In a Perfect Ocean: The State Of Fisheries And Ecosystems In The North Atlantic Ocean

The Sea Around Us Project

IN A PERFECT OCEAN

A series edited by Daniel Pauly

The State of Fisheries and Ecosystems in the North Atlantic Ocean, by Daniel Pauly and Jay Maclean

THE STATE OF

FISHERIES AND ECOSYSTEMS

IN THE NORTH ATLANTIC OCEAN

DANIEL PAULY

AND

JAY MACLEAN

The Sea Around Us Project

ISLAND PRESS

Washington • Covelo • London

About Island Press

Island Press is the only nonprofit organization in the United States whose principal purpose is the publication of books on environmental issues and natural resource management. We provide solutions-oriented information to professionals, public officials, business and community leaders, and concerned citizens who are shaping responses to environmental problems.

In 2002, Island Press celebrates its eighteenth anniversary as the leading provider of timely and practical books that take a multidisciplinary approach to critical environmental concerns. Our growing list of titles reflects our commitment to bringing the best of an expanding body of literature to the environmental community throughout North America and the world.

Support for Island Press is provided by The Nathan Cummings Foundation, Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Educational Foundation of America, The Charles Engelhard Foundation, The Ford Foundation, The George Gund Foundation, The Vira I. Heinz Endowment, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Henry Luce Foundation, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Moriah Fund, The Curtis and Edith Munson Foundation, National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, The New-Land Foundation, Oak Foundation, The Overbrook Foundation, The David and Lucile Packard Foundation, The Pew Charitable Trusts, The Rockefeller Foundation, The Winslow Foundation, and other generous donors.

The opinions expressed in this book are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of these foundations.

The State of the World’s Ocean Series

©2002 Island Press

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher: Island Press, Suite 300, 1718 Connecticut Ave., NW, Washington, DC 20009

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Table of Contents

The Sea Around Us Project

About Island Press

The State of the World’s Ocean Series

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Table of Figures

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

CHAPTER 1 - A Brief History of the North Atlantic and its Resources

CHAPTER 2 - The Decline of North Atlantic Fisheries

CHAPTER 3 - How Did We Get Here?

CHAPTER 4 - What to Do?

Notes

References

Table of Figures

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Preface

This volume, the first in a series, presents the findings of an ambitious project—to measure the impact of fishing on the ecosystems that make up the North Atlantic Ocean and to propose ways to mitigate that impact. The project arose from a request by Dr. Joshua Reichert, the Director of the Environment Program of the Pew Charitable Trusts, Philadelphia, to answer six specific questions about the North Atlantic:

What are the total fisheries catches from the ecosystems, including reported and unreported landings and discards at sea?

What are the biological impacts of these withdrawals of biomass for the remaining life in the ecosystems?

What would be the likely biological and economic impacts of continuing current fishing trends?

What were the former states of these ecosystems before the expansion of large-scale commercial fisheries?

How do the present ecosystems rate on a scale from healthy to unhealthy?

What specific policy changes and management measures should be implemented to avoid continued worsening of the present situation and improve the North Atlantic ecosystem’s health?

These questions were prompted by previous research, which strongly suggested that fisheries in the North Atlantic and in many other areas are gradually destroying the ecosystems on which they depend. This is an alarming prospect, not only for the fishers and consumers of the ocean’s living resources, but for the conservation of its biodiversity, and for the non-extractive uses made of the resources, such as diving, whale- or bird-watching and other forms of ecotourism.

Overfishing—catching too many fish in a given time and area and resulting in a dearth of fish in subsequent years—has been a concern for at least several centuries. Fisheries science was begun in the early twentieth century to advise managers of ways to maximize sustainable catches. It has largely failed in this endeavor, primarily because the advice it provided went unheeded. Today, though, with the recent shift in attitude toward marine resources as the responsibility of all humankind, not just of a small group of fishers, conservation-oriented scientists are putting forward the case for new arrangements in the stewardship of marine resources.

The project has drawn on fisheries and conservation literature, and has conducted a number of new studies as well, in most cases with new methodologies developed to best answer the questions posed in assessing the many fisheries and ecosystems of the North Atlantic Ocean.

This book offers a comprehensive assessment of fishery impact in the North Atlantic Ocean and recommendations for mitigating that impact. It serves as a model of tested methodologies for analyzing and assessing the condition of other seas and ecosystems as well.

The project was called The Sea Around Us, a name drawn from the outstanding book of this title by Rachel Carson.¹ We thank University of British Columbia President, Dr. Martha Piper, for reminding us of that work, and thus inspiring the name of our project.

We hope that through this book, readers will realize the importance of maintaining and safeguarding marine ecosystems, which are in many ways as indispensable to our well-being as the terrestrial ecosystems that we inhabit.

