FORUM: Anti-fishing proposal would shipwreck balanced marine management

By D.B. Pleschner

North County Times

If you didn’t know better, you might think that forage fish like sardines and squid are on the brink of destruction in California.

That’s what some activists imply. However, nothing could be further from the truth.

California’s coastal pelagic “forage” fisheries are the most protected in the world, with one of the lowest harvest rates.

In addition to strict fishing quotas, the Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA), has implemented no-take reserves, including many near bird rookeries and haul-out sites to protect forage for marine life.

But activists are pushing even more restrictions in the form of Assembly Bill 1299.

California already provides a science-based process to manage forage species. The federal Pacific Fishery Management Council is also developing a California Current Ecosystem Management Plan, covering the entire West Coast, not just California state waters. Further, the federal Coastal Pelagic Species Fishery Management Plan that governs these fish adopted an ecosystem-based management policy more than a decade ago.

To initiate new legislation like AB 1299 as if no regulation exists is fiscally irresponsible and disrespectful of California’s management history.

The National Marine Fisheries Service voiced concern about the bill’s redundancy and overlap with federal management, pointing out that it could actually impede ecosystem-based management.

AB 1299 won’t protect forage species because virtually all range far beyond California state waters, which only extend three miles from shore.

But the bill does jeopardize the future of California’s historic wetfish fisheries, the backbone of California’s fishing economy. AB 1299 restricts California fishermen unfairly, because virtually all the forage species listed are actively managed or monitored by the federal government and most species are harvested along the entire West Coast.

In this economic crisis, why would California squander millions of dollars —- and sacrifice thousands of jobs —- on an unfunded mandate that duplicates existing laws?

Apparently this doesn’t matter to activists, whose rhetoric claims that overfishing is occurring in California now and a change is needed.

AB 1299 proponents have made many false claims about forage species. For example, they referenced a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration evaluation of the California Current Ecosystem, predicting a downward trend for some marine life, including squid, but failed to explain that this report was simply a draft. The evaluation excluded southern Californiawaters, where 80 percent of the squid harvest occurs. A record spawning event also occurred in 2010.

And consider sardines. After their decline in the 1940s, fishery managers instituted an ecosystem-based management plan that accounts for forage needs before setting harvest quotas, and reduces quotas in concert with natural declines in the resource. The harvest quota for the West Coast plummeted 74 percent from 2007 to 2011.

But activists embellished a NOAA graph to “prove” their claim that the current sardine population decline was due to overfishing. The marine scientist who developed the graph pointed out their error, stating, “You can rest assured that the U.S. has not exceeded the overfishing limit based on the rules in place today.”

In fact, the majority of California’s fishing community —- municipalities, harbor districts, recreational and commercial fishing groups, seafood companies and knowledgeable fishery scientists —- oppose AB 1299, seeing it as a disingenuous attempt to curtail sustainable fisheries unnecessarily.

D.B. Pleschner is executive director of the California Wetfish Producers Association, a nonprofit designed to promote sustainable wetfish resources.

State’s no-fishing rule stinks

By David Hansen

When fishing as a boy, I used to stare at my jar of salmon eggs and marvel. I wondered how they could arrive so perfectly formed and opaque and inherently controversial — stripped from their host like corn off a cob.

Years later as a reporter covering tribal fishing rights in the Pacific Northwest, I learned a lot more about salmon eggs, types of salmon, salmon hatcheries, salmon fillets, Copper River salmon (yes, they are worth the price) and how to properly paint a salmon-colored wall.

So it is with great interest I read about how the state of California basically will ban fishing off Laguna Beach starting Oct. 1 (Coastline Pilot, “State’s ‘no fishing’ rule starts in fall,” July 8).

There are some activities in life — fishing, hunting, reading a paper, purchasing certain goods and services — that are closely tied to “inalienable rights.” People get emotional when you take them away.

There are also times when those activities become at risk due to overuse.

The truth is often somewhere in the middle.

Unfortunately, in our day, it takes lawsuits to figure it all out, and that’s what will happen here.

Read the rest of the column in the Laguna Beach Coastline Pilot here.

Fishing banned from most of Laguna Beach this fall

Most of Laguna’s shoreline will be closed to anglers starting this fall.

The city’s  Fish and Game Commission announced that implementation of the Marine Protected Areas, or MPAs, in Southern California will begin Oct. 1 under regulations adopted in December that ban fishing from certain coastal areas.

“Commercial lobster fishermen will lose 30% to 40% of their income with the 7-mile closure of Laguna’s coastline,” Councilman Kelly Boyd told the Coastline Pilot. “As for recreational fishing, sea mammals eat way more than a fisherman catches, and under the restrictions, a man can’t even take his grandson grunion hunting.”

