"Ask Dr. Pauly" Columns: Answers for Ocean Conservation
Answe r s for ocean conser vation
Winter 2018: Why we need a global ban on the
30 Spring 2019: The enormous — and still uncertain — impact and size of China’s wild fish catch
Winter 2021: How can we bring fisheries back from the brink?
50 Spring 2022: How is global warming affecting fisheries?
52 Fall 2022: Why are plastics in the ocean so harmful? 54 Winter 2022: Why are we giving subsidies to the fishing industry?
56 Spring 2023: Stewards of the sea 58 Fall 2023: How does deep-sea mining affect marine life? 60 Winter 2023: What are marine heat waves?
FOREWORD
This little book assembles the articles written by Dr. Daniel Pauly for publication in Oceana’s thrice yearly membership magazine. The topics were chosen by Oceana’s magazine editors to address the concerns and questions they knew mattered to the generous people whose contributions fund Oceana’s ocean conservation policy campaigns. These campaigns are now in nine countries and the European Union; places chosen because they carry an outsize impact on the overall health of the global ocean. These contributors care deeply about the ocean and want it protected by science-driven policy. They are public, spirited people who are not scientists. They want to learn, but as busy people, they need the most important ocean information stated clearly and succinctly.
This is difficult to do well. Accomplished academic ocean experts often find it especially challenging to write for this kind of audience. Many refuse to do it. Their profession rewards writing that presumes a reader with an advanced and sophisticated knowledge of marine science. The scientific language of such writing is often so dense and full of arcane terms that the lay reader even one with an advanced degree in a field other than marine science cannot easily make sense of it.
Dr. Pauly is the most cited fisheries scientist in the world whose work has earned him many prestigious awards. His insights and research, published in countless peer-reviewed academic articles, are cited worldwide. Over his lifetime, he has been honored countless times for his fundamental contributions to humanity’s understanding of the changes in the status of our oceans. When you read his articles in this collection, you are reading insights you can trust.
I served as Oceana’s CEO for more than 20 years, retiring at the end of June 2024. Throughout that time, Daniel served as a member of our Board of Directors, attending all but two of our nearly 70 meetings. In that time, as Oceana’s board chose what our policy campaigners would seek to accomplish, and which countries we would fight in, Daniel steadily and gently taught our board the science they needed to correctly make these fundamental strategic choices. We now have more than 300 policy wins that cut overfishing, conserve habitat, stop pollution, protect endangered species, and require the transparency essential to honest and effective ocean management. Every single one of those victories was informed by Daniel’s expertise and advice.
Science-driven policymaking requires scientists willing to communicate with regulators and lawmakers on the “operational” questions that drive the difference between ocean depletion and abundance. Sadly, many academic scientists do not help with this task. Their career incentives often reward so-called ‘pure’ science, not the sort of applied science that a policymaker desperately needs. Even worse, some institutions treat association with practical policymaking as evidence of a lack of commitment to precision or scientific independence. This is a great disservice to the world. An academic expert whose insights
help to restore and protect an abundant and biodiverse ocean is worthy of the highest level of respect and commendation (and career advancement). Precise academic measurements of a dying ocean are not more valuable than science-based insights that drive conservation policymaking that restores abundance.
To state it metaphorically, the world needs more practicing ocean conservation doctors, not more forensic marine autopsy technicians. We need careful, science-based diagnoses of the causes of ocean decline, coupled with clear recommendations on the policies that would restore marine abundance and health. Informed by that expert advice, advocates like those of us at Oceana, in partnership with smallscale fishers, coastal communities, and our many allies can campaign to push the policymakers to stand up to the overfishers and the polluters.
Globally significant improvement in the status of our ocean is essential, even if you just care about feeding a hungry humanity. The very good news is that rebuilding ocean abundance is a practical mission. Thanks in part to Dr. Daniel Pauly’s leadership with us at Oceana, we’ve proven that. Ocean conservation, delivered country by country, is achievable. We hope this collection will inspire other distinguished marine scientists to find ways to share their insights in language and in fora that assist policymakers and marine advocates in saving the ocean and helping to feed the world.
The contributions in this booklet were not just written for fun. While I enjoyed writing them, they also reflect the need for modern conservation — including ocean conservation — to rely on facts or, more generally, on science.
Our detractors — those who, for example, deny the devastating impacts of bottom trawling on marine biodiversity, or even the effects of greenhouse gases on the world’s climate (as if one could argue with physics) — claim that concerns about the loss of diversity are not driven by facts but by emotions. This is not true even if sadness and outrage at the wanton destruction of marine biodiversity are legitimate emotions.
Oceana’s campaigns are science-based and informed by facts such as those presented in the columns in this booklet. However, giving attention to facts when planning a campaign is not enough. A campaign must also have a realistic chance of success, and for this, one needs allies, especially the force multipliers that governments can be when they are brought on board.
Oceana is successful because its campaigns are planned to reach governments that — at least in democracies — implement the laws and rules that enable us to thrive together.
Smoking was not eliminated from most public places because non-smokers convinced their friends and families to limit their smoking. Rather, smoking is banned from enclosed public spaces because governments acted based on the facts and the science that were presented to them showing that smoking kills. The same happened with safety belts in cars.
This is why non-governmental organizations devoted to conservation and working to positively impact the world we live in must rely on facts and science while emphasizing the benefits and beauty of the world’s biodiversity.
Finally, given my emphasis on facts, I must mention that my comparison of marine heat waves with forest fires, which I proudly presented as an original idea on page 60, was actually an old hat, having originally appeared in an article in Nature (no less!), but which I swear I had not read. These things happen.
Daniel Pauly, Ph.D.
Oceana Board Member
Sea Around Us Principal Investigator
October 2024
¹
Local television and newspaper reports have been filled with stories about jellyfish outbreaks in recent years. People notice jellyfish more these days – or is it the jellyfish that notice more people? In any case, more people are getting stung – a rash of rashes as it were.
There are also more reports of the water intake pipes of power or desalinization plants being clogged up by jellyfishes. However, it would be wrong to infer just from such reports that jellyfish are increasing worldwide. It could be that there are more people going to beaches and more power and desalinization plants being built, and that incidents involving jellyfishes are nowadays more likely to be reported that they were earlier.
I decided to get to the bottom of this question a few years ago. I gave one of my graduate students, Mr. Lucas Brotz, the task of elucidating for his master’s thesis whether there has truly been a worldwide increase in jellyfish or not. One way to go about this was to rely on data from so-called ‘systematic surveys’ of marine ecosystems conducted by research vessels. However, the scientists conducting these surveys are usually interested only in the commercial caught species, and they often threw away the jellyfish that they had collected without recording them.
Nevertheless, by searching through a huge amount of scientific literature, one can find many studies indicating, for various ecosystems, that jellyfish have increased, decreased or remained steady over time. Similarly, the opinions of fishers and marine scientists can help identify changes (or lack thereof) in jellyfish populations, as such professionals are keenly tuned to the marine environment.
The results have now been published and they are quite clear: of the 66 so-called large marine ecosystems (LMEs) of the world ocean, 45 had data allowing inferences on trends in jellyfish. Of these, 28 (62%) showed an increasing trend, while only 3 (7%) showed a decreasing trend
Ask Dr. Pauly:
are the oceans Jellifying?
(the rest 14 LMEs showed no trend)¹. These results received a lot of media attention because it was the first study that demonstrated widespread increases on the basis of an analysis of numerous datasets spanning many decades, contrary to earlier studies and the above-mentioned above media reports, both of which tend to pertain to brief, localized incidents.
We are now engaged in the identification of the causes for the widespread increase of jellyfish. One possible culprit is the recent decimation of jellyfish predators, for example, leatherback turtles and sunfish (Mola mola), caught as bycatch of tuna longline fisheries. Similarly, overfishing of jellyfish competitors (e.g., small pelagic fishes) may also play a role.
Yet another possible cause is the modification of habitats by bottom trawling, which eliminates the potential predators (e.g., crabs) and competitors of ‘polyps’, the flower-like young stage of many kinds of jellyfish. Finally, another cause for the increase of jellyfish, likely acting in concert with the others, is the construction boom
L, W.W.L. Cheung, K. Kleisner, E. Pakhomov and D. Pauly. 2012. Increasing jellyfish populations: trends in Large Marine Ecosystems Hydrobiologia DOI: 10.1007/s/10750-012-1039-7.
along the coasts of the world, for ports, marinas, jetties, etc. These structures provide new habitat for polyps, which subsequently reproduce, potentially leading to millions of free-floating jellyfish.
By Daniel Pauly
There are other ideas floating around, notably linking the increase in jellyfish with global warming or the increase of ‘dead zones’ in the world’s oceans. Whatever the reason(s), jellyfish are proliferating, and since they feast on the eggs and larvae of fish, this is a further challenge to the health of the oceans in general, and to fisheries in particular.
Perhaps bathers everywhere will have to follow the example of the Australians who, because of the nasty box jellyfish, usually venture into the ocean only with a full body suit. Such form-hugging, colorful body suits can be fashionable, which is the only plus side of the ocean jellification story that I can see.
Brotz,
Daniel Pauly is a Professor of Fisheries at the Fisheries Centre of the University of British Columbia, the Principal Investigator of the Sea Around Us Project, and a member of the Board of Oceana.
Nomura jellyfish, pictured above, have proliferated in Japanese waters in recent years. Photo: Niu Fisheries Cooperative
What are forage fish?
To explain the importance of forage fish, first we must go back to the basics of who eats whom, on land versus in the ocean. On land it is very easy. We either eat plants, or animals that have eaten plants, or a mixture of the two.
Re-expressed in term of trophic levels, i.e., steps in the food chain, this means that we have trophic level 1, which are plants. Then we have trophic level 2, things that eat plants, and level 3, animals that eat planteating animals (e.g., cows, eating grass). So, for example, if you have a diet of 90 percent vegetable matter (fries, salads, the onions on hamburgers), plus 10 percent meat, you have a trophic level of 2.1.
In the sea, the equivalent of grass and corn and other edible plant matter are microscopic algae known as phytoplankton. The plant-eating marine herbivores, the equivalent of deer and cows on land, are tiny zooplankton, usually less than one-tenth of an inch, and we don’t eat them. They are eaten instead by small schooling fishes such as sardines, herring, and anchovies. We call these forage fish because they serve as food for larger
¹ Pikitch, E., P.D. Boersma, I.L. Boyd, D.O. Conover, P. Cury, T. Essington, S.S. Heppell, E.D. Houde, M. Mangel, D. Pauly, É. Plagányi, K. Sainsbury and R.S. Steneck. 2012. Little Fish, Big Impact: Managing a Crucial Link in Ocean Food Webs. Lenfest Ocean Program, Washington, DC. 108 p.
animals in the ecosystem, for example, cod and tuna among fishes, sea lions and humpback whales among marine mammals, and sea birds such as pelicans and gannets.
Since forage fish have trophic levels usually around 3 (because they mainly consume herbivorous zooplankton), the larger fish preying on them, such as cod or tuna, have a trophic level of about 4, and people whose diet consisted only of such fish would have a trophic level of 5. Accordingly, somebody who eats only tuna sashimi would have a diet corresponding on land to a diet of super-dragons, which would themselves have been feeding on dragons, which would have consumed wolves, lions and other carnivores feeding on gazelles, caribou cattle and other plant-eaters.
Each transition from one trophic level to the next causes a loss of energy; there are fewer calories in a pound of chicken than in the corn that the chicken ate. This loss rate is about 90 percent per trophic level, and thus, the lower the trophic level that we eat at, the more food we have. With landbased foods, this makes a strong case for vegetarianism. With regard to seafood, this makes a strong case for us to consume forage fish rather than the fish that consume the forage fish.
And there are other benefits to eating forage fish. Because they don’t live long, forage fish do not accumulate as many pollutants (such as dioxin) and heavy metal (such as mercury) as fish higher in the food chain, and they contain more omega 3-fatty acids, which originate from the phytoplankton.
People in many European countries, such as Spain, Italy, France and Germany, consume forage fish including sardines, anchovies and herring, as do people in Africa and Asia, where they are often a staple food. In the U.S., people are no longer familiar with fish such as sardines, though they were two generations ago, during the heyday of the California sardine fishery of John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row fame.
Forage fish need to be re-introduced to consumers in the U.S. and in some other countries, where the seafood demand can no longer be met by the now-depleted fish of higher trophic levels. Sardine, herring, and similar fish are healthy, still relatively cheap and they can be exploited such that enough is left in waters to feed other species, like marine mammals and seabirds, as established recently by a panel of experts 1
In fact, if we consume small fish, we can have our fish and eat it too, which is more than we can say for cake.
Daniel Pauly is a Professor of Fisheries at the Fisheries Centre of the University of British Columbia, the Principal Investigator of the Sea Around Us Project, and a member of the Board of Oceana.
“Nomen es omen,” said the Romans (who, interestingly, were all good Latinists) or “Your name is your fate.” So it is with “smallscale fisheries,” which are widely seen as traditional, slightly exotic activities maintaining fishing lore and postcard harbors, but which no longer supply the seafood that people eat worldwide, this being the job of large scale industrial, or “commercial” fisheries.
But this is all wrong.
Small-scale fisheries consist of three components:
1
3
Subsistence fishing, i.e., fishing for one’s own consumption (plus family and friends), with no commercial transaction involved
recreational fishing, which, as for subsistence fisheries, involves no commercial transaction, but whose main purpose is recreation, not obtaining food. Where ‘catch and release’ programs are involved, a fraction of the released fish survive, the other are so stressed that they later die and/or are taken by a predator, even if it looked viable when released; and
artisanal fishing (often called ‘petit métiers’ in Western Europe), which use small inshore vessels and/or fixed gear (e.g., coastal traps) and whose purpose is to catch fish and other organisms for sale. (For this reason, “commercial fishery” is an inappropriate term for industrial fishing, as artisanal fishers also engage in “commercial” transactions).
Presently, the only database of global fisheries statistics in the world was created and is maintained by the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO), based on annual submissions by its member countries. It is from this source that most statements on the world catch trends and their composition originate, e.g., in FAO’s 2012 State of the World’s Aquaculture
¹ Zeller, D., S. Booth, G. Davis and D. Pauly. 2007. Re-estimation of small-scale for U.S. flag-associated islands in the western Pacific: the last 50 years. U.S. Fisheries Bulletin 105: 266-277.
and Aquaculture (SOFIA), which reports that “the declining global marine catch over the last few years together with the increased percentage of overexploited fish stocks and the decreased proportion of non-fully exploited species around the world convey the strong message that the state of world marine fisheries is worsening and has had a negative impact on fishery production.”
However, the government agencies of FAO member countries which send in catch statistics, for example, NOAA in the United States, do not usually have small-scale fisheries in their mandates. This means that the catch statistics they send to FAO do not include small-scale fisheries catches, which are then omitted from all reports based on FAO data, then justifying, that one doesn’t need to look at small-scale fisheries.
This vicious circle, resulting in the exclusion of small-scale fisheries from the FAO database, is the main reason why they are not mentioned in international debates about food security. This is similar to ignoring the huge catch that is discarded annually by industrial fisheries, e.g., for shrimp, where for one pound of shrimp, 8-9 pounds of mostly perfectly edible fish are caught and immediately discarded.
The result is an underestimation by the FAO database of fisheries statistics of the world catch and with the contribution of smallscale fisheries (and particularly artisanal fisheries) underestimated to a tremendous extent.
The Sea Around Us project is presently completing ‘reconstructions’ of the historic catches since 1950 taken from the 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone of all maritime countries and territories of the world. Thus, for the U.S. flag-associated islands in the Pacific, i.e., Guam, the Northern Marianas, and American Samoa, the reconstructed (or ‘actual’) catches were about 2.5 times larger than the official catches, and it was mainly the small-scale reef fisheries that were underestimated1
Overall, this will allow us to assess the true contribution of smallscale fisheries to the world catch, and hence to our food security. Watch this space for the key results of our study, of which I can already announce one: small-scale fisheries are not small!
OCEANA.O
Daniel Pauly is a Professor of Fisheries at the Fisheries Centre of the University of British Columbia, the Principal Investigator of the Sea Around Us Project, and a member of the Board of Oceana.
What are distant-water fishing fleets, and how do they affect overfishing?
Distant-water fishing fleets are the fishing vessels that operate within the 200 mile Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs) of other countries, and less often further offshore, in what is known as the high seas. The flags that these vessels fly are important here, because there are countries – Belize, Liberia and Panama come to mind – that will lend them so-called ‘flags of convenience’ for a few bucks. According to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), distant-water fleets must be offered to take the ‘surplus’ of fish not caught by a given country in its EEZ, against a fee that is part of a negotiated ‘access agreement.’
After World War II, the US had a large distant-water tuna fleet in the Eastern Pacific, but no agreements were needed then, as there was no UNCLOS and no EEZs. Then Japan, the USSR (remember?) and its successor republics followed, notably Russia and the Ukraine, along with South Korea, Taiwan, Spain and France. These fleets quickly acquired questionable reputations as they often were found to deploy illegal gears, or catching
amounts of fish above the agreed quota. In addition, negotiated access agreements, when they do exist, tend to award a paltry 5 percent or less of the landed value of the fish that is caught.
China’s distant-water fleets, which began their build-up around 1985, are no exception to this. Also, they are huge, operate largely without access agreements (or under access agreements that are secret, thus we don’t even know if their catch is legal or not), and they are completely undocumented, i.e., Chinese authorities are not publishing catch statistics or evaluations of the stocks exploited by their fleets.
Thus, there are good reasons to think that China’s distant-water fleets, legally or not, catch well above the surplus in the countries where they operate. This is particularly acute in Africa where Chinese distant-water fleets are highly active, and where they directly compete with local artisanal fisheries, causing unemployment and endangering the longterm food security of the local populations.
Daniel Pauly is a Professor of Fisheries at the Fisheries Centre of the University of British Columbia, the Principal Investigator of the Sea Around Us Project, and a member of the Board of Oceana.
What are bycatch and discards?
