stock is generally
a very poor predictor of recruitment (recruitment being independent of parental
abundance) except at relatively low parental stock sizes,” because juvenile
survival is usually “strongly density-dependent (there is a decrease in
juvenile survival with increasing abundance) despite the fact that the net resultant
recruitment is independent of parental abundance.” In other words, juvenile
survival is usually higher when the initial size of the year class is small,
and lower when the year class is large.
If fishermen, and those who
write about management issues in the angling press, had a better grasp of that
basic principle, summer flounder managers might have been spared a lot of
criticism from those who have claimed that the current size limits remove too
many females from the spawning stock, and so limit spawning success.
And that’s why gaining an understanding of the language and
principles of fishery management can be so important to anglers. Reading a few
books won’t make you a biologist, any more than watching a few reruns of This Old House or New Yankee Workshop will
make you a master finish carpenter. It takes years of intense training, and
then years of working out in the world, to do that.
But it will, at least, give
you enough background to speak intelligently to fisheries managers, know what
questions to ask, and to understand their replies.
And perhaps more important,
it will let you know when a writer, an organization, or another fisherman
begins promoting an agenda that just makes no sense.
For that reason alone,
learning the language and the process can be a good thing.
-----
This blog post first appeared in “From the Waterfront,” the
blog of the Marine Fish Conservation Network, which can be found at
http://conservefish.org/blog/
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