Laguna already has no-take areas, such as Treasure Island and Main Beach tide pools. The ban is expected to start on opening day of the recreational lobster season. Under the regulations, Laguna has three MPAs, said Marine Safety Chief Kevin Snow, who attended a two-hour meeting Tuesday morning with commission representatives.

Read the rest on the LA Times blog here.

The (Nonsensical) Politics of Fisheries Funding

Fisherman Larry Collins stands next to his boat the Autumn Gale at Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco. SOURCE: AP/Marcio Jose Sanchez

By Michael Conathan

All eyes in Washington are focused up these days. They’re peering cautiously at that ever-encroaching debt ceiling and the economic ruin pundits and politicians are forecasting if we allow ourselves to bump into it. Meanwhile, spending-phobia has gripped the less headline-grabbing, more mundane aspects of congressional operations as well. So we’re going to spend a bit of time today in one of Capitol Hill’s metaphorical windowless rooms crunching numbers to find out what Congress is doing to fund (or not fund) fisheries management.

Let’s start with a quick note about the congressional appropriations process. Per the Constitution, Congress holds the “power of the purse.” The president asks for money by submitting a budget but the legislature dictates how much will actually be spent.

Like all pieces of legislation—recall your “Schoolhouse Rock”—spending (also known as appropriations) bills originate in committee. In this case, that’s the Appropriations Committee, which passes them on, accompanied by an explanatory report, for consideration of the full body. Ultimately, both House and Senate must pass identical versions of legislation that are then sent to the president to be signed into law. The bill that contains funding for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, and thus for fisheries management, is the Commerce, Justice, and Science, or CJS, Appropriations Act.

House appropriators talked a good game this year in the CJS bill’s report, stating “healthy levels of investment in scientific research are the key to long-term economic growth.” One would think that in these days of anemic job growth, 9.2 percent unemployment, and an angry electorate, if Congress held “the key to long-term economic growth,” they might use that key to unlock America’s potential. Instead, line-in-the-sand politics rose up and trumped common sense. In short, the “cut spending now” mantra seems to have all but obliterated the more reasoned and storied catchphrase of entrepreneurs everywhere: “You have to spend money to make money.”

Read the rest of the story here.

Marine preservation proposal would allow Indian tribal harvests

By Matt Weiser
mweiser@sacbee.com

American Indian tribes on California’s North Coast will retain the right to harvest plants and wildlife for subsistence purposes under a plan for new marine preserves north of Fort Bragg.

Read more here.

Squid Studies: Scientists Seeking and Savoring Squid

William Gilly, a professor of biology at Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station, embarked on new expedition this month to study jumbo squid in the Gulf of California on the National Science Foundation–funded research vessel New Horizon. This is his second blog post about the trip.

By William Gilly

SEA OF CORTEZ— As we moved up the Gulf towards Guaymas, we continued to prepare our equipment. Actually, this will be a never-ending focus for the next two weeks. A research cruise in most cases is a creation in progress, and ‘equipment’ in our case ranges from Brad Seibel’s industrial-scale plumbing system for keeping big squid alive during experiments to our collection of fishing gear to catch squid. Everything will need constant, meticulous attention.

We arrived in Guaymas mid-afternoon and collected the rest of our party by 7 pm and immediately headed out to deep water about 10 miles offshore for our first exploratory squid jigging session. We arrived around 10:00 pm at the chosen site where a finger-like canyon poked back toward Guaymas. We immediately began to catch squid, and this had a predictable effect. We believe that catching a squid automatically triggers joyful exuberance. We have seen this phenomenon hundreds of times over the last decade. If there is photo of someone frowning while holding up a squid for the camera, we would like to see it. We doubt such an image exits.

Within an hour or so we collected our target sample of 20 to 30 squid. They were lined up sequentially on deck, measured, weighed, sexed and assessed for stage of maturity. This is information is simple but vital for two main reasons.

First, it is necessary to confirm the size of animals being sampled by the scientific sonar system on board that is being used by the Oregon State group. Acoustic data collected shows the depth where the squid and their prey are, and it can also be used to calculate numbers of squid or biomass – but only if you know how large the squid are that are being sampled acoustically. This is standard fare for acoustic assessment of fin-fish fisheries around the world, but use of such methods with squid is much less widespread. Kelly Benoit-Bird’s team from Oregon State is doing pioneering work in this area, and her insights and creativity were recognized with a MacArthur award in 2010.

Read the rest at Scientific American.

