Nils Stolpe Archives - Saving Seafood

REST IN PEACE, NILS STOLPE, FISHERIES GURU

May 19, 2025 — Guru; a person who enlightens others with his teaching and knowledge. Early Friday morning, May 16 th , the commercial fishing industry lost one of its most respected voices as Nils Stolpe, 79, passed away in his sleep. Nils had been hospitalized Thursday morning after falling in his home and breaking his ankle. He also bumped his head, and his blood pressure was low, so he was held overnight for observation, he never woke up. He is survived by his wife of 54 years, Pat, his son Nils, and his wife Janet.

Nils was born on December 16 th , 1945 in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania and graduated from Hammonton HS in New Jersey. He attended Rutgers University where he studied marine biology and earned his master’s degree in environmental planning. He spent 10 years as a project manager on a small-scale aquaculture project on the Delaware river, before he moved on to work at the New Jersey Department of Agriculture where he spent the next 9 years attempting to come up with an aquaculture development plan. He gradually recognized that large scale aquaculture in New Jersey was not feasible due to the overall costs involved, including high labor, taxes, real estate, and construction. When his boss insisted on continuing pursuing aquaculture development, Nils moved on.

Read the full article at fisherynation.com

Nils E. Stolpe/FishNet USA: “Fish Wars” or a Regime Shift in Ocean Governance?

October 2, 2017 — The reasons for Big Oil’s (now more accurately Big Energy’s) focus on fisheries – and on demonizing fishing and fishermen – has been fairly obvious since a coalition of fishermen and environmentalists successfully stopped energy exploration on Georges Bank in the early 80s. Using a handful of ocean oriented ENGOs as their agents, the Pew Charitable Trusts and other “charitable” trusts funded a hugely expensive campaign that the domestic fishing industry is still suffering from, but that campaign has paid off handsomely to the entities that participated in or funded it.

However, the entry of Philadelphia’s Lenfest Foundation into the fray, particularly considering that operational control was delegated to Pew, appeared to put the participation of other foundations with roots in the high tech area in a different light. Packard, Moore and Lenfest all working together with Pew et al to scuttle the public image and “revolutionize” the financial and social underpinnings of an entire industry in an apparently coordinated way started to make some sense (read more here).

But my thinking on this was further crystallized after reading a recent article in the New York Times. From the February 22, 2016 Fishnet:

“The authors (of the most recent Daniel Pauly assault on commercial fishing) acknowledge, and it will probably come as no surprise to most readers, “that The Pew Charitable Trusts, Philadelphia, funded the Sea Around Us from 1999 to 2014, during which the bulk of the catch reconstruction work was performed.” However, it might be news that “since mid-2014, the Sea Around Us has been funded mainly by The Paul G. Allen Family Foundation.” If anyone wonders why one of the founders of Microsoft might be interested in supporting research by Daniel Pauly, from an article in the NY Times last week – Microsoft Plumbs Ocean’s Depths to Test Underwater Data Center)

“REDMOND, Wash. — Taking a page from Jules Verne, researchers at Microsoft believe the future of data centers may be under the sea. Microsoft has tested a prototype of a self-contained data center that can operate hundreds of feet below the surface of the ocean, eliminating one of the technology industry’s most expensive problems: the air-conditioning bill. Today’s data centers, which power everything from streaming video to social networking and email, contain thousands of computer servers generating lots of heat. When there is too much heat, the servers crash. Putting the gear under cold ocean water could fix the problem. It may also answer the exponentially growing energy demands of the computing world be-cause Microsoft is considering pairing the system either with a turbine or a tidal energy system to generate electricity. The effort, code-named Project Natick, might lead to strands of giant steel tubes linked by fiber optic cables placed on the seafloor. Another possibility would suspend containers shaped like jelly beans beneath the surface to capture the ocean current with turbines that generate electricity.”

Of course this needs to be coupled with Microsoft’s commitment to the future of “cloud computing” (for those readers who have successfully avoided advanced nerdhood up until now, the “cloud” is just a lot of web-connected servers housed in what are called server farms. Server farms are becoming increasingly expensive to operate shoreside – see the NY Times article linked above) and do a Google search on “Microsoft cloud future” to see where the tech industry thinks Microsoft is heading vis a vis cloud computing.

Is it possible that in the near future we’ll be reading foundation-funded research reports from our neighbors in British Columbia “proving” that submerged server farms put in place by the well-known Redmond conservationists provide much needed shelter for a myriad of marine creatures that are threatened by those rapacious fisher-men? Or that Marine Protected Areas are a really logical place to put those submerged servers?”

If you haven’t fully embraced the high-tech, internet-based wonders that are now easily and affordably available to virtually all of us – how about a Brita water purifier that will automatically order another filter before the old one needs replacing? – the major impetus for this seems to be to get folks to spend money without consciously deciding to do so. Propping this all up, making it possible, is “cloud computing” enabling you to receive a Brita filter and to get Amazon and Brita handsomely paid for getting it to you without you being involved.

With the increase in web-connected, web-enabled, web-anythinged appliances, processes, monitors, alarms, lighting and who knows what else in the future, and in hi-definition video and music streaming, a rapid growth in the capacity of the so-called cloud, which is going to become increasingly crowded, is guaranteed. That means that the demand for server farms will be increasing as well – and the closer those server farms are to the demand (population centers), the more efficient they will be.

As the Microsoft interest clearly demonstrates, alternatives to land based server farms in close proximity to population centers are going to become a high priority, and the only alternative is going to be siting them in the ocean – which offers the additional benefit of significantly reducing, or perhaps eliminating, cooling costs.

These sub-surface server farms will be as compatible with fishing as offshore power generation or the petroleum industry are. Would there be a more rational solution to what has already become a significant problem, given hundreds of billions of dollars in the bank, than for these high tech industries that are committed to a future in the oceans, than to marginalize fishermen.

Read the full opinion piece at FishNet USA

Commercial Fishermen Question Obama’s Ocean ‘Monument’ Preserve

September 29, 2016 — Commercial fishing boat owners and groups are reacting to the executive action taken by President Obama that created a marine national preserve in the North Atlantic on Sept. 15. They say that banning commercial fishing there is unnecessary, since the fishing industry has already been working with government agencies on conservation measures. Plus, they fear the preserve will be expanded in the future, like the recent quadrupling of the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument off the Hawaiian islands.

The new 4,193-square-mile Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument is located about 130 miles southeast of Cape Cod.

Environmentalists praise the fact that the preserve will also protect marine life from all drilling. However, the fishing angle is another matter, according to industry organizations such as the Garden State Seafood Association.

“All commercial fishing is excluded from the area, but fisheries in the top 10 to 20 feet, no way in the world they’re going to impact the bottom,” pointed out Nils Stolpe, communications director of the association.

Such is the case for a lot of the Barnegat Light-based boats, he said, for example, longliners and some hook-and-line tuna boats. “They’re fishing 3 miles up above all of this on the ocean floor.”

“Longliners are probably affected more than any of our other fisheries up there” by the declaration, said Ernie Panacek, general manager at Viking Village Commercial Seafood Producers in Barnegat Light. “Our bottom longlining boats and surface longlining for sword and tuna boats are going to be affected up there.”

