Posts Tagged global fisheries

Nov 29 2011

Partnership Preserves Livelihoods and Fish Stocks

Stevie Fitz leases a fishing permit from the Nature Conservancy. He reports his catches as part of the group's effort to manage fish stocks in Half Moon Bay. (Peter DaSilva for The New York Times)

By 

HALF MOON BAY, Calif. — Stevie Fitz, a commercial fisherman, was pulling up his catch in one of his favorite spots off of Point Reyes in June when he saw something terrifying — in his nets were nearly 300 bocaccio, a dwindling species of rockfish protected by the government.

There are such strict limits on catching the overfished bocaccio that netting a large load, even by accident, can sideline and even ruin an independent fisherman.

Still, Mr. Fitz did not try to hide his mistake by slipping it back into the deep. Instead, he reported himself. With a few swipes on his iPad, he posted the exact time and location of the catch to a computerized mapping system shared by a fleet of 13 commercial boats, helping others to avoid his mistake.

“It was a slap in the face,” he said, “but we are trying to build an information base that will help everyone out.” He was later able to sell the bocaccio, although the catch still counted against his quota for the year.

A lifelong fisherman, Mr. Fitz is part of a very unusual business arrangement with the Nature Conservancy, an environmental group that is trying to transform commercial fishing in the region by offering a model of how to keep the industry vital without damaging fish stocks or sensitive areas of the ocean floor.

Five years ago, the conservancy bought out area fishing boats and licenses in a fairly extreme deal — forged with the local fishing industry — to protect millions of acres of fish habitat. The unusual collaboration was enjoined to meet stricter federal regulations and the results of a successful legal challenge. But once the conservancy had access to what was essentially its own private commercial fishing fleet, the group decided to put the boats back to work and set up a collaborative model for sustainable fishing.

Bringing information technology and better data collection to such an old-world industry is part of the plan. So is working with the fishermen it licenses to control overfishing by expanding closed areas and converting trawlers — boats that drag weighted nets across the ocean floor — to engage in more gentle and less ecologically damaging techniques like using traps, hooks and line, and seine netting.

The conservancy’s model is designed to take advantage of radical new changes in government regulation that allow fishermen in the region both more control and more responsibility for their operating choices. The new rules have led to better conservation practices across all fleets, government monitors say.

“It is blowing me away what is happening out there,” said William Stelle, the administrator for Pacific Northwest region of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s marine fisheries service. But, he added, the conservancy “may be the most sophisticated example of the successful marriage of interests between the environmental community and the fishing industry in marine conservation.” Similar programs are beginning to appear in other places.

American fish stocks have been troubled since the early 1990s and remain so because of overfishing, pollution, and warming seas. The government says that today 23 percent of fish stocks are not at self-sustaining levels at current fishing pressure.

Congress passed a law in 1996 demanding that local fishery councils protect “essential fish habitat.” In 2006, it also imposed tight catch limits for overfished species. As a result, if a fishery exceeds its limit on just one of these species, under federal law, the entire area could be closed to commercial boats for a season.

Local councils have struggled to balance the inherent tensions of adhering to these limits without ruining the fishermen’s ability to make a living. To do this, they have imposed regulations like prohibiting fishing in some areas, dictating the catch season and limiting what techniques and gear are used.

But last year, the Pacific Fisheries Management Council replaced some of those restrictions with strict quotas on six imperiled species and parceled them out among all 138 commercial vessels along the coast. Government observers are now put on every boat to make sure there is no cheating.

The downside is that if one boat lands too much of a sensitive species, known as bycatch, it must be docked until it can buy another boat’s unused quota — and there is not always a market to balance the catch. The quota system also provides incentive for each fisherman in the risk pool to help prevent others from using up their quota. And the early results for fish stocks are promising. Bycatch has dropped from 15 percent to 20 percent of the total haul to less than 1 percent.

The Nature Conservancy first got involved in central California in 2004 when it was looking to invest in marine conservation zones. The group realized that it needed better information to preserve the most critical areas.

“What the fishermen had was a deep local knowledge of the habitats of certain species,” said Michael Bell, senior project director with the conservancy. “There wasn’t scientific information at that level that could match the fisherman knowledge.”

Read the rest from The New York Times.

Oct 24 2011

Growing chorus against catch shares

'U.S. Capital' photo (c) 2009, chucka_nc - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

Written by
John Oswald | Staff Writer

A number of U.S. legislators are voicing their growing displeasure with NOAA’s catch shares program by asking the federal government to abandon the controversial fisheries management measure.

