Saving Seafood

RAY HILBORN: Keep eating fish; it’s the best way to feed the world

June 3, 2019 — This week, the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation (NMSF) is convening Capitol Hill Ocean Week in Washington, D.C. Additionally, President Trump has declared the month of June “National Ocean Month” in recognition of the importance of the ocean to the economy, national security, and environment of the United States.

For the duration of Ocean Week, Saving Seafood will share materials related to the sustainable and economically vital U.S. commercial fishing and seafood industries, including information tied directly to events being organized as part of the NMSF conference.

To kick off the week, Saving Seafood is sharing the following article on the importance of eating fish to global food security and the environment. It was written by renowned fisheries scientist Dr. Ray Hilborn and published by the Oxford University Press Blog last week:

The famous ocean explorer, Sylvia Earle, has long advocated that people stop eating fish. Recently, George Monbiot made a similar plea in The Guardian – there’s only one way to save the life in our oceans, stop eating fish – which, incidentally, would condemn several million people to starvation.

In both cases, it’s facile reasoning. The oceans may suffer from many things, but fishing isn’t the biggest. Earle and Monbiot’s sweeping pronouncements lack any thought for the consequences of rejecting fish and substituting fish protein for what? Steak? That delicious sizzler on your plate carries the most appallingly large environmental costs regarding fresh water, grain production, land use, erosion, loss of topsoil, transportation, you name it.

Luckily for our planet, not everyone eats steak. You’re vegan, you say, and your conscience is clean. An admirable choice – so long as there aren’t too many of you. For the sake of argument and numbers, let us assume that we can substitute plant protein in the form of tofu, made from soybeans, for fish protein. Soybeans need decent land; in fact it would take 2.58 times the land area of England to produce enough tofu to substitute for no longer available fish. That extra amount of decent arable land just isn’t available – unless we can persuade Brazil, Ecuador and Columbia to cut down more of the Amazon rainforest. We would also add 1.71 times the amount of greenhouse gases that it takes to catch the fish.

And, again for the sake of argument, were we to substitute beef for fish, we would need 192.43 Englands to raise all that cattle and greenhouse gases would rocket to 42.4 times what they are from fishing.

But aren’t there alternatives that we can eat with a clean conscience? It depends. First, we must accept the inescapable truth that everyone has to eat. You and I and another few billion humans right down to the single cell organisms. The second inescapable truth arises from the first but is often ignored, is that there is no free lunch. The big variable in this business of eating is deciding the appropriate price to the environment.

Read the full opinion piece at the Oxford University Press (OUP) Blog

Now that the IUCN World Conservation Congress in Hawaii has taken place, what happens next?

October 6th, 2016 — “If all we do is host people from around the world and have a really great conference, then we have missed the opportunity.” So said Charles “Chipper” Wichman, addressing attendees of the Hawaii Conservation Conference at UH-Hilo in August of 2015.

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), founded in 1948, has a mission to, “Influence, encourage and assist societies throughout the world to conserve the integrity and diversity of nature and to ensure that any use of natural resources is equitable and ecologically sustainable.” Every four years they convene members, delegates and guests to the World Conservation Congress (WCC), most recently held in Jeju, Korea (2012) and Barcelona, Spain (2008). Never before had the United States been a venue for the Congress.

Wichman, National Tropical Botanical Garden President and CEO, curator of the 989-acre Limahuli Preserve on Kauai, not only served on the Host and Program Committees of the WCC, but was largely responsible for the idea of holding the event in Hawaii, where threats to unique eco-systems and biodiversity are on center stage.  Back in 2008, after attending the Barcelona WCC, Maui kalo farmer and educator Penny Levin suggested that the only way to get suitable attention and funding for local conservation needs would be to bring an event of this stature to Hawaii. Dr. Christopher Dunn, then-director of Lyon Arboretum, and Wichman agreed, and began an eight-year odyssey of making the dream a reality.

By all accounts, the 2016 IUCN-WCC, held Sept. 1-10 at Honolulu’s Hawaii Convention Center, was an unprecedented success. More that 10,000 people attended, from more than 190 nations. The extravaganza showcased Hawaii, Pacific and global eco-issues and challenges with dozens of displays, presentations, forums and discussions over the first five days. Then the Congress shifted gears, with five days of deliberations and voting on 85 proposals, from closing domestic markets for elephant ivory trade to securing our future by developing a post-2020 strategy.

