Pew Charitable Trusts Archives - Page 10 of 12

Pew Vs. Pew: A Tale of Two Stories

June 3, 2016 — The following was released by the Menhaden Fisheries Coalition:

WASHINGTON (MFC) — On May 16, the Pew Charitable Trusts published an article (“Mid-Atlantic Council Poised to Take Historic Action for Forage Fish”), on their website, authored by Peter Baker, Director of US Oceans, Northeast, falsely claiming that “Many forage fish, such as … menhaden, are fished in large numbers for use in fish oil, bait, and livestock feed, with no limits on how many can be caught[.]”

The truth? Atlantic menhaden are actually closely monitored and responsibly regulated. It’s curious for Pew and Mr. Baker to claim there are “no limits” on the catch, since in a May 15, 2014 Pew story, “Atlantic Menhaden Catch Cap a Success,” Mr. Baker himself wrote that the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) “voted into place a cap that reduced the overall catch of Atlantic menhaden by 25 percent from the previous year.”

It is not clear whether Pew has changed its mind, or if they are experiencing institutional amnesia. In their most recent release, they claim “at this scale, industrial fishing could dramatically reduce the numbers of forage fish, potentially destabilizing the entire ocean ecosystem.” Yet, two years ago, they stated that the “commissioners should be proud that that they’ve established an effective management system for the largest fishery on the Atlantic coast.” This is yet the latest example of misinformation from Pew regarding menhaden management.

Pew’s sudden forgetfulness notwithstanding, the fact is that rather than being unmanaged and unrestricted, the menhaden fishery operates under the responsible oversight of the ASMFC, which manages fisheries in state waters from Maine to Florida. The ASMFC sets coastwide harvest quotas for menhaden based on the best available science.

With the release of the most recent assessment of the Atlantic menhaden stock in 2015, the ASMFC found menhaden to be neither overfished nor experiencing overfishing. In another indicator of stock health, the assessment also found fishing mortality to be at an all-time low. Combined with the fact that fecundity – a measure of the stock’s reproductive ability – is at an all-time high, the science clearly supports the fact that menhaden are not only well-protected, but are well-positioned for the future. In fact, as testament to the successful efforts undertaken by menhaden fishermen to ensure stock health, in 2015 the ASMFC even raised the harvest quota by 10 percent.

These conclusions have also been supported by several independent organizations. In a report last year, the non-profit Sustainable Fisheries Partnership (SFP) rated menhaden as one of the best-managed forage fish species in the world. In their report, menhaden was cited as one of only four fish species to have improved its status from previous years. Corroborating SFP is a certificationfrom the third-party sustainability certifier Friend of the Sea, which independently rated Atlantic menhaden as sustainable.

The evidence is clear – menhaden is a healthy, well-managed stock, not the unmanaged fishery Mr. Baker claims.

Nations negotiate fishing in Arctic high seas

April 29, 2016 — Last week, delegates from six Arctic nations and other countries with major fishing fleets met in Washington, D.C., to discuss plans to prohibit commercial fishing in the central Arctic Ocean until scientists can find out more about the fish stocks and how they are changing.

“Fishing shouldn’t occur up there until we have the science and the rules in place,” said Scott Highleyman, director of the International Arctic Program at The Pew Charitable Trusts.

No commercial fishing occurs in the high seas of the Arctic Ocean yet. The 2.8m square kilometer area (1.08m sq. mile) region surrounds the North Pole. It is referred to as the high seas because it lies beyond the 200 nautical mile limit of the Arctic nations. Without regulations, it is permissible for fishing fleets to cast their nets within these waters.

Until recently, the area has been largely impenetrable to fishing fleets. According to satellite records spanning 1979-2000, this high seas area remained ice covered throughout the year, even during the summer. But in the past decade, summer sea ice has retreated dramatically.

During the summers of 2007 and 2012, as much as 40 percent of the Central Arctic Ocean – particularly the waters adjacent to Canada, Russia and the United States – was open water, Highleyman said. Permanent ice has given way to navigable seas and seasonal ice, he added.

In August 2015, the five Arctic countries with coastlines bordering the Arctic Ocean – Canada, Denmark, Norway, Russia and the United States – signed a voluntary agreement to bar commercial fishing in the Central Arctic Ocean.