Read the full story at The Sand Paper

NILS STOLPE: When it comes to fish and fishing Huffington Post is all wet

August 30, 2016 — FISH NET USA — Last week Dana Ellis Hunnes, a Huffington Post blogger, managed to package in just 700 words more false, misleading, distorted and just plain wrong information about fish and seafood production than I’ve ever seen in works with far more words by professional anti-fishing activists. Addressing her inaccuracies on a point by point basis:

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· Sustainable Fish Do Not Exist

Starting out with her title, the Merriam-Webster definition of sustainable is “able to be used without being completely used up or destroyed, involving methods that do not completely use up or destroy natural resources, able to last or continue for a long time.” The concept of renewable resources revolves around the sustainable utilization of those resources.

In 2014, according to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization, the United States was ranked number three in the production of its capture fisheries in the world (behind China and Indonesia). The federal fisheries management system, as set forth in the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, has sustainability as its primary focus. Overfished fish stocks are those that are harvested at an unsustainable level and the Act demands that fishing effort on overfished stocks be reduced to the level of sustainability (also known as the maximum sustainable yield or MSY). In 2015 only nine percent of U.S. fish stocks were being fished at an unsustainable level –http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/sfa/fisheries_eco/status_of_fisheries/.

Note that as defined in the Magnuson Act “overfished” does not necessarily mean too much fishing, it means that there are not as many fish in a stock as fishery scientist think should be there regardless of the cause

By any definition of sustainability that is used (except for Ms. Hunnes’), nine out of ten of our fisheries, and more than 90% of the fish that we harvest, are inarguably sustainable.

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· In fact, the United Nations Environmental Programme and Food and Agriculture Organization, report that we are running out of fish. We have overfished or overexploited more than 80% of our fish stocks.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in its 2016 The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture reported “fully fished stocks accounted for 58.1 percent (of the world’s capture fisheries) and underfished stocks 10.5 percent.” (http://www.fao.org/3/a-i5555e.pdf on Pg. 5). Fully fished stocks are those that are being harvested at their MSY. So, in spite of what Ms. Hunnes wrote in the Huffington Post, almost 70% of the fish stocks in the world are being harvested sustainably. That is a far cry from “running out of fish.” As the graph below (from Pg. 13 of the same FAO report cited above) demonstrates, the production of the world’s capture fisheries has been level since the late 1980s. I could find nothing on the FAO website that even hinted that there was any indication that we were “running out of fish.”

In fact, a number of the species have been declared as critically endangered and threatened with extinction by the International Union on the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

In spite of IUCN declarations, in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Environmental Conservation Online System, listing animal species that are Endangered or Threatened in the U.S. and abroad (http://preview.tinyurl.com/zl3qgk3), the only fish listed that support commercial fisheries are geographically distinct groups of salmon (threatened or endangered because of anthropogenic impacts on their spawning grounds, not fishing – see note above). None of those salmon species are considered endangered or threatened throughout their range. Some species of sturgeon are listed throughout their range as are some distinct population segments of others, but no commercial sturgeon fisheries are permitted in the U.S. The same for sawfish. The rest of the listed threatened or endangered species are species of no commercial interest.

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· And, while we may believe that consuming farmed fish is a more sustainable and ecological choice….

Any definition of “sustainable” that I’m aware of indicates that it’s an all or nothing term. Something is either utilized sustainably or it isn’t. Ms. Hunnes’ use of “more sustainable” is linguistically puzzling. “Ecological” relates to or is concerned with the study of organisms in relation to each other and to their living and non-living environment. The idea of applying the term to a dietary choice is even more linguistically puzzling than “more sustainable.”

But, the niceties of effective communications aside, there are numerous ways to grow fish and to catch fish. Some are – or should be – unacceptable because of the damage they do to the environment. It’s the role of government to insure that these are not permitted, and in the U.S. they aren’t. Other methods of fish production in the U.S. and in much of the rest of the world are environmentally acceptable and are permitted, though highly regulated.

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· It takes approximately five pounds of wild small fish such as herring, menhaden, or anchovies to create one pound of salmon, a predatory fish. The proportion of the healthy omega-3 fatty acids found in salmon is lower pound-for-pound than it would be simply in the smaller fish.

This is a generalization that, like many generalizations, doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. The DHA and EPA (respectively docosahexaenoic acid and eicosapentaenoic acid, fish-derived omega 3 fatty acids) content of the flesh of particular fish as determined by the US Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services are below.

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Current statistical analyses and estimates indicate that in a “business as usual” world, we will run out of the fish we eat by 2048

In 2006 Canadian fisheries researcher Boris Worm and a group of scientists published a paper in the journal Science predicting that the continuation of present trends would mean that all of the big fish in the oceans would be gone by 2048. Needless to say, this prediction generated a media storm and much scientific controversy, which the media ignored. Unfortunately, a casual web search will provide links to the dire prediction that Ms. Hunnes focused on.

But she was off by at least a decade with what she refers to as “current statistical analyses.” In fact, in 2009 Worm and University of Washington Fisheries Professor Ray Hilborn and a group of other researchers published a follow-up paper that soundly rejected the 2006 prediction of the imminent destruction of the world’s fisheries. (http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090730/full/news.2009.751.html)

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But the fact of the matter is, it’s near impossible to grow or to take a fish in a sustainable way. In a way, nearly every fish humans eat is threatened with extinction.

It’s hard to imagine in exactly what way that would be, and unfortunately Ms. Hunnes didn’t share her insights on this with her readers. She could have just as easily written in a way, nearly every cow (or pig or goat or string bean or ear of corn) humans eat is threatened with extinction. The whole point of sustainable food production is to not eat more than is being produced. That covers a very large proportion of our seafood and that proportion increases every year.

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Never order bluefin tuna. It would be akin to eating a rhinoceros.

According to the USFWS bluefin tuna are not classified as endangered or threatened – in spite of an ongoing campaign by anti-fishing zealots to have them listed as such. Accordingly, if it’s legally caught and legally sold, ordering bluefin tuna is akin to ordering a beef steak, though the tuna is much healthier. But in keeping with the old adage “even a blind squirrel finds the occasional acorn,” Ms Hunnes was right about rhinoceroses. They definitely shouldn’t be eaten.

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If you are going to eat fish, consume the small ones. The anchovies, the herring; the bottom of the food chain.

The bottom of the ocean food chain is composed of plants, almost exclusively algae and almost exclusively planktonic. The “small ones” Ms. Hunnes is referring to are a couple of steps up the food chain from there.

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Skip that fish oil. You don’t need it, there’s no real benefit, and you can get those healthy oils from other foods including algal oils, flaxseed, seeds and nuts.

The pros and cons of dietary fish oil, or more precisely of omega 3 fatty acids, and of the relative health benefits of omega 3s produced by oceanic algae and found in oceanic fish vs the health benefits of omega 3s produced by terrestrial plants, has been going on for more than a decade. There’s nothing approaching a scientific consensus as yet, except perhaps in Ms. Hunnes’ mind. For the other side of the argument take a look at The Best Omega-3 Supplement: Flaxseed Oil vs. Fish Oil on the University Health News website at http://universityhealthnews.com/daily/nutrition/the-best-omega-3-supplement-flaxseed-oil-vs-fish-oil/.

And from the Tufts University Health and Nutrition Newsletter (January 2012 Issue)

Question: As a vegetarian, can I get enough omega-3 from walnuts, flax seed, canola oil and trace amounts in other foods?