Bycatch and discards are two very technical terms which nevertheless are worth learning about, because they allow us to think clearly about what fisheries do. Besides, they allow us to deal with an often-ignored ethical dimension of fisheries.
Fisheries usually target a given species, or species group, which defines them, and for which the fishing gear that is deployed is optimized. Thus, we have a “tuna fishery” that deploys longlines, or a “shrimp fishery” using a bottom trawl, or a “swordfish fisher” using harpoons.
The targeted species or group, except when the gear is very selective (like harpoons), is usually caught together with other species that live in the same habitat or have similar habits—the reason why they are caught by the same gear. Thus, longlines, or the now-banned pelagic driftnets, catch, besides tuna, a wide array of animal sharing open waters with tuna (like sharks) in amounts often exceeding the catch of the targeted species. Similarly, “shrimp trawls” catch, besides shrimps, organisms that lives on or near the bottom of the sea, including corals, sponges and various species of fish, like sharks and rays. Shrimp trawls usually catch five to 10 pounds of other sea creatures for every pound of shrimp.
These non-target species are called “bycatch,” a word proposed in the early 1950s by W.H. “Bertie” Allsopp, a fishery scientist from Guyana, to replace the misleading terms “trash” or “waste” fish.
Once bycatch is caught and piled up on deck of a fishing boat, the fishers can either:
• Retain it, in which case it becomes part of the “landed catch,” or “landings,” or
• Get rid of it by throwing it overboard, in which case it becomes “discards.”
Marine fisheries worldwide generate huge amount of discards. In the mid-1990s discards were estimated at 26 million metric tons per year, or about one-quarter of the world catch at the time. In the 2000s global discards were estimated at 7-8 million metric tons, which is about one-tenth of current marine catches. The decline is thought to be due to more bycatch being retained to produce feed for use in fish farming, but this low estimate is contested.
Most people not connected with fisheries feel that discarding perfectly edible fish in our age of widespread hunger and scarcity is unethical, and they are right, even if it is only 7-8 million metric tons that are discarded. Moreover, some fishing countries, notably Norway, banned discarding altogether, and the European Union is poised to do so. If the European Union succeeds in banning discarding, it will force its fisheries to become more selective and generate “cleaner” catches, with fewer non-target species.
Oh, I almost forgot. There are an awful lot of marine mammals, seabirds, and sea turtles—many belonging to threatened species—among the bycatch and discards of the world’s fisheries. But as I hope to have shown above, discards are not limited to cute or threatened animals. Discarding is crazy and immoral even when we are looking only at fish.
ASK DR. PAULY
Daniel Pauly is a Professor of Fisheries at the Fisheries Centre of the University of British Columbia, the Principal Investigator of the Sea Around Us Project, and a member of the Board of Oceana.
Maximum sustainable yield (or MSY) is the maximum catch that can be extracted from a fish or other population in the long term. Thus, given that the term was coined before WWII, one could say that fisheries scientists thought about sustainability way before it became fashionable, but they did not have sustainability in mind. (See sidebar.) And since the term is old, lots of people, including fisheries scientists, now think that MSY is an obsolete concept, or even a misleading one. But I don’t agree: it’s an extremely useful tool, but like all tools it can be misused.
A well-justified use of this tool is at the conceptual level, where it comes in handy to explain the basic elements of fishery science to students: if you do not exploit it, a fish population will tend to be high (and catches are zero), that when you fish it moderately, this population will first decline, but then stabilize at some intermediate level (and generate a high catch), and that when you fish excessively, the population and the catch will crash. The point is to fish moderately, or just right.
In practice, it has been realized for most fisheries that fishing “just right” cannot involve a fixed, unchanging MSY, but must use a Total Allowable Catch (TAC) which must be set annually by fisheries managers. The TAC allows for fishing “just right” in the face of natural fluctuations of the environment, which induce natural fluctuations in the size of fish populations.
Fishing “just right” can be undermined, however, by lobbying, when fishing enterprises are allowed to maintain their operations and profits by exploiting a species whose abundance is so reduced that it shouldn’t be fished, and should be allowed to recover instead.
Thus, in contrast to the widespread belief that the MSY concept is dead (a well-known fisheries scientist once wrote in an “Epitaph to MSY”), the concept is a very much alive and kicking, and is the bedrock of many stock assessment models that are used to set TACs or “quotas” in fisheries throughout the world.
The MSY concept is also an important component of the United Nations Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). UNCLOS requires countries with Exclusive Economic Zones, or EEZs, (essentially all maritime countries
THE ORIGINS OF MSY
While there is good science behind the MSY concept, the term itself appears to be a post-WWII invention of the scientist-turned-politician Wilbert Chapman, of the University of Washington and later with the US Department of State. He used MSY to argue that Latin American countries, like Peru and Costa Rica, should allow U.S. tuna vessels to access the surplus in their waters, while simultaneously
of the world) to assess their fish stocks relative to their MSY and to allow interested countries with distant-water fleets access to their EEZ if they have a “surplus,” meaning if they do not exploit their fisheries resources at MSY level. Indeed, this is one reason why poor countries, like those in fish-rich West Africa, or in the tuna-rich Pacific find it difficult to resist when distant-water fleets from the EU, Eastern Europe, or East Asia knock at their door. That they get a pittance for their fish (usually between one and five percent of their value at first sale) doesn’t protect them—under UNCLOS, they must let other countries take their fish because they don’t fish “at MSY.”
Thus, the MSY is here to stay (at least for a while), and we will have to get used to its Janus-like nature as both a rigorous and useful scientific concept and as an instrument of power politics.
denying Japan permission to fish in Alaska, because of its alleged lack of a surplus. The saddest part of this cynical game is that when Chapman published his version of a “surplus-production model,” he got it all wrong and could not actually compute anything. This is all neatly explained in an excellent little book by Carmel Findlay, entitled All the Fish in the Sea: Maximum Sustainable Yield and the Failure of Fisheries Management (University of Chicago Press, 2011).
Daniel Pauly is a Professor of Fisheries at the Fisheries Centre of the University of British Columbia, the Principal Investigator of the Sea Around Us Project, and a member of the Board of Oceana.
How do we know how many fish there are in the sea?
Fishing is meant to remove fish from the sea, and so it is no wonder that there are fewer fish in the sea, given all that we do to catch them.
However, we do not want to leave so few fish in the sea that they can’t maintain their population, and this begs the question in the title: How do we know how many fish there are in the sea?
Fisheries scientists answer this question by performing stock assessments to estimate the biomass, or weight, of fish in the sea. These assessments can involve a wide array of methods, as determined by the data that are available. One method is to divide the catch of a fishery (the weight of the fish that are caught in a given year) by the effort needed to generate the catch (the number of fishing hours or days deployed to catch the fish in that year). The result of this calculation, called the catch per unit effort (CPUE), is going to be higher when the stock is abundant and lower when the stock is depleted. Thus, if CPUE estimates are available for a number of years, their trend will be roughly parallel to the trend of the (still unknown) biomass of a fish population.
Fishing is meant to remove fish from the sea, and so it is no wonder that there are fewer fish in the sea, given all that we do to catch them. However, we do not want to leave so few fish in the sea that they can’t maintain their population, and this begs the question in the title: How do we know how many fish there are in the sea?
Another technique is called the swept-area method, used for fish living on or near the sea floor that can be caught by bottom trawlers. Research trawlers drag a net of known width for say one hour at a known speed to cover an area of the sea floor that can be easily calculated. Thus, their catch during that hour can be multiplied by the number of times that area fits in the entire fishing ground, and voila! In reality, analyzing the results of bottom-trawl surveys is more complicated than that, but the basic idea remains simple.
Another technique is to use sound, which we already use to locate schooling fish (like dolphins and whales also do) to estimate the size of a school of fish. Thus, if a sound wave of known energy level is sent from a fishing boat, the fraction of this wave that is reflected as an echo by a fish school will tend to be proportional to the size of that school — so a small school will reflect less sound than a big school. Echosounding — or hydroacoustic methods in general — can then be calibrated using schools that have been caught and weighed, and the biomass in the water thus estimated. This method works best with small schooling fishes, including herring, sardine, and anchovies.
Still other methods involve tagging, where a certain number of fish are given a tag or mark and then released into the population. (Tags can range from a clipped fin to electronic devices that provide information on movements and information of the environments that the fish encounter.) Subsequent catches will contain both tagged and un-tagged fish, and using some
simple arithmetic one can then calculate the size of the population, along with the exploitation rate. Finally, one can move from simple arithmetic to more serious mathematics, and integrate into computer models of exploited fish population all fishery-dependent and other information that is available on catches, effort, biomass estimates from hydroacoustics, and tagging data into one single analysis. These analyses are usually accurate and precise, but occasionally they can be very wrong. A good example of this is provided by the collapse, in the early 1990s, of the cod fishery off Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, which was then being assessed using the best integrated models of the day, as operated by one of the then most respected fishery management agency in the world. Their model was essentially flawed because it did not correctly interpret spatial information, but at the time that was not visible because of the model’s inherent complexity. This is one reason why the marine conservation community now insists on transparency, where the data and assumptions that go into fish stock assessments are made explicit and justified publicly.
In conclusion, whether using simple CPUEbased analyses, as commonly done in developing countries, or integrated models, as often done in developed countries, the abundance of fish can be estimated for the purposes of fisheries management, allowing fisheries managers to determine how much can be taken for a fishery to be sustained. And we must insist that it be done for all fisheries.
ASK DR. PAULY
Daniel Pauly is a Professor of Fisheries at the Fisheries Centre of the University of British Columbia, the Principal Investigator of the Sea Around Us Project, and a member of the Board of Oceana.
IUU is a widely used acronym, at least in the world of fishing; it pertains to Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated fishing or catches. This definition of IUU, however, requires that we also define its three components, as they have particular meanings that are slightly different from their meaning in non-fisheries contexts.
Thus, the illegal part of IUU in fisheries refers largely to international law, especially the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which makes it illegal for the vessel of a given country to operate without explicit permission (i.e. an “access agreement”) in the 200mile Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ) of another country. Thus, the ‘I’ in IUU does not usually cover the vessels of a given country breaking the rules (i.e., fisheries regulations) in their own country’s EEZ.
Similarly, “unreported” fishing generally refers to fishing in the High Sea (the offshore region beyond the EEZs, covering 60 percent of the Earth’s oceans). High Sea fishing, which is not covered by UNCLOS, is partly governed by a small number of Regional Fisheries Management Organizations (RFMOs). An example of an RFMO is the controversial International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tuna (ICCAT), which has earned a dubious reputation for largely failing in the mission implied in its name. RFMOs attempt to regulate the fisheries of their members, mostly distant-
water fishing countries (Spain, Japan, South Korea, the U.S., etc.) by catch quota, that is by setting overall limits of the species in their remit that their members can catch, and allocating the quota among its members. However, member countries can opt out of these decisions and land catches that are not reported to RFMOs. Their catch, in this case, becomes “unreported” (though not “illegal”) — which takes care of the first ‘U’ of IUU.
The second ‘U’ of IUU refers to “unregulated,” which itself refers to fishing vessels operating in the High Sea area regulated by a given RFMO without obvious flag or flying the flag of a country that is not member of that RFMO, and thus not bound to its rules (remember: this is the High Sea, where almost anything goes!). The operation and catch of these vessels will be “unregulated.”
The acronym IUU is now widely used, often thoughtlessly — notably by staff of environmental NGOs as synonymous of “illegal.” This is misleading, as not reporting catches and fishing without being regulated by an RFMO is not illegal. In fact, using the term “IUU” instead of “illegal” obscures the fact that the Law of the Sea needs further development, such as to cover the High Seas.
The above definitions of the Us of IUU illustrate the primary concerns of industrial tuna fisheries, as practiced by countries with distant-water,
High-Seas fisheries. However, over 90 percent of the world fishery catches occur not on the high seas. They are instead within the EEZs of maritime countries. This catch is underreported by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations because the majority of its member countries tend to under-report their catch (for reasons that will have to be explained in another column). This is particularly true for the catches of small-scale coastal fisheries, conducted by millions of artisanal and subsistence fishers, which are usually not reported to the statistical office of their country.
Being perceived as nonexistent both by their national governments and the FAO, and the international community, small-scale fisheries are thus largely unregulated, and thus end up overfishing their resource base.
This is, by far, a more important issue for food security and the conservation of marine biodiversity than the supply of industry-caught tuna to a few rich countries. Thus, because it is loaded with too much baggage and usually used imprecisely, I now avoid the use of eye-you-you, and I urge the reader to do the same.
ASK DR. PAULY
Daniel Pauly is a Professor of Fisheries at the Fisheries Centre of the University of British Columbia, the Principal Investigator of the Sea Around Us Project, and a member of the Board of Oceana.
Fishing must generate a catch, whether it is practiced by West African artisanal fishers supplying a teeming rural market, by huge trawler fleets in Alaska supplying international seafood markets, by women gleaning on a reef flat in the Philippines to feed their families or by an Australian recreational fisher bragging about it in a bar. Indeed, the catch of a fishery and its monetary value both define that fishery and provide the metric by which to assess its importance relative to other fisheries, and other sectors of the overall economy. Hence, changes in the magnitude and species composition of catches obviously can and should be used – along with other information (e.g., on the growth, mortality, etc. of the fish that are exploited) – for inferences on the status of fisheries.
The key role of catch data in evaluating fisheries is the reason why the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) proceeded, soon after it was founded in 1945, to issue occasional compendia of the world’s fishery statistics. These compendia turned, in 1950, into the much-appreciated FAO Yearbook of Fisheries Catch and Landings. It was based on annual data submissions by its member countries and vetted and harmonized by FAO staff.
However, detailed analysis of the statistics reported since 1950 by FAO member countries suggests that these catches
(with the exception of domestic catches by China and a few other countries with exceptionally dodgy statistics), are massively under-reported. We know this because The Sea Around Us, the research project I lead at the University of British Columbia, has performed “catch reconstructions” for all maritime countries of the world. In other words, we re-estimated the total catch of all their sea fisheries from 1950 to 2010 (see www.searoundus.org).
This was done separately for industrial fisheries (including their discarded bycatch) and for artisanal, subsistence and recreational fisheries, with the higher values for the reconstructed catch due to FAO member countries reporting mainly industrial landings (i.e., omitting the discards that industrial fisheries generate). Also, the FAO statistics generally ignore small-scale fisheries (artisanal, subsistence and recreational fisheries), although they can be substantial in many countries.
Over the 12 years required by our global catch reconstructions, the key obstacle was psychological. It was necessary to convince our national research partners to overcome the notion that “no information is available.” We encouraged them to realize that fisheries are social activities, bound to throw large shadows onto the societies in which they are conducted. Hence, online or hard copy records usually exist that document some aspects of these fisheries.
All that is required is to find them and to judiciously interpret the data they contain.
Important sources for such an undertaking include old files of their fisheries department, peer-reviewed journal articles, theses, scientific and travel reports, records from harbor masters and other maritime authorities with information on number of fishing crafts (small boats by type; large boats by length class and/or engine power), records from the cooperative or private sectors (companies exporting fisheries products, processing plants, importers of fishing gear, etc.), old aerial photos from geographic or other surveys (to estimate numbers of boats on beaches and along piers) and last but not least, interviews with old fishers.
Overall, our reconstructed catches exceed FAO reported (or “official”) catches by about 30 to 50 percent in developed countries, and 100 to 300 percent in developing countries. This is good news. It suggests that the ocean contributes even more than we thought to the (sea-)food security of people. However, the trend in global catches, i.e., the sum of all the country catch reconstructions, shows a rapid decline in the last two decades, which is worrying. It will require that, throughout the world, the example of the few countries –notably the US – that are rebuilding their fish stocks be followed.
Daniel Pauly is a Professor of Fisheries at the Fisheries Centre of the University of British Columbia, the Principal Investigator of the Sea Around Us Project, and a member of the Board of Oceana.
It has become fashionable to consume mussels, oysters and other shellfish, but before I try to explain why this fashion might be a good thing, we must be clear about what these shellfish actually are.
Shellfish are animals that live in the sea, but are not fish — fish have no shells. But lobsters and shrimp are also called shellfish. And thus, to distinguish oysters, mussels, and similar animals from other shellfish we should call them bivalves, referring to the fact that their shells consist of two halves, which can close and protect the animal living within. Most bivalves do not move. Rather, they attach themselves to rocks or the ropes of bivalve farmers. Only scallops can jump, by quickly snapping their shells when they see a hungry starfish approaching, which they see with a dozen blue eyes, like six tiny Scandinavians in a row.
Bivalves feed by pumping water into their bodies and filtering out the matter suspended in the water surrounding them, mainly living and dead microscopic algae. In effect, they clean the water in which they live. Many of us will recall school experiments in which two or three oysters placed in an aquarium, whose waters had been blackened by China ink, will restore the tank to clean water in an hour or so (but I suggest that you don’t eat the oysters afterward).
Because they can’t move to escape from waters they do not like, bivalves will only thrive when the water around them is clean.
In Chesapeake Bay, where once-giant oyster reefs kept the water crystal clear, the reef was destroyed by overfishing. Now, oysters have had difficulty reestablishing themselves because the water is too polluted. Thus, bivalves require clean water, but they also contribute to clean water along our coasts.
Now, why should anything that is good to eat be mentioned in connection with cleaning water — or China ink?
Bivalves are among the few marine herbivores that humans eat in large amounts. Herbivores are animals that eat plants on land, like grass and leaves, or their marine equivalent, the microscope algae which are known as phytoplankton. In the sea, however, most herbivorous animals — the flea-sized zooplankton — are much too small to be eaten by humans. To contribute to our seafood, zooplankton must first be consumed by small fish which we can eat, like sardine, or by big fish that eat the small fish which we can also eat.
Thus, in the sea, we usually consume the equivalent of lions, wolves, or other predators that feed on herbivores, or of animals that eat lions and wolves (like dragons). The only animals that we eat in great amounts from the sea that are equivalent to our herbivores on land — antelope, sheep and cattle — are mussels, oysters and other bivalves.
