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| Fisheries management - Species are viewed in isolation Now, we need to achieve balance Posted by the Asbury Park Press on 12/15/06 Story Chat Post Comment When people talk about ecosystems, a word often mentioned is balance. The balance of lives in that system — plants, animals, minerals — are important.Yet when it comes to fisheries management, there is no balance, there is no ecosystem. Species are viewed in isolation, as though they're being raised in a big tank of saltwater with nothing else. And this is the problem we continue to face with fluke, despite the actions taken this week. Our Congressional delegation is to be commended for its actions that extended the rebuilding deadline for fluke to 2013, and the effect that had in gaining promises from William Hogarth, the head of the National Marine Fisheries Service, to put through emergency measures to set a fluke quota of 17.1 million pounds for 2007. But with all those positives, there remains a lot of work to be done. Our fisheries management system must be fixed, or we will continue to face the crisis we have this year down the road, with fluke and with other fisheries, too. While extending the rebuilding deadline by three years helps, it's only a Band-Aid on a much bigger problem. Revising the target biomass from 197 million pounds may help, but as some have pointed out, it may just result in tighter quotas for good. The 33 million pounds the fluke fishing community was promised in 2005 will likely never materialize under a lower rebuilding target. The biggest problem, in my mind, continues to be the refusal by NMFS and by the extremist environmental groups to view the problems of our ocean fisheries as ecosystems. Though there are discussions of looking at fisheries from an ecosystem standpoint among fisheries managers — I sat in on a meeting on that topic during the ASMFC meetings in Galloway in November 2005 — the impetus to move to that style of management is next to nil.The argument given is the scientific information that's needed to manage from an ecosystem approach isn't in place. Environmentalists love to hold up oceans as ecosystems whenever pollution is the topic; yet they're the first to discount the idea that any one species of fish (including our beloved spiny dogfish) could possibly be having a negative impact on any other species. It's mind-boggling. How can the academic minds hold so tightly to such beliefs when we teach our third-graders about the oceans as an ecosystem? It makes no sense. Why is it so hard for fisheries officials to wrap their minds around the concept that you can't look at any fish species as an isolated group? This isn't rocket science, folks. I've heard the argument that it's difficult to determine the impact one species is having on another, in terms of calculating mortality. Is it just difficult, or is there an inherent unwillingness to change approaches because it will require effort? Change is scary. Change takes work — a lot of it, sometimes. And most human beings naturally resist change — even when they know something isn't working or isn't right.Perhaps this is why nothing has been done to fix the Marine Recreational Fishery Statistics Survey nearly a year after the National Research Council told NMFS that MRFSS was seriously flawed. What's worse, it's still held up as "the best available science," and used to bludgeon the fishing industry, because "it's the only science available." The Magnuson reauthorization addresses the issue, and gives NMFS two years to fix it. But as long as our fisheries managers continue to use MRFSS as a cold, hard fact instead of the estimate it is, as long as they refuse to apply common sense to MRFSS, the fisheries management system will continue to be broken. I've said it before, but it holds true: there isn't a fisherman I've met who wants to see us take every last fish from the ocean. The charter boat captains don't want that to happen; it would put them out of business. The same goes for the commercial fishermen. Their lives and livelihoods depend on there being fish to catch for years to come — and not fish they find by continually changing the species they target.Are there lawbreakers? We know there are. We know that foreign nations continually ignore the agreements reached by the International Convention on the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas. ICCAT meets yearly, makes decisions, and while U.S. fishermen adhere to tighter and tighter restrictions, other nations take what they want, treaties be damned. We know there are American fishermen who exceed limits, who are always looking for that edge of what's right and what's wrong. And those people should be punished. But too often the fishing industry as a whole is whipped for the sins of a few. Fishermen — particularly the ones who run party and charter boats or commercial fishing enterprises — have families to feed, children to clothe and educate, mortgages or rent to pay. They're not living in million-dollar mansions. They're not sending their kids to expensive private schools. They're honest, hard-working people who deserve a little more effort on the part of the government — in this case NMFS — to find a system that meets the needs of sustaining fisheries without destroying lives.That system must start looking at fisheries as ecosystems, not as isolated units. It must start to acknowledge that having fluke and dogfish and bluefish and striped bass and herring and sand eels and bunker and every other species at peak biomass levels that are at best guesses by scientists — based on mathematical models that allow for little affect of anything but fishing — is simply not realistic.We as humans — and particularly here in the U.S. — operate under this notion that we can manipulate anything on this Earth to reach its highest potential.Have we impacted the oceans with the things we've done to the planet? Yes. Can we lessen those effects? Yes. But we as Americans cannot "fix" the balance of the oceans to reach some mathematical model unless that model includes all the variables. We can't stop hurricanes; we can't force other nations accept the principles we apply and the beliefs we hold about the environment. It's narcissistic to believe we are all-powerful when it comes to the environment. I'm not saying we should stop trying to ensure our fisheries continue to thrive. But we must apply common sense — the kind of common sense that will question MRFSS figures that say Florida fishermen exceeded their red snapper quota by more than 100 percent in a summer that had four hurricanes. We need the common sense that looks at the numbers of spiny dogfish, male and female, and opens them up and looks at their stomach contents and sees them full of baby fluke, baby weakfish and other species we hold dear, and rethinks what impact that is having on all of our fisheries.Some of that common sense is being injected into the process through the Magnuson reauthorization, which is a positive sign. On Monday, Hogarth and Patricia Kurkul, the Northeast regional administrator for NMFS, showed a bit of common sense and some much-needed humanity in promising they will set a fluke quota of 17.1 million pounds — provided a number of other factors are met — if the ASMFC backed their 12.98 million-pound figure for now.I hope they hold true to that promise, because there are a lot of people counting on that. We have to change our approach to fisheries management. Continuing to isolate species, and continuing to paint fishermen as evil, greedy and self-serving will keep us from ever achieving the goal everyone seeks: Balance. Karen E. Wall is the editor of Hook, Line & Sinker. kwall@app.com | ||||||||
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