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In 2010 and 2012 fishermen held two different successful protests in Washington DC with thousands of fishermen travelling from around the country to attend. Both commercial and recreational fishermen voiced their concerns regarding catch shares and Magnuson Act reauthorization, among the multitude of issues that threatened their livelihoods. During the Obama administration, Jane Lubchenco, a PEW fellow, oversaw a major shift in the way we manage our fishery resources by introducing “Catch Shares” a controversial form of individual transferable quota, that has destroyed the very fabric of the New England ground fisheries. Many fishermen were almost immediately put out of business by the passage of Groundfish Amendment 13, the rest have slowly gone out of business, with large, pocketed vultures scooping up their quota, ultimately resulting in a Dutch company, Blue Harvest, owning a large portion of not only Groundfish, but also Scallops. This outcome was predicted by many experienced fishermen, but their concerns were ignored, as the Obama administration plowed over any objectors. Lawsuits were filed, including one with me as lead plaintiff, but they all failed to stop this disaster to our industry.

Today, the fishing industry is facing a far worse enemy then fishery management, as thousands of square miles of their historic fishing grounds have been auctioned off to the highest bidder in order to make way for the wildlife killing machines called wind turbines. These auctions have been held by BOEM, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, a part of the Department of the Interior. They are charged with the selling or leasing of US natural resources in our offshore waters, and apparently, they
have absolutely no regard for any wildlife that may exist within them, or any people who might derive a living from catching said wildlife. Before the Biden Administration, BOEM generally dealt with offshore leasing to oil companies for oil and gas reserves. Those companies employed research vessels using seismic air guns to locate oil reserves deep within the earth’s crust, making deadly sound waves of over 240 DBs, coincidentally in many places marine mammals would mysteriously strand themselves on beaches and die. Now, thanks to the green new deal, those research vessels have been blasting the east coast since last November, [about the time that Whales started washing up dead on the beaches], to map the sub seafloor for offshore wind turbines.

The fishing industry has been keenly aware of the disastrous fate that offshore wind poses not only to their existence, but also to the marine creatures who inhabit it. BOEM has run roughshod over not only the fishing industry, but the federal agency in charge of managing those fishery resources. Flexing their bureaucratic muscle, they have highjacked fishery management from the National Marine Fishery Service who has been relegated to an observer of the unfolding environmental disaster being created in order to save the world. The death of hundreds of marine mammals along the east coast, washing up on public beaches, finally awakened the public to the environmental dangers that offshore wind causes. Activist groups sprung up in opposition to offshore wind, and protests have been held regularly in many states. A petition circulated in New Jersey garnered over 500,000 signatures calling for a halt to sonar and seismic activities until an investigation into the strandings takes place. Multiple lawsuits have been filed and are working their way through various court districts. While these suits may eventually prevail, in the meantime construction and cataclysmic noise making continue. Every day that goes by more historic fishing grounds are lost as thousands of tons of large boulders are dumped onto the seafloor around turbine bases. These grounds will be unfishable to mobile gear for hundreds of years.

Now is the time for the American public to stand up and fight the corruption in our state and federal governments, a mass demonstration needs to be held in Washington DC as soon as possible, before the green new deal bankrupts our country, and destroys our ocean and its creatures. Northern European countries have the highest electric rates of any developed country in the world, excluding islands. Some of them are having serious doubts about their decision of closing down coal and nuclear plants for renewable energy sources that are not only more expensive, but totally unreliable. We can stop this, but it will require a lot of work, getting groups to work together to plan out details, getting permits, publicizing the protest, etc. Step one is to circulate this article among fishing and public groups opposed to offshore wind and generate a discussion among these groups and their leaders about organizing the protest. Wouldn’t it be amazing if those 500,000 people who signed that anti-wind petition showed up in Washington DC.? I think this amount of people is possible if properly publicized, and it would have an immediate effect. Although the east coast has been affected before the Gulf of Mexico, and the West coast, BOEM has plans for them too, so if fishermen value their livelihoods, no matter what coast they live on, they need to make plans and get involved.

Charismatic Megafauna… “are animal species that are large—in the relevant category that they represent—with symbolic value or widespread popular appeal, and are often used by environmental activists to gain public support for environmentalist goals.” (Wikipedia) Whales are among the quintessential charismatic megafauna groups, having been hunted almost to extinction and only gaining international protection in the mid-twentieth century. Since then many species have flourished though a few are still threatened with extinction. Hence the massive amount of media attention generated by a single individual death, particularly when the dead or dying whale is accessible to tourists.

“Latest figures show that over 13 million people a year are taking a whale watch trip, in an industry spanning 120 countries and overseas territories worldwide, generating $2.1 billion in total revenues.” (Ulla Christina Ludewig and Vanessa Williams-Grey, Responsible Whale Watching, Whale and Dolphin Conservation, 2019 tinyurl.com/328zhcc9

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Humpback Whale Unusual Mortality Event (UME) Along the Atlantic Coast  

Since January 2016, elevated humpback whale mortalities have occurred along the Atlantic coast from Maine through Florida. A portion of the whales have shown evidence of pre-mortem vessel strike; however, this finding is not consistent across all whales examined. More research is needed. (from NJDEP 2016–2023 Humpback Whale Unusual Mortality Event, https://dep.nj.gov/humpback-whale-unusual-mortality-event/federal-resources/)

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“Republicans have claimed that the deaths are linked to offshore wind development. Amendments in the House energy bill would have required the Government Accountability Office to study the potential impacts of offshore wind on tourism, military activities, and marine wildlife. “Like the canary in the coal mine, the recent spate of tragic whale deaths shed new light and increased scrutiny to the fast-tracking of thousands of wind turbines off our coast,” said Representative Chris Smith, a Republican from New Jersey, at a hearing in March.

Instead, the agency states that “the greatest human threats to large whales” are vessel strikes and entanglement in fishing gear. Examinations of about half the humpback whales stranded since 2016 attributed 40 percent of the deaths to either of the two causes. (The other half of the beached whales were too decomposed to analyze.)

A few bigger trends could be behind the increase in whale mortality. One is climate change — warming waters have pulled small fish closer to shore, which also draws in whales hunting food. Fishers looking to catch those same fish tend to follow closely behind, leading to a greater risk of collision between boats and whales.