Now where does all the good stuff that we expect our seafood to provide — like Omega 3s, iodine and other micronutrients —
actually come from? Not from zooplankton, or from the fish that feed on zooplankton. The good stuff all comes from phytoplankton, from the microscopic algae that are the food of bivalves. Bivalves feed on the very plants that synthesize the good stuff we want in our seafood, and this is also the reason why they are so tasty, especially when served raw, smoked, or as part of a paella.
Because they do not need to be given costly animal feeds — as do farmed salmon — farmraised oysters and mussels, like those grown on ropes hanging from floating rafts, are also quite inexpensive.
Thus, eating bivalves from farms will provide you with animal protein from animals that do not suffer existential angst and that do not mess up the environment, but rather clean it. And this package of good things will not cost you much. So go ahead and eat an oyster; and if you don’t like them, eat mussels.
ASK DR. PAULY
Daniel Pauly is a Professor of Fisheries at the Fisheries Centre of the University of British Columbia, the Principal Investigator of the Sea Around Us Project, and a member of the Board of Oceana.
Struggling to Breathe: The Impact of Warming Oceans on Fish and Oxygen
Marine fishes and invertebrates such as mussels, squids, shrimps or lobsters, like all animals, must take in oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide to survive. They must breathe, even if they do this, in a manner very different from us, through gills. Breathing is hard work for fish as water contains about 30 times less oxygen than air. If climate change warms the water fish live in, that water has even less oxygen and more dissolved carbon dioxide. Subsequently, fish have difficulties breathing.
This oxygen depletion is intensified by the fact that fish, unlike us, cannot regulate their body temperature. With increasing water temperatures, their metabolic rate increases. As a result, they need more oxygen and also produce more carbon dioxide. Furthermore, as the density difference between surface and deeper water layers increases with these changes, mixing between these layers is reduced, and the stratification of the ocean increases. Stratification acts as a barrier between the atmosphere and the water, preventing oxygen from penetrating into the deeper ocean.
For all these reasons, fish in warming oceans get less oxygen just when their oxygen requirements increase. Moreover, exhaling carbon dioxide (or rather excreting it through their gills) is more difficult when increasing amounts of atmospheric carbon dioxide is dissolved in the ocean, causing it to become more acidic. Fish that cannot
Predicted impact of global warming on fish catches
Predicted impact of global warming on fish catches in 40-50 years, with red indicating declines of 50% and more (from Cheung, Lam, Kearney, Sarmiento, Watson, Zeller and Pauly 2009; Global Change Biology; see also IPCC, 5th Assessment, Summary for Policy Makers).
relocate remain smaller as a result, and/or their local population collapses.
However, the response of most fish to the increasing temperature (and reduced oxygen) of their habitats is to shift their distribution toward cooler waters—toward the poles— northward in the Northern Hemisphere and conversely in the Southern Hemisphere. Along the coasts of countries with temperate climates, such as much of the U.S. or Western Europe, this leads to warmwater fish species appearing in the catch and the cold-loving species becoming scarcer.
However, in the tropics, there are no ‘hotter-water’ species to replace the tropical species that are migrating out, while the non-migrating tropical species try to adapt. Hence, tropical fisheries will decline more due to global warming than in temperate areas. (See figure above for potential change in catch.) The implications for the food security of tropical developing countries are tragic.
Global warming has already had a big impact on fish and fishers. This will increase in the future, simply because fish must breathe.
ASK DR.
Daniel Pauly is a Professor of Fisheries at the Fisheries Centre of the University of British Columbia, the Principal Investigator of the Sea Around Us Project and a member of the Board of Oceana.
Jellyfish as food may sound incongruous or even disgusting to some, but it does not matter: people eat these invertebrates. What they put in their mouths, however, is not the slimy, watery goo our imagination conjures when we see live jellyfish in the ocean, in a public aquarium or stranded on a beach.
Jellyfish are easy to catch — just scoop them from the water. But once caught, they must be quickly processed: that is, soaked in a mixture of salt and alum (otherwise known as potassium aluminum sulfate), which sucks excess water from the jellyfish and firms up their bodies. As a result, the water content of jellyfish is reduced from about 98 percent to about 80 percent — about the same water content as fresh vegetables or fresh finfish. Indeed, processed jellyfish are quite crunchy. Given that they are essentially tasteless, jellyfish can thus be served like noodles to accompany another dish, or sliced into chunks to be dipped in some sauce.
About 1 million tonnes of jellyfish (fresh weight) are caught annually, mostly in Asia (China catches about 50 percent of the total), but increasingly in places
like the Gulf of California in Mexico. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations reports much lower catches, but then it tends to underestimate the catches of nearly all global fisheries (see page 10). The overwhelming part of the non-Chinese catch is exported to China for human consumption, where they are considered a delicacy. Japan, Taiwan and Thailand also have high consumption rates for jellyfish. Consumption is likely to spread globally, if only because eating jellyfish won’t make you fat.
People use jellyfish for other things, including as filler in animal feed for finfish and shellfish, as fertilizers, as emulsifiers for the food industry and in various medical agents ranging from anticoagulants to collagen supplements.
Some think that the increasing consumption and utilization of jellyfish by humans could slow down increases in jellyfish populations as reported from most of the world’s marine ecosystems1. But this is not likely. This is because edible jellyfish (i.e., those with relatively firm bodies, such as the cannonball jellyfish) are only a
small subset of the many species that are now proliferating throughout the world’s coastal waters, clogging up the intake pipes of power and desalination plants, scaring tourists away from Mediterranean beaches, killing the occasional swimmer in Australia and generally making a nuisance of themselves.
But then, people have created the conditions in marine ecosystems that give jellyfish an advantage over their competitors. This has been driven by the decimation of previously huge populations of leatherback turtles and of large fishes that feed nearly exclusively or predominately on jellyfish. Also, the construction of commercial docks, marinas and other coastal installations introduced the hard, concrete surfaces that jellyfish larvae need to settle on to produce new jellyfish. Either way, there are jellyfish in our future. We might as well eat some.
1Brotz, L, W.W.L. Cheung, K. Kleisner, E. Pakhomov and D. Pauly. 2012. Increasing jellyfish populations: trends in Large Marine Ecosystems. Hydrobiologia 690(1): 3-20
Daniel Pauly is a Professor of Fisheries at the Fisheries Centre of the University of British Columbia, the Principal Investigator of the Sea Around Us Project and a member of the Board of Oceana.
As denizens of the terrestrial realm, we humans might assume that, since the sea has more water than ever (it does, thanks to global warming), fish must now have an abundance of places to call home. We might not realize that fish don’t only need water—they need habitats, and these habitats need to be protected.
For example, take salmon, which begin their lives on land. Salmon spawn in gravel nests, usually near a river’s source. If these gravel beds become clogged by mud, whether from a landslide due to logging, waste from mines or other threats, the eggs deposited by the adult salmon will not hatch into the young salmon that eventually go to sea before returning to the river and completing the cycle of their wondrous lives. Clean gravel beds are essential habitats for salmon.
Other fish that spend their entire life cycle in the sea also need structure and places to grow. Most marine fishes start their lives offshore as eggs the size of a pinhead. Then they change into larvae and ride the tides and other currents toward the coasts, where they must find safe places to feed and grow without getting eaten by one of the many predators in the sea. In other words, they need habitats. In the tropics, these essential habitats are found in coral reefs and between the roots of mangrove trees, two ecosystems that provide both hiding places and abundant food in form of plankton.
And what about small cod (codlings) that live in New England, where it is too cold for either coral reefs or mangrove? Codlings and other cold-water fish seek out safety in structures on the ocean’s floor such as seagrass beds, oyster reefs, bush-like animals know as gorgonians, sea pens and smaller mounds created by marine invertebrates. There they hide from would-be predators and feed on the plankton that live in these structures. Also, and very importantly, these structures provide resting places from currents that would otherwise require the small fish to continuously swim to stay in place, wasting energy in the process. These seafloor habitats are essential to them.
Yet habitats are under siege. A commonly used fishing method called bottom trawling consists of dragging a trawl, or net, along the seafloor behind a ship. The net—a strong, flexible piece of gear
kept taught by large multi-ton weights—flattens and obliterates any habitat in its way while catching all the fish in its path. Essentially, a trawl net treats seafloor structures as a bulldozer treats trees in a forest.
One single pass of a trawler bulldozes habitats that may have taken hundreds of years to build. Entire seas have been decimated in this way. For example, trawlers flattened the Java Sea (see photo below) in Indonesia beginning in the 1970s and turned the habitats on its floor into a large underwater muddy field. Similarly, the North Sea, between the British Isles and northwestern continental Europe, has endured more than 100 years of trawling. This is why trawlerfree areas and marine reserves are crucial throughout the world and why it’s vital that these restricted zones be protected permanently. Closures that are only temporary enable fast growing ‘weed’ species to proliferate but do not allow the time needed to recreate the bottom structures and essential habitats that the many species of fish and commercial invertebrates need to grow and survive.
The catch of a research trawler in the Java Sea, Indonesia. Prior to 1975, the Java Sea had not been trawled, and sponges and other organisms covered the bottom of the sea with habitat-forming structures. Their removal transformed the Java Sea into a mudhole.
In sum, fish need habitats. That’s why it’s important to advocate for fishing gear that does not destroy them and for policies that can protect them. Aside from that, what can individuals do? Buy linecaught fish when possible. Hooks and lines do not destroy essential fish habitats. Trawling does.
Photo:
Daniel Pauly is a Professor of Fisheries at the Fisheries Centre of the University of British Columbia, the Principal Investigator of the Sea Around Us Project and a member of the Board of Oceana.
While the cows, pigs and other mammals we process into steaks and schnitzels are generally of similar sizes—a cow or pig is usually about the same size as other cows or pigs—fish in the sea range drastically in size.
For example, bluefin tuna and swordfish can reach lengths of 10 feet and beyond while anchovies do not even grow to 10 inches. Some people prefer to consume bits of large fish (think fish steaks or the slivers of tuna on sushi) while others prefer to eat small fish such as herring, sardines or anchovies. The latter group that tends to incorporate small fish into its diet is making the smarter decision, since small fish contain large quantities of the omega-3 fatty acids that fish are famous for but none of the pollutants that large fish are infamous for. Big fish such as tuna or swordfish live much longer than small fish and thus have more opportunities to accumulate heavy metals such as mercury and persistent organic pollutants such as dioxin or polychlorinated biphenyls, which are really nasty.
Small fish are generally abundant, which has led to their use as food for other domestic animals, such as chicken or pigs, or even as
fertilizer. Thus, unsurprisingly, when large fish became so depleted in the wild that it became commercially advantageous to raise them in captivity, those farming fish decided to feed their stock with small fish, notably in the form of pellets made from dried and ground up individuals, or fishmeal.
Farmed salmon are raised this way, as are many other species of carnivorous fish that are farmed. About one quarter of the 120 million metric tons of fish caught per year is sent to reduction plants where they are cooked, pressed, dried and ground up into fishmeal while the precious fish oil is separated out. The fishmeal and fish oil are then used mainly as animal feed and additives, respectively, mostly for salmon and other carnivorous fishes.
Reduction fisheries occur throughout the world; for example, in Peru, they’re based on a local species of anchovy and, in the United States, on two sardine-like species, Atlantic and Gulf menhaden. Business is booming. So all is well?
Not really. The main problem is that small fish can and are eaten directly by people in many parts of the world, mainly in developing countries where they often contribute the only animal protein to which people have access.
Thus, locals sometimes have to compete for a significant part of their food supply. For example, the foreign industrial sardinella fisheries off Northwest Africa, which supply feed fish to salmon and pig farms in well-to-do Europe, compete with local fishers who supply African markets, including in the impoverished interior of the continent where sun-dried sardinella is often the only fish and the only available source of animal protein and its associated micronutrients. For people in West Africa, access to small fish is a question of food security and of equity.
That’s not the only way small fish are misused, however. In the United States and other rich, discerning markets, consumers often choose to eat fish because it is a healthy option. And where do the healthy omega-3 fatty acids you get by eating farmed salmon come from? The fishmeal and fish oil in their diet. And where did that come from? The anchovies or sardines or other fish that were ground up to feed that salmon.
So why not get those health benefits straight from the source and eat the small fish instead?
Further reading: Check out The Perfect Protein by Oceana CEO Andy Sharpless.
Small fish to try: Herring, sardines, anchovies and yes, even menhaden, are tasty little fish that, when well prepared, can be part of a sumptuous meal.
Daniel Pauly is the principal investigator of the Sea Around Us Project at the University of British Columbia’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries and a member of the Board of Oceana.
Illegal Fishing by Another Name Smells too Sweet
I’m writing this on a plane home from the Netherlands, where I attended a conference sponsored by the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research and the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement. Why, you may ask, did these two very different organizations co-sponsor a conference? It was to discuss and closely examine the relationship between illegal fishing and the ecosystems and food security of developing countries. The conference brought together experts from disciplines that rarely collaborate, namely fisheries scientists and criminologists. It caused me to consider how and why we — in the conservation community — need to increase our focus on illegal fishing as a stand-alone issue.
IUU VS. ILLEGAL FISHING
In the ocean conservation world, you will often hear about “IUU fishing,” which stands for illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing. It was created to shed light on the scale of “off-the-books” fisheries. The conference made clear, however, that the term IUU has long outlived its usefulness. IUU has too often been used as a synonym for “illegal,” and has consequently conflated criminal activities with fisheries management issues including what may be the simple non-reporting of catches from perfectly legal fisheries. Illegal fishing is a crime and as such must be dealt with by law enforcement institutions rather than lumped together with fishery management problems. It’s not an issue of fishery management any more than car theft is an issue for car mechanics. We now have other ways, such as new data on the Sea Around Us website, to emphasize the (very large) scale of other forms of off-the-books fishing.
The crime of illegal fishing directly affects food security in developing countries. For example, when Russian industrial vessels illegally target sardines off Senegal in Northwest Africa, they catch a fish that is also sought after by the local, canoe-based artisanal fishery. This fishery in turn supplies local processors who dry the sardines and send them inland where they represent a unique source of animal protein and micronutrients.
Illegal fishing not only threatens food security, it also threatens the very biodiversity upon which functioning marine ecosystems depend. A Chinese fleet operating off Mauritania, another Northwest African country with extremely productive waters, illegally catches seabirds (yes, seabirds!) such as the Northern gannet, in addition to targeting the fish for which they have presumably paid an “access fee.” We know this because in 2013 Mauritanian inspectors found a Chinese fishing vessel with boxes labeled “corvina,” which are also known as croakers or weakfish. The boxes actually contained frozen gannets ready to thaw and cook.
FEWER FISH, MORE CRIME
The decline of fish stocks worldwide has spurred some unscrupulous fleet owners to reduce the cost of fishing through illegal means. These criminal workarounds include using flags of convenience for their vessels — registering the ship to another country or “flag,” which may enable a ship to bypass oversight and regulations — or illegally accessing fish by not paying for fishing rights in a coastal nation’s Exclusive Economic Zone. The owners and officers of vessels involved in illegal fishing are too often also
involved in other illegal activities such as drug running, wildlife and human trafficking or human rights violations against their semi-enslaved crew. So, as many of the criminologists at the conference pointed out: Suppressing illegal fishing helps reduce associated criminal activities as well.
As a result, the many national and international NGOs that increasingly deal with illegal fishing must begin to focus on the role that states and intergovernmental organizations such as Interpol, the International Maritime Organization and the International Labor Organization play in combating illegal fishing. The efforts of NGOs may not be enough to crack a criminal enterprise, but a determined state prosecutor — especially one who gets information from NGOs — can be. Global Fishing Watch and other data-based projects from the nonprofit sector are an excellent start to ensuring that the information needed to find and track illegal fishing is made available to the right individuals, authorities and institutions.
This last point seems crucial to me. It’s time to move beyond discussing how awful “IUU fishing” is and to start assisting the parts of government — namely law enforcement authorities and the judiciary — that can help to address the “illegal” or criminal enterprise present in this acronym. Doing so will help us all to save the oceans and feed the world.
Daniel Pauly is the principal investigator of the Sea Around Us Project at the University of British Columbia’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries and a member of the Board of Oceana.
DANIEL PAULY AND GEORGE MONBIOT IN CONVERSATION ABOUT “SHIFTING BASELINES SYNDROME”
Why is it that a young fisherman views his catch of a few scrawny sardines as natural, while an old-timer sees it as the sad scraps of an ocean once brimming with giant wildlife? Two decades ago, renowned fisheries expert Daniel Pauly introduced “shifting baselines syndrome” to explain our generational blindness to environmental destruction. In recent years the idea has found a particular advocate in George Monbiot, a respected environmental writer. Oceana spoke with Monbiot and Pauly to learn how much we’ve lost, and what it will take to make abundance the ocean’s new baseline.
DR. DANIEL PAULY
Dr. Daniel Pauly is one of the most prolific and widely cited fisheries biologists in the world. Born in France and raised in Switzerland, Daniel Pauly acquired a doctorate in fisheries biology in 1979 from the University of Kiel. After working in the Philippines through the 1980s and early 1990s, Pauly became a professor at the University of British Columbia Fisheries Centre in 1994, and was its director from 2003 to 2008. In 1999, Pauly founded, and since leads, Sea Around Us, a large research project devoted to identifying and quantifying global fisheries trends. He is the author or co-author of over 1,000 articles, books and book chapters on fish and fisheries.
GEORGE MONBIOT
George Monbiot studied zoology at Oxford and has spent his career as a journalist and environmentalist. His celebrated Guardian columns are syndicated all over the world. He is the author of the bestselling books Captive State, The Age of Consent, Bring on the Apocalypse and Heat, as well as the investigative travel books Poisoned Arrows, Amazon Watershed and No Man’s Land. His 2014 book, Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life, was shortlisted for the Great Outdoors Book of the Year award. Among the many prizes he has won is the United Nations Global 500 award for outstanding environmental achievement, presented to him by Nelson Mandela.
OCEANA: How did “shifting baselines” get its start?
PAULY: In 1995, I got an email from the editor of Trends in Ecology and Evolution asking me if I could help out. Somebody had failed to deliver a one-page script. They wanted an essay, anything, to fill in the space. I quickly wrote this thing based on what was floating in my head at the time.
