Time to rethink fishery management?

TO THE POINT: Point Judith fishing boat Karen Elizabeth steams out of Galilee on its way to the squid fishing grounds. / PBN PHOTO/JOHN P. LEE
TO THE POINT: Point Judith fishing boat Karen Elizabeth steams out of Galilee on its way to the squid fishing grounds. / PBN PHOTO/JOHN P. LEE

Fishery management traditionally has focused on fishing pressure, the removal of animals from a population with nets, lines and traps, as the only statistic worth using in the regulatory equation.
The rationale is simple, at least in theory: If the landings in a fishery drop, it’s assumed that the population has declined.
Everything else that might change a fish stock – all the environmental, ecological or climatic variables that are virtually impossible to quantify with any accuracy – have been addressed as statistical constants in fish-population models.
But climate change and its rapid effect on fisheries are forcing scientists and policymakers to rethink the traditional management approach. Suddenly, every fixed point in the equation has to be reconsidered as a network of moving parts.
“We’re feeling pressure from a lot of people to get out in front of climate change,” said Richard Seagraves, senior staff scientist at the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council, the federal regulatory body responsible for many of Rhode Island’s most important fish stocks. “We’re all asking ourselves, how does climate change impact the way we think about fish stocks? Whatever the answer, it’s going to be a huge undertaking.”
That re-examination has opened the doors for a new way of looking at fishery management that goes beyond fishing effort. Officials now recognize that predator and prey relationships can alter a fish stock: Seals, dogfish and sea bass can eat an enormous amount of squid, cod, lobster; a change in surface or bottom temperature can alter a fish stock by making the fish shift to more favorable habitats; and bycatch on fishing vessels, the discarding that happens at sea, often without proper documentation, can alter a stock by not accounting for animals being removed.
Every decision made in fisheries management gets run through a statistical model. Fishery policy is hungry for data, and its appetite will only increase as scientists, fishermen and managers try to understand and model the complex, interwoven relationships of the fishing industry and the marine environment, not as separate things but together.
Climate change scientists have their own models, but many are designed to identify patterns or generate predictions on a huge scale. For fishery-management purposes, the scale is just too large, way beyond the local concerns about where fish are caught, eaten, where fish decide to swim away, or head for new ground, says John Manderson, a fishery ecologist with the National Marine Fisheries Service. Chris Brown, a Point Judith fisherman, sees the changes on the water – at the local scale. As a boy in the 1970s, he fished with his grandfather, doing the same thing he does now, towing nets. Brown, like all fishermen, spends a good deal of time comparing notes with other fishermen – anything odd that they are seeing in their nets or on their lines – and considering possible new trends or patterns in waters they work. Collectively, the information, while anecdotal and hard to quantify precisely, can be valuable.
What fishermen in Point Judith are saying is that what was odd or abnormal not so long ago is becoming more common. Species historically seen off Cape Hatteras, N.C., species such as cobia, jacks, spot, croaker and loggerhead sea turtles are now appearing regularly just south of Long Island, knocking on Rhode Island’s door.
Angel sharks and cownose rays, common bottom dwellers of the mid-Atlantic, are coming up in fishermen’s nets around Block Island. In many cases, the fishermen catching them are seeing them for the first time in their careers.
And during the winter the past few years about 60 miles off Block Island, the fishing effort on fluke (a kind of flounder) would represent vessels from six different states, with Virginia and North Carolina dominant. As recently as five years ago, mid-Atlantic boats would never steam up this way, burning fuel, if the fluke weren’t here. Traditionally the mid-Atlantic ports had the fluke, they had the big landings, the catch history, and therefore, the big state quotas.
Do such changes merely reflect increases or decreases in the populations of specific species? Or is it a new shift in the species range, its distribution – or a combination of both? The answer, however difficult to obtain, matters when you try, for instance, to make a new stock assessment on fluke.
“The general trend for a lot of species is to the north and east, and often deeper,” said Manderson. “I think [over time] some species will do very well, others won’t. You’ll have winners and losers.” Fishing last summer around Block Island, Brown pulled up 3,000 pounds of spot, a commercially important species generally harvested, processed and sold below Barnegat Light, N.J. “That was a first for me,” said Brown. “Sure, every year I see a few spot – a few … but 3,000 pounds?”
Point Judith fishermen and resource surveys have all observed an increase off Rhode Island of sea bass and fluke. Both fish are common here, but their abundance and distribution in “local” waters are changing quite rapidly.
“Narragansett Bay is seeing large numbers of larval stage and juvenile fluke when normally we’d expect to see them [the juveniles] down in Delaware Bay,” said Manderson. “But winter flounder and lobster in southern New England don’t look like they’re doing so well.”
Brown doesn’t think fishermen should be worried about changing fish stocks: “We should be worried about the managers’ response to the change.”
There’s also the question of whether this is all really new? The book “Fishes of the Gulf of Maine” contains numerous examples of warm-water species appearing in New England waters. The book was published in 1950.
“I look at the data,” said National Marine Fisheries Service oceanographer Jon Hare, “and a cold winter now is warmer than a cold winter 30 or 100 years ago. Our summers are also warmer. So it’s long-term climate change with a very high seasonal variability in temperature that I think is causing this shift we’re seeing.”
According to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data, the ocean temperature from Cape Hatteras to Nova Scotia, going back 150 years, has risen between 1.25 and 1.3 degrees Celsius.
“[It] seems like nothing,” said Hare. “But that increase adds a lot of heat to the ocean each year, and temperature is a key driver of all biology in the oceans, from the enzyme level to the top predators.”
Meanwhile, according to a fall 2013 survey of the American public by George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communications, 23 percent of Americans don’t believe in climate change – that number is up 7 percentage points from April 2013. “I don’t know what I call it – climate change, a regime shift, a cycle, a new trend,” said Brown. “All I know is that something is going on that the management had better catch up” to.
The new term for this management philosophy – the whole-system approach – is “ecosystem-based” fishery management.
“No one really knows how to define it,” Brown said. “It really incorporates a new way of looking at how our fisheries are managed, using data and information from many different sources, different disciplines. If we don’t manage for the change and stay in a fixed fishery system, then fishermen will have to remain fixed – and you can’t make a living that way. We need options.”
Brown and Manderson are among those who think more co-management is the way forward, using different sources of data taken by research and industry vessels and by interconnected computer programs for real-time data collection.
Brown takes it a step further. Given current federal and state budgetary shortfalls, Brown suggests a 2 percent to 3 percent tax at the first point of sale, right at the dock, on all fish landed. The tax would then fund industry boats to collect data in real time and then work in concert with the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council and National Marine Fisheries Service. It would also, Brown said, enable the fisherman to own the data, thereby increasing the fisherman’s confidence in the whole process.
“I’m all for it,” said Jon Knight, owner of the net-manufacturing company Superior Trawl, in Narragansett. “But I have my doubts. Maybe I’m jaded. We’ve all been through a lot, and now we’re talking about a paradigm change. We can’t seem to figure out single-species, never mind [everything else].”
Jason McNamee, supervising marine biologist for the R.I. Department of Environmental Management, has heard the talk about climate change and fisheries, and how many fish species appear to be shifting north.
“I do know that not all changes we’re seeing are negative – Point Judith may well benefit economically with shifts in fish stocks. Since climate change together with fisheries is so amorphous, we’re watching how the [federal government] responds to this with their policy.” •