Simply, catch share programs take the total allowable catch for a fishery and divide it up into shares which are then bought by individuals, associations, communities or corporations. A main concern among those raising the cry against catch shares is that the policy consolidates the fishery in the hands of a few large operations to the detriment of individual fishermen.

On Oct. 6, Congressman John Runyan (R-NJ) sent a letter to President Obama urging him to reconsider the use of catch share programs for commercial and recreational fishermen. In his letter, which was also signed by Representatives Frank LoBiondo (R-NJ), Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), Frank Guinta (R-NH), and Sandy Adams (R-FL), Runyan wrote,

“Excessive government regulations have played a large role in our continued economic crisis. One of these excessive regulations is the catch share programs for fishermen. These programs have proven to decrease the number of fishing boats, which can have long lasting unintended economic consequences, including the loss of jobs in the fishing industry.”

Less than a week later, U.S. Senators Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) and Scott Brown (R-MA) introduced the Saving Fishing Jobs Act of 2011 which would require, among other things, that the Secretary of Commerce terminate new and existing catch share programs that result in a 15 percent or more reduction in the total number of fishermen in the program.

“Catch share programs are driving New Hampshire’s fishermen out of business. Five months after federal catch shares were implemented in New England, 55 out of the initial 500 boats in the fishery controlled 61 percent of the revenue, and 253 of the boats were sitting at the dock, unable to fish without quota,” Sen. Ayotte said.

And as recently as Wednesday, an article in the Gloucester Times of Gloucester, Mass, reports that Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) has requested that NOAA administrator, Dr. Jane Lubchenco, declare the catch shares program a disaster.

Read the rest here.

Oct 6 2011

An interview with ICES guest instructor Ray Hilborn

Ray Hilborn

All about Bayesian inference in fisheries science

​ICES Training Programme recently offered Introduction to Bayesian Inference in Fisheries Science, conducted by Ray Hilborn and Samu Mäntyniemi. It was attended by 26 students from 17 countries.

Ray Hilborn, one of today’s leading experts on fisheries, is a professor in the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, University of Washington, specializing in natural resource management and conservation. He serves as an advisor to several international fisheries commissions and agencies as well as teaching graduate and undergraduate courses in conservation, fishery stock assessment, and risk analysis. He is author of Quantitative Fisheries Stock Assessment, with Carl Walters, and The Ecological Detective: Confronting Models with Data, with Marc Mangel.

What is Bayesian statistics?

Bayesian statistics is one variety of statistics. Depending on how you divide it, you could say there are three primary schools. Beginning statistics courses centre on the concept of the null hypothesis and whether the data support rejection of the null hypothesis; usually, statistics are reported so that the probability of the null hypothesis is false. Then, there is the probability that you can reject the null hypothesis, and that’s often called Frequentive statistics. Finally, there’s another school, the Likelihoodist, that deals primarily with the extent to which the data support competing hypotheses. It’s a more interesting statistic because it realizes that you often have multiple different hypotheses, which is interesting to the extent that the data support the different hypotheses.

Bayesian statistics is, in a sense, much like the Likelihoodist, but it goes the additional step of actually assigning probabilities to competing hypotheses. The reason that’s so important is that, when you are giving advice to decision-makers, they want to know what’s the chance that something will happen. It turns out that Bayesian statistics is the only form of statistics that philosophically claims that they are probabilities. Going back – I guess I first ran into Bayesian statistics about 35 years ago – you find that Bayesian statistics really dominated business schools because they were built around decision-making.

Read the rest here.


Sep 27 2011

Agencies prepare to carve up coastal waters

Unprecedented zoning process will be based on ecosystem approach

BY MIKE LEE, REPORTER

State officials decided last week that a hotly contested set of marine protected areas will take effect in the nearshore waters of Southern California on Jan. 1.

That planning process split the region into pro-fishing and no-fishing camps since it started in 2008, but it pales in comparison to the scope of a federal initiative that’s starting to take shape as a priority of the Obama administration.

The coastal and marine spatial planning process, launched by executive order in 2010, seeks to account for the full range of ocean uses, from wave energy and oil extraction to shipping and recreation. It’s supposed to span broad ecosystems instead of relying on the traditional sector-by-sector approach to regulating ocean activities.

The blueprint will extend the debate about marine uses from the three-mile limit of state waters to 200 miles from shore as part of an unprecedented national effort to balance a growing list of competing interests. It’s never been done on the national level in the United States, though a few states and other countries have created similar plans.

Think of them like ocean zoning maps covering nine regions of the country that say what activities are best suited for specific areas. If they work, they could give industries more confidence about investing in certain spots and conservationists clarity about which regions are designated for boosting marine life.