OCEANA: Since then, why has “shifting baselines” gained traction in so many disciplines?
MONBIOT: It’s incredibly useful both in the immediate sense, in that it explains our attitudes to ecosystems and our failure to perceive the way in which they’ve changed, but also as an analogy, a metaphor, a homology for stuff that’s going on elsewhere. I’ve used it in the political sense to say: Why do people accept tyranny and despotism and the erosion of democracy? It’s because you normalize whatever surrounds you.
Shifting baselines has helped me to greatly understand the problem in my home country, the U.K. Conservation in this country has become indistinguishable from destruction, because what we’re conserving is an ecocidal system of sheep ranching. Sheep eat everything, and as a result there’s no birds, no insects. We’ve lost almost everything, and yet we regard that as normal and natural. This is a tremendous example of shifting baseline syndrome.
PAULY: I would like to make a point about what George just said. It is an anecdote about shifting baseline syndrome, and anecdotes are important. If you want to fight the loss of memory and knowledge about the past, you have to rely on past information. But past information is viewed by many fisheries scientists as anecdotal. There is no knowledge in the past, however secure, however sound, that they are willing to consider because it is not couched in the verbiage that is fashionable at present.
In other disciplines, for example astronomy, they will use the position of a star or an eclipse that was found in old documents in Sumerian or in Chinese. But fishery scientists would not accept a record of fish that was a bit bigger than at present, or a record of abundance that is not compatible with the present. They will say these are anecdotes; we cannot use that. But these are data. We have to get rid of this notion that the past is a provider of anecdotes and the present is a provider of knowledge.
OCEANA: How have you see shifting baselines syndrome play out in your own research?
PAULY: My catch reconstruction project indicates that the world’s fish catch is bigger than reported — that’s almost obvious. In the process we discovered another kind of bias that I was not aware of: I would call it the presentist bias. When the UN Food and Agriculture Organization records global fish catch, it corrects for missing data in the present but not in the past. And so we have the impression that everything is fine, while in fact the catches that we extract from the sea are in free fall.
ASK DR. PAULY
MONBIOT: There’s a classic example of that here in the North Sea, where the baseline is 1970. And they say: Look, we’re doing great because we’re almost back up to the natural condition of stocks. But by 1970 there had been over a hundred years of mechanized fishing, which had been absolutely devastating.
PAULY: This is also the case for the U.S. The U.S. requires that stocks be rebuilt, but they usually use the ‘80s as a baseline. But in the ‘80s there was a huge foreign fishing fleet along the U.S.
45,000 YEARS OF MISSING MEGAFAUNA
Why is the United States no longer home to mammoths and elephant-sized sloths? And why are 1,000-pound tuna and 18-foot sturgeon so rare? It’s not the normal state of things — it’s because humans have selectively killed megafauna for tens of thousands of years. As our baselines shifted, we forgot that truly natural, healthy ecosystems are ruled by giant animals.
45,000 TO 11,000 YEARS AGO
As prehistoric humans spread across Europe, Asia, Australia and the Americas, many animals weighing over 100 pounds disappeared. Three-ton wombats and 9-foot-long salmon are now extinct.
1600S
TO 1800S
Europeans began targeting marine mammals that were once too remote or hard to hunt. Atlantic gray whales and 30-foot-long Steller’s sea cows disappeared.
1880S TO PRESENT DAY
Burgeoning human populations and fossil fuel-powered fishing vessels decimated the sea. Once-abundant giant fish like river sturgeon, bluefin tuna and goliath grouper are now endangered. The good news is that with science-based protections, these leviathans can rebound.
HOW MUCH CAN YOU CATCH FROM A DAY OF FISHING?
Decades of photographs from Key West, Florida, document the declining size and abundance of fish. On a typical day in the 1950s, a sport fisher could expect to snare several groupers longer than he or she was tall. Fifty years later, the biggest “prize” fish was a little over a foot long.
1950 s:
Giant groupers dominate the catch. Smaller specimens are not worth keeping.
The biggest fish are no longer bigger than the fishermen 1960s & 1970s:
1980s:
Giant grouper are gone. Snappers and smaller fish abound.
2000s:
The average catch is usually no longer than a foot.
Source: McCLENACHAN, L. (2009), Documenting Loss of Large Trophy Fish from the Florida Keys with Historical Photographs. Conservation Biology, 23: 636–643.
coastline. Stocks were overexploited. Some had collapsed. To use the ‘80s as a rebuilding goal is completely ludicrous if you think about it.
MONBIOT: What I think is so often missed is that the natural world in its natural state is a system of almost unbelievable abundance. Almost all ecosystems everywhere on earth, on land and at sea, were once dominated by enormous animals. Whales were everywhere, great sharks were everywhere. If you go back to the last interglacial period, Britain was dominated by the straighttusked elephant, a beast so massive that it makes the African elephant look like a ballet dancer.
OCEANA: Can we restore ecosystems to this ancient state of abundance?
PAULY: I don’t think it’s likely that we can restore pre-contact, pre-human ecosystems. As soon as humans appear on the scene the large megafauna is annihilated, no matter if it is in Australia or North America. So, these animals are toast regardless. But we started the industrial age, in fisheries at least, as late as 1880. 1880 is an important date because it’s the first time we used fossil energy to go after fish. That’s when the first trawler was deployed around England. Even then, there was huge megafauna still in the sea.
Industrialization, at least in Europe and in Russia, is welldocumented. We don’t know about marine ecosystems 10,000, 20,000 years ago. But we sure know about 120 years ago. I think this is a politically defensible reconstruction of biomass that one can push. We should use this reconstruction at least as an aspirational goal.
MONBIOT: My only concern with that is when you read the accounts of the first European arrivals on the eastern seaboard of North America they encountered extraordinary marine life — these vast lobsters just there for the taking in the rock pools, these huge shoals of sturgeon moving up the rivers. If you go back far enough in Britain, it’s the same thing.
PAULY: I’m just being pragmatic about it. For my catch reconstruction project I chose data from 1950, because industrial countries had just been through WWII, and most other countries had not yet begun to industrialize. This gives a nice contrast. But ultimately, it will always be an arbitrary decision.
OCEANA: So, is it enough to choose a set point in the past and aim for that?
MONBIOT: I would say that recognizing a baseline is itself not a policy, but it is something which can inform. We can use our understanding of paleoecology to guide us how far we can go towards that ideal. And in marine ecosystems, there is a very good compromise that can be struck, which is to create large marine reserves in which no commercial extractive activity takes place. It’s one of those rare situations where large-scale conservation of resources is going to benefit everyone, even in the short term. It’s a genuine win-win.
Take sea angling here in the UK. Even with our greatly depleted seas, and even though angling is a pretty dispiriting experience because there’s so little to catch, it still brings in more income and employs more people than commercial fishing activities. It generates loads of economic activity that stays in the community: the bed and breakfasts, the cafes, the tackle shops. And on top of that you’ve got all the other things that you get from a pristine marine environment. You’ve got the dolphin watching, you got the snorkeling and the diving.
PAULY: In British Columbia, there was a whaling industry that operated from shore stations until the ‘60s. They killed all the humpback and gray whales that were there. But now we have a whale-watching industry that makes more money than the whaling industry ever made. We even have Japanese tourists coming to us! And the benefits are spread all along the coast, whereas before they were spread in the pockets of the owners of the whaling industry. If you were to rewild Britain and other places, you would have all kind of tourist-based economies that now don’t exist.
OCEANA: If we manage to restore or “rewild” the ocean, what do we gain beyond economic benefits?
PAULY: The system becomes more resilient to change. That will be important with global warming coming. If there are more animals, there are more interactions, and it’s the long-term stability of this interaction that prevents rapid change from happening.
To pick an example, in Tasmania there is an invasion of sea urchins from the Sydney, in the north, because marine animals are moving towards the poles. This invasion of sea urchins eats all the kelp. But if these kelp-eating sea urchins arrive in an intact marine reserve, they get consumed by the large fish, and the kelp is still standing. Whereas in areas where there are no large fish the sea urchins can eat the kelp and devastate the entire ecosystem.
OCEANA: Are there any emotional or spiritual gains from a rewilded ocean?
MONBIOT: Wonder, enchantment, a discovery of hidden aspects of ourselves, insight into living processes of the kind that is impossible in managed and degraded ecosystems, and the knowledge that we are not the only species to benefit from this transition.
But above all it gives us something even more endangered than Patagonian toothfish: hope. A positive environmental vision, with rewilding at its heart, is an essential antidote to the endless stream of depressing news about what’s happening to the living world.
Plankton, the tiny wanderers that rule the sea
The German evolutionist Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) became famous for his “Art Forms in Nature” illustrations, a series of delicate drawings of the microscopic algae that live in the sea. But it was another German, Victor Hensen (18351924), who can be thought of as the true discoverer of plankton. On numerous expeditions in the North Atlantic, he identified and mapped tiny, drifting algae and animals, which he named “plankton” after the Greek word for wanderer.
Hensen uncovered predicable patterns in the average plankton abundance across different regions of the North Atlantic. He also correctly identified phytoplankton — “plant plankton” — as the first rung of marine food chains, with phytoplankton-eating zooplankton as the second rung. Zooplankton include jellyfish, shrimp-like krill and other animals that drift with the sea’s currents, rather than actively swimming.
Hensen’s work was a great conceptual achievement. But Ernst Haeckel disagreed. He had studied the bizarre and beautiful shapes of microscopic algae for 30 years, and he didn’t believe that averages and other arithmetic contrivances — not to speak of more sophisticated mathematics — could be used to describe the wondrous diversity of these ocean drifters.
We now know that mathematics can and must be applied when studying
phytoplankton and zooplankton. Indeed, it is now possible to map the distribution of phytoplankton from satellites. This is because phytoplankton change the color of the ocean, and clever mathematics can relate the intensity of this color to phytoplankton abundance.
This abundance can then be used to estimate “primary production,” the creation of living matter from water, oxygen, carbon dioxide, certain nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus, and the energy of sunlight. Ocean phytoplankton therefore act like grasses do on land, and produce about half of the oxygen we breathe.
Satellite data has helped confirm Hensen’s hypothesis that phytoplankton form the basis of most marine (and freshwater) food webs. We can also observe this from fisheries studies: Fish catches are higher in coastal areas with greater plankton abundance than offshore in the open ocean.
Like all plants, phytoplankton need fertilizer in the form of iron, nitrogen and other nutrients. In the sea, these nutrients are usually in deeper waters, since marine plants and animals often sink once they die. As climate change heats up surface water, it expands and becomes lighter. Surface water has a harder time mixing with denser, deep water. This process, known as “stratification,” is the reason why the giant plankton-poor, desertlike ocean currents known as gyres are currently expanding.
Along coastlines, on the other hand, primary production is often excessive. This is mainly due to agricultural fertilizers and other nutrient-rich runoff being washed from the land into the sea. This leads to phytoplankton “blooms,” which grow so swiftly that they can’t be grazed down by zooplankton. Once the phytoplankton die, they sink and are consumed by bacteria. The bacteria suck up all the oxygen in the water column, creating a “dead zone” where fish, crabs, mussels and other animals choke to death.
Every summer a huge dead zone arises in the Gulf of Mexico at the mouth of the Mississippi River, which drains agricultural runoff from the entire Midwest. Another dead zone occurs along the coast of Oregon. There are currently about 500 dead zones in the world, and their number and size are increasing.
Plankton may be small, even microscopic, but they drive systems as huge as the sea. There is a lesson in this.
Daniel Pauly is the principal investigator of the Sea Around Us Project at the University of British Columbia’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries and a member of the Board of Oceana.
These iridescent comb jellies are just one example of the thousands of species of plankton in the sea.
The world’s fishing fleet is too big, and fish stocks are dwindling. Many fleets are even losing money. Yet fishing continues, fueled by government subsidies that pay fishers to stay at sea, even when they catch too little to turn a profit.
Dr. Daniel Pauly spoke with his long-time colleague at the University of British Colombia, Dr. Rashid Sumaila, to discuss why perverse subsidies exist and what can be done to fix them. Sumaila, a leading fisheries economist, recently joined Pauly as a member of Oceana’s board of directors.
OCEANA: Why do subsidies exist in the first place?
PAULY: Fisheries subsidies have a different origin than agricultural subsidies. In France and in England, fisheries have been traditionally subsidized, beginning as early as three centuries ago, because these two countries wanted to maintain a number of operational fishers that could crew warships. These subsidies were part of the defense budget.
RASHID SUMAILA: Subsidies made sense when most of the world’s fish stocks were underexploited. In the 1950s and 1960s, the more subsidies a government gave, the more catch it got back. For many countries, that’s not the case anymore.
OCEANA: How do subsidies spur overfishing?
SUMAILA: In theory, fisheries should be self-regulating. When fish stocks get too low, or fishing gets too expensive, workers and investments should move out of the fishery. But
in practice, unprofitable fleets can continue fishing — and can even grow larger — when they receive government subsidies.
The problem is enormous. In a 2015 study, my group at the University of British Columbia estimated that global fishing subsidies in 2009 were $35 billion, between 30 and 40 percent of the total value earned by marine fisheries worldwide. As a result of this artificial profit-boosting, and general mismanagement, the global fishing fleet is about twice the size the ocean can sustainably support.
OCEANA: Why don’t countries get rid of harmful subsidies?
PAULY: The issue is that the first country to stop will be at a competitive disadvantage. The fish that they sell will become comparatively more expensive. And if other countries don’t follow up immediately, the first country will not be able to sell its seafood.
Some countries say they have gotten rid of subsidies, but figuring out whether this is true is tricky. We have discovered that Australia, one of the countries which claim to have gotten rid of subsidies, now gives them under different names.
OCEANA: Can fishing subsidies ever be beneficial?
SUMAILA: Subsidies can be divided into three broad categories. The first category, capacity enhancing subsidies, is what promotes overfishing. The second, ambiguous subsidies, can either promote positive or negative outcomes, depending on how they are implemented. And the third category, the beneficial category, supports research and management. If you have a good management system, for example, you can detect illegal fishers and catch them.
PAULY: I can think of a scenario where you have fishers landing fish on the beach, throwing the fish in the sand, and later smoking them using procedures that waste fuel wood. You get a very bad product all the way from the landing and processing to the sale. Subsidies applied here could improve the product quality post-harvest. Thus, subsidies could finance concrete tables to display the fish, and well-designed smoking chimneys that make efficient use of fuel. This would make a great difference in increasing incomes.
SUMAILA: The issue is that very few subsidies are of the beneficial sort. Nearly 60 percent of the global total goes to harmful subsidies like ship fuel. Instead of giving away subsidies that lead to overcapacity and overfishing, keep
the money in the community. Use that money to upgrade the catch, rather than destroy the resource by intensifying overfishing.
OCEANA: What can be done?
SUMAILA: One of the things we could do practically is take the top-subsidizing countries — there are a maybe a dozen — and then create cadres in these countries of biologists, economists and other thought-leaders to help their government really see how bad this is, and push through action. Sometimes it’s better to tackle global issues on a global stage, but sometimes one person in one country does something, and then that becomes something global.
PAULY: The irony about subsidies is that they contradict the spirit of capitalism. We can get support for getting rid of them. And then you might get a breakthrough at the WTO. Whether it happens through the WTO, or through multilateral arrangement, it is possible that subsidies could at least decline.
OCEANA: Scientists, international bodies and organizations like Oceana have been raising the alarm about subsidies for decades. Has this helped?
SUMAILA: My own thinking is that these efforts have slowed the tendency to give subsidies. It would have been worse if these kinds of efforts were not in place. When it comes to subsidies, governments are looking over their shoulders now.
Dr. Daniel Pauly is the founder and director of the Sea Around Us project at the University of British Columbia’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, and is a member of the Oceana board.
Dr. Rashid Sumaila is the director of the Fisheries Economics Research Unit at the University of British Columbia’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, and is a member of the Oceana board.
Dr. Pauly What Are Stock Assessments?
One of the major tasks that fisheries scientists face, once they have documented a fishery’s catch and fishing effort, is assessing the abundance, or “biomass,” of the population, or “stock,” of fish that the fishery exploits.
The goal here is to optimize the fishery, that is, for the catch to be set as high as possible but not so high that the population risks crashing, or cannot recover if it has previously been overfished. This is called the maximum sustainable yield, or MSY.
The stock assessments themselves are based on “fisheryindependent” information obtained from research vessel surveys and complex computer models that integrate into a single framework the survey results with “fishery-dependent” data, such as the age and number of the fish that are caught and the number and properties of fishing gears. From this, and a vast number of assumptions, the presumed abundance of the stock and the suggested quota for the following year can be inferred.
Classical stock assessments, therefore, are not only extremely expensive — a research vessel survey lasting a week can cost several hundred thousand dollars — but also very demanding in terms of data and expertise. Thus, they are performed mainly in wealthier countries.
A diver helps corral skipjack tuna in the Philippines. Fisheries in less-developed nations are often data-deficient.
For the rest of the world simpler methods, often rules of thumb, have been used to assess stocks, and their inaccuracies have led to a situation where many countries overfish their marine resources without realizing it.
This can be overcome, however, through the development of methods suitable for use in data-sparse situations. A new approach, the CMSY method, infers a fishery’s MSY from catch data — hence the acronym.
Essentially, the CMSY method requires only a computer and a time series of catch data, typically 20 or more years. Then, it proceeds as follows (warning: some math to follow):
1. Assume a carrying capacity (k) which equals the level of abundance, or “biomass,” of a given species that can be accommodated in a given ecosystem, corresponding to the mean abundance of that species before it was exploited by the fishery.
2. Subtract the catch of the fishery’s first year from the carrying capacity of that fishery (k).
3. Multiply that remaining biomass by the species’ growth rate (r), which is reduced by the fact that biomass is close to carrying capacity.
4. Subtract the catch of the second year from the product of r times the residual biomass.
5. Repeat 3 and 4 for each year, taking account of the fact that r varies when the biomass changes.
Depending on the initial values of the carrying capacity and the species growth rate, this procedure will either crash the population (more catch will be removed than can be compensated for by biomass growth) or the population will remain present, or viable.