Daniel Pauly, Vancouver

Jay Maclean, Manila

Acknowledgments

We would like to acknowledge the Environment Program of the Pew Charitable Trusts and particularly its Director, Dr. J. Reichert, for the farsightedness and initiative shown in sponsoring this work, and hope that the contents of this volume satisfactorily answer the questions that formed the basis of this project—the questions put by Dr. Reichert (see Preface).

We also wish to thank the members of the Sea Around Us Project team, mainly at the Fisheries Centre of the University of British Columbia, whose dedication is evident in the outstanding results of the project’s investigations. They are (in alphabetical order): Jackie Alder, Villy Christensen, Sylvie Guénette, Nigel Haggan, Gordon Munro, Tony Pitcher, Peter Tyedmers, Ussif Rashid Sumaila, Reg Watson, and Dirk Zeller. They worked with a large group of scientific colleagues and consultants from countries all around the North Atlantic, to whom we also express our thanks.

Several other persons took part in developing methodologies and conclusions included in this book. They include, from the Fisheries Centre, Eny Buchary, Ratana Chuenpagdee, Birgit Ferriss, Felimon Gayanilo Jr., Ahmed Gelchu, Kristin Kaschner, David Preikshot, Lore Ruttan, and Carl Walters. Other scientists who took part included Alan Longhurst, Jean-Jacques Maguire, Trevor Platt, and Kenneth Sherman. The methodologies were reviewed at a week-long workshop in May 2000 by a group of experts external to the Fisheries Centre: Lee Alverson, Kevern Cochrane, Poul Degnbol, Paul Fanning, and Richard Grainger.

Other external reviewers kindly provided extensive written comments on the proposed methodologies for the methodology-review workshop: Ragnar Arnason, Trond Bjorndal, John Blaxter, Tony Charles, Cutler Cleveland, Michael Fogarty, Ken Frank, Quentin Grafton, Norman Hall, Rögnvaldur Hannesson, Paul Hart, Simon Levin, Pamela Mace, Paul Medley, Lief Nøttestad, David Pimentel, David Ramm, and Saul Saila.

We are extremely grateful for feedback received at a second workshop, in May 2001, by our invited experts David Allison, Nancy Baron, Philip Clapp, Kevern Cochrane, Paul Fanning, Richard Grainger, Jay Nelson, Andy Rosenberg, Carl Safina, and Lisa Speers.

Thanks also to Amy Poon and Yvette Rizzo for reporting during the workshops, and to Gunna Weingartner and Claire Brignall for organizing them.

Thanks to graphic artist Diana MacPhail for improving our graphs, to Mike Weber for helpful comments, and to Todd Baldwin and his group at Island Press for turning our files into a presentable book.

Daniel Pauly, Vancouver

Jay Maclean, Manila

Introduction

The North Atlantic Ocean has always been portrayed as a dangerous, untamed place, a maelstrom of icebergs, sea creatures, and nor’easters, a place only the bravest, strongest—or most desperate—fishers dared to venture. For those who did, it held vast riches of cod and swordfish, giant blue fin tuna, right whales, and winged skates the size of barn doors. Its turbulence warded off the incursions of fishers, and even in recent decades, it continues to claim their lives, including those on board the Andrea Gail, the swordfishing vessel whose plight was chronicled in the major motion picture, The Perfect Storm.

It is a curiously underappreciated fact that the Andrea Gail had been at sea a full 38 days—six days’ travel from her home port to a remote part of the North Atlantic—when she ran into the convergence of storms that ultimately sank her. She had gone to the very limit of her fuel oil tether to find swordfish in numbers large enough to make the trip worth the investment. The nearby fishing grounds on Georges Bank were nearly empty, about to be closed to fishing altogether. When looked at from this perspective, the plight of the Andrea Gail points to quite a different picture of the North Atlantic, one of a conquered ocean whose vast fish reserves are depleted below reasonable commercial viability. Far from being the scourge of fishing vessels, it is the North Atlantic that suffers.

Hundreds of feet below the surface, along the continental shelf off the coast of Maine where the Andrea Gail might once have fished, the bottom is smooth. In many places, except for the tracks left by a few thin worms, the animals have largely left without a trace. The muddy water moves lazily back and forth, as if swinging with the muffled sounds of the waves, hundreds of feet above. There are no fish. But humans have made their mark: beer cans roll back and forth over the bottom, either from a fishing vessel or from one of the cruise ships that ply that part of the ocean. A few feet further into the murk, we might see torn bits of coarse nylon mesh form a ghostly shape, swinging with a beer can.

Like most of Georges Bank, this area has been trawled. The tracks cannot be missed. They are left by the rollers of a deep bottom trawl, a contraption about the size of a football field, dragged over the ground to catch fish and whatever else lies in its path. Trawlers plough this part of the ocean several times a year. A few years ago, there might have been a reef there, shimmering with small colorful fish darting about beds of gorgonians and other magic, plant-like animals. Now, it is a low, scarred hill.