A Who’s Who list of conservation luminaries and leaders highlighted the event–Jane Goodall, Sylvia Earle, Jean Michel Cousteau, E.O. Wilson and more—with President Barack Obama a late no-show after a brief welcome to the Pacific Island Conference of Leaders in a small, private event at the UH East-West Center on Manoa on the eve of the WCC. Expected to address the general assembly at an opening reception at Neal Blaisdell Center the next morning, Obama instead flew to Midway, in the center of the Paphanaumokuakea Marine National Monument (PMNM) that he expanded just a week earlier by presidential order, making it the world’s largest marine protected area.

Read the full story at Mauitime

Can the net transform the world’s fishing industries?

November 30, 2015 — Local fishing communities in Indonesia are beset by a multitude of connected challenges, from illegal fishing to declining fish populations to their own personal safety in the country’s turbulent seas.

But a New York based telecoms company called Tone believes mobile network technology can solve these problems by getting fishermen in remote communities connected to the Internet through an initiative called mFish. Scaled up, they believe their model could address the problem of unsustainable and illegal fishing globally, as well as being applied in many other contexts.

“What we’re trying to do is bridge the digital divide,” says Tone’s Chief Marketing Officer Roald Van Wyk. “People assume technology equals connectivity, but a smartphone is no use if you can’t afford the data.” According to Tone, mobile broadband penetration in the developing world is still just 21%, indicating a huge untapped market which they’re hoping to help bring online.

Tone’s business model is to work with local partners to deliver a range of affordable data plans in countries where far fewer people are locked into long term contracts with mobile carriers – what’s known as ‘unbundling.’ The idea is that consumers get access to various content packages via channels on the Tone platform, some of which are co-branded with local companies to make them affordable. Tone will reinvest 20% of profits into social and environmental initiatives through its foundation.

Read the full story at The Guardian

 

Do Fish Feel Pain? Sylvia Earle talks Fishing Ethics

November 18, 2015 — I am passionate. I must be – I am a scientist. And I admire people who are passionate. I thus admire Dr. Sylvia Earle for her passionate work in relation to saving the oceans. However, as a scientist I am also an advocate of unbiased scientific facts. I thus feel unease whenever facts are inappropriately represented or biased information misused for bold claims how the world should be and how others should behave. In a recent lengthy feature in Outside Magazine the author, Ian Frazier, reports on the life achievements of Sylvia Earle. Therein one can find the following passage:

“You know that the misconception that fish can’t feel pain has been completely disproven, don’t you?” she [Sylvia Earle] asked. I said yes, I had seen studies in which fish jaws were injected with bee venom and the fish showed pain. I said I knew hooks hurt, having sometimes hooked myself.

This and some other verbiage in the article is used to showcase how terrible fishing is because it induces suffering in the world of fishes that show individuality and personality. We have a case of practical animal liberation or even animal rights philosophy at play where the suffering in the world of fishes is traded-off against the benefits of fishing to humans. Animal liberation and animal rights both are deeply anti-fishing. Usually humans tend to lose the moral balancing act because fishing is perceived by some, including Earle, as unnecessary cruelty.

That would not be a problem, per se. However, all statements in the above quotation are factually contested at best, and wrong at worst. First, fish are not known for sure to be able to feel pain or to suffer despite repeated claims for the opposite. Second, all reactions by rainbow trout in the famous “bee venom” study alluded to by Frazier are fully compatible with simple nociception, which is not pain. Third, there is also no evidence that hooks hurt fishes other than the physical damage they induce; in fact, there is strong evidence that Atlantic cod do not show any reactions at all, neither physiological nor behavioural, when hooked by a fishing hook in the lip without an associated pull on a line. They are thus unlikely to be in pain, or they show pain different to us humans. Both issues are problematic and cast doubts onto the interpretation of published behavioural experiments supposed to provide evidence for pain in fishes. In short: inferring pain from fish behaviours or from higher order cognitive concepts such as “intelligence” or “personality” is impossible because pain lacks construct ability, i.e., there is no possibility to infer pain from physiological and behavioural measures in fishes.