Another obvious source of whale and vessel strikes is the growing global shipping industry. In 2020, almost 15,000 ships sailed through the Port of New York and New Jersey alone. “Collisions involving ships and whales tend to occur around areas with the greatest commercial shipping traffic,” according to NOAA.

To reduce collision risk, the agency and major environmental groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council advocate for tighter restrictions on vessel speed. But Republicans’ proposed policies have made no mention of this evidence-based solution for protecting whales and other wildlife. In Grist, by Akielly Hu, Apr 20, 2023.” (https://tinyurl.com/2nvh6ncv).

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Beginning in December of last year and extending through most of the first quarter of 2023, New Jersey and New York beaches were inundated with abnormally high numbers of dead or dying whales and smaller marine mammals. These majestic creatures-though not so majestic when being pushed about willy-nilly by tides, wind, waves and various types of earth moving machines-have never expired in such large numbers in such publicly accessible locations in local residents’ memories. Perhaps coincidently, intensive hydroacoustic surveys to determine the suitability of potential sites for the construction of thousands of gigantic windmills and their supporting infrastructure (supposedly to help us all survive what is being sold as an imminent energy/climate crisis) were being committed offshore of the beaches where all of these marine mammal deaths and strandings have been concentrated.

To us inveterate observers of that hunk of Atlantic Ocean real estate known as the New York Bight, and the critters that temporarily or permanently live there, and of the actions of the public agencies charged with-and entitled to tens of millions of taxpayer dollars each year to do so-administering the Endangered Species and the Marine Mammal Protection Acts, that surely hints at, at best, ineptitude at that’s ineptitude at a fairly advanced level.

What is the “expert” consensus on what seems to us amateurs to be this surprising number of dying/dead marine mammals, species which are all supposedly protected by two rigorously and expensively enforced federal laws (often with corresponding legislation at the state level)? The U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Marine Fisheries Service (NOAA/NMFS) and the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Offshore Energy Management (BOEM) have emphatically told anyone who will listen three “Facts.” “Fact” #1” is that what is going on among the whales and dolphins in NY/NJ waters has been declared an Unusual Mortality Event (which has been bureaucratized, of course, as a UME (see the “official” definition of this current UME at the beginning of this FishNet piece). “Fact #2” is that none of those government personnel (scientists or bureaucrats) in NOAA/NMFS or BOAM know what caused the majority of the dead dolphins and whales to die (refer to the prior mention of “ineptitude” at the end of the previous paragraph), and (somewhat confusingly, having just written “Fact #2) “Fact #3” is that the dead dolphins and whales were not the victims of anything associated with President Biden’s and (NJ) Governor Murphy’s high profile commitments to filling our inshore and offshore waters with thousands of wind powered generators. And they are going to have this done in a time frame which many experts, experts who are familiar with huge, technically and environmentally complex and bank-breakingly expensive infrastructure projects, believe is impossible.

Note here that all of the involved federal employees, while they are sure that nothing to do with either Governor Murphy’s or President Biden’s dreams and aspirations regarding offshore wind power is involved with the marine mammal deaths, have admitted repeatedly and emphatically that they don’t know what is causing the UME (though they take every possible opportunity to suggest that it is connected to commercial shipping or commercial fishing in the Bight.

According to NOAA/NMFS, the federal agency that conducts marine research, “at this point, there is no evidence to support speculation that noise resulting from wind development-related site characterization surveys could potentially cause mortality of whales, and no specific links between recent large whale mortalities and currently ongoing surveys.” NOAA’s website says.

So, let’s consider the above three “facts;” that the causes of the almost simultaneous deaths of all these whales and dolphins is not known (real fact), that it is an unusual event (real fact) and that it emphatically has nothing to do with the offshore windmill site work, which has been ongoing for years, or with ongoing offshore windmill siting/sampling or construction, which has barely begun. Those of us who are reasonably familiar with the use-or the misuse-of the English language understand that if you don’t know what the cause of an event is, you can’t from that admitted lack of knowledge determine what the cause of the event isn’t. If all you know is that a car crashed, you can’t say that it definitely didn’t crash because of faulty brakes but it was because of some other yet to be determined factor. Nice try, but….

Then, perhaps coincidently, just when the number of Cetacean deaths/strandings were reaching a crescendo in the media, they stopped dead (yea, pun intended!). Now all the people involved in observing, studying, reporting (and perhaps causing, because we have no proof that they aren’t) these mortalities either work for or contract with New Jersey government, NOAA/NMFS/BOEM, hungry academicians, on the dole ENGOs, or the offshore wind industries (who in more than one instance are the dolees to the ENGOs doling (see Lisa Linowes’ guest column Wind energy or whales? NGO financial conflicts uncovered in The New Lede- 05/12/2022-at https://tinyurl.com/mryvsxk3).

If there are any sceptics among us (God forbid!) they might suspect that word somehow filtered down to the folks on deck, NOAA/NMFS/BOEM employees, wind energy employees, ENGO staff, academicians, etc. that it would be best for their paychecks, their careers, or perhaps their future employment if they ceased or modified those operations that they are still assuring us have no connection to the cetacean deaths/strandings, at least temporarily, at least until the public interest in all of these examples of dead/dying charismatic mega fauna wanes. Just in case, of course.

(I have just seen a post that a bloated, decomposed, smaller whale corpse was photographed just “South of Moriches” in NY waters. And a dying minke whale washed up on a beach in Maine on May 6 – tinyurl.com/4ne5ed4v. It seems more and more like we have an event that started out as a UME has now graduated to a “Just Another Mortality Event-how about JAME for all you acronym fans?)

I have been assured by various folks that the whales/dolphins have not disappeared from the NY Bight. They are still out there. So are the fishermen, and they are still fishing. How about the other vessels that have made NY/NJ the busiest commercial port in the U.S.? Has there been a really significant reduction in shipping into and out of the ports of New York/New Jersey coincident with the surprising cessation of whale/dolphin deaths? When I asked Jeff Bezos, he assured me it wasn’t him (that’s a joke, his line was busy). It seems like the BOEM/NOAA/NMFS list of likely suspects seem to have been eliminated from the list of probable UME (JAME?) causes.