Answer: The omega-3 fatty acids found in plant foods (ALA) have their own health benefits, but they are not the same as the omega-3s found in fish (DHA and EPA) that have been associated with heart-health benefits. According to Alice H. Lichtenstein, DSc, director of Tufts’ HNRCA Cardiovascular Nutrition Laboratory, while your body does convert ALA into DHA/EPA, studies have found that this conversion is very inefficient. Only between 3% and 5% of the ALA gets converted into EPA and as little as 0.5% to 9% into DHA. If you’re concerned about getting enough of the omega-3s found in fish, it is possible to buy vegetarian supplements that derive DHA from algae. (http://www.nutritionletter.tufts.edu/issues/8_1/ask-experts/ask-tufts-experts_1173-1.html)

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Confirm that it is not an endangered species simply renamed for marketing purposes.

The federal Food and Drug Administration has a list of common and scientific names of fish and shellfish called the Seafood List, which is regularly updated. More properly the Guide to Acceptable Market Names for Seafood, it’s available at http://preview.tinyurl.com/jaffa33, it’s quite extensive, and reputable seafood dealers and restaurateurs adhere to its content. But above and beyond the Seafood List, the probability of an endangered – or a threatened – species making its way to any retail markets or restaurants which don’t follow federal and state laws is remote. The probability of buying an endangered species of fish or shellfish from a fish market would be approaching the probability of buying a rhinoceros roast from a butcher.

There has been a problem with misidentified species, but this involves either mislabeling a less expensive product as a more expensive one or concealing where the seafood originated to circumvent import restrictions. Curtailing this misidentification was recently made a federal priority (see http://www.iuufishing.noaa.gov/) .

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In sum it appears as if Ms. Hunnes is not a fan of seafood in the human diet. And she appears to have fully embraced every doom and gloom report she stumbled upon in researching this blog, selecting the worst of the worst. But by looking just the slightest bit behind the headlines she would have found that much of the worst that she has embraced is not justified. I would think that her readers deserve better.

With a world population of over seven billion no one who wasn’t suffering from some level of misanthropy could have a problem with 60 percent of our fisheries being fully and sustainably exploited (though they might not look with favor at the 10 percent that aren’t), but somehow Ms. Hunnes insists that there’s no such thing as a sustainable fishery. Perhaps in another blog she’ll explain how she arrived at that conclusion and set the world of fishing and fishery management straight, because an awful lot of people believe in, an awful lot more people depend on and even more people than that both enjoy and benefit from sustainably grown and sustainably harvested fish and shellfish.

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“This significant growth in fish consumption has enhanced people’s diets around the world through diversified and nutritious food. In 2013, fish accounted for about 17 percent of the global population’s intake of animal protein and 6.7 percent of all protein consumed” (Pg. 4 of the FAO report cited above). This might be inconsequential to Ms Hunnes and the Huffington Post, but rest assured that to the people who depend on catching, processing, transporting, marketing and consuming these fish, it surely isn’t, and no alternative animal protein sources are very likely. Maybe their plan, like Marie Antoinette’s, is to let them eat cake instead.

This story originally appeared on FishNetUSA.com. It is reprinted with permission.

NILS STOLPE: Pew/Oceana’s latest exercise in crepe hanging

August 17, 2016 — Hard as it is to imagine, Pew/Oceana’s latest “the sky is falling” attempt at mobilizing the forces of righteousness to avoid the end of the world’s oceans via rampant overfishing took some startling liberties in crafting their latest call to arms (i.e. make a donation to Oceana). In their attempt to convince potential donors that oceanic doom and gloom had already arrived, the people at Pew/Oceana tried to conflate “overfished” and “fully fished” fish stocks, illogically putting them in the same category, allowing their use of the alarmingly seeming (to the average unsophisticated reader) 89.5% figure. Get out the checkbooks, folks!) But, with a nod to Paul Harvey, how about the rest of the story?

From the FAO report (http://www.fao.org/3/a-i5555e.pdf) on Pg. 5, “fully fished stocks accounted for 58.1 percent (of the world’s capture fisheries)and underfished stocks 10.5 percent.” In other words, just under 70% of the world’s fish stocks aren’t overfished and just over 30% are. But that’s nowhere nearly as dismal-sounding as Pew/Oceana’s almost 90% either being overfished or not underfished – though it’s certainly the way that any group that isn’t crisis-oriented would present the data.

Consider the FAO figures in a different context. Obviously there are three classes of drivers; drivers who drive below the speed limit, drivers who drive at the speed limit and drivers who drive over the speed limit. Let’s assume that 10.5% of drivers are in the first group, 58.1% are in the second and 31.4% are in the third. And then let’s assume that you wanted to make it appear as if speeding was as much of a problem as possible. Would you write that just under 70% of drivers drove at or below the speed limit or that almost 90% of drivers drove at or above the speed limit? Both are correct, but in the first case the focus is on drivers who are operating their vehicles lawfully and in the second the focus has been shifted to drivers who are speeding.

Is there any difference between the machinations that the people at Pew/Oceana are using to argue that the world’s fisheries are in really bad shape due to fishing/overfishing and having some other group writing that 89.5% of automobile accidents involve drivers having collisions with other vehicles or drivers talking on cell phones.

Read the full story from FishNet USA

NILS STOLPE: Are You Getting the Idea That If You’re a Fisherman Daniel Pauly Isn’t On Your Side?

February 22, 2016 — The following opinion was first published by Fishery Nation:

“… The crisis in the world’s fisheries is less about scientific proof than about attitude and political will. And the world’s fish need a dynamic, high-profile political champion like a Bono or Mandela to give finned creatures the public profile of cute and furry ones.” (Daniel Pauly in Hooked on fishing, and we’re heading for the bottom, says scientist, a 02/17/06 press release by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council

This quote by the Pew Charitable Trusts’ premier fisheries researcher says just about all that needs to be said about the ongoing anti-fishing campaign that they have been financing, along with a handful of other mega-foundations, to convince anyone who is willing to listen that, in spite of a dearth of compelling scientific evidence supporting this strum und drang , the world’s oceans are – and have been – facing a crisis brought about because of the depredations of commercial fishermen.

Where are the Kardashian’s when Pauly really needs them?

Just imagine a scientist, any scientist, willing to publicly discount scientific proof and instead embrace the cachet of celebrity to sell his message of doom and gloom in the oceans. And then imagine multi-billion dollar “charitable” foundations eager to support him in these efforts, all in the face of rigorous opposition from well-established scientists who dismiss this rabble rousing for what it is; full of sound and fury but signifying not very much at all.

To help in putting his most recent round of pronouncements on how bad fishing is supposed to be in the proper perspective, I’ve highlighted – because “lowlighted” isn’t yet an accepted term, but there’s always hope – a number of his sky is falling predictions that I’d consider on a par with his “we don’t need sound science, we need high profile personages” plea up above.

The attack of the mud trails!

Back in 2007 Pauly and another researcher generated an inordinate amount of publicity by releasing some satellite images of “mud trails” caused by shrimp trawlers fishing over the Yangtze River delta off China’s coast. Said Pauly of these images “think of the story about China’s Great Wall being the only human artefacts visible from space. Now we can add the mudtrails of trawlers. But not only trawlers from China – from all over the world.” Note that in 2007 Google Earth had been available for several years. Contrary to Pauly’s contention, Google Earth made available via satellite imagery many millions of “human artefacts,” including the four skylights on my house and the patio furniture on the patio. But we wouldn’t want anything like accuracy interfering with a good story, would we?

