WASHINGTON (Saving Seafood) — December 12, 2013 — The following story is a response to an article which appeared this morning on OZY, a news website founded in September 2013, and financed by prominent investors, including Laurene Jobs, wife of the late Apple CEO, Steve Jobs. The site is the brainchild of Carlos Watson, who first made his name as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and parlayed his celebrity into television on CNBC, CNN and MSNBC. OZY describes itself as “the go-to daily news and culture site for the Change Generation, bringing you up to speed on what happened in the last 24 hours and vaulting you ahead by previewing new people, places, ideas and trends in bite-sized original articles that are intelligent, compelling and stylish.” It is most widely known for a November interview with former President Bill Clinton, in which the former President made headlines with his opinions on the Affordable Care Act.
Warning that “within our lifetimes, the world’s supply of fish could collapse entirely,” the startup news website OZY promulgates several popular alarmist claims about global fisheries (“Plenty of Fish in the Sea?” by Melissa Pandika, 12/12). These claims, which have been widely shared by several prominent environmental organizations, are based on years-old studies that were controversial even at the time of their publication, and in the years since have largely been disproven.
This article is the latest to cite the commonly repeated statistic that the population of bluefin tuna “has dropped almost 90 percent since the 1960s in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Southern Oceans.” Unfortunately, this claim is based on a methodologically flawed study that has been questioned by several preeminent tuna experts. The study, published in 2003 by Drs. Ransom A. Myers and Boris Worm, of Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Canada, reaches its conclusions using data on bluefin tuna taken only from longline fisheries. Using longline fisheries as the sole source of data on bluefin is problematic because the fishery selectively targets larger bluefin, meaning that the fish caught using longlines are not a representative sample of the species as a whole.
The study’s conclusion that the tuna population has declined by 90 percent has been challenged by, among others, Dr. Victor Restrepo, Senior Vice President of Science at the International Seafood Sustainability Foundation (ISSF), who previously worked with the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICATT) and served as head scientist for the NOAA delegation to ICATT. In a recent radio interview with Saving Seafood, Dr. Restrepo discussed this issue, and presented evidence that the decline in tuna has been closer to 50 percent than 90. Despite this, the Myers and Worm study has created a popular myth affecting the way tuna stocks are managed to this day.
An even more controversial claim passed on without critical examination is the assertion that all fisheries are on track to collapse by 2048. This claim, first published in a 2006 study by Dr. Boris Worm, has been challenged by prominent fisheries scientists. Dr. Ray Hilborn, of the University of Washington in Seattle, accused the science journals Science and Nature of publishing a string of papers on the collapse of the fisheries, "not for their scientific merit, but for their publicity value.” Dr. Brian Rothschild, the former dean of the University of Massachusetts School for Marine Science and Technology, called the 2048 date “reckless,” and Dr. Steve Murawski, at the time head scientist at the National Marine Fisheries Service, debunked Dr. Worm's assertion in a lecture on sustainable fisheries delivered at Yale University in 2007. In 2009, Dr. Hilborn and Dr. Worm collaborated on a subsequent paper that showed the 2006 prediction was incorrect.
The article also urges readers to follow the seafood sustainability recommendations published by the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Relying on third party sustainability certifications can be problematic, as they are often determined not solely on objective data related to sustainability, but also based on the organization’s biases related to gear types and other issues. For example, Monterrey Bay’s “Seafood Watch” program includes whether or not a fishery uses trawl gear in determining its sustainability ranking, a factor that does not influence whether or not a species is being fished sustainably, and is more a reflection of the Aquarium’s own priorities. It is important to note, as the article does not, that federal law requires that all species taken and processed from US waters be harvested under a fishery management plan to ensure sustainability.
The article is ultimately an assembly of some of the most hyperbolic claims to emerge in fisheries reporting in the last decade, without providing appropriate context or analysis. Rather than being an objective look at these issues, the result is instead a sensationalistic piece that not only fails to better inform readers, but actually misleads them.
References
Hilborn, Ray, "Faith Based Fisheries," Fisheries, vol. 31 no. 11, November 2006
Hilborn, Ray, "Let Us Eat Fish," The New York Times, April 14, 2011
Kareiva, Peter, "Why Do We Keep Hearing Global Fisheries Are Collapsing?," Conservancy Talk, The Nature Conservancy, November 29, 2010
Murawski, Steven; Methot, Richard; Tromble, Galen, "Biodiversity Loss in the Ocean: How Bad Is It?," Science, vol. 316 no. 5829, pp. 1281-1284, June 1, 2007
Myers, Ransom; Worm, Boris, "Rapid Worldwide Depletion of Predatory Fish Communities," Nature, vol. 423, pp. 280-283, May 15, 2003
Worm, Boris; Barbier, Edward; Beaumont, Nicola; Duffy, J. Emmett; Folke, Carl; Halpern, Benjamin; Jackson, Jeremy; Lotze, Heike; Micheli, Fiorenza; Palumbi, Stephen; Sala, Enric; Selkoe, Kimberly; Stachowicz; Watson, Reg, "Impacts of Biodiversity Loss on Ocean Ecosystem Services," Science, vol. 314 no. 5800, pp. 787-790, November 3, 2006
Worm, Boris; Hiborn, Ray; Baum, Julia; Branch, Trevor; Collie, Jeremy; Costello, Christopher; Fogarty, Michael; Fulton, Elizabeth; Hutchings, Jeffrey; Jennings, Simon; Jensen, Olaf; Lotze, Heike; Mace, Pamela; McClanahan, Tim; Minto, Cóilín; Palumbi, Stephen; Parma, Ana; Ricard, Daniel; Rosenberg, Andrew; Watson, Reg; Zeller, Dirk, "Rebuilding Global Fisheries," Science, vol. 325 no. 5940, pp. 578-585, July 31, 2009