“It’s important to get ahead of the curve as demands for space in the ocean increase, but also to move deliberately to make sure all the relevant information is assembled and everyone is included,” said Karen Garrison, at the Natural Resources Defense Council in San Francisco. “This is about keeping the ocean healthy and making sure it continues producing the benefits we depend on into the future.”

Momentum for ocean-use maps has grown along with concern about the ability of the world’s seas to handle pressures for ocean-based food, energy and other necessities. The California Current Ecosystem, which runs along the West Coast of the continental U.S., is among the most highly productive saltwater areas on Earth. It’s also one of the most difficult to manage because tens of millions of residents live within 50 miles of the shore and use the ocean in countless ways.

Read the rest from the San Diego Union-Tribune.

Sep 7 2011

Barbecued squid salad with snake beans and grapefruit

Serves 4

By Bill Granger

While fish can fall apart and be tricky to cook on a grill, prawns, langoustines, squid and other seafood are made for it. The punchy dressing and citrus give this squid salad a real kick.

2 green chillies, finely chopped
1 tsp sea salt
4 coriander root, rinsed well and roughly chopped
1 garlic clove
3 tbsp fish sauce
3 tbsp caster sugar
3 tbsp lime juice
Large handful picked, fresh mint leaves
Large handful fresh coriander leaves
300g/10oz snake beans or green beans, cut into 5cm lengths
2 pink grapefruit, peeled, cut into segments, pith and membrane removed
800g/1¾lb squid tubes, cleaned, cut into approx 6cm x 3cm pieces and scored on the inside
3 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil

Read the full recipe here.

Sep 7 2011

Fishermen face the most dangerous work in US

Want to get into a safe — relatively speaking — line of work? Be a firefighter

By Jacquelyn Smith
updated 9/5/2011 6:24:30 PM ET
If your work day sometimes seems to consist of nothing but boring meetings, coffee spills, and computer glitches, consider yourself lucky.

Each year thousands of U.S. workers die from injuries on the job. In fact, the Bureau of Labor Statistics‘ National Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries shows a preliminary total of 4,547 fatal work injuries in 2010, down slightly from the final count of 4,551 in 2009.

The rate of fatal work injury for U.S. workers in 2010 was 3.5 per 100,000 full-time equivalent workers, the same as the final rate for 2009 — but that may change. Datareleased in the last two weeks offers a preliminary count. The final 2010 data will be released in the spring of 2012 and shouldn’t be much different.

Forbes.com slideshow: America’s most dangerous jobs

The BLS breaks down the numbers to tell us what the most dangerous professions of all in America are. The top spot on the list goes to fishermen and fisherwomen, who lost their lives at a rate of 116 per 100,000 full-time workers. Fishing is a legendarily hazardous occupation, particularly Alaskan shellfishing, and fatalities have been high in recent years. High compensation helps offset the risks and seasonal fluctuations that come with the work.

Loggers and airplane pilots had the second and third deadliest jobs, respectively. Both are menaced by the threat of malfunctioning machinery and falling heavy objects. Fifty-nine loggers and 78 pilots and flight engineers were killed on the job in 2010.

Some occupations that seem dangerous, like firefighting and tractor operation, are actually relatively safe; both of those jobs, for example, are less dangerous than being a car mechanic. The safest jobs of all, with less than 1 death per 100,000 full-time workers, include secretaries, salespersons, and librarians.

Read the rest of the story on MSNBC.com

 

 

 

 

Sep 2 2011

KGO-TV: FDA helps create DNA database for fish

How do you know the fish you buy is really what it’s supposed to be? The answer is often you don’t. So the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is trying to protect consumers using DNA identification. It’s a global project, and the Philippines is believed to have more types of fish than almost any place on Earth, so it’s a great place to collect specimens. ABC7 News was the only TV station to go there with American researchers working to keep our food safe.

Read the rest of the story here.

Aug 30 2011

Fish on Fridays: The Newest Redlist Species: Commercial Fishermen

'Fishing Boats in San Diego' photo (c) 2011, Randy Kashka - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/

By Michael Conathan

Sustainability is the ultimate buzzword in fisheries and it’s led to the ubiquitous red-yellow-green list as one of the most popular means of trying to present consumers with a simple yet comprehensive way of determining whether or not they should order a certain kind of fish. Yet on the wallet cards that attempt to provide an accurate breakdown, there’s one species that’s never talked about: commercial fishermen.

There’s no question that the number of jobs available in many fisheries declined in recent years, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that this will continue. But unlike other industries in which job loss is driven by economic decline or market contraction, in fisheries, productivity is limited by just one thing: fish. Not enough fish means not enough fishing.