Read the full story at United Press International

Ocean Sanctuary Threatens Maori Constitutional Rights, Say New Zealand Indigenous Leaders

April 28, 2016 — When New Zealand’s Prime Minister John Key announced the establishment of one of the world’s largest marine reserves at the United Nations last year, it was met with near unanimous praise. The proposal got the nod from big conservation groups and scientists, and media coverage was generally flattering.

The 620,000 square kilometer sanctuary in the Kermadec region, northeast of New Zealand, is one of the most pristine and biodiverse on Earth, home to 35 species of whales and dolphins, 150 types of fish, and three of the world’s seven sea turtle species. Under the plan, fishing, oil, gas, and mineral exploration would be banned.

But seven months later the sanctuary is at the center of a legal dispute and claims that “foreign” NGOs — most notably the Pew Charitable Trusts — were instrumental in a decision that will see New Zealand’s indigenous people stripped of constitutional rights.

Jamie Tuuta, the director of New Zealand’s peak indigenous fishing body, Te Ohu Kaimoana, said lobbying of the New Zealand government by the Pew Charitable Trusts had directly resulted in the removal of fishing rights granted to Maori in the Kermadec region.

“We are not saying it is unreasonable for Pew Trust or other environmental NGOs to advocate for what they consider to be appropriate marine environment protection,” Tuuta said. “What we do take issue with is where the consequences are that that advocacy cuts across and abrogates Treaty [of Waitangi] rights protected and guaranteed to Maori.”

Read the full story at Vice

Environmentalists spar with Obama administration over fish catches

April 7, 2016 — WASHINGTON — A proposed federal rule that would give regional councils more say in setting catch limits on fish has sparked rare friction between the Obama administration and environmental groups.

The proposal, years in the making, could take effect this summer. It would provide the eight councils “additional clarity and potential flexibility” to comply with the Magnuson-Stevens Fisheries Conservation and Management Act.

Groups such as the Natural Resources Defense Council and Earth Justice say the change could roll back nearly a decade of progress in rescuing once-overfished populations.

Since Congress updated Magnuson-Stevens in 2006, the number of stocks labeled as overfished or subject to overfishing has dropped to the lowest level in 20 years of tracking.

“We would go backwards from what is now a pretty successful rule,” said Lee Crockett, director of U.S. Ocean Conservation for the Pew Charitable Trusts. “This adds more flexibility to what was pretty clear guidelines, and our experience has been that when flexibility is provided to these fishery management councils, it’s not a good thing.”

The councils, which include state officials, environmental activists and industry representatives, determine catch limits on dozens of stocks, including cod off New England, red snapper in the Gulf of Mexico and salmon in the Pacific.

They follow science-driven guidelines — first issued in early 2009 in the waning days of the Bush administration — that are enforced through the “National Standard 1” regulation, which the proposed rule would modify.

Read the full story at USA Today

Tiny Island Chain Wants To Create The World’s Largest Ocean Sanctuary

April 5, 2016 — In an effort to protect fisheries and preserve one of the planet’s healthiest marine ecosystems, communities in a remote archipelago south of Tahiti are working to establish the largest fully protected marine reserve on the planet.

The proposal, which municipalities in the Austral Islands presented to the French Polynesian government on Monday, would ban fishing in more than 385,000 square miles of ocean surrounding the island chain and establish sustainable coastal fishing areas around each of its five inhabited islands.

The Pew Charitable Trusts, which helped the communities draft their proposal, said in an announcement on Tuesday that islanders hope the reserve will “help maintain healthy fish stocks to feed their families and support local fishermen while maintaining Polynesian customs that date back hundreds of years.”

The reserve, if approved, would be roughly the size of California, Nevada and Arizona combined.

Jérôme Petit, director of Pew’s Global Ocean Legacy campaign in French Polynesia, told The Huffington Post that the 6,000-plus residents of Rimatara, Rurutu, Tubuai, Raivavae and Rapa are concerned about the environmental damage affecting the world’s fisheries.

“They say, ‘We fish now in one day what we could fish 20 years ago in one hour,’” Petit said.

The reserve would extend roughly 200 nautical miles around each island, with the exception of the islands’ northern coasts. Sustainable coastal fishing areas extending 20 miles from each island would allow local anglers to fish from boats that are less than 25 feet long, according to the proposal.