LAT looks for surprising numbers to track possible fishing recovery

By Rosland Gammon

Like its Gulf Coast counterpart, the fishing industry in California has faced hard times. But it doesn’t have an oil spill to blame. Instead, a low population of salmon prompted a three-year ban on fishing. Alana Semuels of the Los Angeles Times takes her audience aboard Duncan MacLean’s boat as he goes out for the first time after the ban was lifted. She writes:

“As dawn breaks on a recent morning, he sits at the helm of his 43-foot wooden boat, the Barbara Faye, guiding it past yachts and pleasure cruisers, two break walls and a beacon. But his enthusiasm to be fishing again is tempered by anxiety over what he will catch.”

Read the rest of the story here.

Editorial: Fisheries have equal claim to water

You’ve seen the signs — “Farms, not fish!” — when the TV cameras are about to roll. But it isn’t likely you’ve seen any proclaiming “Fish, not subsidized water for corporate ag,” which is because there haven’t been many signs like that.

Fishermen can be just as appealing as farmers, but agriculture continues to win the political and public relations fight over the limited amount of California water that both of them need. Those who should be supporting the fishing interests—including the people and institutions of the Central Coast—should start doing that more loudly and more clearly.

A bill now in the House, H.R. 1837 by tea party favorite Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Visalia, would set the clock back to 1994 for environmental regulations imposed on giant water traffickers such as the Westlands Water District and the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.

Read the rest of the The Monterey County Herald editorial here.

Oceana Twists Truth to Further Agenda

Oceana’s Geoff Shester recently penned an op-ed in The Santa Cruz Sentinel alleging that forage fish harvesting is out of control and must be reigned in.  The only problem with his opinion:  the “facts”.  They are, in fact, not accurate, but instead reflect an agenda.

Below, I’ve highlighted Mr. Shester’s false claims and followed them with a dose of reality:

• “Thirty years ago forage species accounted for 40 percent of California’s commercial fish landings by weight.  Today, with big fish gone, forage landings have soared to 85 percent”

In 1981, a moratorium was in effect prohibiting sardine fishing, and tunas dominated California landings, totaling more than 40 percent of the California catch.  The tuna canning industry based in San Diego, then the tuna capitol of the world, was driven out of California beginning in the mid-1980s, due in large measure to unfair competition from foreign water-packed imports and the excessive cost of doing business in the Golden State.  Those ‘big fish’ weren’t gone from the ocean, however, they were just not landed in California.

The sardine resource made a dramatic recovery beginning in the late 1970s, with the advent of a warm-water oceanic cycle.  Resource managers reopened the fishery in 1985, but this time around, they enacted strict harvest limits coupled with environmental triggers.  The resource was declared fully recovered in 1999 when the population exceeding one million metric tons.  But the harvest rate was capped at 10 percent after subtracting 150,000 mt off the top of the biomass estimate to account for forage needs.  The stock appears to have entered another natural decline and biomass estimates have dropped sharply.  Which brings up another allegation:

• “…Overfish the forage and the rest of the marine species are in trouble…but that is exactly what is happening in California today.  Pacific sardines have declined 70 percent in the past decade, and market squid are being fished at record levels.  California fisheries, like salmon, rockfish and tuna, are depleted and in dire need of recovery.”

Regarding sardine, the conservative biomass estimate does not measure transboundary stocks in Canada and Mexico, but it does count landings from those countries, and those have declined; but coastwide harvest guidelines, including Washington and Oregon, as well as California, have also declined precipitously – from 152,000 mt in 2007 to 40,000 mt in 2011.

The market squid statement also is calculated to confuse.

California’s ocean has exhibited incredible productivity in the past two years, producing the highest grey whale count on record, resurgent rockfish stocks and a rebounding salmon fishery.  Market squid also thrived in these productive ocean conditions, but the fishery did not hit ‘record levels’.  In fact precautionary management has established a maximum harvest cap, intended to prevent overexploitation.  The fishery reached it and was closed before the end of the year.  A post-season survey of the squid spawning grounds revealed large aggregations of squid spawning nearly everywhere, well beyond end of the normal spawning cycle.

The squid life cycle runs from birth to death after spawning in nine short months or less, and abundance is driven primarily by environmental cycles. To maintain a sustainable fishery, The Department of Fish and Game instituted weekend fishing closures, allowing squid to spawn untouched for 30 percent of the week, and implemented marine reserves in more than 30 percent of traditional fishing grounds in central and southern California.  In addition, the fishery management plan approved in 2004 reduced the fleet by more than half.

California fisheries are by no means depleted, they are managed strictly by both the state and federal government (that’s why landings have appeared to decline – more fish are left in the ocean!).  Rockfish and salmon are managed under the ecosystem-based fishery management mandate of the federal Magnuson Act, with precautionary annual catch limits to prevent overfishing.