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4 COMMENTS

  1. John –

    Great job. I have been writing about the shortcomings of our fishing-centric attempts to manage our fisheries for most of two decades. The New England groundfish debacle is only the most obvious example of how ultimately futile this can be, and how much human misery it has caused and is continuing to cause in fishing communities on all of our coasts.

    Keep up the good work. It’s tremendously refreshing to read an article that wasn’t written directly from a press release paid for by one of a handful of mega-foudations that has no regard for fishermen or fishing communities.

  2. This piece brings up a great point about rethinking fishery management. Methods like ecosystem-based fishery management, where multiple ecosystem measurements are taken into account, need to be used to address the needs of fish and fishermen alike. What happens in our rivers has a huge effect on our oceans, and vice versa.

  3. Great article. Taking new perspectives on fishery management is important, as long as we keep in mind the importance of maintaining habitat protection. This can really help provide resilience for marine species against climate change effects on ecosystems in RI. This effort, combined with minimizing bycatch of nontarget fish (as well as birds and mammals, of course) can help ecosystem plans take an appropriately broad view.

  4. This article does a good job of putting in context the larger changes happening in fisheries in RI and greater New England. What needs to follow is smarter management policies that maintain habitat protection. Some plans, like the currently proposed Omnibus Habitat Amendment, don’t do enough, and in fact will significantly reduce protection of habitat in New England’s ocean waters. We need to protect areas known to shelter spawning aggregations of fish, and to protect young fish and forage species.

    This is a solvable problem, but we have to work together. We don’t want to fall back into the well just as we’re beginning to climb out!