Read the full story at the Huffington Post

Northeast Seafood Coalition responds to erroneous statements on Cashes Ledge from Pew Charitable Trusts

The following was released by the Northeast Seafood Coalition:

March 29, 2016 – GLOUCESTER, Mass. – Earlier today, in a webinar releasing a new report regarding the environmental composition of Cashes Ledge, in response to Cape Cod Times reporter Doug Fraser’s question as to whether there is an imminent threat to Cashes Ledge, The Pew Charitable Trusts’ Director of US Oceans, Northeast, Peter Baker stated:

“..the different areas – Cashes Ledge, the coral canyons, and the sea mounts – have different pressures on them, and different levels of imminent pressures that might be put on them. For instance Cashes Ledge, some of the council members, led by Terry Alexander, who is the president of the Associated Fisheries of Maine and was quoted in a press release last week, put up a motion just last year at the NEFMC to open Cashes Ledge once again to bottom trawling. The other guy, Vito Giacalone, who was quoted in that press release, at a public forum in Gloucester just last month, said that the fishing industry is eager to get in and catch the cod that are in Cashes Ledge. So, certainly the leaders of the groundfish industry have made it clear, recently, that they’re eager and working to get back in there and that at every available opportunity they’re going to try and open up Cashes to bottom trawling again. So I’d say, yes, absolutely, there’s an imminent threat to Cashes Ledge.”

The statement attributed to Vito Giacalone of the Northeast Seafood Coalition, and the description of the motion made by Councilmember Terry Alexander are factually inaccurate. There was never a motion or statement made proposing access to Cashes Ledge.

The problem is the terminology used. “Cashes Ledge” is often used as verbal shorthand to refer to the large, 1400 square kilometer ‘Mortality Closure’ that includes Cashes Ledge and the surrounding areas and is an artifact of the old effort control system created to protect cod.

What we did say, and will maintain, is that once the old effort control system was replaced with a quota system, we want to be able to access the old mortality closures, including the Cashes Ledge Mortality Closure when such access is appropriate and scientifically justified. These portions of the Cashes Ledge Mortality Closure, despite the name, are not located on Cashes Ledge.

The Northeast Seafood Coalition proposed and supports the habitat management areas developed with government science, included in Omnibus Habitat Amendment 2 which was adopted by the New England Fisheries Management Council last June, and are pending approval by NOAA.

We collaborated with the Associated Fisheries of Maine, and with the Fisheries Survival Fund, representing the limited access scallop fleet. We did not develop our own habitat closed area on Cashes Ledge, but rather embraced the habitat management area developed via the government science.

This habitat area is significantly larger than Cashes Ledge itself, in fact, it completely engulfs Cashes Ledge, all of the kelp forest, and all of the areas displayed in the video and photographs circulated in recent months by proponents of a marine national monument. The protected area includes a surrounding buffer of hundreds of square miles.

We never would propose re-entering an area which we agreed to protect, and especially this area that encompasses Cashes Ledge. It is simply untrue to say that we stated that we are “eager” to fish within the habitat management area on Cashes Ledge.

Did we say we want to preserve the ability to access portions of the mortality closure such as Cashes Basin and other basins that were not identified as important habitat areas by the science? Yes, we did say that.

We have no way of knowing whether Mr. Baker’s statement was made to intentionally mislead, or simply out of a lack of clear understanding regarding the difference between Cashes Ledge, the habitat management area surrounding Cashes Ledge, and the remaining portions of the previous mortality areas that were artifacts of the old system, but we state unequivocally that it is not true to say we ever proposed accessing the Cashes Ledge habitat management area.

Environmental groups release scientific analysis of areas proposed for Atlantic marine monuments

March 29, 2016 – WASHINGTON (Saving Seafood) – This morning, the “Protect New England’s Ocean Treasures Coalition” released an analysis of Northeast ocean areas under consideration for designation as marine National Monuments. The analysis was conducted by Dr. Peter Auster of Mystic Aquarium and Dr. Scott Kraus of the New England Aquarium, and was presented in a press webinar organized by the Pew Charitable Trusts.

Dr. Auster and Dr. Kraus concluded, among other findings, that the proposed monument areas possess high habitat diversity and an abundance of species, function as a source of habitats including for commercial species, and contain species sensitive to disturbance. However, they noted that they do not have adequate data to address what the economic and human effects of area closures to fisheries might be. Presenters also acknowledged that the areas under consideration are already protected, but expressed concern about the future possibility of drilling and mining.