However, there is a simple argument that fish are unlikely to feel pain in a human or mammalian sense. When one pulls on a hook embedded in a lip of a fish, the fish, e.g., the cod in the experiment above, would fight in opposite directions to the pulling strength. This is what anglers call a fight. Imagine you would pull on a bull ring attached through the nose of kettle. The kettle would tamely follow the pulling strength, to avoid pain, the exact opposite what fishes do. Didn’t I just say we should not infer anything about the emotional life of fishes from plain behavioural data because we are humans, not fishes? Indeed. But let’s for the sake of argument anthropomorphizes how a fish might feel when hooked by a fishing hook, as Frazier does. When taken this stance, one would need to conclude from the above that fish apparently do everything (swim in opposite direction to pulling strength) to feel “pain” when hooked. One could thus conclude that fish are not only feeling “pain,” but they are likely masochistic creatures because they induce this pain on purpose. It is unlikely that any living creature would do this if they indeed would feel something that we humans call pain when hooked by a fishing hook.

Read the full story from CFood

JOHN SACKTON: Media’s Rampant ‘Fisheries Are Going Extinct’ Claim Finally has Serious Rebuttal from Scientists

SEAFOODNEWS.COM [The Editor’s View] by John Sackton — Nov 3, 2015 — The following headline came across our newsfeed this morning “Some South China Sea fish ‘close to extinction'”, courtesy of Agence France Presse.

The report was based on a quote from Rashid Sumaila, director of the Fisheries Economics Research Unit of the University of British Columbia.

“The South China Sea is… under threat from various sources. We need to do something,” said Sumaila.

“The most scary thing is the level of decline we have seen over the years. Some species (are facing) technically extinction or depletion,” Sumaila, who headed the study, told a press conference in Hong Kong. 

Having not seen the paper, it is not possible to evaluate his statements. But they are readily taken up because they feed into a media narrative that has proved very hard to change: fisheries around the world are dying because of human greed and overfishing.  This narrative has been central to NGO campaigns focused on fisheries. 

For many years, there was no organized response, and especially no way for journalists to get accurate scientific information. If they were fed a quote, such as “90% of the worlds stocks were unsustainably harvested” as appeared in Newsweek this summer, or that fish is ‘aquatic bushmeat’ comparable to eating monkeys and rhinoceros, as was said by Sylvia Earle, they have no way to evaluate its truthfulness. No wonder that seafood seems so controversial.

A group of scientists has come together through Ray Hilborn and his colleagues at the University of Washington, that is finally providing real-time commentary and rebuttal – i.e. pointing out the basic science – which in many cases does not support these media stories. 

Our companion story today by Peggy Parker has more detail on Hilborn’s rebuttal to Newsweek, where he said one article ‘may set a record for factual errors’.

The idea is not to simply point out poor science and unsupported conclusions, but to encourage media to use their website cfooduw.org, as a resource whenever they see a scientific claim about fisheries.

For example, just in the past few days, scientists from around the world have posted comments on a range of global topics.

Hilborn pointed out, and the Newsweek editors accepted, a correction that not 90%, but 28.8% of fish stocks were estimated as overfished. Would they have run the story if they had not been pitched intitally that 90% of fish stocks have collapsed?

Steve Cadrin of the University of Massachusetts comments on recent articles about cod in both New England and Newfoundland.  He says “The lesson from both of these papers is that rebuilding the stocks to historical levels depends both on fisheries management … and on the return of favorable environmental conditions.” 

“Stock assessment models are simplifications of a much more complex reality. Stock assessments typically assume that components of productivity (survival from natural mortality, reproductive rates, growth) are relatively constant. These assumptions may be reasonable for relatively stable ecosystems. However, considering the extreme climate change experienced in the Gulf of Maine, such assumptions need to be re-considered.  Alternative approaches to science and management are needed to help preserve the fishing communities that rely on Gulf of Maine cod.” 

Two tuna scientists collaborate on a story in response to the charge by Greenpeace that John West is breaking its sustainable tuna pledge by buying fish caught with FADs.

FADs are a type of fishing gear (radio monitored fish aggregating devices) that have become very widely used for pelagic tuna. The two scientists, Laurent Dagorn and Gala Moreno, point out in a comment and a recent paper the important issues with FADs are 1) quantifying, with scientific data, how big that impact actually is, 2) determining if the impact is acceptable for the amount and diversity of fish caught, 3) comparing it with the impact of other fishing gears, and 4) implementing measures to reduce an impact if it is too high for the ecosystem, taking into account all fishing impacts. 