And anything that causes a decline in jobs is ripe for political pressure to end the slide at any cost, particularly in a down economy. Yet here’s the fundamental problem: There’s not a single politician in the world—not a president or prime minister or poobah—who can regulate, dictate, or legislate more fish into existence.

This hasn’t stopped some politicians, though, from pointing fingers in an attempt to score points with their constituents, who understandably blame low catch levels on the regulators who set the limits on how much fish can be harvested. These same regulators are under a legal mandate to set catches at or below levels recommended by scientists based on the best information they can gather.

Complicating matters is that at the same time these strict catch-limit policies have taken effect, a new management system touted mainly by environmental groups has gained quite a bit of traction with federal regulators. Catch shares is an overarching term for a management system that, in one form or another, divides up the total amount of fish available for harvest in a given year and allocates it to permit holders annually, usually on the basis of their historical landings. Fishermen can then either fish their allocation, or lease or sell it to their colleagues. Think of it as a cap-and-trade system for fish. A Fish on Fridays column from April has more on the details of catch shares.

Read the rest here.

Aug 15 2011

Scientist calls to end rule of NOAA

By Richard Gaines

Staff Writer

Influential marine scientist Brian Rothschild has charged NOAA with adopting an “unnecessarily hard-line,” wrong, wasteful and job-destroying interpretation of Congress’ intent for managing America’s fisheries.

Finding no accountability, “no master plan” or will to align policy more closely with what was intended and no hope for redress from the judiciary, Rothschild — who is based at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth and is one of New England’s most respected fishing advocates — proposed that Congress create an ad hoc commission to restructure fisheries management in the Northeast.

Rothschild issued his blunt judgments about the performance of the government and the courts in the aftermath of a June ruling by a federal judge in Boston that upheld the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s catch share policy management system, which data shows is bringing about a consolidation of the industry and forcing out small, independent boats and businesses.

Rothschild’s full commentary is reprinted in full on Page 8 of today’s Times; it was also published in the Wednesday Standard-Times of New Bedford, which is adjacent to Rothschild’s Dartmouth base.

A venerable waterman, scientist and linchpin between the Massachusetts fishing industry, academia and the political system, Rothschild’s words are read carefully across the country.

Rothschild, who turns 77 Sunday, was NOAA’s senior scientist during the 1970s, when the Magnuson-Stevens Act was rolled out. He was also the much-preferred choice of the industry and many members of Congress to head the National Marine Fisheries Service, but Jane Lubchenco, President Obama’s choice to lead NOAA in 2009, instead went for Maryland state wildlife official Eric Schwaab, never explaining her strange choice.

In his op-ed column, Rothschild absolved Judge Rya Zobel of much responsibility for affirming the government’s groundfishery policies, writing that she was “working within the bounds of standards established in administrative law.”

Rothschild wrote that the two cases handled by Zobel, brought by the cities of Gloucester and New Bedford and fishermen from every Atlantic coast state from Maine through North Carolina, showed that the judicial system does not always have the wherewithal to align the “executive’s implementation of laws with congressional intent.”

Certainly, Rothschild wrote, Congress did not intend NOAA to create a system that wastes 100,000 tons of fish a year worth $300 million at the dock, or $1.2 billion to the economy, while eliminating “hundreds if not thousands of jobs.” And it did not intend to disregard the economic and social impacts, unfairly reward some groups at the expense of others and “ignore valid scientific findings and suppress discussion regarding the magnitude of fish stocks.”

Congressman John Tierney and Barney Frank, both Democrats, and Sen. Scott Brown, a Republican, agreed with Rothschild’s view of NOAA, as did the consumer group, Food & Water Watch, which added that “Congress needs to step in and put an end to the agency’s abuse of any discretion that it has …”

NOAA did not respond to a request for comment.

“NOAA continues to send a clear message that it is unwilling to make the system fair for our fishermen,” Tierney said in a prepared statement to the Times. “I agree with Mr. Rothschild, that ‘protecting fishing jobs is a priority’ and that Congress must take every available action to ensure that our fishing communities are not driven out of business by NOAA’s inflexible interpretation of the Magnuson-Stevens Act.

“I am committed to working with my colleagues in Congress to protect our local fishing economy and push for a change in leadership at NOAA,” added Tierney, whose district includes Gloucester, all of Cape Ann and much of the North Shore.

In a telephone interview, Frank, who represents New Bedford and seeks Rothschild’s counsel on fisheries issues, said he believes Congress was moving closer to a bipartisan consensus to rein in NOAA by the limiting statutory changes to the Atlantic and Gulf regions, where grievances are greatest.

Read the rest here.

Jun 22 2011

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.