The trawlers would not have destroyed the reef in one pass. First, they dragged around it, lifting and removing the protective boulders that had protected it, like the outer wall of a castle. Thanks to their precise geo-positioning systems, they were able to return day after day and year after year to the exact same place, gradually eroding the outer parts of the reef. Finally, they reached its central core, where the last fish had found refuge, in the nethermost parts of a doomed castle.

About a hundred feet up is where most of the fish congregate, where the longlines trail from boats like the Andrea Gail. There you can find tuna, warm-blooded and swift as bullets until caught, now big chunks of cold flesh. They are the target fish, sought because of the huge prices they command in international markets. If they take the bait, they will be turned into sublime dishes such as sashimi or sushi, or steaks for backyard grills—or into cat food, if the fishers retrieve them too late, after their flesh has lost that special flavor.

The longlines also snag swordfishes, large shiny knights without armor, whose large eyes, and the warm brain behind them, help them spot prey at depth, but not tell them from baited hooks. Each year, fishers now struggle mightily to land fewer and smaller swordfish, once numbering in the millions in the North Atlantic. Their slender bodies are sliced up for trendy restaurants.

The other fish dangling from the lines were not targeted; they are the by-catch. Among them are small and large sharks. Some have long pectoral fins, like bird wings; some have long tail fins, like giant underwater squirrels. Once, sharks were thrown overboard when caught by long-liners, but now their fins are cut off to supply a huge million dollar market for shark-fin soup. The finned, bleeding carcasses are thrown back overboard—thousands of them, day in, day out. A few more decades of long-lining will resolve the problem, as extinct sharks cannot be finned and discarded. A substitute for shark fin soup will be found: we are an ingenious lot. But the sharks themselves can never be replaced.

Closer to the surface is another set of shapes, jumbled, some pointing up, some down, some dying while still trying to move forward, but all held by the meshes and folds of a drift net. This is an old net that lost its surface marker buoys and has been drifting for a long time—a murderous Flying Dutchman trapping everything in its twenty-mile wide path. Some of the entangled fish are tuna, which will not be counted toward reported catch quotas. Others are sailfish, the beautiful cousins of the becalmed swordfish. Still others have strange shapes few humans have ever seen. These fish are so rare that museum curators would consider specimens the highlight of their careers. They will rot unstudied, though. In the unlikely event the runaway net were retrieved by a drift-netting vessel, the strange fish would most probably be discarded. Indeed, given current trends, many species of large, rare fish will probably become extinct before anyone can study them.

The net would have been torn from an industrial fishing vessel. The ship might have flown a flag, but the nationalities of its crew would not much matter. Many countries do not care what their vessels do, especially in international waters. Some countries even make it a business to lend their flags to fleet owners who want to break their own countries’ laws. Thus, safety is low, salaries are low, and the motley crews, many without training and experience in fishing, couldn’t care less about the long-term state of the resource they are paid to exploit.

The vessel might have been constructed in a subsidized shipyard, to keep jobs in a depressed region of the home country. Or it could have been imported, second-hand and tax-free—another form of subsidy—from a country with a buy-back scheme, which allowed that country to modernize its fleet. Though it may be rusty and battered, its electronics are state-of-the-art The geo-positioning system enables it to pinpoint its position within a few meters, thus enabling it to return to the exact same spot and repeatedly trawl the same productive reef until there is nothing worthwhile left to catch. It can fish in bad weather, even in icy winters. It can travel great distances, for months on end, and thanks to its blast freezers, return with its catch in prime condition. What it cannot do is avoid the results of its own success: a rapidly dwindling supply of fish in the sea. In the last few years, too, its fuel efficiency—the amount of fish caught per unit of fuel burnt in its huge diesel engines—has steadily dropped, making it more and more costly to catch fewer and fewer fish.

Fished out local waters and upwardly spiraling fuel costs are what drove the Andrea Gail further and further from Gloucester. It needed a big catch to justify the rising cost of steaming to ever more distant fishing grounds and staying at sea for weeks on end. When carbon or energy-based taxes are finally put in place to combat global warming, vessels like the trawler will cease to be economically viable. The point may be moot, though, as the fisheries on which it depends may long since have collapsed—and vessels like the Andrea Gail will simply be retired, not swallowed by the North Atlantic.

Of course, this is not the kind of picture that interests either Hollywood or the fishing industry. Typically, the misleading image they paint is one of relative abundance in the North Atlantic, one in which fishers may have been through hard times but are seeing local stocks rebound and global catches increase; one in which large-scale commercial fishing remains a viable, sustainable enterprise. But in fact, the scientific evidence does not support that rosy picture.

This book presents the best evidence we have on the status of North Atlantic