So what probable cause hasn’t been eliminated as a factor in the surprising, and surprisingly coincidental, dearth of recent deaths?

What do President Biden’s and Governor Murphy’s joint (and very public) commitments mean to the state (of New Jersey) and the federal bureaucracies that they control? You don’t have to be an expert in bureaucratic behavior to understand that it’s going to be the extremely rare and/or naïve government bureaucrat (and very possibly soon to be unemployed) in Trenton, NJ or Washington, DC who is going to do or say anything that will slow down their respective bosses’ wishes, dreams, or aspirations to turn our coastal waters into industrial sites, no matter how unrealistic (or in reality how economically or environmentally damaging) they might actually be. That’s definitely not the way to move up the bureaucratic ladder or to secure a civil service pension.

So, as Detective Frank Drebin (Leslie Nielsen) sort of immortalized in the film The Naked Gun, “nothing to see here!” In interview after interview, in article after article, in every instance imaginable, of civil servants, reporters, experts, researchers, environmentalists, grad students, butchers, bakers and candle stick makers (well maybe not the last three!) were-intentionally or not-riffing on Detective Drebin. And just about every one of them said no one knows what’s causing these coincident whale/dolphin deaths/strandings but we’re sure it’s not offshore wind development! And it’s not really abnormal!

(And, considering that rate- and tax-payers will be so terminally invested in windmills, how long will it be before we will be able to dig our way out of what increasingly looks like it’s going to be a mountain of dept?)

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From the NOAA/NMFS Incidental Take Authorizations Under the Marine Mammal Protection Act

The NOAA Fisheries Office of Protected Resources authorizes the incidental take of marine mammals under the MMPA to U.S. citizens and U.S.-based entities, if we find that the taking would:

• Be of small numbers;
• Have no more than a “negligible impact” on those mammal species or stocks; and
• Not have an “unmitigable adverse impact” on the availability of the species or stock for subsistence uses.

Further, we must prescribe the permissible methods of taking and other means of effecting the least practicable adverse impact on the affected species or stocks and their habitat (i.e., mitigation), paying particular attention to rookeries, mating grounds, and areas of similar significance, and on the availability of such species or stocks for taking for certain subsistence uses; and requirements pertaining to the monitoring and reporting of such takings. (https://tinyurl.com/2yt8k2zt)

On another question definitely not addressed by NOAA/NMFS regarding impacts on marine mammals; what does a cetacean do when it is “only” adversely impacted, not unmitigatedly adversely impacted? Move to another neighborhood? Take an Advil (or a lot of Advil)? Curse at his or her respective mate? Scream at the kids? Pout? Us taxpaying citizens could actually get fined or jailed for harassing marine mammals (see https://tinyurl.com/hbnv9a69 for one of the latest “cases”). What’s the difference between swimming after a dolphin pod in an apparent game of touristy tag and buggering up a bunch of dolphins’ hearing (even if only temporarily, but that’s kind of hard to prove). Just like it’s kind of hard to prove that any “adverse impacts” aren’t eventually directly or indirectly injurious or mortal.

And finally, on the politicalization of this whale/dolphin UME.

Absolutely no proof exists, no evidence, no data, no documentation, not even inside tipoffs or traces, nothing at all to suggest offshore wind turbines and their development in the Atlantic Ocean is the cause of these whale/dolphin deaths. But, the coincidence of the arrival of a fleet of site survey vessels with a reportedly unprecedented increase in the number of observable whale/dolphin deaths-and don’t forget that nowhere near 100% of the dead whales/dolphins are going to end up being observed-is impossible to ignore. A bunch of us want to know why, and if any of us are being encouraged to “lobby” on this issue by the fossil fuel industry, which is a contention of the pro-wind claque-they are keeping a CIA worthy low profile.

Why is the whole issue being turned by the wind power lobbyists, a large chunk of the greenish world and a whole bunch of non-objective individuals and organizations (in “Deep Throat’s” immortal words, “follow the money”) into a us vs. them (or red vs. blue or donkeys vs. mules or progressive vs. conservative or whatever else) political contest. Something is killing whales and dolphins and who knows what else in our oceans. Considering what’s potentially at risk, we can’t afford to not find out what it is. (For some in-your-face shear internet rabble-rousing, read Stop Lying About Whale Deaths by J. Renyolds, Prez of Save Coastal Wildlife-tinyurl.com/2s3v9n3r. Evidently Mr. Renyolds’ solution for saving whales and dolphins-and whatever else out there that is or might be at risk-is to push for dissension rather than for progress. Confoundingly he ends his above linked screed with “If you wish to save whales along the Jersey Shore then we need to work together, not separately.” Words to live by, Mr. Renolds? Seems like in his opinion his are the only words that should count (shades of Frank Drebin!

And finally-at least for now-there is a select group of animals that have been placed in a non-taxonomic group of critters called “charismatic megafauna. This means a really popular (for all of the right reasons) big animal. Whales are among the few ocean-inhabiting critters that are considered to be members of this select group, along with lions and tigers and polar bears and koalas and etc. So an organization with the goal of halting wind industry expansion until we know what its impacts ae going to be on our coastal waters and the animals that live in them has started a petition on Change.org..

 The petition starts “we the signers of this petition hereby call for the immediate halting of all offshore wind activity currently being progressed (undertaken) along the New Jersey shore. We call on both the Federal Government and the State of New Jersey to ensure a thorough independent, transparent investigation of these 7 (as of this writing) whale deaths. We ask these investigations be carried out by federal agencies with independent, third party scientific oversight.”

The petition has garnered over half a million signatures (the URL is https://www.change.org/p/protect-our-coast-nj-save-the-whales-stop-offshore-wind) already. These people, or unquestionably a large majority of them, are most certainly not being either controlled or influenced by the fossil fuel boogeyman in spite of what J. Renolds and his wind energy cheering squad want you to think.

The only thing that’s going to change with a year or two delay to acquire at least an idea of what the possible environmental (and economic) impacts of 3,500 windmills off our coast is going to be, is the economic performance of a number of what I gather are highly subsidized (by guess who?) foreign and domestic mega corporations. Oh well! Perhaps they should have thought of those whales and dolphins just a bit sooner.

