The Catch
Page 5 of 6
|
|
Currently, only the North Pacific Council—which many experts regard as a model—is effective at setting and monitoring strict quotas, which go against the grain of many fishermen. According to fishery analyst Tom Nies, the New England Council tried so-called hard quotas for groundfish in the ’70s and ’80s, “but it didn’t work. There were problems with setting the quotas, and the fishermen cheated.”
Critics admit that such quotas could benefit larger fishing operations over smaller fishermen. But right now, “they’re the best management tool,” asserts Lee Crockett, executive director of the Marine Fish Conservation Network. “Reach the limit and you close [the fishing] down.” Of course, not everyone agrees: “There’d be a mushroom cloud if you went to quotas in New England,” says long-liner Russo. “There’s a 300-year-old fishing community here and it hasn’t changed much.”
As things now stand, the scientific conclusions about a given fish stock are advisory. “If a council doesn’t do what it is supposed to,” says Andrew Rosenberg, a former NOAA Northeast regional administrator now at the University of New Hampshire, “there isn’t much you can do about it. You can’t sue a council.” All too often over the years—even decades—some councils have overridden the scientific conclusions and set catch limits that were too high.
And yet, setting unsustainably high catch limits can’t be understood as a simple matter of the councils’ making corrupt decisions: The Magnuson-Stevens Act requires them to take into account the socioeconomic impacts of their decisions on coastal communities. By law, marine science alone does not carry the day, so NOAA’s regional science centers also employ social scientists, economists, and anthropologists.
Complicating the issue further is the imprecision of the science. By statute, fishing regulations are based on the “best scientific information available,” so for over 40 years NOAA has run a sizable research operation through its regional science centers, employing 1,400 scientists and technicians. Their task includes assessing, for each of the hundreds of commercial fish species, the average age, size, weight, gender, rates of reproduction, locations, movements, feeding habits, and predator-prey relationships. They also gauge the impacts of the fishing itself.
An experienced marine biologist can often determine a fish’s age just by looking at its scales, much the way tree rings reveal a tree’s age. Of course, NOAA scientists can’t count all the fish in the sea, so they do a lot of sampling and computer modeling. “It’s like pulling a thimble two feet through a room, then counting the dust motes caught in the thimble and trying to estimate the quantity of dust in the whole room,” says John Boreman, director of the research center in Woods Hole. “It’s a big ocean and we have small nets.” Samples can show, for instance, that the cod being landed are mostly three or four years old, whereas “we know that Atlantic cod live for about 15 years,” Boreman notes. “That tells you something important about the stock.”
While the so-called fishery management plans include staggering amounts of data, skepticism of the science runs high among fishermen. “People sometimes see the answers that they want,” says Rosenberg. “And one of them is, ‘Well, you know, we’re catching more red snapper, therefore the science must be wrong.’” Many critics of NOAA praise the scientists’ expertise. But with so much—investments, careers, family, mortgages, and community well-being—riding on regulatory decisions, it’s tempting to question the data.
“There is a lot of debate about the science centers’ numbers, a lot of screaming,” says senior analyst Nies, who heads up the team that writes the controversial groundfish plans in the New England region. “The dirty little secret is that even with really good science, there is still a lot of uncertainty about the stocks.” But if that uncertainty opens the door to regulatory decisions that result in overfishing, the science, says Eagle, is sure on one point: “We know enough to know that there’s trouble out there, and we ought to manage the fisheries accordingly.”
The tradition of recreational fishing is losing out to the nmfs, the commercial fishing interest and the far left whiners.
Let us not forget this much hated bill was the work of one Ted Stevens from Alaska.
Roy Crabtree at nmfs should be tried on criminal charges, of course there is a good chance we will see him in front of a federal judge soon.