Counting fish is a
difficult job, and even the best stock assessment contains its share of
uncertainty.
The 2014 stock assessment update for Gulf
of Maine cod found that,
depending on the model used, the current spawning stock biomass might be as low
as 2,100 metric tons or as high as 2,400 metric tons, and that’s before any
statistical errors are taken into consideration. However, for practical
management purposes, any such errors shrink into insignificance, since the
spawning stock biomass needed to support a healthy, sustainable stock is
somewhere between 47,184 and 69,621 metric tons, again depending upon the model
used, and the current spawning stock is, at best a mere 4% of that.
Thus, there isn’t much
uncertainty about the state of the cod stock at all. Based on the best
available data, Gulf of Maine cod are in serious trouble.
Fishermen, however, disagree. Rejecting the scientists’ data in
favor of their own opinions about the stock’s health, they objected to harvest
reductions imposed in response to the update. Vito Giacolone, the policy director
of the Northeast Seafood Coalition, said, “The fish are in great shape and the only real
constraint on catch is quota. Fishermen are seeing that across the board on a
lot of the species…We’ve never had a greater gap between what the fishermen are
seeing on the water and what the scientists are saying. Never.”
Some have argued that the scientists’ problem is that they use
gear that isn’t good for catching the species in question. Gloucester, Massachusetts fisherman
Al Cottone claims that the gear used in
the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) fish surveys miss “the species
that tend to stay on the bottom, like cod and flounders. Everything that
attacks the bottom of the net is taking a hit, is that a coincidence? If we
were seeing that every day in our fishing practices, we’d all say we have a
serious problem. But that’s not what we’re seeing.”
In response to concerns about the accuracy of the NMFS surveys,
and in an effort to support its struggling fishing industry, the Commonwealth
of Massachusetts decided to do its own survey,
announcing that, “Given the poor stock of Gulf of Maine (GOM) cod, low catch
limits, and many fisherman’s claims that the cod status is better than currently
assessed, MarineFisheries implemented a new GOM Cod Industry Based
Survey in April 2016.”
The first year of the survey has been completed, and the news is
not good. As the Boston Globe reported,
“in a milestone in the war over the true state of cod in the Gulf of Maine,
Massachusetts scientists have reached the same dismal conclusion that their
federal counterparts did: The region’s cod are at a historic low—about 80
percent less than the population from just a decade ago.”
The state survey was comprehensive. According to the Globe, “the state spent
more than $500,000 to trawl for cod in 10 times as many locations [compared to
the NMFS surveys]. Rather than sampling the waters twice a year, as [NMFS]
does, the state cast its nets every month from last April to January, and kept
them in the water about 50 percent longer. They also searched for the fish in
deeper waters, where fishermen have said they tend to congregate.” Micah Dean,
the Massachusetts scientist overseeing the survey, noted that “It was an
exhaustive survey meant to provide an answer to the questions that the
fishermen were posing. But the fish weren’t there.”
Fishermen, on the other hand, are steadfastly rejecting the
Massachusetts survey’s results. Vito Giacalone declared,
“The state survey literally does zero to improve our confidence. You can’t just
sample anywhere. You have to go where the cod are supposed to be. Where these
fish exist in the western Gulf of Maine is greater than it has ever been in my
lifetime.”
Scientists say that cod tend to group together when the
population shrinks, and that fishermen tend to emphasize the places where such
bunches of cod remain abundant, and ignore all of the empty water elsewhere.
But bolstered by their own observations and, perhaps, by confirmation bias—people’s
tendency to embrace any information that supports their own beliefs, and reject
information that contradicts them—fishermen remain unwilling to accept what the
scientists say.
As noted in the blog Talking Fish,
“it seems obvious now that those who disagree with the assessments will never
agree. They no longer seem to only be blaming faulty assessments but the
foundation of science itself.”
Unfortunately, such
intransigence isn’t limited to Gulf of Maine cod.
In New Jersey, some recreational fishermen, abetted by various
elected and appointed officials, are challenging NMFS’ most recent update of the summer
flounder stock assessment.
Based on such update,
which shows that summer flounder have experienced poor recruitment for six
consecutive years, and that the population has declined to just 58% of its
target level, scientists have determined that the annual catch limit must be
reduced by 30% to avoid driving the stock into an overfished state.
In January, a group of New Jersey congressmen wrote to
then-Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzger, requesting that the annual catch
limit not be cut. According to columnist Al Ristori,
writing for the website nj.com, the congressmen asked that NMFS “reexamine its
methodologies and conduct a new benchmark summer flounder stock assessment
before making any decision to reduce summer flounder quotas.”
Ristori said that
proposed regulations “would all be an economic disaster for the N.J. [summer
flounder] fishery, and many experts believe they are not necessary for a
fishery which appears to be in relatively good condition. The goals set for
full recovery were established on questionable data from long before there was
management of the fishery—and may not be attainable.”
Such comments are
effectively indistinguishable from the comments that New England fishermen made
about cod….
Further down the coast, the same sort of things are being said about
South Atlantic red snapper. A stock assessment released in April
2016 indicated that the
spawning stock biomass, although slowly increasing, remained low—about 22% of
the spawning stock biomass target.
Neither commercial nor recreational fishermen were allowed to harvest South Atlantic red
snapper in 2016, in order to account for account for excessive
mortality the year before, when fishermen killed more than twice the annual
catch limit. The season may remain closed through 2017.
The season closure
angers fishermen and for-hire vessel operators, who are seeing more snapper
than they had in past years, and are confusing a stock that has improved from
dismal to somewhat less dismal abundance with a truly recovered population.
A recent article on the website of TC
Palm, published in southeastern Florida, quoted charterboat captain
Glenn Cameron, who complained, “I think [red snapper are] brutally mismanaged.
I believe the stock assessments are asinine. I don’t know where they collect
their data, but there are productive bottom fishing spots I used to go to and
don’t anymore due to all the red snapper there. I can’t catch any mutton
snapper, mangrove snapper or grouper in some spots because it’s been polluted
with red snapper.”
Another captain, Rich
Kluglein, agrees, saying “It’s gotten pretty silly…They are on every rock along
the 27 Fathom Curve. I’ve caught them as shallow as 55 feet of water.”
Again, it sounds a lot
like what the New England cod fishermen are saying.
Yet all indications
suggest that the New England cod fishermen are completely wrong.
There are no
indications that the fishermen who pursue Mid-Atlantic summer flounder or South
Atlantic red snapper are any more right.
Some fishermen will
believe what they choose to believe, regardless of the facts that fisheries
managers are more than happy to provide them.
But the nice thing
about facts is that they remain true, whether one chooses to believe them or
not.
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This essay 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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