Another Humpback Whale washed ashore on a New Jersey beach on March 1 st , the 12th known Whale to die since the start of December, along the New York, New Jersey shoreline, coincident with multiple research vessels using active Sonar, seismic Pingers, and Ultra High Resolution Seismic sparkers. These are different types of equipment used to map the seafloor by Wind and oil companies, which emit loud sound pulses over 200 dBs continuously around the clock, that can travel hundreds of miles underwater.

While the damage caused by Naval high powered active sonar, both mid and low frequency, is documented and admitted by the US Navy, the use of lower powered active sonar [both low and mid frequency] has not yet been linked to marine mammal strandings. Of course the US government has not funded any research into this issue, so that they can claim no evidence of a link between strandings and the use of this lower powered active sonar. Active Navy sonar operates at a level of 230 to 240 dBs one meter from its sound source and any unfortunate animal to be within 50 feet of operating Navy sonar will die a horrible death as its internal organs turn to mush by the powerful sound waves. The lower power sonar used by the research vessels creates sounds in the low 200 dBs range, which while not powerful enough to kill immediately, may kill indirectly due to its constant 24 hour a day usage, by a number of different boats within the New York Bight area. The government’s claim that there is no evidence that the research vessels noise-making sonar, or seismic sparkers are linked in any way to the recent Whale strandings, is being put to the test with each Whale death.

As more research vessels ply our waters, more dead Whales wash up on the beach. This is just the start of the gigantic ecosystem changing industrialization of the US continental shelf from the Gulf of Maine to Florida. The Biden administration’s stated goal of 30 gigawatts [GW] of offshore wind power by 2030 means that there will be over 3,400 individual wind turbines permanently occupying over 2,400,000 acres of ocean bottom. Once operational, they will form an imposing gauntlet of noise,  vibrations, and electro-magnetic fields that marine mammals, turtles, fish, and birds will have to migrate through. This is especially critical in the area east of Rhode Island to south of Nantucket where the lease areas stretch from shoal waters to far offshore and has been designated as critical habitat for the endangered Northern Right Whale. If they want to avoid the noise of an operating wind farm they will have to swim in the inshore shipping lanes, where they suffer their most fatalities, or farther offshore
where food sources may be scarcer or even non-existent while having to navigate through the maze of offshore lobster and crab buoy’s.

In a recent Coast Guard notice to mariners for two CG districts in the New York bight it was announced; “TerraSond will be conducting geophysical survey activities within the Bluepoint Wind lease area [OCS-A 0537], 38 nautical miles [nm] off the coast of New York and 53 miles off the coast of New Jersey, from March 1 through September 30, 2023, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Equipment on scene will be the GO Adventurer survey vessel, utilizing sidescan sonar, multibeam bathymetry echo sounder, cesium vapor magnetometer, parametric sub-bottom profiler, and ultrashort base line acoustic transceiver.”

There are dozens of these vessels and their support ships presently operating off the east coast all using high powered sonar and seismic equipment. The use of the dreaded seismic air guns has been replaced by the kindler, gentler Sparkers and pingers, which generate seismic sound by an electrical
charge as opposed to the air gun’s compressed air discharge. While the air gun arrays create noise at the 240 to 250 dBs level at the source, the sparkers noise is lower, operating in the 200 to 210 dBs range. Used in low frequency’s this sound can travel hundreds of miles in a spreading pattern which loses strength the farther from the source it travels. Since there are presently anywhere from 3 to 6 research vessels presently using either sonar or seismic equipment from Cape May to Nantucket Island it stands to reason that the complete continental shelf of the Mid Atlantic/Southern New England region is blanketed with some level of sonar or seismic noise. With other research vessels working from South Carolina, north into the Gulf of Maine the whole east coast is being blanketed by more underwater noise than ever before, all along the migratory paths of multiple endangered species.

Since marine mammals rely on hearing to feed, navigate, avoid prey, and mate, the intrusion of so much man made noise in such a short period of time is bound to be physically harmful to these sound sensitive animals. [read “Impacts of Navy sonar on Whales and dolphins : Now beyond a smoking gun? E.C. Parsons”] If a Whale is in an area where seismic or sonar is being used it will affect his ability to hear and communicate, and likely trigger a flight response, expending valuable fat reserves while doing so. An analogy; you and a friend go out to diner at a local restaurant that seats fifty people. There are six other people in the room at different tables and you and your friend can have a pleasant conversation. But as more people are seated the background noise starts getting louder, and you find yourself having to repeat statements because your friend can’t hear them. When the room is full, you can no longer hear each other from the accumulated amount of noise echoing from wall to wall. After sufficient noise
harassment, you ask for the check and leave. Whales don’t really have a way to leave their annual migratory path, its ingrained in them, and even small changes in a Whales migratory path can expend so much energy that it causes the animal physiological harm.

We now have 23 dead Whales on the east coast within a three month period, and despite what government officials claim, it is not a normal amount. A number of those deaths coincided with the operations of the RV Fugro Enterprise, which has multiple different sonar’s, and also features a GeoAcoustics 5430/5210 Sub Bottom Profiler, also known as a seismic pinger. The timing of strandings with the Fugro Enterprise operations has been documented by use of the AIS vessel tracking system. Presently geophysical surveying has been finished or is ongoing in about one third of the leased wind sites on the east coast.

When surveys in one area are completed, the research vessels move on to a different lease site, as the demand for these specialized vessels is presently intense. In their place come the construction crews, vessels, barges, jacking platform, ships, etc. all preparing for the loudest assault on the
environment, the pile-driving part, where a 150 to 200 ton hydraulic “hammer” is dropped onto the anchor pile, driving it repeatedly further into the seabed with each timed 250 dBs loud drop. One of the loudest man-made underwater sounds there is. Not to worry though, that sound will be mitigated, by a “Bubble curtain” which will trap the sound and reduce any harm to nearby animals, so say the bureaucrats who also claim no connection of sonar to the strandings. Regarding underwater sound mitigation techniques, quoting from, [Parsons et al, 2009] “It may be a long time before technology and methods are easily available to answer the many still unanswered questions about the exact nature and degree of the impacts of sound on cetaceans, especially when we know that many of the mitigation measures in place for protecting cetaceans against the impacts of sound are untested “best guesses” or indeed, are known to be ineffectual.”