These steps are then repeated for a wide range of values. The few values of k and r which allow for population viability are averaged, and the averages are retained as best estimates. This might require 10,000 or more runs of steps 1 – 5, but computer time is cheap, and it can be substantially reduced by studying ranges of values previously known to produce viable trajectories.
The point is that, with catch data, and given simple constrains, one can estimate the carrying capacity and population growth rate. From these, MSY can be computed. Also, for every year with catch data, the ratio B/BMSY, that is, a measure of the abundance of fish (B) relative to that which allows MSY to be taken (BMSY) can be calculated, and used to set quotas.
The Sea Around Us initiative, with Oceana’s support, has recently applied this method to the overwhelming majority of stocks contributing to the global fish catch, with catch data covering the years 1950 to 2014 — longer than for most stock assessments. The results can be found on seaaroundus.org for each of the world’s marine ecoregions, providing useful data for sciencebased fisheries management at national and international levels.
1 I will spare you the equations required to do this. Also, this presentation of the CMSY method is simplified; there is more to it than presented here, but it is still simple in principle
Dr. Daniel Pauly is the founder and director of the Sea Around Us project at the University of British Columbia’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, and is a member of the Oceana board.
Palomares, M.L.D., R. Froese, B. Derrick, S.-L. Nöel, G. Tsui, J. Woroniak and D. Pauly. 2018. A preliminary global assessment of the status of exploited marine fish and invertebrate populations. Sea Around Us Report to Oceana, 60 p.
Dr. Pauly Why we need a global ban on the shark fin trade
Shark finning should not be a contentious issue, but it is. Thus, as with all such issues, it is best to define the problem at hand. Contrary to bony fish such as herrings or perches, sharks have a rigid dorsal fin on their back, paired pectoral and pelvic fins that correspond to our arms and legs, and a tail, or caudal fin. Jointly, these fins make up about 5 percent of their live weighti
The rigidity of shark fins is provided by a bit of cartilage which, when dried, processed and cooked, turns into a chewy, noodle-like substance. Shark fins are the key ingredient in shark fin soup, a sought-after delicacy in Asian countries. Because the fin itself has no taste, the soup’s flavor is supplied by chicken broth.
Shark fin soup was a rare dish in ancient times, as sharks are difficult to catch with traditional fishing methods. Thus, it was reserved for the nobility in coastal towns of China.
As the industrialization of fisheries made sharks easier to catch, shark fin soup became more affordable, but kept its standing as a prestigious dish, and spread into the interior of China and throughout the Chinese diaspora.
Beluga sturgeon and sharks are desirable, hard to manage and don’t reproduce often. Herring and Peruvian anchovy are productive and manageable, but aren’t particularly desirable.
This then generated a nearinsatiable demand for shark fins, with the number of sharks finned estimated to range between 50 and 100 million per year. This always involves their death, as fins do not grow back — as many consumers conveniently believe.
At first, this demand was met by shark bycatch in tuna and shrimp fisheries. Now, dedicated shark fin fisheries have developed, for example in the Pacific, where dolphins and sea lions are caught to then serve as bait for sharks.
Dried shark fins are extremely valuable. About half of the shark fins traded in the world go through Hong Kong for local consumption or re-export to mainland Chinaii .
Sharks, in the meantime, are suffering on an individual scale, as their fins are often sliced off when they are still alive, leaving them to suffer a painful death once they are dumped overboard. Sharks are also suffering as a group, with at least 30 percent of all shark species on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.
The situation is now so bad that the Chinese government has forbidden the serving of shark fin soup at official banquets. Numerous hotels and restaurants in Hong Kong and elsewhere have removed shark fin soup from their menus, and airlines are refusing to transport shark fins.
In the United States, 12 states, notably California — home to many citizens who have their roots in China — have banned the trade of shark fins. This is in part for ethical reasons, but also because shark fin fisheries are very often pirate operations, conducted in conjunction with other illegal activities such as human and drug trafficking.
Some fisheries scientists have suggested that “sustainable” and legal shark fin fisheries should be encouraged, even though they would, at best, meet 10 percent of market demand. Moreover, as shown by the examples of ivory and caviar — which are also highly desirable and hard to manage — it is impossible to maintain the separation between luxury wildlife products that are legally “harvested” (what a term!) and those that are poached. Indeed, the authorities in Hong Kong would not be able to distinguish between shark fins from legal and sustainable fisheries from those that were pirated, even assuming that there was a motivation for such distinction.
My personal opinion is that the trade of shark fins ought to be banned everywhere. It is not worth risking the future of these essential and amazing animals in exchange for bowls of chicken soup with bits of shark inside.
Dr. Daniel Pauly is the founder and director of the Sea Around Us project at the University of British Columbia’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, and is a member of the Oceana board.
[i] Biery, L., and D. Pauly. 2012. A global review of species-specific shark-fin-to-body-mass ratios and relevant legislation. Journal of Fish Biology 80(5): 1643-1677.
[ii] Sadovy de Mitcheson, Y., A.A. Andersson, A. Hofford, C.S.W. Law, L.C.Y. Hau and D. Pauly. 2018. Out of control means off the menu: The case for stopping the international shark fin trade because most fins are sourced from unsustainable IUU fisheries and trade. Marine Policy, doi. org/10.1016/j.marpol.2018.08.012.
Dr. Pauly The enormous — and still uncertain — impact and size of China’s wild fish catch
China has always had impressive fisheries and aquaculture industries; indeed, the latter, which builds on over 1,000 years of experience, contributes over 60 percent of global aquaculture production. Assessing the real contribution of China’s marine fisheries to the world fish supply is another story, however.
Following a century of civil war and foreign invasions, the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 provided the basis for the rapid industrialization — mainly via coastal trawlers — of fishery operations along the Chinese coast. Within a decade or two, coastal fish stocks were depleted of larger fish, some of which, like the large croaker Bahaba taipingensis, are now critically
endangered, if not extinct. Small fish, often referred to as “trash fish,” then became dominant in trawl catches. The existence of an aquaculture sector that utilized small wild fish as feed for farmed fish enabled overfishing to continue, as did massive government subsidies to what was, and still is, a largely stateowned sector.
Then, starting in 1985, China found a way to “regulate” the number of its industrial vessels: It sent them abroad to operate in the Exclusive Economic Zone of other countries, that is, it literally exported some of its coastal fisheries to the coasts of other countries in Asia, Africa and South America. This was problematic from the onset. Hainan Province in South China, from which most
of the initial Chinese distant-water fleet operated, refunded the fines that vessels fishing illegally were incurring when operating without “access agreements” — fees generally based on paying about 5 percent of the ex-vessel value of the catch. This was reminiscent of a U.S. practice in the 1960s and 1970s, when the government reimbursed the value of tuna fishing vessels caught fishing illegally and confiscated by Central and South American countries.
China’s huge aquaculture industry uses equally huge amounts of wild fish as feed.
These incentives, along with the logistical and diplomatic support China provided to its distant water fleet, enabled it to become the largest in the world, with an annual catch in excess of 4 million tons, taken from the waters of nearly 100 countries1. Of the total catch, about two-thirds ends up in the markets of the countries where it was harvested, or in international markets which supply the U.S. and Europe, with only one-third brought back to China, where it complements the domestic catch.
The latter is normally of around 10 million metric tons per year (see www.seaaroundus.org), but it may
2001 I published a piece in Nature which documented the wide overreporting of China’s catches2. This caused a furor in China, and at the Food and Aquaculture Organization of the U.N., which monitors world catches.
Now that the dust has settled, China has retroactively reduced the catch that it submitted to the FAO by a few million tons, but we still don’t know what the country’s catches really are. There are statistical methods that could be used to estimate Chinese marine catches without having to sample every fishing village and vessel. The next step is for China to follow
be much higher or much lower. Nobody really knows. The reason is that from 1980 to the end of the 1990s, local functionaries inflated their annual catch reports to look good to their superiors, as tends to occur in many sector socialist economies. They mostly added a similar percentage of catch every year, which led to an exponential increase of catches that became so outrageously fake that China’s central government clamped down and declared in 1998 that the domestic catch was henceforth subjected to a Zero Growth Policy. I played a part in this saga, when in
through on its ambitious five-year plans, which make accurate catch statistics and the management and rebuilding of the domestic fisheries a priority. Chinese leaders have stated that their goals are well-managed domestic seas and an appropriately limited and controlled distant water fleet. For these admirable but challenging goals to be achieved, they will need to push as hard as they can to make the appropriate changes in both their fishery management system and their fleets. All of us around the world should be prepared to help them to do that.
Dr. Daniel Pauly is the founder and director of the Sea Around Us project at the University of British Columbia’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, and is a member of the Oceana board.
Chinese bahaba is a large croaker that can reach 2 meters. It is commercially extinct, and is probably extinct altogether. It was much appreciated for its delicate flesh and especially for its swim bladder, which when dried could sell for hundreds of dollars apiece.
1) Pauly, D., D. Belhabib, R. Blomeyer, W.W.L. Cheung, A. Cisneros-Montemayor, D. Copeland, S. Harper, V.W.Y. Lam, Y. Mai, F. Le Manach, H. Österblom, K.M. Mok, L. van der Meer, A. Sanz, S. Shon, U.R. Sumaila, W. Swartz, R. Watson, Y. Zhai, and D. Zeller. 2014. China’s distant-water fisheries in the 21st century. Fish and Fisheries 15(3): 474-488
2) Watson, R. and D. Pauly. 2001. Systematic distortions in world fisheries catch trends. Nature 414: 534-536.
China is responsible for 60 percent of global aquaculture output.
Following my frequent public lectures on the parlous states of fisheries in the world, I invariably get the question, “Is aquaculture not the answer to all these problems?” This sounds reasonable: If fish populations dwindle in the wild, why not grow fish in coastal areas, or on land, or in ponds or tanks? After all, this is what we do with plants and agriculture.
American journalist H.L. Mencken is supposed to have said: “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.” This is a good example of that. Aquaculture (including mariculture)
actually consists of two subsectors that are as distinct from each other as growing vegetables and raising cattle. I call these two sectors
“Aquaculture A” and “Aquaculture B,” with the former being the farming of mussel, oyster, clam and other animals that feed on microscopic algae (i.e. the grass of the sea), and the latter being the raising of carnivorous fish, such as salmon, seabass and groupers.
While the former do not need to be fed animal protein any more than carp, tilapia and other freshwater herbivores, marine carnivores must have animal proteins in the
diet they are given. They get these animal proteins in the form of fishmeal and fish oils, which are made by grinding up millions of tons of sardine, anchovies, herring, mackerel and other fish that are not only perfectly edible, but favored in Europe as well as African and Asian countries, where they often are the only “meat” many people can afford.
Thus, when we speak of “us” needing to increase aquaculture production so “we” have enough fish in the future, the question is who is “us” and “we.” If “we” pertains to the U.S., Canada and Europe, then yes, “we” can increase our
supply of salmon for our sushi and other delicacies. If “we” are people throughout the world, then no, the more carnivorous fish we raise, the less fish there will be both in the water and in the diets of poorer people.
That aquaculture B consumes rather than produces fish is not intuitive. It’s similar to the fact that air conditioners actually warm the world (when accounting for not only the space they cool, but for the space that gets the waste heat), or that our discarded plastic bags do not actually vanish into thin air when we “recycle” them.
of species that has so far remained underexploited in the ocean, which is the reason why yellowfin and other tunas are still able to find some food. However, mesopelagics will probably be turned into fishmeal, as well.
The reason for this fishmeal “hunger” is that soybean meal, long touted as a replacement for fishmeal, cannot fully substitute for it; fish fed soymeal get sick without fishmeal and/or fish oil, and they also taste like tofu. Thus, while fish feed may contain more soymeal than before, the increased
Dr. Daniel Pauly is the founder and director of the Sea Around Us project at the University of British Columbia’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, and is a member of the Oceana board.
Thus, fisheries will not be replaced by aquaculture (at least not by Aquaculture B, the one we love in “our” countries). Rather, Aquaculture B, in search of more and more feedstock, is currently exploiting Antarctic krill — the food of penguins and marine mammals — and will soon target tiny lanternfish and other mesopelagic fishes found in shallow waters at night (when tuna feed on them), and at depths of up to 3,000 feet during the day. These fish may be the last group
production of Aquaculture B still raises demand for fishmeal. In the meantime, let’s be wary of people who tell us that aquaculture will solve our fisheries problems. They tend to forget that aquaculture uses an increasing fraction of the limited fishmeal obtained from fisheries and will destroy, in order to grow, the food base of our remaining wild fish — most notably by extracting krill and mesopelagic fishes.
Figure 1. Trends in fisheries catches and aquaculture production, 1950-2014. The black lines are based on marine and freshwater fisheries catch and aquaculture production data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), as reported by its member countries, and includes edible algae (mainly from China). The trend in dark blue is based on freshwater catch data from FAO, plus marine catch data “reconstructed” by the Sea Around Us, (see www.seaaroundus.org) minus discarded fish (also not included in the FAO data) and the fish used for fishmeal and for aquaculture (to avoid double counting), i.e. 70 percent in the 2010s, declining to 50 percent in the 1980s. The light blue trend shows aquaculture production data from FAO, excluding edible algae.
Dr. Pauly A weird background for a marine scientist?
This personal essay is an excerpt from Dr. Daniel Pauly’s book, “Vanishing Fish: Shifting Baselines and the Future of Global Fisheries,” published by Greystone Books in May 2019. It has been condensed for republication here.
Although I was born in Paris, I grew up in La Chaux-de-Fonds, a little town in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, in the Jura Mountains, where cows roam freely but not very far, because they have bells. I did not have a “normal” youth, but I did have hamsters, a goldfish, and sometimes a dog. However, I did not have the intimate connections with Nature that some well-known biologists enjoyed. I was into books and ideas, never a naturalist. I tend to see patterns in data, but not in raw Nature.
At 16, I dropped out of high school and went to work in Germany for a year as a “diaconic helper” for six months in an asylum run by the Lutheran Church and another six months in a city hospital, which cured me forever of the religious delusions common in juveniles.
Instead, I realized that I needed to go back to school, and this I did: For four years, I attended evening school from 5 to 9 p.m., five times a week, while working low-level jobs in a paint factory, a brush factory, and other factories during the day to support myself. Nature receded even farther into the background of my life.
Then, in the spring of 1969, I graduated and went to the United
States to connect with my father and his family for the first time, much as I had reconnected with my mother and her family three years before in Paris. As the son of a Frenchwoman and an AfricanAmerican G.I., I had previously been aware that I was biracial (and there was always somebody to remind me, lest I forgot), but I was not ready to be part of a group. In the United States, I became assimilated into one (“AfricanAmericans”) that was still engaged in the fight for civil rights and its various ramifications.
I came out of this experience more confused than ever but convinced that I should somehow join in the struggle of people of color. I decided I would not live in Europe after my studies.
Thus, when I began my studies at Kiel University, I aimed to learn something “useful,” something that would enable me to work in developing countries. I obtained permission to do a double major in biology and agronomy, but unreformed, old Nazi professors (real, not metaphoric ones!) drove me out of agronomy.
Marine science offered an alternative mix of useful and neat science, and Kiel University was a good place for it: You could learn classical fisheries science and marine biology at the very place where, in the late 19th century, Victor Hanen and Karl Möbius founded planktology and (benthic) community ecology, respectively.
The cover of Dr. Pauly’s new book (top left) and photos from different stages of his life.
Here are two things that impressed me during my studies: First, my six months (in 1971) in Ghana to study a coastal lagoon, near the port city of Tema. I learned all about the little lagoon, which supported an artisanal fishery for blackchin tilapia, and even discovered a new species of parasite in their mouths. Now, almost 50 years later, the lagoon is inside Tema, and the tilapia, size-wise, have turned into guppies. It was also then that I got my first sunburn and learned that I was European, not African.
Second, my six weeks (in 1973) onboard a giant factory ship turned research vessel, surveying cod off Newfoundland and Labrador. These were the heydays of the cod fishery (which collapsed less than two decades later). We were fishing at 1,600-foot depths, with trawls capable of lifting a boulder the size of a Volkswagen. Now I understand: We did not know what we were doing.
In 1974, I obtained a “Diplom,” the German equivalent of a master’s degree, and I was hired by the German international development agency (GTZ) to work in Tanzania. Then, in mid-1975, I was shipped to Indonesia to help introduce trawling to the country.
In Indonesia, I did the standard work of foreign fisheries “experts” working in developing countries, that is, helping to “develop” fisheries. This consisted mainly of conducting surveys to estimate the then-largely unexploited demersal fish biomass of western Indonesia and writing reports about how much was there and how much could be taken. Of the many scientific challenges at the time, three now stick out: (1) We were “terraforming” the sea (but did not know it), (2) We were ignoring small-scale fishers (but did not care), and (3) We were dealing with more species than we could handle.
I chose the last of these problems as my research challenge. The two years in Indonesia passed quickly, and I then returned to Germany with my head full of ideas for how to improve fish stock assessments in the tropics. I earned a Ph.D. working out some of these concepts and also teamed up with colleagues who helped me program some of the more outlandish ideas.
In 1979, I was back in Southeast Asia, this time in the Philippines, at the International Center for Living Aquatic Resource Management (ICLARM). This institution, founded two years earlier by the Rockefeller Foundation, was to do for the ocean what the green revolution had done for the land (increasing yields, the panacea in those days). For me, this meant teaching my newly developed methods and concepts as tools of “empowerment” throughout the tropical world. Thus, I got to know hundreds of colleagues on five continents and found out that they all had similar concerns.
Traveling as I did and crossing cultures and languages helped me see similarities where others saw differences. In the 1980s, the artisanal fisheries of Senegal, in northwestern Africa, were booming and were a source of wealth, and those of the Philippines were already in deep trouble.
However, unlike many anthropologists, I understood that this difference was not due to differences in the countries’ social organization, or “Asianness” versus “Africanness,” but to contingencies of development, such as when development began. Now, Senegalese fisheries are in the same trouble as those in the Philippines. This required a theoretical explanation, which I endeavored to develop.
