High Seas Fisheries Management Gets Low Marks

Fishing on the high seas—areas beyond the 200-nautical-mile jurisdiction of coastal states—is increasing, largely driven by advanced vessel and gear technology, which facilitates fishing far from shore. High seas fisheries are overseen by various regional fisheries management organizations (RFMOs)—intergovernmental bodies made up of nations that have agreed to cooperatively manage fish stocks beyond their national boundaries. Although RFMOs were established to manage and conserve high seas fish stocks, these populations are declining.To illuminate any contradiction between stated management goals and the status of managed fish stocks, Sarika Cullis-Suzuki and Daniel Pauly, researchers at the University of British Columbia, developed a way to score the performance of RFMOs "on paper" versus "in practice." Their results show that on paper, RFMOs are not meeting best practice standards and, in practice, are failing to halt the dramatic declines of fish stocks for which they have management responsibility

On losing and recovering fisheries and marine science data

Large sums are spent annually collecting and, increasingly, electronically encoding field data, making them widely accessible. Earlier data were recorded on paper, and archived at a few institutions, which eventually discard them. Data recovery and distribution is a valuable contribution to science, as it counters the ‘shifting baseline’ syndrome and ensures long-term returns on funds society invested in data gathering. Data recovery need not be expensive. We present the data recovery from the Guinean Trawling Survey, conducted in the early 1960s off West Africa, which cost 0.2% of initial survey costs. Research and graduate training institutions, as well as funding agencies should make digital data globally available as part of their deliverables

The fisheries in the South-Western Indian Ocean, with emphasis on reconstructed catches

Following a brief description of the evolution of marine fisheries since the Second World War, the major trends in the domestic and foreign fisheries in the Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs) of the Comoros, Madagascar, Mozambique, the Seychelles and Tanzania are reviewed, with emphasis on the actual (‘reconstructed’) catches (as opposed to officially reported catches) of the domestic fisheries for the 61 year period from 1950 to 2010. The discrepancies between these two catch types have policy implication which leads to a discussion of what the governance of these fisheries should emphasize, besides having to be ecosystem-based, and increasingly account for demographic pressure and climate change. The resource managers to be trained for facing these challenges will have to have to be versatile, conservation-orientated, and adept at making use of generic online resources that allow bypassing time-consuming and costly local replications.Suite à une brève description de l’évolution de la pêche maritime depuis la Seconde Guerre mondiale, les principales tendances de la pêche intérieure et étrangère dans les zones économiques exclusives (ZEE) des Comores, Madagascar, le Mozambique, les Seychelles et la Tanzanie sont examinées, l’accent étant mis sur les captures (‘reconstruites’) réelles (par rapport à les captures déclarées officiellement) des pêches intérieures pour la période de 61 ans allant de 1950 à 2010. Ces divergences ont une implication politique qui conduit à une discussion sur ce que la gouvernance de ces pêcheries devrait souligner, en plus d’avoir à être fondée sur les écosystèmes, et de plus en plus tenir compte de la pression démographique et le changement climatique. Les gestionnaires des ressources formés pour faire face à ces défis devront être polyvalents, orientées vers la conservation et doués pour utiliser des ressources en ligne génériques permettant de contourner les reproductions locales coûteuses en temps et laborieuses.This is a contribution of the Sea Around Us, a research initiative based at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada and funded by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation

Más allá de la duplicidad y la ignorancia en las pesquerías globales

The three decades following World War II were a period of rapidly increasing fishing effort and landings, but also of spectacular collapses, particularly in small pelagic fish stocks. This is also the period in which a toxic triad of catch underreporting, ignoring scientific advice and blaming the environment emerged as standard response to ongoing fisheries collapses, which became increasingly more frequent, finally engulfing major North Atlantic fisheries. The response to the depletion of traditional fishing grounds was an expansion of North Atlantic (and generally of northern hemisphere) fisheries in three dimensions: southward, into deeper waters and into new taxa, i.e. catching and marketing species of fish and invertebrates previously spurned, and usually lower in the food web. This expansion provided many opportunities for mischief, as illustrated by the European Union’s negotiated ‘agreements’ for access to the fish resources of Northwest Africa, China’s agreement-fee exploitation of the same, and Japan blaming the resulting resource declines on the whales. Also, this expansion provided new opportunities for mislabelling seafood unfamiliar to North Americans and Europeans, and misleading consumers, thus reducing the impact of seafood guides and similar effort toward sustainability. With fisheries catches declining, aquaculture—despite all public relation efforts—not being able to pick up the slack, and rapidly increasing fuel prices, structural changes are to be expected in both the fishing industry and the scientific disciplines that study it and influence its governance. Notably, fisheries biology, now predominantly concerned with the welfare of the fishing industry, will have to be converted into fisheries conservation science, whose goal will be to resolve the toxic triad alluded to above, and thus maintain the marine biodiversity and ecosystems that provide existential services to fisheries. Similarly, fisheries economists will have to get past their obsession with privatising fisheries resources, as their stated goal of providing the proper incentives to fishers can be achieved without giving away what are, after all, public resources. Overall, the crisis that fisheries are now going through can be seen as an opportunity to renew both their structure—away from fuel-intensive large-scale fisheries—and their governance, and to renew the disciplines which study fisheries, creating a fisheries conservation science in the process. Its greatest achievement will be the creation of a global network of Marine Protected Areas, which, as anticipated by Ramon Margalef, is the way to make controlled exploitation compatible with the continued existence of functioning marine ecosystems.Las tres décadas que siguieron a la Segunda Guerra Mundial fueron un período de rápido incremento en el esfuerzo y la captura pesquera, pero también de colapsos espectaculares, principalmente de los estocs de peces pelágicos pequeños. Durante este periodo también apareció un ‘trío tóxico’, según el cual, declarar capturas inferiores a las reales, ignorar las sugerencias de la comunidad científica y culpabilizar al medio ambiente constituyeron la respuesta usual a los continuos colapsos pesqueros que, por ello, se volvieron más frecuentes, y acabaron por abarcar las principales pesquerías del Atlántico Norte. La respuesta a la disminución de los caladeros de pesca tradicionales fue una expansión de las pesquerías del Atlántico Norte (y del Hemisferio Norte en general) en tres dimensiones: hacia el sur, hacia aguas más profundas y a nuevos organismos, o sea, capturando y vendiendo especies de peces e invertebrados que antes se desechaban, y que generalmente pertenecen a niveles inferiores de la red trófica. Esta expansión ofreció muchas oportunidades para realizar disparates, como los “acuerdos” negociados por la Unión Europea para acceder a los recursos pesqueros del Noroeste de África, el acuerdo-cuota que permitía a China explotar la misma región, y el que Japón culpara a las ballenas por la resultante disminución de los recursos. Además esta expansión ofreció nuevas oportunidades para etiquetar mal a las especies poco conocidas por los norteamericanos o europeos, y engañar a los consumidores, reduciendo así el impacto de las guías de consumo de pescados y otros esfuerzos similares dirigidos hacia la sostenibilidad. Con las capturas pesqueras disminuyendo, la acuicultura – a pesar de todos los esfuerzos de relaciones públicas – siendo incapaz de compensar la pérdida, y el rápido incremento de los precios de combustibles, deben esperarse cambios tanto en la industria pesquera como en las disciplinas científicas que la estudian, e influyen en su gestión. En particular, la biología pesquera, ahora preocupada predominantemente por el bienestar de la industria pesquera, tendrá que convertirse a la ciencia de la conservación de las pesquerías, cuyo objetivo será el de resolver el ‘trío tóxico’ mencionado anteriormente, y así mantener la biodiversidad marina y de los ecosistemas que proveen servicios esenciales a las pesquerías. De manera similar, los economistas pesqueros deberán superar su obsesión por la privatización de los recursos pesqueros, dado que su objetivo declarado de proveer a los pescadores con incentivos adecuados puede ser logrado sin regalar lo que son, después de todo, recursos públicos. En términos generales, la crisis por la que están atravesando las pesquerías puede considerarse como una oportunidad para renovar su estructura – alejándose de las pesquerías a gran escala y con uso intensivo de combustible – y gestión, y renovar las disciplinas que estudian a las pesquerías, creando durante ese proceso una ciencia de conservación pesquera. Su mayor logro será la creación de una red mundial de Áreas Naturales Protegidas, lo cual, como lo anticipara Ramón Margalef, es la manera de establecer una explotación controlada, compatible con la existencia duradera del funcionamiento de los ecosistemas marinos

Re-estimation of small-scale fishery catches for U.S. flag-associated island areas in the western Pacific: the last 50 years

Nearshore fisheries in the tropical Pacific play an important role, both culturally and as a reliable source of food security, but often remain under-reported in statistics, leading to undervaluation of their importance to communities. We re-estimated nonpelagic catches for Guam and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI), and summarize previous work for American Samoa for 1950−2002. For all islands combined, catches declined by 77%, contrasting with increasing trends indicated by reported data. For individual island entities, re-estima-tion suggested declines of 86%, 54%, and 79% for Guam, CNMI, and American Samoa, respectively. Except for Guam, reported data primarily represented commercial catches, and hence under-represented contributions by subsistence and recreational fisheries. Guam’s consistent use of creel surveys for data collection resulted in the most reliable reported catches for any of the islands considered. Our re-estimation makes the scale of under-reporting of total catches evident, and provides valuable baselines of likely historic patterns in fisheries catches

Trophic signatures of marine organisms in the Mediterranean as compared with other ecosystems

We compared several large marine ecosystems in terms of species numbers of fishes, sea birds, marine mammals, and cephalopods. We examined how these numbers were distributed by trophic level, from herbivores to top predators. We created group-specific trophic signatures as plots of number of species by trophic level, and used these to identify similarities and discrepancies between taxonomic groups and ecosystems. Preliminary results suggested that trophic signatures are similar for ecosystems previously known to share major features, and different for dissimilar ecosystems. In the Mediterranean, as well as in the other large marine ecosystems, fish clearly dominate the predatory trophic levels above 3.0. Preliminary signatures for cephalopods, marine mammals, and sea birds in the Mediterranean and in the North Sea indicate that these groups are restricted to trophic levels above 3.0, and are represented by many fewer species than are predatory fish. Notably, cephalopods are the only invertebrates present at higher trophic levels (>= 4). Invertebrates other than cephalopods are restricted to trophic levels below 3, with very few exceptions. Trophic signatures appear to be useful tools for better understanding of the roles that different groups of organisms play in different ecosystems. We also applied free-scale network theory to analyse the food web created by trophic links of fishes. Our preliminary results indicated that Mediterranean fishes are, on average, only two trophic links away from each other