While the pile driving is going on, the sea bed will be carved into trenches so they can bury 6,800 miles of undersea high voltage cables which connect the turbines to the substations and then to shore, utilizing a whole other type of construction vessel and further increasing vessel traffic. Eventually some of the turbines will start working introducing a new sound, plus the vibrations of the turbine itself into the marine environment. Electro- magnetic fields will be created around the turbines, substations, and the buried cables under the seabed which will affect benthic animal movements and migrations. This will go on for decades. The slaughter has just begun.

Has everyone conveniently forgotten the precautionary principle?

Seemingly all of the self-professed significant actors (both personal and organizational) with self-professed interest and expertise in how potential threats to the oceans and the critters in them should be handled has been synopsized for us rather conveniently-in the Antarctic Ocean Alliance Briefing #2: Applying the Precautionary Principle to Marine Reserves and Marine Protected Areas.*

Borrowing from said briefing, we have:

The foundation of the precautionary principle

The precautionary principle has deep roots finding expression in sayings such as ‘an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure’ or ‘better safe than sorry’. As the need to address environmental issues was increasingly recognized in the late 20th century, the precautionary principle became more widely used in national and international legislative contexts.

The precautionary principle was enshrined in International Law through Principle 15 of the Rio Declaration, 1992. The concept is now central to law making on a large range of issues, including climate change, toxic chemicals and genetically modified organisms (GMOs), forests, wildlife protection and oceans.

The use of the precautionary principle in ecosystem management is especially important in the case of the marine environment where scientific uncertainties abound. Repeated failures of management highlighted by the collapse of northern cod off Canada, the California sardine fishery, and herring, sandeels, blue whiting and capelin stocks in the North Sea have demonstrated the need for this approach in order to help address scientific uncertainty.

With the precautionary principle as a foundation many international agreements and bodies have sought to apply a precautionary approach specific to their particular challenges. In its essence the precautionary principle re-quires taking action in the form of protective conservation and management actions to reduce the risk of serious and/or irreversible harm from an activity before negative consequences become apparent. The establishment of MRs and MPAs is thus a precautionary act.

Precaution in regional fisheries management organizations (RFMOs):

 Many international institutions and RFMOs have endorsed the use of the precautionary principle and precautionary approach in conserving marine ecosystems and protecting biodiversity.10 For example, the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD)’s Conference of the Parties (COP) links the precautionary principle to the development of MPAs, noting that the COP “has a key role in supporting the work of the [UN] General Assembly with regard to marine protected areas beyond national jurisdiction, by focusing on provision of scientific and as appropriate, technical information and advice relating to marine biological diversity, the application of the ecosystem approach and the precautionary approach.”11 MRs and MPAs are thus increasingly recognized as an important application of the precautionary principle in the marine environment. Improving traditional fisheries management, data and modelling cannot always ensure the long-term sustainability of marine life.

Scientists note that “MPAs can serve to hedge against inevitable uncertainties, errors and biases in fisheries management. Marine Protected Areas (or as we have called them, simply, protected reserves) may well be the simplest and best approach to implementing the precautionary principle.”

The Antarctic Ocean Alliance is a coalition of more than 30 leading environmental organizations and high-profile individuals working together to achieve large-scale protection for key Antarctic ocean ecosystems.

Alliance members include the Pew Environment Group, Greenpeace, WWF, the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition (ASOC), Whale and Dolphin Conservation (WDC), Humane Society International, Mission Blue (US), International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), Oceans 5 (US), Deep Wave (Germany), The Last Ocean, Green-ovation Hub (China), the Korean Federation for Environmental Movement (KFEM), Forest & Bird (NZ), ECO (NZ) and associate partners the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), Oceana, TerraMar Project, the In-ternational Polar Foundation (UK), Plant a Fish, the International Programme on the State of the Oceans (IPSO), the Ocean Project, Bloom Association (France), OceanCare (Switzerland), Eco-Sys Action, Ocean Planet (Aus-tralia) and Corail Vivant (New Caledonia). AOA Ambassadors include actors Leonardo DiCaprio, Edward Nor-ton, Oceanographer Dr. Sylvia Earle, entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson, Chinese entrepreneur and explorer Wang Jing and Korean actor Yoo Ji-Tae.(https://www.asoc.org/storage/documents/resources/aoa-briefing-2-applying-precautionary-approach.pdf, undated.)

All of the above enumerated anti-fishing activists and their organizations (and then some) have been using their so-called precautionary principle as a reason to oppose just about any fishing industry originated or accepted proposal or management proposal for any action which might actually result in helping fishermen and fishing because the radical environmental “rightness” of any outcome can’t be assured.

Yet, when it comes to protecting huge swaths of ocean-and huge numbers of the critters in them or dependent on them-from a seemingly endless list of actual or potential threats brought about by envisioned unprecedented offshore developments, these same self-styled activists/ocean saviors have all conveniently forgotten that anything vaguely similar to their revered precautionary principle has ever existed or should be applied to anything but fishing.

Clog our near shore and offshore waters with hulking (approaching 1,000 feet tall today, who knows what’s in store for tomorrow?) structures supporting huge rotors with tips moving through the air at velocities approaching 200 miles per hour? So what? Festoon our seabeds with electrical cables carrying huge amounts of electricity, the passage of which will generate electro-magnetic fields that will almost certainly have some effect on some of the species of critters that will be influenced at some level by those fields daily, monthly or annually? Who cares? Influence wave/current/tidal scouring and associated turbidity in undetermined-and very likely undeterminable-ways on the fish, marine mammals, birds, phyto- and zooplankton, and other sea life? What’s the difference?

And what of undersea server farms (see David Myers’ Microsoft hails success of its undersea data center experiment—and says it could have implications on dry land, too in the 9/15/2020 issue of Fortune magazine at https://fortune.com/2020/09/15/microsoft-project-natick-undersea-datacenter-scotland/), tidal generators (see Jake Dean’s The Scots Are Unlocking the Ocean’s Energy Potential posted to Slate’s website last month at https://slate.com/technology/2021/06/orbital-marine-power-scotland-ocean-energy.html), and telecom cables (see Adam Satariano’s People think that data is in the cloud, but it’s not. It’s in the ocean in the 03/10/2018 NY Times at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/03/10/technology/internet-cables-oceans.html)?

