WASHINGTON — Environmental special interest group Oceana made headlines last March with its bycatch report, "Wasted Catch: Unsolved Problems in U.S. Fisheries." Since the report's release, mainstream media publications and other environmental organizations, like the Pew Charitable Trusts, have further presented one-sided coverage of issues regarding bycatch in the United States — often providing little or no information about the significant and successful efforts taken by many commercial fisheries to curb unintended catch. These omissions of facts are misleading, ultimately providing the public a skewed perspective on U.S. fisheries management.
In their report, Oceana consistently presented the data in a way that magnifies alleged problems with bycatch, while minimizing references to successful and ongoing efforts to address unintended bycatch. The result is a distorted picture of the current state of U.S. fisheries as a whole, and bycatch issues in particular. Not surprisingly, Oceana quickly began heavily promoting this picture as part of its fundraising campaign, referring hyperbolically to "badly managed fisheries" and "badly enforced regulations." In a recent article appearing in various online publications, "The ABC's of Ecosystem-Based Management, Part III," Lee Crockett, Director of U.S. Oceans at The Pew Charitable Trusts, makes similarly strong allegations, equating fishery bycatch to "needless incidental killing of untold seabirds, whales, and other marine life." A closer examination of such findings, and omissions, reveals that the situation is more complicated and less dire than these groups' misleading reports have led readers, radio listeners, and television viewers to believe.
Bycatch Prevention Efforts
Prior to the release of Oceana's report and continuing today, fishermen, regulators, and scientists are working together, as they have for years, to address these issues and improve bycatch reduction technologies.
As highlighted in a previous Saving Seafood report, several prominent U.S. fisheries have made great strides in controlling their bycatch through innovative new gear modifications and cooperative efforts with scientists and fisheries managers. The Atlantic sea scallop fishery, one of the most valuable in the nation, has partnered in the last decade with the Coonamessett Farm Foundation to design new gear that helps prevent endangered sea turtles from interacting with, and being injured by, scallop gear. These turtle excluder devices, which have been required on all scallop vessels since 2013, have successfully helped the scallop fleet reduce its turtle bycatch.
They have also actively participated in one of the most successful initiatives at bycatch reduction: the Yellowtail Flounder Bycatch Avoidance Program run by the School for Marine Science and Technology at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. The program identifies areas where yellowtail flounder, a common source of scallop bycatch, have been sighted, and helps the rest of the fleet avoid them. Almost 75 percent of the scallop fleet participates in the program, which has resulted in the fishery not exceeding its annual allocation of yellowtail flounder since its inception. While these are major conservation success stories, they were buried deep within Oceana's report, and far from showcased.
Other successful bycatch reduction efforts looked over in Oceana's report and the resulting media coverage include efforts by long-line fisheries, such as the swordfish fishery to reduce deaths to marine mammals and turtles by deploying circle hooks, and the use by gillnet fisheries of devices meant to deter marine mammals from interacting with their nets. The report also fails to mention fisheries with generally low bycatch rates, like purse seine fisheries.
Federal efforts, like cooperative research endeavors joining fisheries managers and the marine science community, have also contributed to advancing state-of-the-art bycatch prevention methods. One prominent example is the Ruhle trawl. Developed as part of a cooperative research effort between NOAA and the University of Rhode Island, the trawl reduces bycatch in the groundfish fishery by minimizing the amount of overfished and non-targeted species caught by groundfish vessels, allowing fishermen to continue to catch healthier groundfish species.
The Ruhle trawl is but one of the many technological innovations that are leading to decreases in bycatch. In a recent article in the Providence Business Journal highlighting innovations by Reidar's Trawl Gear and Marine Supply in Massachusetts, Chief Operating Officer Tor Bendiksen said, "We design gear that specifically targets selected species. For instance, I design gear to catch haddock, which are abundant now. You don't want to catch flounder with the haddock, so with our gear, you don't even bring the flounder into the net."
The successful development and deployment of devices like the turtle excluders and acoustic sound technology have reduced the number of interactions between fishing vessels and protected endangered species like turtles and marine mammals, according to the 2011 National Bycatch Report. NOAA has also, since 2008, funded the Bycatch Reduction Engineering Program (BREP), pioneering research efforts to develop gear that minimize bycatch, with $2.5 million allocated to the program in 2012 alone, according to figures released by the agency. Through its support of various research programs, including previous support for the World Wildlife Fund's Smart Gear Competition, the BREP has helped NOAA work with fishermen to advance its bycatch prevention goals.
Bycatch Success Stories
Oceana's report also obscures the fact that many fisheries have made great strides in reducing their levels of bycatch, and that current bycatch figures are not necessarily indications that a fishery is being operated in an unsustainable fashion. Returning to the example of the Northeast fishery, groundfish vessels in particular have seen recent success in keeping the bycatch of groundfish species relatively low. For the 2012 Fishing Year, total groundfish bycatch for the Northeast multispecies fishery was around 8 percent, according to figures released by NOAA, and fishermen in the Northeast did not exceed their yearly allocations for most groundfish species.
But bycatch rates alone are not sufficient to paint a true picture of a fishery's impact on the environment. What species are being caught as bycatch and why they are being caught are factors as important as how many of them are being caught. Oceana's report clouds these distinctions to seemingly advance an agenda, all to the detriment of an informed analysis on bycatch-related matters. In the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, for instance, Oceana records dogfish as one of the largest sources of bycatch. But, after years of strict catch limits and other management measures, dogfish is both not overfished and is also one of the most abundant species in these areas. As a result, dogfish bycatch is virtually unavoidable for any vessel targeting groundfish. High rates of dogfish bycatch do not demonstrate that the fishery is being wasteful, but simply that fishermen are frequently encountering an abundant and ubiquitous species.