A monument designation would likely affect the fisheries for Atlantic red crab, offshore lobster, squid, mackerel, butterfish, tilefish, albacore wahoo, dolphinfish (mahi mahi), and others. Pelagic longline, rod and reel, and greenstick fisheries including yellowfin tuna, bluefin tuna, bigeye tuna, and swordfish may also be affected. During the webinar, the presenters conceded that they do not have enough data to analyze how a monument designation would affect many of these fisheries.

The analysis addressed both Cashes Ledge and the Northeast Seamounts and Canyons. White House officials stated last week that Cashes Ledge is “not under consideration for a [national monument] designation at this time.” However, representatives of the Northeast Seafood Coalition and Associated Fisheries of Maine, who attended meetings with White House officials, said in a joint statement that offshore canyon areas east of Cape Cod remain under consideration and “affected fishermen should remain vigilant in assuring that any concerns they may have are addressed.”

The Protect New England’s Ocean Treasures Coalition, which “is advocating for the establishment of a Marine National Monument in the North Atlantic Ocean,” is composed of:

Center for American Progress
Conservation Law Foundation
Environment America
Mystic Aquarium
National Geographic Society
National Wildlife Federation
Natural Resources Defense Council
New England Aquarium
Ocean Conservancy
Oceana
The Pew Charitable Trusts

Read a fact sheet about the proposed Atlantic monument areas

Captions courtesy of Pew Charitable Trusts

Proposed Marine National Monument in Northeastern Waters of the U.S.

These maps illustrate that while whale and dolphin species are distributed throughout the whole Cashes Ledge region, the deep water toward the center of the proposed monument area is a hot spot for both the total numbers of species (left) and the total numbers of animals (right). Courtesy of Scott Kraus and Brooke Wikgren, New England Aquarium

This map illustrates the pattern of species richness (number of species) of bottom-dwelling animals in the Cashes Ledge area. Warmer colors indicate more species. The largest red diversity hot spot is the peak of Cashes Ledge, where the largest continuous kelp forest on Cashes Ledge is located. Note that this map displays number of species, not numbers of individuals or density of animals. Courtesy of Peter Auster and Michel McKee, Mystic Aquarium

Topographic roughness – essentially, small-scale bumpiness of the seafloor – is linked to the distribution and diversity of microhabitats that in turn support a diversity of species. Warmer colors indicate greater “roughness” and are linked to locations of species-rich communities. For example, the area of high roughness on the top of Cashes Ledge (right inside the proposed monument boundary) is where the kelp forest is located and a species diversity hotspot. Courtesy of Peter Auster and Michel McKee, Mystic Aquarium

These maps illustrate patterns in the richness of species (left) and total numbers of whales and dolphins (right) observed during surveys in the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts region. Warmer colors indicate greater richness or abundance. Note how species concentrate on the eastern Georges Bank, where the shelf descends into the deep ocean, and hot spots for concentrations of whales and dolphins dot the shelf-edge. Courtesy of Scott Kraus and Brooke Wikgren, New England Aquarium

This map shows hot and cold spots for species of bottom-dwelling animals in the New England Canyons and Seamounts areas. Species are especially diverse along the edge of Georges Bank, where the shelf descends into the deep ocean. Hot spots are also visible on Bear, Physalia, Retriever and Mytilus Seamounts. Courtesy of Peter Auster and Michel McKee, Mystic Aquarium

Topographic roughness – essentially small-scale bumpiness of the seafloor – is linked to the distribution and diversity of microhabitats that in turn support a diversity of species. Warmer colors indicate greater “roughness” and are linked to locations of species-rich communities. A high topographic roughness value suggests where especially rich communities may be found. The entire shelf-edge, where Georges Bank descends into the deep ocean, is topographically rough, and Bear, Physalia, Retriever and Mytilus Seamounts stand out. Courtesy of Peter Auster and Michel McKee, Mystic Aquarium

Environmental Bullies: How Conservation Ideologues Attack Scientists Who Don’t Agree With Them

March 11, 2016 — The following is an excerpt from a commentary from Dr. Molly Lutcavage, the head of the Large Pelagics Research Center in Gloucester, Massachusetts. It was originally published on Medium :