In addition (though it doesn’t generate electro-magnetic fields), we certainly shouldn’t ignore the biological and oceanographic impacts of seafloor mining (see Olive Heffernan’s  Seabed mining is coming — bringing mineral riches and fears of epic extinctions in the 7/24/2019 issue of Nature at https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02242-y ).

All of these (and very probably other) activities come with potentially huge though for the most part unidentified downsides, but it’s very doubtful that the well-entrenched and well-funded activists and organizations that are so anxious to employ the precautionary principle to protect the Antarctic and other oceans from fishing will most probably be “out to lunch” when it comes to those considerations.

If (as?) it becomes apparent that that is the case, the major question is going to be why? With potential negative im-pacts that might easily prove to be worse than even poorly regulated fishing could ever be, energy-, telecom- or mining-developments, are the members of the fishing industry going to be capable of surviving with what’s just around the corner? Back in the 70s the fishing industry worked with other (primarily environmental?) interests to regain control of the fisheries resources of what was to become our Exclusive Economic Zone. Is that possible now?

Of course the answer is yes, but is it likely? It’s definitely not happening with wind power today. Evidently, according to the enviro-orgs that have never failed to invoke the precautionary principle when it comes to reducing restrictions on fishing, wind farm developers are on the side of the angels. The enviro orgs are apparently of the mind that windfarms and other proposed ocean uses-and misuses- are incapable of significantly harming the onshore, inshore or offshore en-vironment.

For an idea of where the anti-fishing activists might be going with this, take a look at A new home for fish: how offshore wind turbines create artificial reefs by Nicole DiPaolo in the National Wildlife Federation blog from 09/26/2019 (https://blog.nwf.org/2019/09/a-new-home-for-fish-how-offshore-wind-turbines-create-artificial-reefs/). This is the argument that got recreational fishing groups firmly behind the Gulf of Mexico oil industry before the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe. Since that catastrophe, perhaps not so much.

But with the antifishing activists the beat is going on. Enric Sala, former Pew (Trusts) Fellow in Marine Conservation who is presently National Geographic’s Explorer in Residence and a dozen or so of his cronies-including ex-NOAA head Jane Lubchenco, who should long be remembered for her controversial use of the dispersant Corexit in the Gulf oil fiasco) published Protecting the global ocean for biodiversity, food and climate (in the March 17 issue of Nature).

In essence Sala and his coauthors argue that one of the solutions for the imminent climate crisis is the coordinated establishment of fully protected (that is, protected from commercial fishing, of course!) marine reserves.

According to a review of the article in the March 17 issue of The Guardian (McVeigh, Karen/Bottom trawling releases as much carbon as air travel, landmark study finds), “the analysis shows that the world must protect a minimum of 30% of the ocean in order to provide multiple benefits. The scientists say their results lend credence to the ambition of protecting at least 30% of the ocean by 2030, which is part of the target adopted by a coalition of 50 countries this year to slow the destruction of the natural world.” According to the authors, bottom trawling releases roughly as much CO2 to the earth’s atmosphere each year as does global aviation. And (coincidently, because it’s right in line with the anti-fishing activists’ unrealistic and unnecessary “dream” of protecting 30% of the world’s oceans from fishermen) this could be reduced by establishing a corresponding network of marine protected (from fishing, not anything else) areas.

So evidently, in the view of a handful of marine scientists, most (we’ve been here before.See my February 2003 FishNet article The Pew Commission – a basis for national ocean policy? at https://www.fishingnj.org/netusa23.htm.) with direct or indirect connections to the Pew Charitable Trusts and all with the media influence that those connections afford them and who are willing to ignore actual and potential activities with massive negative impacts on our inshore and offshore ocean environments, this is one of the top priorities. They are still maintaining their campaign to continue persecuting commercial fishing and commercial fishermen needlessly.* And all of this in spite of their oft professed-though not so much lately-adherence to the precautionary principle and their blatant disregard of other stressors.

Their tunnel vision and short-sightedness seem staggering.

*In a response to Sala et al (above), Jan Geert Hiddink, S. van de Velde, R.A. McConnaughey, E. de Borger, F.G. O’Neill, J. Tiano, M.J. Kaiser, A. Sweetman and M. Sciberras wrote “Sala, et al. suggest that seafloor disturbance by industrial trawlers and dredgers results in 0.58 to 1.47 Pg of aqueous CO 2 emissions annually, owing to increased organic carbon (OC) remineralization in sediments after trawling. We agree that bottom trawling disrupts natural carbon flows in seabed ecosystems due to sediment mixing, resuspension and changes in the bio-logical community and that it is important to estimate the magnitude of this effect. We disagree however that their assessment represents a ‘best estimate’. Firstly, the assumption that OC in undisturbed sediment is inert and is remineralised only after disturbance by trawling is at odds with decades of geochemical research on natural processing of OC in marine sediments 2 . Secondly, the volume of sediment where carbon is mineralised after trawling is greatly overestimated. Thirdly, secondary effects, such as the removal of bioturbating benthic fauna and sedimentary nutrient release, which could lead to the preservation and production of OC in sediments, are ignored. Together these issues result in an upward bias in the estimated CO 2 emissions by one or more orders of magnitude.”   

Nils E. Stolpe/FishNet USA. © 2021 Nils E. Stolpe, July 31, 2021

Seemingly all of the self-professed significant actors (both personal and organizational) with self-professed interest and expertise in how potential threats to the oceans and the critters in them should be handled has been synopsized for us rather conveniently-and very obviously and (suspiciously?) conveniently-in the Antarctic Ocean Alliance Briefing #2: Applying the Precautionary Principle to Marine Reserves and Marine Protected Areas.* Borrowing from said briefing, we have:

The foundation of the precautionary principle

The precautionary principle has deep roots finding expression in sayings such as ‘an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure’ or ‘better safe than sorry’. As the need to address environmental issues was increasingly recognized in the late 20th century, the precautionary principle became more widely used in national and international legislative contexts.

The precautionary principle was enshrined in International Law through Principle 15 of the Rio Declaration, 1992. The concept is now central to law making on a large range of issues, including climate change, toxic chemicals and genetically modified organisms (GMOs), forests, wildlife protection and oceans.

