VALUING MARINE RESOURCES: JUST WHAT IS AN ANIMAL WORTH?

 

Last Tuesday, I attended a meeting of New York’s Marine Resources Advisory Council.

The meeting wasn’t particularly notable.  A number of significant matters were discussed, but most fell outside of my primary areas of interest and expertise, and I think that the only time I might have spoken all afternoon was to make a minor correction to the minutes of the previous meeting.

But as the meeting began to wind down, and reached that part of the agenda where folks talk about things like upcoming meetings and pending regulations, an interesting exchange took place that deserves a little thought.

About a year and a half ago, after a couple of urban legislators tried to force New York to shut down its horseshoe crab fishery, and Governor Hochul vetoed the resulting legislation, the Department of Environmental Conservation lost its authority to manage not only horseshoe crabs (which aren’t really crabs, despite their name), but true crabs as well.  In response, the agency promulgated new regulations based on a theory of general authority, rather than a clear legislative grant, a somewhat iffy approach that might or might not have survived a court challenge.

The legislature and governor later reached a compromise, which would see the horseshoe crab fishery phased out over a few years, and again gave the DEC explicit management authority over anything that might be called a crab.  So, at the meeting, the DEC announced that new regulations were adopted, at which point one of the commercial fishermen on the MRAC panel asked whether the agency would continue to conduct horseshoe crab surveys and do other research because,

“It seems like a waste of money,”

given that the fishermen wouldn’t be allowed to harvest them in a few years.

The biologist’s response was that yes, the surveys would continue, in part because the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s horseshoe crab management plan requires the states to provide certain data to the Commission each year, but the fisherman still remained dubious.

That view of fisheries management—that management efforts should be expended on fish and other lifeforms that yield an economic return—is something that I’ve run across from time to time, and seems to suggest that economic value is the only value that matters.

But there are other views.

At last Tuesday’s meeting, Martin Gary, the Director of the DEC’s Marine Division, also addressed the room, and provided a very different perspective on the issue.

He described a night earlier that summer, when he, a team of DEC biologists, plus folks from academic institutions and environmental organizations, along with some people just interested in helping out, joined together under a full moon to survey and tag horseshoe crabs.

He described how the volunteers all helped to ease the DEC’s burden, and most of all, how some of the children that were there were completely enraptured by the activity, and asked good questions as they tried to learn more.  Some of the children, he noted, seemed so fascinated by the process that he wouldn’t be surprised if they became marine scientists somewhere down the road.

And that’s a value that we don’t think about often enough.

For while there’s no denying that some fish, crustacean, and mollusk stocks are economically important, and generate many millions of dollars—billions in some cases—through the commercial and recreational fisheries that they support, it’s also important to note that those “valuable” species aren’t in the ocean alone.

Close to three-quarters of a century ago, pioneer ecologist Aldo Leopold observed that

“The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant, ‘What good is it?’  If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not.  If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts?  To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.”

While Leopold was describing a land ethic, it applies to the ocean just as well.

While New York may shut down its commercial horseshoe crab fishery in a few years, that doesn’t mean that the animals won’t play the same role in the ecosystem that they played before—roles that they and their ancestors have been playing in parts of the world’s oceans for at least the last quarter of a billion years.

Whan an animal sticks around that long, there’s a good chance that at least some of those ecosystem roles might be fairly important, and that we might be well-advised to keep the stock healthy, just in case that it’s demise might cause harm to a resource we value more.

So continuing horseshoe crab research might not be the “waste of money” that some have suggested.

But the deeper value may well be the one that Mr. Gary alluded to:  Its ability to draw people, particularly children, closer to the sea.

There is little question that children are spending far less time outdoors than they once did, as the allure of electronic devices, coupled with increasing pressure to participate in extracurricular activities at school, on sports teams, and in other activities that steal their free time, alienate them from the environment, and that alienation has some fairly dire implications for the future.  The University of Michigan has noted that

“What is less often studied is what impact the trend of children staying indoors might have on the environmental consciousness of future generations.  Environmentalists often point to youth as future stewards of the natural world.  What will happen to their sense of stewardship as our children become increasingly disconnected from nature?

“Researchers at Cornell University attempted to address this question by examining the relationship between the time spent in nature as a child and pro-environment attitudes and behaviors.  They found that those individuals who participated in activities such as camping, hunting, fishing, hiking, and playing in natural areas before the age of 11 were more likely to demonstrate pro-environment attitudes and behaviors as adults.”

So it may very well be that those humble, soon-to-be economically worthless horseshoe crabs, or perhaps some other, seemingly valueless member of the marine ecosystem, could inspire someone to take up a career in fisheries conservation and management, and help to ensure that the “important” fish stocks, and the fisheries that they support, will remain healthy and viable throughout the foreseeable future.

And there is a value in that that far outweighs the costs of a little research and monitoring.

Yet, so many times, I still come across people calling certain fish “worthless.”

When I sat on the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council a couple of decades ago, there was always debate about why it should manage spiny dogfish, instead of paying more attention to species that “were good for something.”

Even here in New York, which is generally considered an environmentally aware state, we have Section 13-0337 of the Environmental Conservation Law, which among other things states that

“Starfish, drills (Urosalpinx cineria), periwinkle (Litorina) and drum fish (Pogonias chromis) when taken shall not be returned alive to the waters of the state.”

That might make sense in the case of periwinkles, which are an invasive shellfish from Europe, but otherwise relegates components of the state’s marine ecosystem—starfish, oyster drills, and black drum—to being not only worthless, but things of negative worth, to be wantonly destroyed, merely because they feed on the same “valuable” shellfish that we do, and that bring dollars into the pockets of shellfishermen and aquaculturists alike.

It seems more than disgraceful, kind of like the old practice of killing off hawks because they killed the king’s grouse.  Yet in this place and time, such thinking persists, with no thought to whether such creatures may be critical cogs and wheels, essential parts of the overall mechanism that is the sea.