This provides a real road map for a discussion of FADs and how they should or should not be used, in contrast to the campaign claims that they are simply destructive types of fishing gear.  Dagorn and Moreno point out that all food production (including organic farming) involves making choices about modifying ecosystems, and tuna fishing should not be considered in isolation, but in how it meets the goal of providing food for global populations.

Aggregating and making this kind of fisheries science easily accessible is one of the most concrete actions that has been taken in years to counteract the misinformation that so many of us in the industry experience every day. 

It is an effort that deserves wholehearted support, including publicizing the resource to local writers and editors. Please visit their website at cfooduw.org.

This opinion piece originally appeared on SeafoodNews.com, a subscription site. It has been reprinted with permission.

Fishermen, Conservationists, and Regulators Honored for Landmark Coral Preservation Efforts

October 29, 2015 – The following was released by the Garden State Seafood Association (GSSA):

TRENTON, N.J. — Representatives from the Garden State Seafood Association (GSSA) are among those being honored for their efforts to preserve 38,000 square miles of Mid-Atlantic ocean habitat, and extend valuable protections to vulnerable coral reefs. Ernie Panacek, President of the GSSA, Richard Robins, Chairman of the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council (MAFMC), and Jay Odell, Director of the Mid-Atlantic Marine Program at the Nature Conservancy, were presented with this year’s Regional Ocean Champions Award, given by the Urban Coast Institute at Monmouth University, at the Institute’s 11th Annual Future of the Ocean Symposium.

Dr. Sylvia Earle, Explorer in Residence at the National Geographic Society, and Terry Garcia, the Chief Science and Exploration Officer at the National Geographic Society, were presented with the National Champions of the Ocean Award.

Earlier this year, the MAFMC approved the Deep Sea Corals Amendment, which created a series of “deep sea coral zones,” totaling over 38,000 square miles, to be closed off to fishing gear that comes into contact with the seafloor. These zones protect the fragile coral ecosystems and other notable habitats from potentially harmful disturbances.

“The Deep Sea Corals Amendment presented the Council with an opportunity of a lifetime to conserve sensitive deep sea corals and their associated marine ecosystems in the Mid-Atlantic,” said Mr. Robins. “What was so unique about this action was that we used a participatory approach to defining the protected areas, which allowed a broad range of stakeholders to reach consensus on what those boundaries should be.”

This participatory process brought together Council members, fishermen and industry representatives, scientists, and other stakeholders in a collaborative and cooperative effort.

“The fishing industry has a lot to offer intellectually,” said Mr. Panacek. “When there is mutual respect, meaningful results can be achieved.”

The resulting protections have been widely praised, by environmentalists and fishermen alike. Peter Baker, of the The Pew Charitable Trusts, wrote in a post featured on the Conservation Law Foundation’s Talking Fish blog that the Amendment would “cement a conservation legacy for the Mid-Atlantic.”

Industry representatives, such as GSSA Executive Director Greg DiDomenico, see the open and inclusive process that lead to the Amendment as an example for fisheries managers nationwide, one that demonstrates the value of stakeholder engagement and proves that the fisheries management system established by the Magnuson-Stevens Act works.

“The process in the Mid-Atlantic should be the model for developing targeted habitat protection in New England,” said Mr. DiDomenico. “An open, collaborative process is the best way to build on these efforts.”  

The Champion of the Ocean Awards honor those who have “demonstrated sustained leadership in advancing a future in which coasts and oceans are clean, safe, sustainably managed and preserved for the benefit and enjoyment of future generations.”

This is the second time this year that GSSA has been honored for its conservation work. Mr. DiDomenico, along with MAFMC Chairman Robins, were recognized as Conservation Leaders by the New York Aquarium in a September ceremony held at the Central Park Zoo.

About the Garden State Seafood Association

The Garden State Seafood Association (GSSA) advocates on behalf of New Jersey’s fishermen and fishing communities. Through closely monitoring regulatory developments, actively participating in the management process, and sharing the latest fisheries news and information with our members, GSSA holds our leaders accountable to the concerns and priorities of New Jersey’s hard working, historic fishing industry.