The use of the precautionary principle in ecosystem management is especially important in the case of the marine environment where scientific uncertainties abound. Repeated failures of management highlighted by the collapse of northern cod off Canada, the California sardine fishery, and herring, sandeels, blue whiting and capelin stocks in the North Sea have demonstrated the need for this approach in order to help address scientific uncertainty.

With the precautionary principle as a foundation many international agreements and bodies have sought to apply a precautionary approach specific to their particular challenges. In its essence the precautionary principle requires taking action in the form of protective conservation and management actions to reduce the risk of serious and/or irreversible harm from an activity before negative consequences become apparent. The establishment of MRs and MPAs is thus a precautionary act.

Precaution in regional fisheries management organizations (RFMOs):

Many international institutions and RFMOs have endorsed the use of the precautionary principle and precautionary approach in conserving marine ecosystems and protecting biodiversity.10 For example, the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD)’s Conference of the Parties (COP) links the precautionary principle to the development of MPAs, noting that the COP “has a key role in supporting the work of the [UN] General Assembly with regard to marine protected areas beyond national jurisdiction, by focusing on provision of scientific and as appropriate, technical information and advice relating to marine biological diversity, the application of the ecosystem approach and the precautionary approach.”11 MRs and MPAs are thus increasingly recognized as an important application of the precautionary principle in the marine environment. Improving traditional fisheries management, data and modelling cannot always ensure the long-term sustainability of marine life.

Scientists note that “MPAs can serve to hedge against inevitable uncertainties, errors and biases in fisheries management. Marine Protected Areas (or as we have called them, simply, protected reserves) may well be the simplest and best approach to implementing the precautionary principle.”

The Antarctic Ocean Alliance is a coalition of more than 30 leading environmental organizations and high-profile individuals working together to achieve large-scale protection for key Antarctic ocean ecosystems.

Alliance members include the Pew Environment Group, Greenpeace, WWF, the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition (ASOC), Whale and Dolphin Conservation (WDC), Humane Society International, Mission Blue (US), International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), Oceans 5 (US), Deep Wave (Germany), The Last Ocean, Greenovation Hub (China), the Korean Federation for Environmental Movement (KFEM), Forest & Bird (NZ), ECO (NZ) and associate partners the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), Oceana, TerraMar Project, the International Polar Foundation (UK), Plant a Fish, the International Programme on the State of the Oceans (IPSO), the Ocean Project, Bloom Association (France), OceanCare (Switzerland), Eco-Sys Action, Ocean Planet (Australia) and Corail Vivant (New Caledonia). AOA Ambassadors include actors Leonardo DiCaprio, Edward Norton, Oceanographer Dr. Sylvia Earle, entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson, Chinese entrepreneur and explorer Wang Jing and Korean actor Yoo Ji-Tae.(https://www.asoc.org/storage/documents/resources/aoa-briefing-2-applying-precautionary-approach.pdf , undated.)

All of the above enumerated anti-fishing activists and organizations (and then some) have been using their so-called precautionary principle as a reason to oppose just about any industry originated or accepted proposal for any action which might actually result in helping fishermen and fishing because the outcome can’t be assured.

Yet when it comes to protecting huge swaths of ocean-and huge numbers of the critters in them or dependent on them-from a seemingly endless list of actual or potential threats brought about by envisioned unprecedented offshore developments these same self-styled activists/ocean saviors have all conveniently forgotten that anything vaguely similar to their revered precautionary principle has ever existed.

Clog our near shore and offshore waters with hulking (approaching 1,000 feet tall today, who knows what’s in store for tomorrow?) structures supporting huge rotors with tips moving through the air at velocities approaching 200 miles per hour? So what? Festoon our sea beds with electrical cables carrying huge amounts of electricity, the passage of which will generate electro-magnetic fields that will almost certainly have some effect on some of the species of critters that will be influenced at some level by those fields daily, monthly or annually? So what? Influence wave/current/tidal scouring and associated turbidity in undetermined-and very likely undeterminable-ways on the fish, marine mammals, birds and other sea life? So what?

And what of undersea server farms (see David Myers’ Microsoft hails success of its undersea data center experiment—and says it could have implications on dry land, too in the 9/15/2020 issue of Fortune magazine at https://fortune.com/2020/09/15/microsoft-project-natick-undersea-datacenter-scotland/), tidal generators (see Jake Dean’s The Scots Are Unlocking the Ocean’s Energy Potential posted to Slate’s website last month at https://slate.com/technology/2021/06/orbital-marine-power-scotland-ocean-energy.html), and telecom cables (see Adam Satariano’s People think that data is in the cloud, but it’s not. It’s in the ocean in the 03/10/2018 NY Times at  https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/03/10/technology/internet-cables-oceans.html)?

In addition (though it doesn’t generate electro-magnetic fields), we certainly shouldn’t ignore the biological and oceanographic impacts of seafloor mining (see Olive Heffernan’s  Seabed mining is coming — bringing mineral riches and fears of epic extinctions in the 07/24/2019 issue of Nature at https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02242-y).

All of these (and very probably other) activities come with potentially huge though for the most part unidentified downsides, but it’s very doubtful that the well-entrenched and well-funded activists and organizations that are so anxious to employ the precautionary principle to protect the Antarctic and other oceans from fishing will most probably be “out to lunch” when it comes to those considerations.

If (as?) it becomes apparent that that is the case, the major question is going to be why? With potential negative impacts that might easily prove to be worse than even poorly regulated fishing could ever be, energy-, telecom- or mining-developments, are the members of the fishing industry going to be capable of surviving with what’s just around the corner? Back in the 70s the fishing industry worked with other (primarily environmental?) interests to regain control of the fisheries resources of what was to become our Exclusive Economic Zone. Is that possible now?

Of course the answer is yes, but is it likely? It’s definitely not happening with wind power today. Evidently, according to the enviro-orgs that have never failed to invoke the precautionary principle when it comes to reducing restrictions on fishing, wind farm developers are on the side of the angels. The enviro orgs are apparently of the mind that windfarms and other proposed ocean uses-and misuses- are incapable of significantly harming the onshore, inshore or offshore environment.