The same principal applies, to a lesser extent, to skate. By far the single largest source of bycatch for the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, most species of skate are both frequently caught and relatively healthy. While one species is currently considered overfished according to recent estimates from the New England Fishery Management Council, most of the species in the skate complex are not overfished. Much like discards of dogfish, the fact that fishing vessels frequently encounter and discard skate should not by itself be used as definitive proof that fishermen are operating a "dirty" fishery. Oceana's coverage of these related fisheries does not account for these details.
Bycatch: Discards vs. Mortality
The Oceana report's primary focus on alleged issues relating to bycatch hinges on the problematic assumption that most, if not all, recorded bycatch is fish that are "thrown overboard dead or dying." This image has been repeated over and over in subsequent media coverage. But while there is certainly mortality associated with bycatch, the related figures vary between species and fisheries, and are often nowhere near 100 percent. Oceana cites extensively the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) 2013 update to its earlier National Bycatch Report. That report explicitly states that while discard estimates for the Northeast "did not account for potential survival of organisms returned to the water," the stock assessments that monitor these species do factor in survival in their estimates. Taking this into consideration exposes a very different picture of some of these supposedly "wasteful" fisheries highlighted in Oceana's report.
For example, Oceana disparages the Northeast bottom trawl fishery. The two largest species of bycatch for this fishery, by far, are skate and dogfish. But neither species has a discard mortality rate approaching 100 percent. For dogfish, mortality is estimated at half of that, around 50 percent for trawl vessels. For the several species of skate, discard mortality is estimated at anywhere from 60 percent (for smooth skate) to 9 percent (for winter skate).
Discard survival rates are a vitally important nuance to consider in order to properly evaluate the sustainability of Northeast bottom trawls, but Oceana's assessment of this fishery fails to do so. If half or more of the two largest sources of discards in the Northeast trawl fishery survive after being discarded, then the fishery is wasting far less than the 50 million pounds reported by Oceana, and is less "dirty" than its attention-grabbing headline lets on.
Instances in which bycatch and mortality are conflated and used interchangeably appear several times in the report. When dealing with interactions between gillnet vessels in New England and the Mid-Atlantic and endangered species like sturgeon, for example, Oceana reports "more than 1,200 mortalities" for sturgeon. But this assumes that every one of the 1,200 recorded interactions between sturgeon and gillnets results in a fatality. Like the assumption of 100 percent bycatch mortality, this is incorrect. Based on federal estimates, sturgeon mortality for gillnet gear is 20 percent, meaning a much smaller percentage of those 1,200 gear interactions results in death than Oceana indicates.
The Future of Bycatch
The trend in U.S. fisheries management is clearly moving in the direction of greater awareness of bycatch-related issues, and increased cooperation among fishermen, scientists, and managers to develop new solutions to these problems. New technologies and new management efforts have already led to measurable improvements in several fisheries, and current initiatives are building on those successes. By minimizing these past successes and dwelling on alleged failures, Oceana's report and much of the subsequent media coverage do not accurately represent the current state of bycatch management, and shortchanges the tremendous efforts taken by American fishermen, regulators, and scientists to make those successes possible.
References
Bell, Tom. March 31, 2014. "Dogfish 'everywhere' in Gulf of Maine, but sales go nowhere." Portland Press Herald
Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council. 2013. Memorandum from Jim Armstrong to the Joint Spiny Dogfish Committee, "Summary of Spiny Dogfish Monitoring Committee Management Measure Recommendations for 2014," dated September 23, 2013
National Marine Fisheries Service. 2011. U.S. National Bycatch Report [W.A. Karp, L.L. Desfosse, S.G. Brooke, Editors]. U.S. Department of Commerce, NOAA Tech. Memo. NMFS-F/SPO-117C
National Marine Fisheries Service. 2013. U.S. National Bycatch Report First Edition Update 1 [L.R. Benaka, C. Rilling, E.E. Seney, H. Winarsoo, Editors]. U.S. Department of Commerce
National Marine Fisheries Service. 2013. Bycatch Reduction Engineering Program 2012 Annual Report to Congress. U.S. Department of Commerce
National Marine Fisheries Service. 2013. Commercial Summary Table (Sector and Common Pool) Catch Monitoring [Fishing Year 2012].
National Marine Fisheries Service. 2013. Endangered Species Act Section 7 Consultation Biological Opinion.
New England Fishery Management Council. 2012. 2012 Annual Monitoring Report, Northeast Skate Complex Fishery Management Plan
New England Fishery Management Council. 2013. Memorandum from the Science and Statistical Committee to Tom Nies, "Skate ABC and discard mortality rates," dated December 2, 2013
Northeast Fisheries Science Center. 2006. 43rd Northeast Regional Stock Assessment Workshop (43rd SAW) 43rd SAW Assessment Report. Northeast Fisheries Science Center Reference Document 06-25
Northeast Fisheries Science Center. 2013. A Brief Description of Northeast Region Fish and Invertebrate Discard Estimation for the 2013 Update to the National Bycatch Report [J. Blaylock, S.E. Wigley, P.J. Rago, M. Mood, M.C. Palmer]. Northeast Fisheries Science Center Reference Document 13-05
Northeast Fisheries Science Center. 2013. Update on the status of spiny dogfish and initial evaluation of alternative harvest strategies. Report to MAFMC SSC September 12, 2013
Source: Saving Seafood