Back in the 90s, bluefin fishermen said that spotter pilots could see, in a single day, as many adult bluefin that were supposed to exist in the entire western Atlantic in just a few surface schools in the Gulf of Maine alone. No federal fisheries scientists would fly to validate the fishermen’s observations, so Dr. Scott Kraus, director of the right whale research group and whale aerial surveys, stepped in to find out. And he hired me to run the surveys after an inquiry about his sea turtle data. I’d completed an oceanography PhD, two postdocs, and recently left a job in the Dept. of Interior as an endangered species scientist to get back to research, which I loved. I had been studying leatherbacks, a warm bodied turtle, and bluefin tuna were a warm bodied fish. And incredibly interesting. My UBC postdoc supervisor, Dr. David R. Jones, was an expert on their blood. And there were huge gaps in biological understanding – in other words, a scientific frontier to explore!

In his clumsy communication to discredit our survey work, Carl Safina made no attempt to confirm the scientific credentials of the scientist running the study (me), nor her highly respected collaborator, Dr. Scott Kraus. In fact, by doing our job as scientists, using aerial survey methods to investigate real-time, surface abundance of bluefin schools, we were disrupting the ocean conservation group’s efforts, especially that of Safina, to list Atlantic bluefin tuna as an endangered species. Apparently, by whatever means necessary. The published spotter survey results eventually provided independent observations that rebutted Safina’s portrayal of western Atlantic bluefin as an endangered species down to a few thousand individuals. The study established the local assemblage as larger than one hundred thousand giant bluefin, at the surface alone.

Since our first research projects over 25 years ago, my lab and our collaborators and students have built a diverse body of peer reviewed science covering extensive aspects of the biology, life history, physiological ecology, reproduction, diet, oceanographic associations, and fisheries dynamics of Atlantic bluefin tuna. We published over 75 research studies on western bluefin. Most of it was new, or challenged the status quo of bluefin biology used in stock assessment. We documented a lower age at maturity, extensive, Atlantic-wide mixing, complex annual migration patterns, and effects of prey dynamics and ocean conditions on their movements. This holistic body of research showed the western Atlantic bluefin population to be far more resilient and larger than that being represented by some NGO’s. Yet this substantial scientific body of evidence, most of it noted by historic studies by Frank Mather and Peter C. Wilson, has been conveniently ignored by those with ideological agendas, even today.

Enviro Bullies rarely confront their targets face to face. Since the 1990’s, they’ve made pretty impressive attempts to mislead about bluefin science. And to influence US fisheries managers, politicians and the direction of research funding, all the way up to the White House. We stuck to our research goals, but when Congressional earmarks funding the Large Pelagics Research Center (LPRC), and its role model, the Pacific Fisheries Research Program, went away, we faced vastly downsized research budgets. Actually, just when the Centers had amassed a substantial body of credible, cutting edge fisheries science, and established their true worth, both pelagic fisheries science Centers went off the cliff, into real extinction. Meanwhile, major funding began streaming in to some ocean-focused NGO’s, and their spokesperson scientists.

In 2013, former students, collaborators and I witnessed the Pew Oceans Campaign and partners mislead, in their press releases and statements to US and Canadian fisheries managers, experts’ consensus regarding the status of the Atlantic bluefin population in Pews Fact Sheet representation of Best Available Science. And more specifically, that LPRC’s peer reviewed research that challenged their take away message, that the Atlantic bluefin population trajectory was downward, and that they were in danger. They labelled our work as well as consensus science from the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT), as “unsubstantiated hypotheses”. Amanda Nickson, director of the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Bluefin Campaign, phoned from Vancouver to berate my colleagues and I for responding to the Pew Fact Sheet, which dramatically misrepresented science. We had corrected it with our own fact sheet, and they were not happy to be called out by credentialed bluefin experts.

Maybe it’s because National Geographic’s Wicked Tuna reality show, on roll out, put me up against Safina’s video blurb about the overfished, endangered bluefin on the show’s website. What can you do when a lauded environmental writer, one with a PhD in seabird ecology, that receives accolades and is often the go to authority on Atlantic bluefin for the New York Times, National Public Radio, high media profile journals Science and Nature (even though he’s not exactly running a research lab, is he?), lacks the ethics most of us practice when we conduct science. To claim to be an expert where you are not, to mislead the public, to falsely disparage those that don’t support your ideology, to repeatedly and falsely allude to a woman scientist being bought by fishermen, “in their pockets”, whatever works, when his ideology or views expressed in books or blogs or lectures are shown to be false. Is this what conservation leadership has become? Incidentally, another blatant attempt to disparage and mislead was accomplished by Pew and their scientists in Quicksilver, by Kenneth Brower, published in National Geographic Magazine March 2014 story on Atlantic bluefin tuna.