Dr.
For the full essay, check out “Vanishing Fish: Shifting Baselines and the Future of Global Fisheries” by Daniel Pauly.
Photos courtesy of Daniel Pauly
Daniel Pauly is the founder and director of the Sea Around Us project at the University of British Columbia’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, and is a member of the Oceana Board.
Ask Dr. Pauly
Of all the questions this column has attempted to answer, the most difficult is “What is ecosystembased fisheries management?”
One reason for this is that ecosystem-based fisheries management (EBFM) means different things to different people. Also, there is a debate – largely useless – between people who advocate for EBFM and even more ambitious folks who aim more broadly for ecosystem-based management (EBM).
Consider these “Principles of EBM” as commonly defined in the conservation community:
1. Maintain the structure and function of ecosystems;
2. Include human values (and use) of these ecosystems;
3. Be cognizant that these systems are dynamic and change a lot;
4. Must be based on a shared vision of all stakeholders;
5. Be centered around science that is supplemented by constant learning.
In other words, EBM as defined here means talking to everyone, considering everything, making no choices, and doing nothing. The term has devolved toward vacuity.
This is similar to “sustainability,” which could be taken to mean things being done in such a way that they could remain more or
What is ecosystem-based fisheries management?
less the way they are forever (or at least for a long time). Sustainability then devolved to “sustainable growth,” which is an oxymoron because something that grows (e.g. an economy, or fisheries catches) cannot continue to do so forever, or even for a long time.
Let’s be serious: Fisheries exploit fish and invertebrate species that are embedded in ecosystems, i.e. a community of plants, animals, and
other living organisms, together with the non-living components of their environment, found in a particular habitat and interacting with each other.
Thus, because of the feeding interactions within ecosystems, fisheries modify the ecosystem they operate in by unavoidably reducing the abundance of the species they exploit, e.g. by depriving certain predator species of their prey, or by
The northwest Atlantic cod fishery suffered a disastrous collapse in the ‘90s as a result of overfishing and poor management.
removing the predators of certain species. Also, we should mention the habitat modifications caused by trawlers, which flatten the seafloor and kill all the animals that live on it.
In fact, mathematical models exist which allow us to study how reducing one or several species impacts other species. On the basis of such models (and/or biological common sense), some measures are sometimes taken to leave certain fish in the water so that their predators have enough to eat. Thus, for example, some capelin (a small prey fish) are deliberately left in the waters around Iceland so that cod, a very valuable species, have enough food.
However, such explicit considerations – even though they seem obvious – are extremely rare in fisheries management. Rather, fisheries managers have found that it is much easier to allow fishing for all the sought-after species in an ecosystem, and to just mention EBFM or EBM as an aspirational goal.
The excuse that these fisheries managers then give if challenged is that it is too difficult to restrict fishing on forage species so that predator species can feed, to give one example. Notably, the managers would have to extract a fee from the fishers who benefit
from their intervention and allocate it to the fishers who don’t. Thus, for all practical purposes, we will continue to have to rely on singlespecies fisheries management for a long time, if not forever.
However, there are two major things we can do to maintain or re-establish healthy marine ecosystems:
First, we should aim to maintain exploited fish populations at the abundance levels that generate Maximum Sustainable Yield (MSY), i.e., half their unexploited abundance, and/or rebuild overfished to depleted populations to that level.
In many cases, such single-species management can, if applied to the major exploited species, reestablish functioning ecosystems. This would be an improvement over the present situation, as the current population levels of such species generally are well below those that will produce MSY.
Second, we should let nature help us. If we create marine reserves with no fishing, the populations therein will recover to levels that are compatible with the abundance of their prey and predators. Nature knows how to manage ecosystems; she has done that for millions of years.
Dr.
Daniel Pauly is the founder and director of the Sea Around Us project at the University of British Columbia’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, and is a member of the Oceana Board.
Capelin are an important forage fish as well as a staple food in the diets of many seabirds, whales, and larger fish. People in some parts of the world like to eat them, too.
The new coronavirus is affecting all aspects of our lives and our economies. In an environment where almost everything is uncertain, it is impossible to fathom the full impact the virus will have on our lives, our economy, and our planet. For some segments of the economy, inferences can be drawn from the history of earlier pandemics.
For fisheries, however, the instructive events are not earlier pandemics. They are instead the effects of wars, another type of recurring catastrophe affecting humans. In wartime, young men who would otherwise be fishing are recruited into armies, and their boats are claimed by governments to guard coastlines or sweep for mines.
Thus, the uncaught fish could grow, spawn, and produce new fish that could also grow and spawn new generations of fish, thereby increasing their abundance in the water. After both WWI and WWII, when fishing from Northern European waters was sharply curtailed for three or more years, fish catches were huge. The war we waged on fish had ceased for a while (see graph above), and the fish recovered.
Recent articles from China, and a vast number of countries from Europe and North America, suggest that some fish populations are
How is COVID-19 affecting fisheries?
Catches of British trawlers from 1883 to 2004, showing the effects of two world wars on fishing around the British Isles and in the open North Sea, redrawn from Thurstan, R.H., Brockington, S., and Roberts, C.M., 2010. The effects of 118 years of industrial fishing on UK bottom trawl fisheries. Nature Communications, 1(1), pp.1-6.
either increasing or changing their behaviors, following local reductions of fishing pressure due to measures taken to reduce the impact of the virus. This is the marine equivalent of various animals that are now entering empty city streets, from goats on Piccadilly Circus in London to wild boars in Haifa.
When the need for social distancing eventually decreases, it would
be nice if this respite allowed exploited fish stocks to rebuild further. Fisheries science has strong evidence that exploited fish populations will quickly recover when given a break. This would ultimately enable fishers to earn more, and obviate the need for the government subsidies that presently keep so many fishing vessels afloat to scrape up depleted fish populations. In the meantime, however, governments, wherever
they can, have to ensure that fishers who cannot work because of this pandemic will not be forgotten.
On Canada’s West Coast, we have a traditional fishery (practiced in various forms for thousands of years) for herring roe on kelp (i.e., for eggs deposited on kelp fronds by herring that go on living). This fishery provides members of the Heiltsuk First Nation about 6 million Canadian dollars per year, with an additional
quarter of a million dollars in salaries to the workers in 40 small processing plants. This fishery, like many throughout the world, is now closed.
Thus, while a respite for fish and the ecosystems in which they are embedded is a good thing, we should not forget the price that has to be paid for this. In the example provided here, it is paid by fishers who do not even kill the fish they rely on.
“ “
Fisheries science has strong evidence that exploited fish populations will quickly recover when given a break.
Dr. Daniel Pauly is the founder and director of the Sea Around Us project at the University of British Columbia’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, and is a member of the Oceana Board.
A juvenile Pacific herring is pictured. Herring eggs are used by many First Nations people for food and cultural purposes.
Wikimedia Commons/OpenCage
Ask Dr. Pauly
There are different ways to catch fish, and their differences are as useful to know as that between hunting rifles and AK47s. In principle, gillnets should be highly selective, i.e., catch fish of a particular species and size, and avoid undesired fish.
Fish are caught in a gillnet that hangs down stiffly when they have a head small enough to enter the mesh of the net, but a body too big to pass through that mesh; in this case, the fish get stuck – not by their gills, but by the posterior side of their gill cover (see arrow in Figure 1).
Also, in principle, smaller fish can pass through the mesh holes, and bigger fish would not be caught either because their heads could fit through the mesh, but their gill covers could not (again, see Figure 1).
However, this works only if the gillnets hang stiffly in the water column, either while they are anchored at specific spots or left to drift with the currents (in which case we speak of “driftnets”). If gillnets do not hang stiffly – and all fishers know how to make them hang loosely – they work as a swaying wall of death that entangles every animal, large or small, that pushes against their folds.
Thus, a gear designed to catch 20-inch snappers ends up catching
How do gillnets work?
Figure 1. How gillnets are supposed to work: In Goldilocks-like fashion, big fish (see A) are not supposed to be caught because their heads are too big for the mesh of the net, while small fish (C) can swim through the net. Thus, in theory, when the net hangs stiffly (as can be ensured by a heavy “leadline”), only the fish that are not too big and not too small will be caught (B).
everything from 6-inch sardines to 6-foot-long sharks along with assorted sea turtles and dolphins. Or, put differently, a gear designed like a precision hunting rifle works like a forest-flattening bomb.
In response to the demand of fishers using selective gear, such as hooks and lines, and of civil society in Belize, a country for which marine fishes are a major touristic asset, Oceana has, for years, pushed for a nationwide gillnet ban. On August 20, 2020, the Government
of Belize signed a joint agreement to ban gillnets and offer fishers compensation to surrender their gear (for more details, read the feature on page 16).
There is also a global dimension to this: Very deep driftnets that had lengths of tens of miles were for decades commonly deployed in the high seas to catch tuna beyond the jurisdictions of coastal countries.
They were outlawed by the United Nations in 1989 because of the
damage they inflicted, but they continue to be used widely, albeit illegally. They are most often used to catch swordfish (and kill thousands of other marine animals), notably in the Mediterranean.
While a gillnet ban is a huge victory for Belize, this deadly gear is still
in use in many other parts of the world.
However, both Belize and the United Nations have shown, by outlawing giant driftnets, that it is possible to reverse course and protect marine diversity rather than mindlessly destroy it.
Both Belize and the United Nations have shown, by outlawing giant driftnets, that it is possible to reverse course and protect marine diversity rather than mindlessly destroy it. “ “
Dr. Daniel Pauly is the founder and director of the Sea Around Us project at the University of British Columbia’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, and is a member of the Oceana Board.
How gillnets actually work: A humpback whale is shown entangled in a gillnet in Alaska’s Lower Chatham Strait.
Why is the creation of marine protected areas such a contentious issue?
Writing to explain why we need marine protected areas (MPAs) is straightforward: Fishing or otherwise harming marine life will reduce marine life’s abundance. Hence, not fishing or otherwise harming marine life should have the opposite effect of enhancing it. So, what is the rub? Why is it necessary to repeatedly write that MPAs are needed to protect marine life from industrial, largely out-of-control fisheries pillaging the world’s oceans? And why are there still so few MPAs?
The first reason is that MPAs are ferociously opposed in most countries by the fishing industry despite MPAs contributing to high catches in areas near them (see
image above). The other reason is that the public-at-large, in most countries, still doesn’t ‘get’ that seascapes and the wildlife they contain – including fish – need to be protected from our depredations in the same manner that landscapes and their flora and fauna are. On land, we have national parks. Hardly anyone argues that we do not need them to maintain forests or other terrestrial ecosystems and the animals therein, whether it is deer, elk, wolves, and bears in Canada, or zebras, wildebeests, and lions in Kenya.
Fish are not commodities-inwaiting, created to be processed into breaded sticks. They are wildlife, and if we put no limit
on their hunt, their populations will decline and disappear, just as elks and zebras would if hunted relentlessly. However, informing the public about MPAs is difficult. There are always bigger issues to consider; also, the associated issues are complicated, notably because there are different types of MPAs.
MPAs can be small and allow lots of activities – including angling – within their limits. Such MPAs are often ineffective in enhancing the fish populations they are supposedly designed to protect. Alternately, MPAs can be large ‘marine reserves’ that are wellenforced and protect a vast array of species and habitats. The large MPA created by the
White and light blue dots representing fishing vessels are shown around the perimeters of the Phoenix Islands Protected Area (PIPA), outlined in yellow. Though fishing is not allowed inside this marine protected area in Kiribati’s waters, fishers may benefit from a “spillover effect,” which occurs when species grow abundant in protected areas and subsequently cross over into areas where fishing is permitted.
Source: Global Fishing Watch. 2018. Accessed on February 9, 2021.
U.S. government around the Northwest Hawaiian Islands –called the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument – is an example of an effective new marine reserve. This example is being emulated throughout the world; Chile created large marine reserves around its oceanic islands, the UK declared the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean a large notake area, and Kiribati created the Phoenix Islands Protected Area (PIPA). Hopefully, the Peruvian government will follow suit and declare the Nazca Ridge a marine reserve, too.
An immense literature documents the many benefits of MPAs, which not only allow for marine biodiversity to recover from injuries inflicted by fisheries, but also help in the fight against global warming and contribute to the sustainability of fisheries and availability of trophy fish.
The benefits for fisheries may seem counterintuitive to non-biologists (how can not fishing be good for fisheries?) but are not difficult to explain. If a previously overfished area is strongly protected, the area’s fish population will increase, and, after a while, this area will become crowded. Therefore, fish will leave this area, and fishers, including anglers, will have excellent catches at the MPA borders; This is known as ‘fishing the line.’
A quasi-MPA surrounds Cape Canaveral, i.e., an area where fishing is prohibited, and ‘fishing the line’ around that area is – oh, irony – one of the few places where you can get trophy fish in Florida, where MPAs are vociferously fought against by anglers’ associations. Thus, those who oppose MPAs may do well to ponder the ways they benefit from them.
Dr. Daniel Pauly is the founder and director of the Sea Around Us project at the University of British Columbia’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, and is a member of the Oceana Board.
A United States Coast Guard vessel is pictured in Tampa, Florida. In the U.S., the Coast Guard and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) jointly work to protect the National Marine Sanctuary System.
Nowadays, everything is supposed to be or become “sustainable,” and sustainability is viewed as inherently good. Indeed, the term sustainable has become so widely used that it has gradually lost most of its original meaning.
Sustainable means (or meant) that something can be maintained at a given level for a long time. Humans usually want to do more of the things they view as positive and fewer of the things they view as negative. Thus, the term “sustainable growth” was coined, which has various complex definitions (Google it!), but is irreparably oxymoronic because
nothing in this world can grow for a long time and remain what it is. Fisheries science and management has a concept of sustainability –called Maximum Sustainable Yield (MSY) – which has been surrounded by controversies1. MSY was built on the notion that a fish population exploited by a fishery can, in principle, support a relatively high catch provided that its biomass (or abundance) is not reduced to less than half its unfished level. On this condition (and taking environmental fluctuations into account), a sustained yield can be taken, just as one can in principle, given a reasonably large sum in a bank, live off the interest forever.
This graph shows the biomass (or “abundance”) of cod in Eastern Canada since 1505, as reconstructed by Rose (2004) from historic catch records and a mathematical model of a cod population, taking account of temperature fluctuations (dotted line) and not (solid line). Since its collapse, the population has remained at very low levels to date, due to fisheries management emphasizing “sustainability” (i.e. continued strong exploitation) rather than rebuilding.
Dr. Daniel Pauly is the founder and director of the Sea Around Us project at the University of British Columbia’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, and is a member of the Oceana Board.
However, in the real world, fisheries are not usually managed to maintain MSY, and most traditionally exploited fish populations have been depleted to levels much lower than that which enable MSY to be taken.
For example, the Northern cod of Eastern Canada, which was exploited by European and later Canadian fisheries from 1500 to 1950, yielded 100,000 to 200,000 metric tons per year. However, in the early 1960s, European industrial trawlers set to work on a cod population that had thus far only been exploited using handlines and traps. The catches increased tremendously, reaching 800,000 metric tons in 1968. Returning to our bank analogy, these trawlers were not just living off the interest: They had broken into the bank’s vaults and were removing massive chunks of the cash.
Predictably, the vast cod population that had supported historic catches collapsed and so did the trawl fishery, which was closed in the early 1990s2. The cod population is now so low (even lower than shown in the figure for the early 2000s) that catches as small as 5,000 metric tons per year prevent it from recovering to its previous abundance.
Where does sustainability fit into this conversation? Well, you can maintain a low cod population and a low catch through a “sustainable fishery,” which is what the Canadian fisheries ministry currently does. However, why maintain such a pitiful yield? In such a case, the goal of fishery management should be to rebuild the fish population to its previous abundance, not to sustain its depleted state.
The vast majority of commercially exploited fish populations throughout the world are being depleted. Most of these populations are not being depleted as strongly as the Northern cod, but so much of what we view as “sustaining” fish is actually just maintaining misery. As it happens, the United States is one of the few countries in the world where sustained overfishing is not acceptable. By law, fisheries must rebuild depleted stocks to the MSY level, a policy that other
governments globally should emulate.
The book by Oceana CEO Andy Sharpless, titled: The Perfect Protein: The Fish Lover’s Guide to Saving the Oceans and Feeding the World, is based on the logic of countries rebuilding diminished fish populations in their 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zones. This would indeed help feed the world; sustainability alone would not.
2 Rose, G. A. 2004. Reconciling overfishing and climate change with stock dynamics of Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua) over 500 years. Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences, 61: 1553-1557. https://doi.org/10.1139/F04-173.
According to an Oceana-commissioned study, a rebuilt cod fishery could provide 16 times more jobs and five times more economic value than today. But for that to happen, the cod fishery must be effectively managed.
The below conversation between journalist Richard Schiffman and Dr. Daniel Pauly was published by ‘Scientific American’ in September. It has been lightly edited for republication.
Overfishing is wiping out commercial fisheries, and climate change is making certain fish species smaller. But Daniel Pauly says the world can still save endangered fisheries. Pauly is called “the ocean’s whistleblower” in a new biography, for good reason. The French-born marine biologist, who teaches at the University of British Columbia, spent much of the past quarter-century documenting
the swift decline of fish within the seas. Now he says that warming waters are depleting the oceans of oxygen that fish need to grow to their full size.
In an interview with Scientific American, Pauly addresses whether fisheries are doomed or if there is still hope for sustaining them. He speaks about how his early experiences working in Southeast Asia convinced him that fisheries science had become a captive of the fishing industry, promoting industrial methods such as bottom trawling that devastated underwater ecosystems and threatened the livelihoods of smallscale artisanal fishers.
Dr. Daniel Pauly is the founder and principal investigator of the Sea Around Us project at the University of British Columbia’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, as well as an Oceana Board Member.
Daniel Pauly is pictured during a diving trip to Tubbataha in the Philippines in 1992. He grew up in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland.
