DENYING THE REALITY OF OVERFISHED STOCKS

People have an extraordinary capacity to deny unpleasant realities.

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’ 1969 book, On Death and Dying, noted that the initial reaction of people who are diagnosed with terminal illnesses is to claim that the doctors made a mistake, the diagnosis was flawed, and that everything will turn out to be fine.

We see the same sort of thing happen when fisheries begin to die.  People attack the science, come up with alternate explanations for why fish are scarce, and assure everyone that as soon as “the cycle” moves to its next phase, stocks will begin to recover, and fish will once again be abundant.

We’ve seen that happen more than once in the case of striped bass, most recently after the 2018 benchmark assessment found the stock to be both overfished and experiencing overfishing.  While many concerned anglers, who had watched the population decline over the past decade, were more than willing to accept the assessment’s findings and begin addressing the threats to the stock, others insisted on denying reality.

Some pointed to places where striped bass were locally abundant, including Raritan Bay in the spring and the Cape Cod Canal during the summer, as evidence that the bass stock was healthy, carefully ignoring the notable lack of fish in many other places where striped bass normally thrive.  

Others, including at least one somewhat erratic member of Congress, argued that fishermen were looking for bass in all the wrong places; instead of seeking them along the shore and in relatively shallow coastal waters, where striped bass had lived since the retreat of the last glacier, they should be looking far offshore where, for unexplained reasons, the bass had decided to move.

The fact that striped bass needed to enter coastal regions to spawn, and are surveyed when they do, was seemingly lost on the folks making such claims.

The same song was sung for bluefish.  A 2019 stock assessment update found the stock to be overfished, but if anyone attended the hearings on the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council’s recently concluded Bluefish Allocation and Rebuilding Amendment, they might have been surprised to hear some people say that there were no problems with the stock; instead, it was just “the cycle” that sees bluefish abundance wax and wane for no apparent reason, or that there were plenty of bluefish around, but they just went somewhere else; one particularly insightful representative of the for-hire fleet suggested Africa as their possible destination.

As ridiculous as such science-denying comments may seem, they are almost understandable given that, until recently, anglers could still catch fair numbers of striped bass and bluefish; as little as six or ten years ago, managers were telling us that the stocks of both species were relatively healthy.

Thus, it’s not too unreasonable that fishermen might run into the occasional school of bass or bluefish offshore and, viewing such fish through the lens of confirmation bias, interpret their sporadic encounters as conclusive evidence that the fish haven’t grown scarce, but merely abandoned their traditional grounds.

But when it comes to cod, it’s hard to give science deniers the benefit of the doubt.  Cod abundance in the northwest Atlantic has been headed downhill for decades.  It was, in part, the decline in New England groundfish that created impetus for passage of the Sustainable Fisheries Act on 1996, which finally converted the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act from a tool used mainly to push foreign fleets out of United States waters and upgrade domestic fishing vessels to an effective force for the conservation and management of the nation’s marine resources.

Yet there are many fishermen up in New England who still deny the clear evidence, and the scientific findings, that cod are overfished.  That fact was most recently demonstrated in an online meeting organized by NOAA Fisheries, which was intended to present information on warming waters and its role in the decline of cod stocks.

The website SouthCoast Today reported that over 70 fishermen attended the meeting, where a scientist from the Gulf of Maine Research Institute explained that deep-water temperatures in the Northeast have increased by 2 degrees since the 1980s, and that over such time, the cod stocks have steadily declined.

According to the website, fishermen weren’t completely on board with what that scientist had to say.

One fisherman from Gloucester, Massachusetts opined that

“The fish are there but we have to work harder to find them.”

He believed that the cod had moved to new areas, perhaps in response to what he perceived as a change in the tides.

Another fishermen rejected the link between water temperature and declining cod stocks.  Instead, he invoked the widespread belief in unexplainable “cycles,” arguing that

“some years are sparser than others, but it always bounces back.”

Given that cod have been in clear decline for the past three or four decades, it is remarkable that his faith that abundance will always bounce back isn’t beginning to wear just a little thin.

Another fisherman blamed an increasing population of gray seals, rather than overfishing, for the cod’s problems.

And, of course, there were those who fell back on the argument that there are fish around, but the scientists just don’t know how to find them, an opinion shared by long-time Massachusetts fisherman Vito Giacolone who, according to SouthCoast Today, believed that, when surveying cod stocks,

“researchers are looking in the wrong places at the wrong times.”

He claims to be finding fish, saying

“We’re talking about all these things meaning there’s no cod, but that’s just not what I’m seeing.”

In one way, many of those fishermen’s comments aren’t exactly wrong.  Fishermen are almost certainly seeing more cod than the researchers are.  That’s not necessarily because they are working harder than the researchers are to find fish, but because, part of the time, scientists actually are “looking in the wrong places at the wrong times.”  

At least, they are if one defines “wrong” as fishermen do.

The key is that fishermen look for fish where they expect, and often know, them to be.  Looking anywhere else would be “wrong.”

A 2013 assessment of the Gulf of Maine stock of Atlantic cod noted that

“Since the mid-1990s the distribution of cod has become increasingly concentrated in the western part of the Gulf, with a gradual loss of cod from the coastal and central Gulf,”

and expanded on that observation by saying

“Since the mid-2000s, the fishing fleet has become particularly concentrated in a small region of the western Gulf due to the fine scale aggregation of cod in an area where their prey (sand lance) were increasingly available.  This biases fishery [catch per unit effort] as an indicator of the abundance of the stock as a whole.”

So fishermen focus their effort in the few areas where concentrations of baitfish attract and hold whatever cod might be available.  Fishing on such localized abundances of cod, the fishermen have no difficulty putting fish in the boat, and catch them at rates suggesting that there are a lot of cod in the water.

And there are—at least, in the bait-filled water directly beneath the fishermen’s boats.  Where the fishermen go wrong is in assuming that such abundance exists elsewhere in the Gulf of Maine, as it once did, and in believing, based on localized abundance, that the overall health of the stock is good.

On the other hand, scientists survey a far greater expanse of water and, as SouthCoast Today notes, base their findings on data that

“is standardized across hundreds of trawl survey results,”

and, unlike fishermen, understand

“that individual experiences aren’t conclusive.”

Based on that wider worldview, they more easily comprehend that cod stocks are not doing well.

But the fishermen probably comprehend that, too.

When cod were far more abundant than they are today, the fishermen could find them in far more places.  They didn’t have to fish on top of one another to make a good catch, a phenomenon that isn’t limited to the Gulf of Maine, but was on display a few years ago off Block Island, when a much-heralded, but all to short-lived, resurgence in the recreational cod fishery saw for-hire boats from ports stretching from northern New Jersey to Rhode Island all fishing within a few hundred yards of one another, trying to load up on cod as quickly as they could before the party came to its inevitable end.

But the fishermen don’t want to believe the science, and they don’t want to believe what they know, in their hearts, to be true.

Like the fisherman quoted above, they want to believe that even if fishing isn’t too good right now, “it always bounces back.”  It’s just the downturn in an eternal cycle, and like the first warm days of spring, good fishing will return without the need for more regulations, for better science, for fishermen to leave enough fish in the water to sustain the stock in the long term.

Like the dying patient who denies the doctors’ findings, they want to believe not in facts, but in a wish that they know won't come true.