Pauly’s mud trails (identified only as “satellite photo”), a portion of the Great Wall of China and Casa Stolpe (both from Google Earth)

As far as Pauly’s supposed damage by these mud trails, ten minutes of “research” with Google revealed that the Yangtze River delta contains 500 billion tons of sediment that ranges from three to one hundred and thirty feet deep. Obviously any critters living over or in this sediment are evolutionarily equipped to handle suspended – or resuspended – sediment, and the little bit extra that is kicked up by trawlers isn’t going to amount to a tinker’s damn to any of them. But then again, how effective would this level of crisis mongering be if it was constrained by reality?

And we can’t forget Pauly’s theory of ugly fish

In his article Aquacalypse Now (New Republic, 09/28/09) Pauly wrote that when the oceans had been stripped of the larger, more visually appealing fish, “boats began to catch fish that were smaller and uglier.” While, given any familiarity with the history of seafood consumption at all, I couldn’t imagine his “Bono” or “Mandela” buying into this one, it appears as if nothing like reality is going to stand in the way of a tale Pauly is set on telling. Picture sea cucumbers, oysters, monkfish, sardines, whitebait, eels, lobsters, clams, crabs, palolo worms, geoducks, etc. All of these, and many other small or “ugly” fish and shellfish have been consumed by hungry humans for generations, and I doubt that anyone – other than Daniel Pauly and his associates – have ever decided not to eat any of them because they’re too small or not pretty enough.

Fishing down the food chain? Fishing up the food chain? How about fishing it sideways?

In 1998 Pauly made his notorious, and probably his most controversial, pronouncement of imminent ocean doom due to fishing. To wit, fishermen had caught too many of the top predators in the world’s oceans and as a consequence were catching fish and shellfish lower down on the food chain, and that without more controls on fishermen we were destined to a future with oceans inhabited by nothing but jellyfish and plankton. In Issues For Debate in Environmental Management he is quoted “we are eating bait and moving on to plankton and jellyfish…. My kids will tell their children “’eat your jellyfish.’” The truth of the matter is that if his children lived in Japan or China or in a bunch of other places in Asia they might be telling their kids to “eat your jellyfish” at this very moment.

Needless to say, Pauly is once again attempting to make the commonplace a harbinger of his supposed imminent “oceans crisis.” In fact, dried jellyfish have been a staple of Asian cuisines for millennia. According to Jellyfish fisheries in Southeast Asia by M. Omori and E. Nakano (Hydrobiologia 451: 19-26, 2001) “a few large jellyfish in the order Rhizostemeae constitute an important food in Chinese cooking. For more than 1700 years they have been exploited along the coasts of China.” This would appear to make Pauly’s belief in the evils of modern fishing based on jellyfish consumption somewhat untenable. It’s highly unlikely that commercial fishermen – or whatever they might have been called back in 200 Anno Domini or thereabouts – had fished down their food chain, so that sort of leaves out jellyfish consumption as an indicator of much of anything other than a desire to eat jellyfish. But it appears as if something as ancient and as culturally acceptable as eating jellyfish can be distorted to reinforce his crisis mongering, he’s going to use it.

(see Ray Hilborn’s Myths – Fishing down food webs at https://rayhblog.wordpress.com/myths/.)

Shifting baselines?

In 1995 Pauly wrote “each generation of fisheries scientists accepts as a baseline the stock size and species composition that occurred at the beginning of their careers, and uses this to evaluate changes. When the next generation starts its career, the stocks have further declined, but it is the stocks at that time that serve as a new baseline. The result obviously is a gradual shift of the baseline, a gradual accommodation of the creeping disappearance of resource species, and inappropriate reference points for evaluating economic losses resulting from overfishing, or for identifying targets for rehabilitation measures.” (Anecdotes and the shifting baseline syndrome of fisheries, Postscript in TREE vol 10, no. 10, October 1995.)

It appears that – at least at the time and perhaps still – he believed that fisheries scientists arrived on the scientific scene in discrete generations, once every 25 years (that’s what a human generation is generally accepted to be), to replace the previous generation, and that the new generation discounted everything that the previous generation observed and recorded. As compelling as others of his fables are, on the face of it this seems to make sense. But does it really?

I strongly suspect that if you visit a college/university fisheries department (perhaps the University of British Columbia’s) or a government research facility (perhaps the NOAA/NMFS Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Woods Hole, MA) you won’t find a staff of scientists of similar or identical age, none younger and none older. I sure haven’t. You’ll find scientists and technicians beginning their careers, ending them, and at every stage in between. And those scientists and technicians don’t start from some particular point in amassing new data and coming up with new theories. In spite of Pauly’s contention – because it makes his indictment of modern fisheries science and modern fisheries scientists seem more believable – they base their work on what’s been done before. For example, the bottom trawl surveys performed annually by the Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Woods Hole, MA go back to 1950, spanning most of three generations. But, in spite of Pauly’s contention,, they were certainly not performed and analyzed by three separate and distinct cohorts of scientists and technicians who paid no attention to the survey results obtained prior to when their “generation” took over. The results of these surveys provide the foundation for the assessments of many of the species in our northeast region. Among other things, science – at least science as performed by most scientists but perhaps not by Pauly and his “generation” at UBC – is a continuous process, scientists building on, adding to or subtracting from the work of their predecessors.

But Pauly’s shifting baselines construct demands that this not be the case, so like all of us who at some point in childhood believed that by wishing we could bring Tinker Bell back from wherever fairies went to after exiting Wonderland, he apparently believes – or wants us to believe – that reality actually mirrors the world he has imagined to support his pronouncements.

And as far as his “creeping disappearance of resource species” is concerned, I have yet to learn of any species that has been driven into oblivion by fishing. By creeping development, damming of rivers, habitat degradation and pollution? Yup, but by fishing? The only reasonable response to that would be “show me.” Of course it could be argued that because of fishing the populations of all targeted species are reduced. That’s axiomatic – fishing kills fish. But to refer to that as“creeping disappearance” is just more of the same old same old.

There are, however and unfortunately, some actual, real-life shifting baselines that have nothing to do with fishing that do have a significant impact on finfish and shellfish resources. Primary among them would be those involving the quality of inshore and offshore waters and habitat. Think disappearing wetlands, think household chemicals pollution, think oceans permeated with plastics, think the continuing mass migration of us humans to the coasts. In any instances that are characterized by not enough fish, that lack of fish is far more likely to be a result of these real shifting baselines that it is of too much fishing.

This brings us to Pauly’s most recent exercise in his “blame it all on fishing” campaign

In a short paper in Nature Communications titled Catch reconstructions reveal that global marine fisheries catches are higher than reported and declining Pauly and co-author Dirk Zellar conclude that the world’s fisheries are in even worse shape than had been previously thought because, for a number of plausible seeming reasons, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has been under-estimating the world’s fish/seafood catch to an increasing degree for the last 30 or so years.

The primary problem with the approach that they used in their analysis is that the harvest of a particular fish stock often has nothing to do with the health of that stock.

As the following graphs show, the only discernable relationship between the monkfish (also known as lotte, one of Dr. Pauley’s so-called “ugly” fish that in spite of his theory to the otherwise has been a staple of Asian and European cuisine for generations) harvest and the monkfish total stock biomass is a fairly dramatic and pronounced inverse one.

I looked at the data for a few other U.S. fisheries and in some the catch went up and down as the biomass varied up and down, some as it varied down and up, and in some there was no relationship between catch and biomass, but, at least with our domestic fisheries, I would be extremely skeptical about making any judgements on the health of a stock based solely (or primarily) on catch statistics.