• “A recent federal study found that top ocean predators off California have declined by more than 50 percent since 2003.  Removing their source of food is like taking medicine away from the patient.  Traditional fisheries management concentrates on single species …”

The study, presumably the first draft of the “California Current Integrated Ecosystem Assessment”, does not yet include the area south of Point Conception – a critical omission acknowledged by the scientific team.  The draft IEA was submitted to the Pacific Fishery Management Council as an example.  Clearly, with data from a significant part the ocean missing, conclusions are not ready for ‘prime time’.

The IEA was developed to assist the Council in developing its Ecosystem-based Management Plan for the entire California Current – which will inform all the other fishery management plans, which now include ecosystem considerations themselves.  (The Coastal Pelagic Species plan has considered forage needs for more than a decade!)

Similar innuendos and misstatements run throughout the article, but I will touch on just one more:

• “The question of fishing sustainably is a matter of political will.  That’s why a strong coalition of conservationists, fishermen and seafood businesses that want to see … healthy California oceans are supporting Assembly Bill 1299 that emphasizes the critical role that forage species play…”

A vast majority of California’s fishing communities, including municipalities, port districts, recreational and commercial fishing groups and individuals, seafood companies and knowledgeable fishery scientists, believe California already fishes sustainably;  indeed, California Current fisheries are acknowledged as having one of the lowest harvest rates in the world.

This super-majority is very much opposed to AB 1299, seeing that it embodies the same type of confusing, captious policy statements as contained in the ‘forage fishing must be controlled’ article.

To be clear, the majority of California fishing-related interests oppose the bill for the following reasons:

• A multi-million dollar boondoggle:  AB 1299 is a solution in search of a problem.  This bill fails to acknowledge and integrate all the existing protections for forage species that now exist in both state and federal law. Whales, sea lions, and sea birds are thriving, providing clear evidence that state and federal forage species policies are working. Moreover, there are no ‘reduction’ fisheries in California, nor fishmeal plants, so the alleged threat from increasing forage fish production for aquaculture does not exist here: fisheries are strictly regulated.

• Fails to recognize existing efforts: California has done a good job managing forage fish – far better than most other states and countries.  In addition to strict harvest rates and other management measures, the Marine Life Protection Act has implemented no-take reserves, including many near bird rookeries and haul out sites to protect forage for other marine life.  To start as if from scratch is both redundant and disrespectful of that management history.

• Requires non-existent funding and staff time: Department of Fish & Game (DFG) is already enormously underfunded and understaffed for its existing tasks. The increased demand for Department research and management resources that this bill would create cannot be met without sacrificing resources for programs that are actually necessary.

• Duplicates federal and state efforts: Oceana, the bill author, admitted at a public forum that California’s Marine Life Management Act already provides a science-based process to manage forage species. The federal Pacific Fishery Management Council is currently developing its California Current Ecosystem Management Plan, which will cover the entire West Coast, not just California state waters, with objectives similar to those in AB 1299. We encourage California to collaborate with the PFMC, which does not require legislation.

• Places impossible standard on fisheries: The May 27 amendments to AB 1299 camouflage the millions needed to do specified research and make findings, yet still require new fishery management plans and amendments to fishery plans to be consistent with the new policy after January 1, 2012.  The new policy objective requires ecosystem-based management that “recognizes, prioritizes, accounts for, and incorporates the ecological services rendered by forage species”.  This implies setting explicit allocations for birds and mammals off the top of all fishery harvest plans  – and much of this information is not available.  Although final amendments in Appropriations Committee removed specific language, the threat of restriction is still inherent in this policy.

AB 1299 still requires millions in new money for DFG to prove that a fishery had no negative impacts before allowing it to operate. This is money that could be going to schools, health care, and other state programs with proven needs.

• AB 1299 does not consider best available science, and could actually impede ecosystem-based management. AB 1299 will not protect forage species as virtually all range far beyond California state waters, but the policy proposed in this bill could severely restrict California fishermen unnecessarily and unfairly.

Fishing interests wary of Commerce nominee

When Dr. Brian Rothschild, dean emeritus of the UMass School of Marine Science and Technology, heard that nominee John Bryson was a co-founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council, his reaction was, “Oh, wow.”

But the NRDC was founded 40 years ago, and today Bryson is better known for being chairman and CEO of the power company Edison International until he retired in 2008.

Today he is a senior adviser to the private equity firm Kohlberg Kravits Roberts & Co. and since 1995 he has sat on the board of directors of the Boeing Co. and since 2000 at Walt Disney.

In a prepared statement, President Obama said, Bryson “understands what it takes for America to succeed in a 21st century global economy. John will be an important part of my economic team, working with the business community, fostering growth, and helping open up new markets abroad to promote jobs and opportunities here at home.”

Apart from the boilerplate, there was immediate concern among fishing interests about Bryson’s personal attitude toward commercial fishing, given that NRDC has long been involved in litigation to tighten fishing restrictions.

Read the rest here.