From the personal collection of Jay Maclean
From the collection of the Pauly family
Pauly is credited with helping to develop a new kind of science, one that pays more attention to the ocean’s ecology and what fish need to thrive. He coined the term “shifting baseline syndrome” to describe how scientists and others forget the biological abundance of earlier times – thinking that today’s meager fisheries are somehow the norm. This “collective amnesia,” as he describes it, has led researchers and regulators to routinely misjudge the magnitude of the ecological disaster taking place in the seas.
In his most influential research project, Pauly assembled hundreds of scientists to create a global database to document the impact of fisheries on marine ecosystems. The team found that governments had routinely underestimated their catch and that fisheries everywhere are close to collapse. If current trends continue, Pauly warns, the world’s oceans will end up as marine junkyards dominated by jellyfish and plankton.
Nevertheless, the outspoken fisheries scientist says that solutions are readily available. If nations close the high seas to fishing and end wasteful government subsidies, fish populations would rebound, he claims. And of course, the world also ultimately needs to
get climate change under control. Pauly is currently researching how global warming drives fish stocks toward the poles and makes fish smaller. The new biography of him is The Ocean’s Whistleblower: The Remarkable Life and Work of Daniel Pauly, by David Grémillet (Greystone Books). It was released on September 21.
You were born in Paris, the son of a Black American GI and a white Frenchwoman, and grew up in Switzerland, far from the ocean. Through some twists and turns, you became an employee of the German government in Indonesia in the 1970s, where you worked on a research trawler as part of a project to introduce industrial fishing to the country.
Yes, I regret that now. Trawlers in Southeast Asia devastated reefy habitat – giant sponges and soft coral that structured the habitat. [Trawling] transformed a productive, diverse ecosystem into a muddy mess. We simply didn’t know what we were doing. We didn’t even have the words to describe this kind of ecological destruction at the time. Trawlers [also] encouraged the capture of fish for export. There was little left over for local fishers. In Indonesia, I encountered such poverty among
the fishers. They were going out with three or four men and coming back with one kilogram of fish. Introducing industrial trawling into such an environment was madness.
Trawling allowed the fishing industry to exploit places that had earlier been unreachable.
That’s right. This expansion of fisheries has eliminated all the protection that fish had naturally from us. Depth was a protection, cold was a protection, ice was a protection, rocky grounds were a protection. With successive technological developments, we can now go everywhere where the fish were protected before.
After working in Southeast Asia, you moved on to West Africa and Peru. Offshore fleets were putting small-scale fishers out of business. You’ve written that this is not just an economic problem, it is a health problem.
Up to 50 percent or more of the protein consumed in many poor regions comes from fish. In these countries, most of the calories come from carbs, from corn, cassava and rice. The only way these carbs are nutritionally efficient is by adding a little fish. Also, the micronutrients, the vitamins, the various minerals and metals such as zinc – all of this comes from fish.
Your work with a team of researchers in a group that you founded, the Sea Around Us, was critical in establishing the fact that industrial fishing was rapidly wiping out local fish stocks all over the globe. You basically created a massive data set that proved that we were fishing unsustainably. How did you pull that off?
Rainer Froese and Daniel Pauly are pictured at an airport in Paris in 1991. Together, they worked with a team of researchers to create FishBase, a comprehensive database of thousands of fish species.
From the collection of the Pauly family
Reconstructing the catch of every country from 1950 to 2018 was an immense job that involved about 300 researchers. We came up with a much higher catch than was being reported officially. Many countries had a completely distorted view of their own fisheries: recreational fisheries were not included in the catch totals; illegal fisheries, local artisanal fisheries were not included. We found that catches have been sharply declining globally since 1996.
Some scientists initially argued that fishing was not to blame but rather natural fluctuations in fish populations. It reminds me of the argument that climate change is a natural phenomenon, so we don’t need to worry about it.
I was about to say that!
Nations also denied that they were engaged in overfishing.
I remember talking to the minister of fisheries in Australia. She said fish in Australia are being exploited sustainably. But you look at the statistics, and the catch there is going down, down, down. So what can she possibly mean? In Canada, the catch of cod has collapsed to 1 percent or 2 percent of its value in the 1950s. If a country can somehow maintain such a meager catch, they call it “sustainable exploitation,” but the bar is set so low that it is meaningless.
You’ve said that if human destruction of the seas continues unchecked, they will end up as marine junkyards dominated by jellyfish and plankton.
It’s already happening. Dead zones without oxygen are spreading; fish are getting smaller and smaller both
because of being caught and also because of global warming.
Not only is this an ecological disaster, but in the long run, it is not in the interest of the fishing industry either.
I have described the form of fishing where you devastate one area, then move on to another, as a Ponzi scheme. As long as you find new suckers, you can go on. Bernie Madoff [a New York City–based financier who was convicted of running the largest Ponzi scheme in history] got money from investors and then paid them back with the money he got from new investors. That works so long as you find new investors, right? But ultimately you run out of investors – you run out of new areas to fish – and the whole thing collapses.
Your latest research has focused on the impact of climate change on fish size. Can you talk about that?
The big problem for us mammals is getting enough food to maintain our temperature. Fish don’t need to maintain their own temperature, so basically they eat much less. Their problem is getting enough oxygen rather than eating enough food. Fish breathe through gills. As the fish grows, its volume grows faster than the surface of its gills. Also, as water grows warmer, it contains less oxygen, and the fish themselves get warmer. And as fish get warmer, they need more oxygen. So you have a perfect storm – the fish are squeezed. The result is that they are getting smaller and smaller.
Fish are also moving to cooler waters.
Fish have to stay at the same temperature that they are adapted to because their enzyme system functions best at a certain temperature. So as the seas warm, it means that South Carolina and North Carolina will be in conflict because the South Carolina fish stocks have moved to North
Tuna fishers are pictured in Spain in 1910. Many fish have declined in both number and size over the decades.
Carolina. These migrations are occurring on a grand scale. In the tropics, the fish that leave are not replaced by anything else.
You say that we should stop fishing on the high seas to help fish stocks recover.
Fishing in the so-called high seas generates only about 5 percent or 6 percent of global catches, mostly tuna. The central part of the oceans are actually a desert. The tuna are like camels in the Sahara. They swim from one oasis to another. Tuna is not a fish that poor people in the developing world eat anyway, so limiting their catch would have no impact on food security.
If the high seas account for such a small percentage of the catch, how will closing them to fishing save fish populations?
Fisheries existed intact for hundreds of years because we couldn’t go after the last fish. But now we can. And you not only catch the fish you want but kill everything else in the process –there is a huge bycatch. If you close
the high seas to fishing, you give fish a sanctuary where they can replenish themselves. Research shows that no-fishing sanctuaries help to rebuild stocks, some of whose individuals will then move into coastal waters, where they can be caught.
International negotiations are currently underway at the World Trade Organization about getting rid of subsidies given by most rich countries to their industrial fishing fleets. Are you hopeful?
I’m somewhat hopeful. I have researched subsidies myself. Many fishers nowadays don’t fish for fish. They fish for subsidies. They couldn’t operate without massive subsidies. So, yes, eliminating them would greatly reduce overfishing. Actually, fisheries issues are not difficult or intractable problems. We need to fish less and to create sanctuaries where fish populations can revive.
Throughout your career, you’ve done science that aims to help people. What is your advice to young scientists?
My advice is to choose problems that are global and not local. We need to attack problems that feed into policy. And we need solutions that can work throughout the world.
You have a reputation as a workaholic, as someone who has tackled ambitious scientific problems. Was there extra pressure on you to prove yourself in a way that a white scientist would not have to?
Yes. But the way that I experienced that is somewhat different. What motivated me is that I was living a privileged life and was working with colleagues in the developing world who were as smart and well educated as I was but were paid one tenth of what I was getting. I felt a responsibility to the people I was working with and the countries I was working in.
Some universities are trying to increase participation in the sciences among students from minority groups. Are they doing enough?
The problem is these kids don’t trust themselves to be scientists. The vision for minority students from poor backgrounds is to become a doctor or lawyer but not a scientist, because frankly, scientists don’t make money. What you understand when you are actually in science is that most people in the profession love what they do. They can’t believe that they are being paid to do it. Science, in its own way, is as creative as the arts. Impoverished young people don’t know that. They don’t know that science is fun and that you don’t have to be a robot or a nerd to do it.
Pauly’s research has taken him around the world. Here, he’s shown in a restaurant in the Philippines.
From the personal collection of Deng Palomares
Ask Dr. Pauly
How is global warming affecting fisheries?
The news about the impact of global warming on the oceans — or, more precisely, of ocean warming and deoxygenation — are gradually becoming more serious and wideranging, so much so that a brief review of the issues involved may be helpful. Here, contrary to my earlier columns, I will add a number of scientific or other references to the summary below of these issues, so that readers get a feel of the existing literature. My excuse for being associated with several of these references is that I do work on these topics.
1. Elevated temperatures increase the oxygen requirements of fish while decreasing the oxygen content of the water1 (see also Oceana
Atlantic cod sizes in higher versus lower temperatures
(1-10° C or 33.8-50° F)
Magazine, Winter 2015). This effect is worse in oxygen-poor zones of the ocean, which are spreading². One major effect of these challenges is that the maximal size that fish and invertebrates (such as lobsters and squids) can reach declines, along with the size at which they become mature¹, which reduces the number of eggs they can produce;
2. Another major effect of increasing ocean temperatures is that fish populations (which usually occur over a range of latitudes) do well on the cool edge of their distributions and badly on the warmer edge3. Thus, rising ocean
Northeastern France (5-15°C or 41-59° F)
The above graph – adapted from one that appears in reference 1 – shows how water temperature affects the growth and size of Atlantic cod in two different regions. In Iceland, they reach much larger sizes than in French waters.
Dr. Daniel Pauly is the founder and principal investigator of the Sea Around Us project at the University of British Columbia’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, as well as an Oceana Board Member.
temperatures cause fish populations to shift their distribution ranges poleward, and the fish populations in tropical waters become depleted4;
3. The population range shifts described above are well documented throughout the world and are known to cause many fish “stocks” that are traditionally exploited by a given country (or state) to move away from the waters of that country or state and into the waters of other countries (or states)5;
4. This situation can cause fisheries management problems in the best case, e.g. between South and North Carolina on the eastern seaboard of the United States, and actual conflicts or “fish wars” in other cases⁶, with the worst cases occurring in tropical countries, whose fish will tend to slowly disappear⁴;
5. Therefore, this will require arrangements to be made between countries and states to either share or swap exploitation rights. However, such arrangements must be
Atlantic cod is one of the world’s most important fisheries. British and Icelandic fishers fought “Cod Wars” over the rights to cod fishing grounds from the 1950s to 1970s, and climate change could fuel more “fish wars” as species move into new territories in search of cooler waters.
made quickly because the fish populations will not be waiting for poetical decisions to move where they must;
6. Unfortunately, we can also expect a recurrence of heat waves such as the one that affected the Pacific Northwest in the summer of 2021, killing an estimated 1 billion shore animals along the coast of British Columbia⁷. Heatwaves make fisheries management procedures and agreements vain.
In other words, if we want to have fish in the ocean and fisheries to
exploit them in the longer term, we need to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions urgently and massively.
This will also involve getting rid of bottom trawlers, which not only use huge quantities of fuel to drag giant nets along the seafloor, and thus emit huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, but also stir up the carbon that had been buried in sediments on the seafloor⁸.
If we don’t reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, we will be in trouble⁹.
1 Pauly, D. 2021. The Gill-Oxygen Limitation Theory (GOLT) and its critics. Science Advances, 7(2), https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abc6050.
2 Levin, L.A., 2018. Manifestation, drivers, and emergence of open ocean deoxygenation. Annual Review of Marine Science, 10: 229-260; https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-marine-121916-063359.
3 Cheung, W.W.L., V.W.Y. Lam, J.L. Sarmiento, K. Kearney R. Watson and D. Pauly. 2009. Projecting global marine biodiversity impacts under climate change scenarios. Fish and Fisheries 10: 235-251; https://doi 10.1111/j.1467-2979.2008.00315.
4 Cheung, W.W.L., R. Watson and D. Pauly. 2013. Signature of ocean warming in global fisheries catch. Nature 497: 365-368; https://doi.10.1038/nature12156.
5 Cheung, W.W.L., V.W.Y. Lam, J.L. Sarmiento, K. Kearney, R. Watson, D. Zeller and D. Pauly. 2010. Large-scale redistribution of maximum fisheries catch potential in the global ocean under climate change. Global Change Biology 16: 24-35; https://doi 10.1111/j.1365-2486.2009.01995.
6 Palacios-Abrantes, J., Frölicher, T.L., Reygondeau, G., Sumaila, U.R., Tagliabue, A., Wabnitz, C.C. and Cheung, W.W., 2021. Timing and magnitude of climate-driven range shifts in transboundary fish stocks challenge their management. Global Change Biology; https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.16058.
8 Sala, E., Mayorga, J., Bradley, D. et al. 2021. Protecting the global ocean for biodiversity, food and climate. Nature 592, 397–402; https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03371-z.
9 Oreskes, N. and E.M. Conway. 2014. The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. 105 p.
Until the 1950s, the animals on Earth, including marine animals, primarily only had to deal with debris and trash in the form of organic substances or objects that were produced by, or derived from, plants or animals. This included wood, fiber, rotting flesh, bones, or other materials that could be degraded by bacteria and fungi, and thus turned back into nutrients or converted into harmless minerals. For eons, these microscopic organisms recycled organic matter on Earth and in our oceans, and quite literally kept our world clean.
This changed radically with the advent of plastics. Chemists consider plastics “organic” because, like most living substances, they consist of chains of carbon
atoms. However, most plastics are petroleum-derived, made from long chains of carbon atoms which have shapes bacteria never encountered in their 3 billion years of existence. Thus, every piece of plastic we throw away, from plastic bags to disposable razors to empty detergent bottles, could remain with us for centuries or longer.
Plastics can’t be burned safely because some of their carbon chains, under high temperatures, link up and form Frankenstein compounds, such as dioxins, which are highly toxic to all life, including humans.i And most plastics cannot be safely recycled because of the thousands of added chemicals — many of which are toxic and make their way into recycled products.ii
Thus, while you can recycle aluminum infinitely, you can only downcycle plastics, i.e., turn highquality plastics, like the ones used to make disposable spoons, into low-quality plastics, like the kind used to make park benches (and we don’t need that many park benches).
However, it is far more likely plastic waste will end up in a landfill or in the environment, including ocean ecosystems.iii And when dealing with the oceans, it is useful to distinguish between two kinds of plastic pollutants: macro- and microplastics.
Macroplastics make up the junk that we see floating at or near the surface of the sea, where they
Dr. Daniel Pauly is the founder and principal investigator of the Sea Around Us project at the University of British Columbia’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, as well as an Oceana Board Member.
Most plastics cannot be safely recycled. It is far more likely plastic waste will end up in a landfill or in the environment, including ocean ecosystems.
have formed gigantic and steadily increasing “garbage patches” in the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific oceans. This form of pollution is a growing threat to seabirds, sea turtles, whales, and other marine mammals because they may mistake macroplastics for food items and die in agony with bellies full of bulking, indigestible trash.iv
These animals can also entangle themselves in floating pieces of plastics and drown. In other cases, they can end up with rings of
plastic around their necks or bodies, which grotesquely maim them and cause immense suffering until they die of their suppurating wounds.
Even worse, because they are more insidious, are microplastics. These are tiny, often barely visible bits of plastic — like the ones shed from clothing in washing machines — which can now be found in all the world’s seas.
To fully understand what microplastics do, we must
appreciate another nasty property of long carbon chains: they make plastic lipophilic, which is a jargony way of saying plastics repel water (which is the reason why we make rain jackets with plastic fibers).
Now, it so happens that most of the worst poisons that the chemical industry produces — DDT, PCB, dioxins, etc. — happen to be lipophilic as well.
Thus, every bit of microplastic in the ocean acts as a minuscule sponge for the various poisons that the chemical and energy industries have disposed of via waterways or the air, and which have ended up in the sea, where they now accumulate.
So these chemicals stick to microfibers, turning them into tiny poison pills that end up being consumed by small, insectlike animals called zooplankton, which store lipophilic substances in the fat of their little bodies.v This is called bioaccumulation. Zooplankton are then consumed by small fish such as sardines and anchovies, which are then eaten by tuna and then…bon appétit!
This is why we must de-plastify the world, starting with the absurd waste that single-use plastic containers and utensils represent.
i https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187802961630158X
ii https://ipen.org/documents/plastics-toxic-additives-and-circular-economy
iii https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1700782#:~:text=We%20estimate%20that%208300%20million,landfills%20or%20the%20 natural%20environment
iv https://usa.oceana.org/reports/choked-strangled-drowned-plastics-crisis-unfolding-our-oceans/
v https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0025326X12005942
Plastic found in sea turtle fecal matter. In 2020, Oceana found evidence of nearly 1,800 animals from 40 different species swallowing or becoming entangled in plastic since 2009 in the U.S.
Ask Dr. Pauly Why are we giving subsidies to the fishing industry?
Subsidies are government funds or other benefits, such as lower taxes, awarded to certain economic sectors or industries. Subsidies to fisheries are nothing new.
From the 17th-19th centuries, the sail-driven navies of leading European powers — notably England, France, and the Netherlands — required huge numbers of experienced sailors for their all-too-frequent wars. The fishing industries of the time trained and employed thousands of sailors, and thus these countries have a well-documented history of subsidizing their fishing fleets. The idea was to prevent the fishing fleets from shedding sailors during
periods of fish scarcities, and thus, for the navies to become unable to crew their man-o-wars.
Nowadays, we don’t have this excuse (if it ever was one) for fishing subsidies, which are now one of the major drivers of global overfishing. This can be readily explained: Fishing reduces abundance, and overfishing even more. At some point, revenue from fishing no longer covers its costs. This is a clear signal that fish populations should be allowed to rebuild.
Subsidies, however, keep the fishing industry from hearing the clear message that nature sends.
Dr. Daniel Pauly is the founder and principal investigator of the Sea Around Us project at the University of British Columbia’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, as well as an Oceana Board Member.