.It appears as if Pauly and Zellar have fallen into a trap that many people with little or no familiarity with fisheries do. Their methodology assumes that the only thing that drives commercial harvesting is the availability of the particular fish or shellfish being harvested. Nothing could be further from the truth. Fuel costs, foreign exchanges rates, bycatch avoidance, import/export requirements, management measures, competing products, the El Niño/La Niña cycle or the North Atlantic Oscillation (or other decadel or longer duration climatic or oceanic events), natural or man-made catastrophes, other easier/closer/more rewarding alternative fisheries, supply and demand and undoubtedly a number of other factors can and often do impact the level of harvest more than the availability of the particular fish or shellfish.

Dr.Pauly apparently still believes that, in his attempts to conflate science with celebrity to push forward his idea of sound bite fisheries science, that scientific rigor should take a back seat to titillation.

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The authors acknowledge, and it will probably come as no surprise to most readers, “that The Pew Charitable Trusts, Philadelphia, funded the Sea Around Us from 1999 to 2014, during which the bulk of the catch reconstruction work was performed.” However, it might be news that “since mid-2014, the Sea Around Us has been funded mainly by The Paul G. Allen Family Foundation.” If anyone wonders why one of the founders of Microsoft might be interested in supporting research by Daniel Pauly, from an article in the NY Times last week – Microsoft Plumbs Ocean’s Depths to Test Underwater Data Center (athttp://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/01/technology/microsoft-plumbs-oceans-depths-to-test-underwater-data-center.html):

“REDMOND, Wash. — Taking a page from Jules Verne, researchers at Microsoft believe the future of data centers may be under the sea. Microsof t has tested a prototype of a self-contained data center that can operate hundreds of feet below the surface of the ocean, eliminating one of the technology industry’s most expensive problems: the air-conditioning bill. Today’s data centers, which power everything from streaming video to social networking and email, contain thousands of computer servers generating lots of heat. When there is too much heat, the servers crash. Putting the gear under cold ocean water could fix the problem. It may also answer the exponentially growing energy demands of the computing world because Microsoft is considering pairing the system either with a turbine or a tidal energy system to generate electricity. The effort, code-named Project Natick, might lead to strands of giant steel tubes linked by fiber optic cables placed on the seafloor. Another possibility would suspend containers shaped like jelly beans beneath the surface to capture the ocean current with turbines that generate electricity.”

Of course this needs to be coupled with Microsoft’s commitment to the future of “cloud computing” (for those readers who have successfully avoided advanced Nerdhood up until now, the “cloud” is just a lot of web-connected servers housed in what are called server farms. Server farms are becoming increasingly expensive to operate shoreside – see the NY Times article linked above) and do a Google search on “microsoft cloud future” to see where the tech industry thinks Microsoft is heading vis a vis cloud computing.

Is it possible that in the near future we’ll be reading foundation-funded research reports from our neighbors in British Columbia “proving” that submerged server farms put in place by the well-known Redmond conservationists provide much needed shelter for a myriad of marine creatures that are threatened by those rapacious fishermen? Or that Marine Protected Areas are a really logical place to put those submerged servers?

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For more background on Daniel Pauly’s science:

http://blog.nature.org/conservancy/2010/11/29/fisheries-apocalypse-ocean-fish-stock-peter-kareiva-ray-hilborn/

http://www.atsea.org/doc/Hilborn%202010%20Science%20Chronicles%202010-11-1.pdf

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/02/130221192734.htm

http://cfooduw.org/do-catch-reconstructions-really-implicate-overfishing/

Read the opinion at Fishery Nation

Nils E. Stolpe: After 39 years of NOAA/NMFS fisheries management, how are they doing?

January 27, 2016 — (FishNet USA – www.fishnet-usa.com/) — Back in June of 2012 I wrote After 35 years of NOAA/NMFS fisheries management, how are they doing? How are we doing because of their efforts? (http://www.fishnet-usa.com/) in which I looked at U.S. commercial landings on a regional basis. While there were some bright spots, overall the picture was somewhat dismal, with total landings minus Alaska’s swinging up slightly after a trending downward over the previous 5 years and being only 60% of what they were in 1979, the year that inflation corrected landings were at their highest value. Regionally, landings (minus scallops and lobster) in New England, in the Mid-Atlantic (minus scallops), in the Southeast and in the Gulf of Mexico were trending downwards with only Pacific landings heading up.

The latest available data from the NOAA/NMFS Commercial Landings website, for the years 2011 to 2014 (http://www.st.nmfs.noaa.gov/st1/commercial/landings/annual_landings.html) tell a different, and much more optimistic, story (But please bear in mind that any indicated “trends” since 2010 are for four years at most and at this point aren’t necessarily anything that people should hang their hats on).

(Note that in all of the following charts 2010, the last year in the original FishNet article for which data was available, is indicated by a red bar. The most current data are for 2014. Also note that all values reported were corrected for inflation, using federal government conversion tables and 2010 as the base year.)

Value of Total U.S. landings

Total U.S. landings reached a maximum of $6.8 billion in 1979. From a recent low of $3.9 billion in 2009 they increased to $5.2 billion in 2011 and are currently (as of 2014) at $5.0 billion.

The value of total U.S. landings has been increasing fairly steadily since 2002.

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A number of people had commented on the original article that it would have been interesting to see a listing of all of the commercial species and their individual contributions to the total value of domestic landings. With landings of 485 species reported in 2014, that would take up a prohibitive amount of space here, but following is a chart listing the top 50 fisheries in terms of value. At the bottom of the list were frigate mackerel ($39), shortbelly rockfish ($22), Chubs ($12), redstripe rockfish ($10) and spider crab (42 lbs landed, no value listed). The values are in 2014 dollars. For reference I’ve also included a chart of the top 50 species in 2005 (the values here are listed in 2004 dollars).

It shouldn’t surprise anyone at all familiar with our commercial fisheries that American lobster, sea scallops and walleye pollock are the three most valuable U.S. fisheries.

But that seven of the ten most valuable species being shellfish might be.

At this point NOAA/NMFS doesn’t differentiate between capture fisheries and aquaculture production in the commercial landings database. Tracking the growth – or not – of aquculture through actual production would be an effective way of determining how realistic the pronouncements of the “future of aquaculture” which have been periodically resurfacing for almost 50 years actually are and it would be most useful.

Other facts that you might find interesting – or that in emergencies can serve as conversation starters:

• Of the top fifty species, twenty-three were shellfish.

• In spite of all of the associated hand-wringing, Atlantic cod were #69 ($9.4 million).

• Ditto for American eels at #66 ($9.8 million).

• Ditto for swordfish at #51 ($18 million).

• Bloodworms were #86 ($6.0 million).

• Florida stone crab claws – the fishermen keep one, the crabs keep one and are then released – were #35 ($28 million).

The fifty highest value fisheries in the U.S. in 2005 (in 2005 dollars) and 2014 (in 2014 dollars)

Forty-five fisheries that were in the fifty most valuable in 2005 were still in the top fifty in 2014. When adjusted for inflation, in 2010 dollars, landings in the top 50 fisheries were valued at $3.9 billion in 2005 and at $4.5 billion in 2014.

(For anyone who is interested in exploring the reported landings of any species in any regions or states on a year-by-year basis, the above linked NOAA/NMFS database provides a wealth of information. With a basic knowledge of spreadsheets you can get an accurate picture of any commercial species (with limited exceptions) for the last 75 years, or for as long as that species supported a fishery. I’ve made one of my worksheets for this FishNet available at http://www.fishnet-usa.com/HowWeDoing_Update.xlsx to give you an idea of what’s possible. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me by replying to this email.)

