Fishing about and about fishing
“Out of Fishermen’s Hands – The Evolution of Fishing Cultures Through the Eyes of Gary D. Sharp, Menakhem Ben-Yami and James R. McGoodwin”
This book represents a contribution towards the now growing effort to re-connect fisheries management systems with non-fishing social, ecological, oceanographic and climatic factors.
The book disputes, among others, the basic assumption of the last 30-40 years, that if you take the fish left from last year plus those recruited this year, less those fished out, and less those that died from predation and other natural causes – you get the amount of commercial-size fish in a stock. This assumption spawned mathematical models used to assess stocks and “maximum sustainable yield”, and became the gist of “the best available science” for the western world’s fisheries management. But, such science is not necessarily sufficient science.
Such population-dynamics models wily-nilly consider fish stocks in isolation from their ecosystem and from major environmental-climatic influences. Whether the simplest or the more sophisticated, multi-species ones, these models hardly comprise the numerous non-fishing factors. They ignore the true-time effects of such factors on abundance, natural mortality, availability, and vulnerability of fish populations. They are highly sensitive to guessed and "guesstimated" inputs, and to inadequate and unreliable data on catch size, composition, and capture area. Claims that non-fishing variables are reliably implied in both recruitment and natural mortality figures are easy to disprove.
One reason for inadequate science surviving so long is that the "peer reviewing" of its presumptions and recommendations is being done by scientists coming from the same discipline and school of thought as that of the authors and practitioners of that paradigm. Thus, statistical modellers devoted to this methodology, rather than model-sceptic scientists review stock assessments.
Ignoring natural environmental factors is ridiculous. There are the anoxic dead zones, off many coasts, some of them extending up to 27,000 sq. miles. There’re the world's seabirds, which consume 70 million tonnes of food, as compared to the 80 M mt of global fish catch, and the even larger fish consumption by marine mammals. Fishermen are responsible perhaps for less than one third of total predation.
Major fishery management flops on one hand, and growing criticism on the part of fishermen and model-skeptic scientists not bewitched by the easily computerized equations, on the other, have forced fisheries and scientific establishments to start revising this methodology. During 2004, uneasy noises have been coming also from the FAO, the U.S. Academy of Sciences, the U.K. Royal Society, the ICES, and the Scottish Royal Society.
Our book follows two FAO published Fisheries Technical Papers, one by Dr. Leonid Klyashtorin and the other by Dr. Gary D. Sharp, who’s also the senior author of our book. These papers and the book present exemplify the growing understanding of the many enumerable factors that act on Earth in general, and on the oceans and marine life, in particular, and interact with each other within their respective ecosystems. This knowledge is now evolving into a new scientific sub-discipline: "Systems Ecology".
Repeated glaciation/deglaciation periods of millennia and decadal to century-scale climate changes were pushing back and forth animal and human populations more often than most people recognize. Klyashtorin correlated the short and long multiannual climatic fluctuations and dynamics of oceanic systems with abundance of various marine fishes, which in turn affected the social and economic developments in many countries.
Unfortunately, our ability of forecasting climate changes is limited, because we have few really long time series that cover more than one or two complete fishery rise-and-fall cycles. Oceans undergo parallel shifts, with dramatic changes in species abundance, composition, and distribution, and consequently also in fish stocks. Our observation systems are young, our time series short, and our measurements local. Many (including satellite-taken) data have only been available since the 1950s, at best, and all they can reflect are just short-term convulsions and distortions on the back of the former.
There're sufficient scientific examples and documentation to show that fisheries dynamics involves much more than only fish and fishing. Oceans, hence fisheries, are affected by larger scale dynamic processes and forces. In fact, catches provide unique ecological climate indicators. But, the influence of the Earth-atmosphere-ocean-climate system on fish populations although well recognized is still poorly accounted for in regional stock assessments.
With all the due respect to our sinful role in degrading the environment, we can only produce contortions, however nasty, upon major fluctuations that are caused by incomparably stronger global, solar, and cosmic forces. Could it be that the trend promoted by the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change that our polluting is producing a major global change – is a bit megalomaniac?
The one thing that can be certain is that climate will continue to
change, and fish distributions and abundances will continue to respond as they have in the past. Unfortunately, the fisheries most sensitive to climate change are also amongst the most affected by (non-fishing) human interventions such as dams, diminished access to up-or down-river migrations, filling in of wetlands, and other issues of human population growth and habitat manipulation and pollution, industrial and agricultural effluents, and urbanization. Thus, we cannot disregard the humans' role in modifying and damaging ecosystems by erasing habitats and depleting Earth's resources, fisheries included. And fishing people and their communities are the first and foremost to pay for it all.
“Out of Fishermen’s Hands” can be acquired through
www.amazon.com or directly from:
G.D. Sharp
Center for Climate/Ocean Resources Study
780 Harrison Road,
Salinas, CA, 93907-1637 USA