The quotes looks pretty familiar:

Tuna science, always politicized, has recently become much more so. As it is no longer possible for ICCAT to simply ignore scientific advice, there is now an effort to massage the science. “There are inherent uncertainties about these stock assessments,” Amanda Nickson, director of global tuna conservation at the Pew Charitable Trusts, told me. “We’re seeing a mining of the areas of uncertainty to justify increases in quota.”

Industry-funded biologists propose that there might be undiscovered spawning grounds for Atlantic bluefin. It is possible, of course, but there is no real evidence for the proposition. The idea seems awfully convenient for an agenda favoring business as usual.

Wow, “awfully convenient for an agenda”, in this Nat Geo story repeating Pew’s positions and only their scientists that support it, Drs. Barbara Block and Safina. So now we have even more evidence that their representations are wrong. Jee, National Geographic Society Research and Exploration had actually funded two of my research projects. Let’s see if they print a correction.

Here we are again, Carl Safina. Yes, you’re certainly not the only enviro bully out there, not the only one wrong again, but this time, I’m calling you out. Let the ocean conservation community represented by Pew tuna campaigns and their chosen scientists see the latest, peer reviewed science finding on Atlantic bluefin tuna spawning areas in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, early edition on 7 March 2016 “Discovery of a new spawning ground reveals diverse migration strategies in Atlantic bluefin tuna (Thunnus thynnus)” by Richardson and coauthors.

Read the full opinion piece at Medium

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

WAITT INSTITUTE: Top 15 Ocean Conservation Wins of 2015

The Waitt Institute is a non-profit organization based in Washington, DC. It was founded in 2005 by Ted Waitt (co-founder of Gateway Computers) to foster exploration and discovery. The focus of the Waitt Institute has shifted in recent years, and today its mission is “empowering communities to restore their oceans to full productivity.” To achieve this, the Waitt Institute directs its efforts toward fostering deep collaborations with local governments and communities to create comprehensive ocean zoning and management solutions.

December 23, 2015 — Overfishing, climate change, habitat destruction, and pollution remain major threats to the world’s ocean. But amidst all that there is some seriously good ocean conservation news worth celebrating. So, to continue the tradition started last year with listing 14 Ocean Conservation Wins of 2014, here’s a rundown for 2015 that will hopefully fill you with #OceanOptimism. These wins represent the diligent efforts of organizations and individuals too numerous to list, so let’s just start with a blanket shoutout to all of #TeamOcean for a great year.

#1. Over 2 million km² of ocean was protected in big new marine reserves. Marine reserves are areas completely closed to fishing, and 2015 saw more ocean protected in a single year than ever before. Chile created Desventuradas Marine Park (297,000 km²), and Easter Island Marine Park 631,000 km²). New Zealand created Kermadec Ocean Sanctuary (620,000 km²), Palau created Palau National Marine Sanctuary (500,000 km²), the UK announced the Pitcairn Island Reserve (833,000 km²), and protected areas are in the works for Patagonia. However, there is a broad consensus that 30% of the ocean should be fully protected in reserves, and these new designations only get us up to 1% – but we’ll take it!

#2. New technology is being developed to combat illegal fishing. Designating all these new reserves means little without enforcement, and we can’t enforce unless we know what’s happening out on the water. One big tech effort launched this year is Global Fishing Watch, a partnership between Skytruth, Google, and Oceana to track fishing vessels and identify illegal fishing. Another similar program is the Pew Charitable Trust’s Virtual Watch Room. These technologies are in prototype phase and need significant improvement before they live up to expectations, but it’s a promising and exciting development.

#3. Illegal fishing boats are being chased down and caught! Sea Shepherd chased a pirate fishing boat on Interpol’s most wanted list for 10,000 miles, until the boat sank (potentially on purpose to drown the evidence of illegal fishing). Another boat was chased for four days, caught, and fined $2 million for illegally fishing in the Phoenix Islands Protected Area. Blackfish and Environmental Justice Foundation have also been stepping up to make sure enforcement happens, but hopefully we can soon rely on law enforcement organizations, not environmental groups, to do this work.

Read the full story from the Waitt Institute at National Geographic