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Ignoring Alaska, the value of U.S. landings appear to be increasing after a decline that began in 1979.

Correcting for inflation, total U.S. landings in 2014 were 74% of what they were at their highest point (1979). Minus Alaska, total U.S. landings were 71% of what they were in 1979.

The story region by region – New England first

Starting out in New England, home of our oldest and not so long ago some of our most valuable “traditional” fisheries, at first glance things appear to be rosy. Reaching a post-Magnuson plateau of just over $1 billion in 1987, the value of total landings declined from then until 2001, from there increasing until almost $1 billion in 2005 and then falling again. But in 2011 they topped $1 billion again, and have remained there ever since.

Unfortunately, the reality in many New England fisheries is not what is indicated by the total landings. Since 1950 about half of the value of New England landings (converted to 2010 dollars) has been in the lobster and sea scallop fisheries. In 2010 these two fisheries accounted for 41% of the value of New England’s total landings (in the previous FishNet I had erroneously reported “over 69%”). In 2014, driven by a large increase in lobster landings which wasn’t offset by smaller decrease in scallop landings, that increased to 47%.

Subtracting the value of sea scallop and lobster landings from the total New England landings, there ws a decline in value extending from the early 90s to 2009. This was offset by an increase beginning in 2010 that increased the value to levels last seen in 1995.

In 2010 dollars, the New England lobster fishery has increased in value from $73 million in 1950 to $518 million in 2014. That’s an increase of 700%. The sea scallop fishery has increased from $57 million to $273 million, an increase of 480% (“record” scallop landings were $370 million in 2012).

In 2014 the next three most valuable fisheries were oysters, soft clams and Atlantic herring. Together with sea scallops and lobsters, landings in these 5 most valuable fisheries were $941 million. This represented 85% of the total New England landings in 2014. In 2000, 2005 and 2010 the 5 most valuable New England fisheries represented respectively 57%, 68% and 77% of the total value of New England landings.

The Mid-Atlantic

With the exception of 2013-14 the total value of Mid-Atlantic landings appear to have been fluctuating pretty widely but staying mostly between $200,000 and $250,000 since the early 1980s. However, the dramatic increase in the value of sea scallop landings have been compensating for a pronounced and prolonged decrease in the value total of landings of the other fisheries.

The South Atlantic

The value of South Atlantic landings declined almost steadily from a peak at in 1979 to 2005 or so and has been fairly constant since then.

Commercial landings in the South Atlantic in 2014 were 38% of what they were at their highest point (1979).

The Gulf of Mexico

The value of commercial landings in the Gulf of Mexico declined until 2010, when it reached the level that it hadn’t been at since 1960. Since then the total value has increased significantly, in 2014 being at 67% of what it was in 1979, when they were at their highest value.

As in the South Atlantic, the value of shrimp landings has varied much as the value of the other species has.

West Coast

The value of total West Coast landings appears to be continuing a 10+ year upward trend which had been interrupted by a drop in 2009/10. The total value of West Coast landings in 2014 was 69% of the highest value, which was in 1988.

The value of Hawaii landings in 2012 almost equaled the highest level reported, which was in 1992 (Hawaii landings were only reported in the NMFS/NOAA commercial landings database beginning in 1981). The value of landings has dropped in the subsequent two years.

The total value of Alaska’s landings appears to have resumed the upward trend that had begun in 1985.

What’s it all mean?

Looking at the biggest picture – and accepting the NOAA/NMFS figures – the domestic commercial fishing industry is doing quite well, having been just under $4 billion in 2009 and in 2014 having topped $5 billion. Adjusted for inflation, landings of the most valuable 50 fisheries were worth $3.9 billion on 2005. The value of the top 50 species had increased to $4.5 billion in 2014.

However, as is almost always the case, the devil is in the details, and some of those details clearly demonstrate that all is not well in every pilot house of every boat fishing in our EEZ.

One of the clearest examples of that is seen in the traditional fisheries of the Mid-Atlantic. While the value of total landings were valued at $195 million in the Mid-Atlantic, 44% was from one fishery (sea scallops). When the value of total landings minus the sea scallops shows that a decline that started in 1997 in the Mid-Atlantic is still continuing.

New England is slightly more complicated. In 2014 the value of landings if two fisheries (lobster and sea scallops) made up 73% of the value of New England’s total landings. In 2000 they accounted for 53% of the total. While the value of landings minus lobster and scallops has increased over $100 million since 2010, the four species – herring, soft shelled clams, oysters and American eels – that have accounted for most of the increase are either caught by very large vessels, are mostly from a limited and highly regulated river fishery for elvers, or are harvested from either inshore fisheries or aquaculture operations.

The bright spot on the East coast is the South Atlantic region, if you consider having stable landings a bright spot.

The value of total U.S. landings in the Gulf of Mexico has increased dramatically since a post-Magnuson low point, not coincidentally the year when BP released 5 million barrels or so of oil and almost 2 million gallons of corexit (an oil dispersant) into the Gulf.

After a gradual increase from the early 90s, the value of West Coast landings (minus Hawaii and Alaska) has been fairly steady since 2010 with an upswing in 2014. The value of Alaska landings increased significantly post 2010 but in 2014 had fell back to the same level it was at then. The value of Hawaiian landings increased steadily from 2009 to 2012, when it reached a level it hadn’t been at since 1993, but it has decreased since then.

Obviously it’s impossible to generalize at the national level much more than that significantly more dollar’s worth of fish and shellfish crossed U.S. docks in 2014 than did in 2010, and that’s definitely a good thing. However, the benefits haven’t been spread out evenly. There are disparities from region to region, from state to state, from port to port, from fishery to fishery and from dock to dock. The situation on the New England groundfish fishery is an example of that (and I’ll note here that decreased landings of a particular species isn’t necessarily related to reduced numbers of that species). But what can’t b\e overemphasized is that in far too many instances fishing revenues are being increasingly concentrated in a decreasing number of fisheries. In the long term this could prove disastrous, not just to the participants in fisheries in which the landings are declining, but to the participants in the other fisheries as well. This is because it takes a certain minimum level of presence to maintain necessary infrastructure (docks, gear suppliers, ice houses, marine railways, etc.), and once that minimum level is reached those businesses that support the fishing industry will have no choices other than shutting down or relocating.

View a PDF of the opinion piece here

NORTH CAROLINA: Weekly Update for Oct. 19, 2015

October 26, 2015 — The following was released by the North Carolina Fisheries Association:

NCFA BOARD OF DIRECTORS MEETING TIME CHANGED

Our board of directors will meet tomorrow at 12:30 p.m. at the Washington Civic Center, 110 Gladden St., Washington. We encourage all fishermen who are able to attend, especially those participating in the summer and southern flounder fisheries.

SAFMC HEARINGS ON PROPOSED FEDERAL MANAGEMENT MEASURES

The South Atlantic Fishery Management Council has scheduled public hearings regarding the commercial dolphin trip limit for the Atlantic Coast, blueline tilefish, yellowtail snapper and black sea bass in South Atlantic in November. For more information on the hearings, dates and how to submit comments see the news release.