Subsidies harm marine life and increase the already substantial carbon footprint of industrial fisheries. The World Trade Organization reached an agreement earlier this year to address this issue, but it was a hollow one, according to Dr. Pauly.
community. Thus, the hope of many groups was that the World 3
Ten years ago, I was at the WTO, as
to see subsidies as what they are:
it is a hollow outcome full of loopholes.
Also, subsidies exacerbate equity because they are overwhelmingly help — improving the quality and pressure. abundance that nature provides; exploited. In the worst cases, the amount to about $35 billion USD, billon USD of these subsidies are “capacity-enhancing”.2
So, although we are almost back they destroy marine life, they drive
Because they are a major driver of markets” (which is a thing, though probably a rare one), the ranges from neo-liberal economists
prevented the consensus necessary to reach a subsidies phaseout agreement.
reached, but sadly, a close
1 S 22(1-2), 183-208; Poulsen, B. (2008). Dutch herring: an environmental history, c. 1600-1860 (Vol. 3). Amsterdam University Press.
Dr. Daniel Pauly and Dr. Rashid Sumaila receive top environmental honor
Oceana’s Board Members Dr. Daniel Pauly and Dr. Rashid Sumaila were honored in February as the co-recipients of the prestigious 2023 Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, which honors leading scientists and researchers for innovative contributions in the fields of environmental science, environmental health, and energy. The Tyler Prize Committee honored Pauly with the award for his “critical contributions to fisheries ecology and conservation through the development of new ecosystem-based analytical approaches to assess global effects on world fisheries, and for helping the public visualize the decline of global fish stocks through The Sea Around Us and FishBase.”
Sumaila received the award in recognition of his “integration of economics, ecology, and other disciplines to sustainably manage ocean fishery resources for the benefit of current and future generations."
We asked Pauly and Sumaila to reflect on their work and what this award means to them.
Dr. Daniel Pauly
Receiving an award as respected as the Tyler Prize has forced me to reflect on my career. In contrast to my usual ruminations — which tend to be focused on mistakes — I’ve decided I should concentrate on the things that worked, bringing us to this wonderful award.
Since the beginning of my career, I’ve aimed to empower my colleagues in the Global South, who had little access to the methods developed to study fisheries and draw inferences about the effects of exploitation on fish populations in the Global North. I programmed existing methods and invented new ones on programmable calculators, and later on microcomputers, which were widely adopted in the early 1980s.
This desire to empower colleagues eventually drove me, working with numerous others, to create and make relevant fishery data available through CD-ROM and later via the internet. For a long time, we didn’t have enough information about tropical fishes or a simple way to access that information. Starting in the late 1980s, I worked with Rainer Froese, a German colleague, and Filipino colleague M.L. “Deng” Palomares to initiate a database of basic information on fish that has since grown into FishBase (fishbase.org), which now covers all the fish of the world and is consulted daily by millions of users.
In the mid-1990s, when I moved from the Philippines to Canada, I began to document that the pathologies of fisheries I had observed throughout the Global South also occurred with the heavily subsidized fisheries of wealthy countries. I became involved with civil society, leading me to become a member of Oceana’s Board of Directors in
2003. I saw the need to address the lack of reliable information on industrial and artisanal fisheries everywhere, including in wealthy countries. This led us to create the Sea Around Us (seaaroundus. org), a database and website that presents fisheries catch data and related statistics for all countries of the world, including subsidies that I worked on with Rashid Sumaila, my friend, colleague, and fellow recipient of this award.
I hope that the Tyler Prize will help us raise the funding required to maintain FishBase and Sea Around Us database and website, which, like Wikipedia, are used by many but require resources to remain free public services.
Moving forward, my own research will increasingly focus on why fish and other animals that breathe water are extremely sensitive to the warming and deoxygenation of their world. Understanding this
understudied topic will be crucial to mitigating, to the extent possible, the effect of global warming on the world’s oceans and freshwaters, and I hope to spread this message in the years ahead.
Dr. Rashid Sumaila
Consider the basic model of the relationship between people and the ocean. When we go to the ocean, we do essentially two things. First, we take the things we want or need and bring them into our economic, social, and cultural systems, and do what we will with them. Then at the end, we generate waste and pump it back into the ocean. So, from the ocean good things come and to the ocean bad things go! Clearly, if we don’t use wisdom in how we take the good and dispense the bad, we can end up with a dead ocean with little or no life, which will undermine the mission to “save the oceans, feed the world.”
I won this award for my contributions to the development of what I call “interdisciplinary ocean and fisheries economics,” which seeks, through the integration of economics with other disciplines, to ensure that we do not end up with a dead ocean but rather “Infinity Fish.” I work at local, national, and global scales, since the ocean is present at all of them. Simply put, the whole world is my workplace. I have experience working in fisheries and natural resource projects in North America, Europe, Southern Africa, West Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, the Pacific region, and the South and East China Seas.
My work has challenged today’s approaches to marine governance, generating exciting new ways of thinking about our relationship to the marine biosphere (e.g., protecting the high seas as a “fish bank” for the world); removing harmful subsidies, as estimated in collaboration with Daniel Pauly and Sea Around Us; and using “intergenerational discount rates” to evaluate natural resource projects based on the costs and benefits to future generations.
Winning the Tyler Prize is humbling, as it puts me among a select group of scientists. I am also pleased to receive this award during Black History Month because I hope that it can inspire Black people and others who have been historically excluded to keep pushing for a place under the sun to reach their own potential. Finally, this award is a recognition of excellence in interdisciplinary ocean and fisheries economics, a field that I hope will get a boost because the world needs more of it.
Oceana Board Members Dr. Rashid Sumaila, Diana Thomson, Dr. Daniel Pauly, and Board Chair Sam Waterston.
Dr. Daniel Pauly is the founder and principal investigator of the Sea Around Us project at the University of British Columbia’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, as well as an Oceana Board Member.
How does deep-sea mining affect marine life?
Deep-sea fish can’t cough, which means they’re in danger
Various companies are interested in mining metals in the deep sea, such as cobalt, nickel, and the like, to be used in the batteries of electric cars and other machines as we transition to renewable energy. Exploitable concentrations of these metals occur in the deep sea on top of seamounts, in deep-sea vents, and in the form of polymetallic nodules on the deep-sea floor.
Mining the tops of seamounts and deep-sea vents cannot mean anything but the destruction of these biodiversity oases.
Polymetallic nodules are associated with less beauty and biodiversity per square meter, though the abyssal seafloor supports some equally incredible life forms. Looking something like dug-up potatoes in a field, these nodules took millions of years to reach their present size but now face an increasingly real risk of exploitation.
How would companies go about collecting these nodules? Since they rest on muddy grounds at immense depths, polymetallic nodules would have to be collected
The “Musicians Seamounts” include about 25 underwater mountains in the central Pacific Ocean, which host corals and other marine life.
“Ask Dr. Pauly”
Three types of deep-sea habitats at risk of mining
Abyssal Plain
The abyssal plain is an immense flat part of the deep seafloor that covers 50% of the Earth’s surface.
Containing cobalt, nickel, copper, and manganese, polymetallic nodules rest on the surface of sediment in vast fields. Animals like sponges, worms, and corals grow on the nodules, while the sediment underneath and surrounding waters host sea stars, sea cucumbers, fish, and more.
Hydrothermal Vents
Hydrothermal vents revealed to humanity how life forms and entire ecosystems can exist in the absence of sunlight.
Hydrothermal venting produces seafloor massive sulfides, which are small, orebearing structures with deposits rich in gold, nickel, copper, and other metals. These ores cannot be mined without destroying the ecosystems hydrothermal vents support.
Seamounts
Seamounts are underwater mountains that are home to corals and sponges, supporting an abundant food web and providing critical habitat for fish and marine mammals.
Cobalt-rich ferromanganese crusts, which accrete on the surfaces of seamounts, are enriched in other metals and rare-earth elements. The same ore that marine life uses for habitat is desired for deep-sea mining, but cannot be mined without destroying the ecosystem.
by some underwater bulldozers, stirring up the mud they rest in. Then, when they are brought to the surface, the polymetallic nodules would have to be separated from the sediment stuck to them. So, lots of mud — millions of tons of it — would slowly sink from around the vessels collecting the nodules, and immense areas of the ocean would become turbid, like the lower reaches of rivers.
The delicate structure of fish gills, and the thin lamellae that allow oxygen to diffuse from the water into their blood, can be easily clogged. Therefore, fish species that live in turbid environments — like muddy estuaries, shallow seashores, and sediment-filled rivers — have evolved the ability to cough to prevent their gills from clogging by fine particles of silt and other suspended solids.¹,² Just like
we humans do when nasty stuff gets into our lungs.
Deep-sea fishes and other organisms have also evolved over millions of years in an ecosystem without turbidity, that is, without gill-clogging particles. Like cavefish that gradually lost the use of their eyes, then their eyes themselves, after they colonized lightless caves, deep-sea fish can be expected to have lost the ability to cough. Coughing requires specialized muscles that are adequately innervated, i.e., an entire system of anatomic and neural adaptations that would cost the fish energy to maintain, yet would be useless in an environment that is never turbid.
Sadly, as a result, deep-sea fishes would almost certainly choke to death in turbid water, along with
various other denizens of the deep such as giant amphipods.
Marine areas where polymetallic nodules are exploited would become devoid of non-microbial life. The marine mammals that feed on deep-sea fish would have left long before their prey fish choked to death because of the noise emitted by underwater bulldozers and engines during the mining process.
The statement, “deep-sea fish can’t cough,” expresses a profound insight about deep-sea mining: it is hostile to marine life. I, personally, can only hope that deep-sea exploitation by mining companies will never be allowed.
1 Carlson, R.W. and Drummond, R.A., 1978. Fish cough response—a method for evaluating quality of treated complex effluents. Water Research, 12(1): 1-6.
2 Hughes, G.M., 1975. Coughing in the rainbow trout (Salmo gairdneri) and the influence of pollutants. Revue Suisse de Zoologie, 82(1): 47-64.
Marine heat waves are what you think: periods of temperature well above the level expected for the season that last for a while. If the temperature of the water along a coast is, for example, 3–5°C (about 5–9°F) above the temperature you expect, lasting for a week or two, then you have a marine heat wave.
Generally, the consequences of a marine heat wave are much greater than those of a heat wave on land. This is because most terrestrial animals — including humans — are used to experiencing a wider range of temperatures than marine animals. Also, many marine animals already live at a temperature close to the maximum they can tolerate. But marine heat waves are not like
terrestrial heat waves. Instead, they are the marine equivalent of forest fires.
Most marine and freshwater animals breathe water, which, unlike air, contains less than 1% oxygen. That’s less oxygen than at the top of Mount Everest. Temperature increases make this worse because warmed water contains even less dissolved oxygen than cold water (see blue line A in the figure below).
Most of these animals — including fish, lobster, and squid — can tolerate a range of temperatures, but their respiration is affected. They need far more oxygen at high temperatures (see red line B in the
Dr. Daniel Pauly is the founder and principal investigator of the Sea Around Us project at the University of British Columbia’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, as well as an Oceana Board Member and recipient of the 2023 Tyler Prize.
Yellow goatfish, as seen on Oceana’s 2010 expedition to the Gulf of Mexico. The Gulf of Mexico has been experiencing a marine heat wave since February/March 2023, according to NOAA.
figure below). This is because their body temperature also increases, which leads to the proteins forming their tissues ‘denaturing’ (i.e., falling apart) and needing to be replaced.¹
So, when a marine heat wave hits, fish and other water-breathers require more oxygen, but the water around them contains less. They try to escape, as animals in a forest would flee a fire, but they can’t, and after a few hours or days, they die.
Marine heat waves are becoming more frequent. Well-documented marine heat waves hit the West Coast of the United States and Canada from late 2013 to early 2016 (the years of “The Blob,” an enormous mass of warm water)² and Western Australia from December 2020 to January 2021.³
Yet again, in June 2021,⁴ marine heat waves struck the West Coast of the U.S. and Canada, where the stench of an estimated billion decaying shore animals, notably clams, mussels, and sea stars,
Marine heat waves are a window to our future — just as forest fires are.
wafted along the coast of British Columbia for days.⁵
Heat waves and low-oxygen events that kill fish are even more frequent in freshwaters, so much so that the Fish and Wildlife agencies of various U.S. states have equipped their field personnel with practical guides. These guides state that if there are large dead fish on, for example, a small lake, they presumably died of lack of oxygen, or “hypoxia” (usually caused by unseasonably high temperatures). On the other hand, if the dead fish are mainly small, a poison, such as an insecticide, is likely responsible.⁶
The reason large, older fish and invertebrates are more susceptible to low oxygen levels is because these individuals have less gill area (i.e., respiratory area) per body weight than young, smaller ones.
So, small individuals survive longer when the oxygen declines and/or temperatures rise. Nevertheless, marine heat waves can last long enough and are sufficiently hot to render the different susceptibility levels among small and large waterbreathers irrelevant — they all will die.
Marine heat waves and their freshwater counterparts are becoming more frequent, and if our greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase, they will also increase in intensity and duration. Marine heat waves are a window to our future — just as forest fires are. If we want vibrant oceans full of life, we must join the fight to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero.
Increasingly warm waters mean that fish need more oxygen — and there’s less of it
Above 4-5°C (39-41°F), the oxygen dissolved in sea or freshwater decreases with rising temperature (blue line A), but the oxygen required by fish and other water-breathing animals increases (red line B). Source: Müller, J., N. Houben, and D. Pauly. 2023.
1, 6 Müller, J., N. Houben, and D. Pauly. 2023. On being the wrong size: what is the role of body size in fish kills and hypoxia exposure? Environmental Biology of Fishes, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10641-023-01442-w
Dr. Daniel Pauly is the founder and principal investigator of the Sea Around Us project at the University of British Columbia’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, as well as an Oceana Board Member and recipient of the 2023 Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement.
Are science and advocacy compatible?
Editor’s Note: World-renowned fisheries scientist and Oceana Board Member Dr. Daniel Pauly has contributed his scientific expertise to Oceana Magazine for over a decade. Across more than 30 issues, he has answered questions on wideranging subjects from illegal fishing to marine heatwaves. We have been honored to share Dr. Pauly’s insights and perspective with readers of Oceana Magazine. Please enjoy this final installment of Ask Dr. Pauly.
Dear Reader: This is my last “Ask Dr. Pauly” column for Oceana Magazine, which I began writing in 2012. In May 2024, I will be 78 years old, and it is time to reduce my workload. I cannot, however, leave without dealing with the old canard (which means “duck” in French; don’t ask) that scientists should not be involved in advocacy.
I have dealt with this question about science and advocacy for a long time, given that I am a published scientist and a member of Oceana’s Board of Directors.
In many ways, the canard creates a problem where there shouldn’t be any problems to begin with. This was eloquently stated in 1993 by Mary O’Brien, who taught publicinterest science and environmental advocacy at the University of Montana.
“[T]here are infinite questions that you could ask about the universe, but as only one scientist, you must necessarily choose to ask only certain questions,” she wrote. “Asking certain questions means not asking other questions, and this decision has implications for society, for the environment, and for the future. The decision to ask any question, therefore, is necessarily a value-laden, social, political decision as well as a scientific decision.”¹
This point becomes even more salient when considering how the range of views expressed by scientists and scholars that are deemed politically “acceptable” during a given period, also called the “Overton Window” (look it up!) can vary enormously. For example, studying or teaching history in the United States was considered harmless for a long time. But studying or teaching the history
Dr. Daniel Pauly speaks at the National Symposium on Fisheries in Manila, Philippines in 2014.
of chattel slavery has now become politically risky for academic historians and history teachers in multiple U.S. states.
Another way to deal with the canard is to consider that scientists and other scholars are citizens of the countries in which they live and work. As citizens, as well as moral beings, they can and should contribute to the well-being of their country — and by extension — to humanity as a whole, to the best of their abilities.
Indeed, there is nothing in the ethos of science that says scientists should be silent when they encounter abuse in their disciplines, be it an abuse of data, a corporation lying about its real environmental impact, or an industry performing inhumane tests.
Medical doctors are expected to help their patients recover from bacterial illnesses, not to be neutral as to the fate of bacteria and people. Why, then, should scientists studying biodiversity remain neutral regarding the decline of North Atlantic right whales, for example, whose last remaining population is threatened by ships that refuse to slow down to avoid lethal collisions? Does the science of cetology (i.e., the scientific study of whales and their relatives) suffer from cetologists preferring for the species they study not to go extinct, and thus becoming advocates for their protection?
This point is not a reductio ad absurdum, but an increasingly common problem for scientists working on environmental issues. We are in an age where more and
more populations and species are going extinct. It’s time to kill the canard.
Finally, in science, there are guardrails to prevent personal opinions from shaping scientific discourse too strongly. The main one is anonymous peer review, formally developed in the 1970s, to help reduce scientific claims to the level supported by the available data. The peer-review system is now slowly failing because fewer scientists are interested in spending hours reviewing papers anonymously for no tangible personal benefit, especially when academic publishers are profiting enormously from this labor.² Peer review, however, remains important and must be revitalized, as it prevents many unsupported claims from being published, or even put to paper in the first place.
In addition to peer review, scientists and scholars are required
¹ O’Brien, M.H. 1993. Being a Scientist Means Taking Sides. BioScience, Vol. 43(10): 706-708. https://doi.org/10.2307/1312342
to disclose their source(s) of funding, unlike other fields such as politics, where many funding sources accessible to politicians are not publicly known, even if they heavily influence a politician’s stances.
In conclusion, scientists can, and in many cases, arguably should, be advocates. In fact, the idea that activism is not compatible with science is usually pushed by people with a political agenda that benefits from the non-involvement of scientist-citizens and is designed to hide the agenda they unavoidably have.
I conclude this column by thanking successive editors of Oceana Magazine and their colleagues for improving over 10 years’ worth of my clunky prose, and the readers of this magazine, who I hope, did appreciate the personal views of a scientist AND advocate.
² One article about this — and there are many — is Buranyi (2017). Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science? https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science .
Dr. Daniel Pauly on board the Oceana Ranger off the coast of Spain’s Balearic Islands.