MAFMC OCTOBER 2015 MEETING SUMMARY

NMFS SEEKS PUBLIC COMMENTS ON DRAFT ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT STATEMENT TO MODIFY A BLACK SEA BASS POT SEASONAL PROHIBITION

NOAA Fisheries is seeking public comment on a draft environmental impact statement for Regulatory Amendment 16 to the Fishery Management Plan for the Snapper-Grouper Fishery of the South Atlantic Region (Regulatory Amendment 16). On Oct. 23, 2013, fishery managers implemented an annual prohibition on the use of black sea bass pots from Nov. 1 through April 30 in the South Atlantic. Regulatory Amendment 16 contains management measures to modify this prohibition in terms of area and time closed. The regulatory amendment also contains management actions to require specific rope marking for black sea bass pot gear. The purpose of the proposed actions is to reduce the adverse socioeconomic impacts from the prohibition while continuing to protect whales in the South Atlantic region. For more information see news release.

NILS STOLPE: “SO HOW’S THAT ‘CATCH SHARES’ REVOLUTION WORKING OUT FOR GROUNDFISH?”

“I’ll add here that catch share management is not a cure-all for all that’s wrong with fishery management – though at the time Dr. Lubchenco and her “team” apparently believed it was – nor is it the reason for management failures. It is nothing more than an option for dividing the catch among users. As such it can have profound socioeconomic impacts on participants in the fishery and on fishing communities that depend on it, but not on the fishery resources themselves.”

Read Nils’ entire opinion here as published in FishNet USA/October 22, 2015.

NOAA LAUNCHES NEW MOBILE-FRIENDLY FISHWATCH.GOV

October is National Seafood Month, and NOAA Fisheries has launched our first-ever mobile-friendly website to enable our users to access the nation’s database on sustainable seafood anywhere, anytime, on any device.

FishWatch offers the same great seafood information, but now it’s easier to use on the go from your phone or tablet. Using the site, consumers can:

Make smart seafood choices with facts about what makes U.S. seafood sustainable-from the ocean or farm to your plate.
Get information on the status of some of the nation’s most valuable marine fish harvested in U.S. federal waters as well as U.S. farmed fish that help meet our country’s growing seafood demand.
Understand how U.S. seafood is responsibly harvested and grown under a strong monitoring, management, and enforcement regime that works to keep the marine environment healthy, fish populations thriving, and our seafood industry on the job.

REGULATION AND RULE CHANGES:

–Commercial Scup Winter II quota and possession limits increase effective Nov. 1

–Commercial harvest of yellowtail snapper in South Atlantic federal waters will close Oct. 31

DEADLINES:

Oct. 29 – NMFS Proposed Rules for Snapper-Grouper, Dolphin and Golden Crab Comments

Nov. 4 – Atlantic HMS SEDAR Pool Nominations

Nov. 9 – NMFS Proposed Rule on ICCAT Bluefin Electronic Documentation Comments

Nov. 16 – SAFMC Proposed Federal Management Measures Comments

Nov. 19 – Derelict Fishing Gear Recovery Project Applications

Dec. 16 – NMFS Draft Ecosystem-based Fishery Management Policy Comments

MEETINGS:

If you are aware of ANY meetings that should be of interest to commercial fishing that is not on this list, please contact us so we can include it here.

Oct. 27 at 12:30 p.m. – NCFA Board of Directors Meeting, Washington Civic Center, 110 Gladden St., Washington, NC

Nov. 2 at 6 p.m. – Question and Answer Webinar for Snapper Grouper Regulatory Amendment 25

Nov. 2-5 – ASFMC Annual Meeting, World Golf Village Renaissance, St. Augustine Resort, 500 Legacy Trail, St. Augustine, Fl

Nov. 9 at 6 p.m.- SAMFC Snapper Grouper Regulatory Amendment 25 Public Hearing

Nov. 12 at 6 p.m. – SAFMC Dolphin Wahoo Regulatory Amendment 1 Public Hearing to address commerical trip limits for dolphin

Nov. 18-20 – ASFMC River Herring Data Collection Standardization Workshop, Linthicum, MD

PROCLAMATIONS:

GILL NETS – ALBEMARLE SOUND AREA- MANAGEMENT UNIT A-OPEN GILL NETS WESTERN ALBEMARLE AND CURRITUCK SOUND

View a PDF of the Weekly Update

NILS STOLPE: So how’s that “catch shares” revolution working out for groundfish?

FishNet USA/October 22, 2015 — NILS E. STOLPE — Most of you probably remember when newly appointed NOAA head Jane Lubchenco went to New England and announced that she was going to save our nation’s oldest fishery. But if it didn’t make a lasting impact on you, quoting from the Environmental Defense blog, EDFish by Tesia Love on April 8, 2009, “Sally McGee, Emilie Litsinger and I got to witness something pretty wonderful today. Jane Lubchenco came to the New England Fishery Management Council meeting to announce the immediate release of $16 million to the groundfish fishery to help move the fishery to ‘sector” catch share management by providing funding for cooperative research to help fishermen get through a tough fishing year with very strict limits on fishing effort.” She went on to quote Dr. Lubchenco “we need a rapid transition to sectors and catch shares. Catch shares are a powerful tool to getting to sustainable fisheries and profitability. I challenge you to deliver on this in Amendment 16, to include measures to end overfishing. I will commit the resources to my staff to do their part to ensure Amendment 16 is passed in June. We are shining a light on your efforts and we will track your progress. There is too much at stake to allow delay and self-interest to prevent sectors and ultimately catch shares from being implemented.”

I’m sure that you were there with the rest of us, heaving a huge sigh of relief with visions of Dr. Lubchenco on her shiny white steed, first riding to the rescue of the New England fishery, and then on to all of the rest of our struggling fisheries. “Hyo Silver! Away!”

So how did she do? A couple of years back NOAA/NMFS released the 2012 Final Report on the Performance of the Northeast Multispecies (Groundfish) Fishery (May 2012 – April 2013). It’s available at http://www.nefsc.noaa.gov/publications/crd/crd1401/. The report included a table – available at http://www.nefsc.noaa.gov/publications/crd/crd1401/tables.pdf – included a table titled Summary of major trends (May through April, includes all vessels with a valid limited access multispecies permit) for the fishing years 2009 to 2012. The table only takes up a single page, is pretty easily understood and is well worth your consideration in its entirety but I’ll take the liberty of synopsizing what I think are the major points it illustrates. In each of the four years the groundfish revenues, landed weight, number of active vessels that took a groundfish trip, the total number of groundfish trips, and the total crew days on groundfish trips decreased. The non-groundfish revenues and landed weight increased. The days absent on a non-groundfish trip increased slightly then decreased.

And then we come to 2013 (it seems that according to NOAA/NMFS, 2014 hasn’t gotten here yet). Had the myriad benefits of Dr. Lubchenco’s and her ENGO/foundation cronies’ Catch Share Revolution finally arrived? Apparently, not quite yet. According to the 2013 Final Report on the Performance of the Northeast Multispecies (Groundfish) Fishery (May 2013 – April 2014), just about everything that was falling in FY 2009 to 2012 continued to fall in FY 2014. I won’t go over any of the details, but the corresponding Table 1 for that year is available at http://www.nefsc.noaa.gov/read/socialsci/pdf/groundfish_report_fy2013.pdf.

Oh well, I guess she deserves a few points for trying – and we shouldn’t forget that before she could really focus on fixing groundfish she was distracted by having to dump a couple of millions of gallons of Corexit into the Gulf of Mexico.

Thirteen species are included in the New England Fishery Management Council’s multi-species fishery management plan, the “groundfish” FMP. Four of those species support no or minimal directed fisheries. The landings of those that support a significant commercial fishery are in the table below (from the NOAA/NMFS commercial landings database). Looking at these data, it’s impossible to suggest that after years of intensive management this management regime is anything that could be considered a success – unless your idea of success is putting a whole bunch of people out of work. In fact only the most charitable among us could term it anything other than disaster – and it’s a disaster that has been in the making since long before Dr. Lubchenco so fatuously announced that she was going to fix it.

(I’ll add here that catch share management is not a cure-all for all that’s wrong with fishery management nor is it the reason for management failures – though at the time Dr. Lubchenco and her “team” apparently believed it was. It is nothing more than an option for dividing the catch among users. As such it can have profound socioeconomic impacts on participants in the fishery and on fishing communities that depend on it, but not on the fishery resources themselves.)

Species	Year	Metric Tons	Value	Species	Year	Metric Tons	Value

Atlantic	2009	8946	$25,223,364	Haddock	2009	5,818	$13,655,842
Cod	2010	8039	$28,142,681		2010	9,811	$21,715,488
	2011	7981	$32,596,942		2011	5,709	$16,316,219
	2012	4766	$22,200,043		2012	1,959	$7,833,001
	2013	2261	$10,455,352		2013	1,869	$6,002,480
Plaice	2009	1395	$3,886,809	White	2009	1,696	$3,556,719
	2010	1413	$4,498,591	Hake	2010	1,807	$4,116,221
	2011	1387	$4,274,757		2011	2,907	$5,849,790
	2012	1480	$5,048,688		2012	2,772	$6,933,743
	2013	1318	$4,688,995		2013	2,238	$6,484,444
Winter	2009	2209	$8,094,381	Pollock	2009	7,492	$10,010,039
Flounder	2010	1587	$6,959,547		2010	5,158	$9,529,022
	2011	2124	$8,002,376		2011	7,193	$12,292,573
	2012	2395	$10,331,500		2012	6,743	$13,185,509
	2013	2746	$9,899,924		2013	5,058	$11,395,943
Yellowtail	2009	1605	$4,759,536	Acadian	2009	1,440	$1,572,292
Flounder	2010	1318	$4,193,981	Redfish	2010	1,646	$1,959,681
	2011	1827	$4,762,969		2011	2,014	$2,754,692
	2012	1808	$5,396,502		2012	4,035	$5,891,429
	2013	1278	$4,199,927		2013	3,577	$4,337,163
Witch	2009	949	$4,036,115
Flounder	2010	759	$3,773,526
	2011	870	$3,955,053
	2012	1037	$4,247,528
	2013	686	$3,735,330

How might it be fixed? In the original FishNet article I quoted a couple of paragraphs from a National Academy of Sciences study Evaluating the Effectiveness of Fish Stock Rebuilding Plans in the United States (available at http://www.nap.edu/catalog/18488/evaluating-the-effectiveness-of-fish-stock-rebuilding-plans-in-the-united-states). I can’t think of anything more valuable than repeating those words here. On page 178 of the report the authors concluded “the tradeoff between flexibility and prescriptiveness within the current legal framework and MFSCMA (Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act) guidelines for rebuilding underlies many of the issues discussed in this chapter. The present approach may not be flexible or adaptive enough in the face of complex ecosystem and fishery dynamics when data and knowledge are limiting. The high degree of prescriptiveness (and concomitant low flexibility) may create incompatibilities between single species rebuilding plans and EBFM (Ecosystem Based Fisheries Management). Fixed rules for rebuilding times can result in inefficiencies and discontinuities of harvest-control rules, put unrealistic demands on models and data for stock assessment and forecasting, cause reduction in yield, especially in mixed-stock situations, and de-emphasize socio-economic factors in the formulation of rebuilding plans. The current approach specifies success of individual rebuilding plans in biological terms. It does not address evaluation of the success in socio-economic terms and at broader regional and national scales, and also does not ensure effective flow of information (communication) across regions.”

In other words, the fishery managers need more informed flexibility to adequately manage our fisheries. It has been the goal of the fishing industry’s friends in Congress to provide this necessary flexibility (with adequate safeguards, of course). Conversely it has been the goal of a handful of foundations and the ENGOs they support and a smaller handful of so-called fishermen’s organizations to prevent this, and it seems that they have been willing to resort to just about any tactics to do it. As they have been successful in their efforts the fishing industry has continued to lose infrastructure that will never be replaced and markets that will be next to impossible to recover – and the percentage of imported seafood that we consume will continue to increase in spite of the fact that our fisheries are among the richest in the world.

View a PDF of the opinion piece

NILS E. STOLPE: FishNet-USA/Who’s really in charge of U.S. fisheries?

September 14, 2015 — An Oligarchy is defined as “a country, business, etc., that is controlled by a small group of people”

Ancient City Shrimp is an eight minute YouTube video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WepRokGO8d8) produced by the St. Augustine Lighthouse Museum that examines St. Augustine’s past as one of several centers of commercial shrimping in Florida.

Unfortunately – or perhaps tragically is a better fit – Florida’s shrimp fleet is only a shadow of what it once was. One of the reasons for this is the imposition of unrealistic regulations on U.S. shrimpers that has made the fishery much less profitable than it used to be.

The video’s producers don’t really focus on this as one of the reasons for this decline, rather emphasizing the impacts of cheaper – and generally inferior – shrimp from abroad. This is understandable. You can only cover so much ground in a short video. Opening the can of worms that fishery regulation in the Southeast has become is a guarantee of complication and controversy, things which few museums would willingly get involved in.

In spite of a really good job overall I found part of the final narration troubling. Almost at the end (7 minutes and 50 seconds or so in) the narrator in his wrap-up states “while we can’t change federal regulations we can change our purchasing habits. Demand local shrimp(my emphasis added).” He’s on target with the “demand local shrimp” but it’s hard to imagine anything more antithetical to the principles that our country was founded upon than his acceptance of the idea that we can’t, or that we shouldn’t, change federal regulations.

While it seems unlikely, apparently he missed out on any exposure to or consideration of the words “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth.”

As close to immortal as any words spoken in the last half a millennium, they are from Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. In a commemoration of the sacrifices of Union soldiers in the battle of Gettysburg, on November 19, 1863, President Lincoln expressed what governance in the United States was all about. To repeat those words, “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”

It kind of makes you wonder how the documentarians who put together Ancient City Shrimp became convinced that we (the people, I presume, as in the U.S. Citizenry) can’t or shouldn’t change federal regulations. One possibility is that they weren’t aware that Aldous Huxley’s 1984 was a work of fiction. Another would be that they have been exposed to the bottomless morass that federal fisheries management has been turned into.

A history lesson or two

Back in 1976 (this was before the existence of a multi-billion dollar environmental industry so thankfully they weren’t there ti impede the process) the Magnuson-Stevens Act became law. It brought fishing in the U.S. Exclusive Economic Zone under federal control and established a management regime that would eventually phase out virtually all foreign commercial fishing in U.S. waters.

It was generally agreed that one of the strongest features of the Act was the determination that fishermen were an integral part of the federal fishery management process. This was achieved by mandating that fishermen were voting members on each regional Fishery Management Council.

This was in recognition of a number of factors that the public, or at least the majority of the involved politicians and bureaucrats, have subsequently turned – or been turned – away from. Among these were the relative lack of knowledge of our fisheries and what affects them, the value to fisheries managers of the knowledge that has been accumulated by a multigenerational fishing industry over many years, and the belief in and the commitment of fishermen to the long term sustainability of the fisheries they participate in.

Read the full op-ed at FisheryNation.com