For an idea of where the anti-fishing activists might be going with this, take a look at A new home for fish: how offshore wind turbines create artificial reefs by Nicole DiPaolo in the National Wildlife Federation blog from 09/26/2019 (https://blog.nwf.org/2019/09/a-new-home-for-fish-how-offshore-wind-turbines-create-artificial-reefs/). This is the argument that got recreational fishing groups firmly behind the Gulf of Mexico oil industry before the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe. Since that catastrophe, perhaps not so much.

But with the anti-fishing activists the beat is going on. Enric Sala, former Pew (Trusts) Fellow in Marine Conservation who is presently National Geographic’s Explorer in Residence and a dozen or so of his cronies-including ex-NOAA head Jane Lubchenco who should be remembered for her controversial use of the dispersant Corexit in the Gulf oil fiasco) published Protecting the global ocean for biodiversity, food and climate (in the March 17 issue of Nature).

In essence Sala and his coauthors argue that one of the solutions for the imminent climate crisis is the coordinated establishment of fully protected (that is, protected from commercial fishing, of course!) marine reserves.

According to a review of the article in the March 17 issue of The Guardian (McVeigh, Karen/Bottom trawling releases as much carbon as air travel, landmark study finds), “the analysis shows that the world must protect a minimum of 30% of the ocean in order to provide multiple benefits. The scientists say their results lend credence to the ambition of protecting at least 30% of the ocean by 2030, which is part of the target adopted by a coalition of 50 countries this year to slow the destruction of the natural world.” According to the authors, bottom trawling releases roughly as much CO2 to the earth’s atmosphere each year as does Global Aviation. And (coincidently, because it’s right in line with the anti-fishing activists’ unrealistic and unnecessary “dream” of protecting 30% of the world’s oceans from fishermen) this could be reduced by establishing a corresponding network of marine protected (from fishing, not anything else) areas.

 So evidently, in the view of a handful of marine scientists, most with direct or indirect connections to the Pew Charitable Trusts and all with the media influence that those connections afford them and who are willing to ignore actual and potential activities with massive negative impacts on our inshore and offshore ocean environments, this is one of the top priorities. They are still maintaining their campaign to continue persecuting commercial fishing and commercial fishermen needlessly.* And all of this in spite of their oft professed-though not so much lately-adherence to the precautionary principle and their blatant disregard of other stressors.

Their tunnel vision and short-sightedness seem staggering.

————————————————-

*In a response to Sala et al (above), Jan Geert Hiddink, S. van de Velde, R.A. McConnaughey, E. de Borger, F.G. O’Neill, J. Tiano, M.J. Kaiser, A. Sweetman and M. Sciberras wrote “Sala, et al. suggest that seafloor disturbance by industrial trawlers and dredgers results in 0.58 to 1.47 Pg of aqueous CO 2 emissions annually, owing to increased organic carbon (OC) remineralization in sediments after trawling. We agree that bottom trawling disrupts natural carbon flows in seabed ecosystems due to sediment mixing, resuspension and changes in the biological community and that it is important to estimate the magnitude of this effect. We disagree however that their assessment represents a ‘best estimate’. Firstly, the assumption that OC in undisturbed sediment is inert and is remineralised only after disturbance by trawling is at odds with decades of geochemical research on natural processing of OC in marine sediments 2 . Secondly, the volume of sediment where carbon is mineralised after trawling is greatly overestimated. Thirdly, secondary effects, such as the removal of bioturbating benthic fauna and sedimentary nutrient release, which could lead to the preservation and production of OC in sediments, are ignored. Together these issues result in an upward bias in the estimated CO 2 emissions by one or more orders of magnitude.”

8/7/20,  Mr. Oliver. Recently you sent out an announcement about the resumption of Observer coverage set to begin on August 14th in fisheries where coverage had been suspended due to the Corona virus outbreak for the last 5 months. Personally I find your reasons for the resumption of observer coverage to be not only reckless, but dangerous to the health and safety of the American fishermen who make their living from the sea.

On a national level the Corona virus has now embarked on a second wave of infections that may be more dangerous than the first wave. Additionally, new research only raises more questions about its spread, while States that have lifted restrictions have re-imposed them, and those that didn’t have restrictions are now facing massive infection rates, resulting in more closures.

Yet you, in your infinite bureaucratic knowledge of what is right and what is wrong, think that at this time it is vitally important that observers be placed on fishing vessels where they can endanger the health of not only the crewmen but their families.

Interestingly, you have not put your own employees at risk. You have cancelled trawl survey’s for the remainder of this year so as not to risk their exposure to this lethal disease. This despite the fact that the NOAA trawl survey vessels are state of the art, and their crew could actually be quarantined before a trip to assure their safety. I’m sure they would be happy to collect two weeks of pay for sitting around watching TV somewhere.

You justify your decision on the fact that the observers will abide by whatever standards the fishing industry abides by. HELLO, Mr. Oliver, the fishing industry on the east coast is a bunch of family owned small boat operators who don’t have any such thing as standards, except that they know their crew, and trust them to behave responsibly. Or else we CAN them. That’s where you actually fire someone, because they are not doing their job, or are endangering the rest of the crew. Being a lifelong bureaucrat I’m sure you’re not familiar with that concept.

So my question is; why is a government employee, who actually produces nothing except politically motivated job destroying regulations, more valuable than a fisherman who actually produces something of value? I’d love to see you try to do this to a farmer. You’d be on the unemployment line in short order. The fishing industry on the other hand is just a disorganized bunch of freeloaders raping the ocean for profit. There’s nothing noble about feeding people if the energy industry is involved.

Hence you are willing to risk the lives of thousands of fishermen and their families so that the observer providers can remain solvent. It’s well known within the industry how a certain former regional administrator pushed for observer’s in all fisheries while serving in his official capacity, and then when he left that position created his own observer company to profiteer off of his previous work. One of his main supporters during that time was the PEW charitable trusts, hence the energy connection, and their subsequent villainization of the fishing industry.

So answer me, is a government employee’s life more valuable than a fisherman’s? Because that is exactly how your mandate comes across to everyone in the fishing industry. The spring and fall annual survey’s by the NEFSC are the backbone of the science used to estimate population dynamics of every stock on the east coast, yet you simply blow them off so as not to endanger government employees, but you are more then willing to risk the lives of fishermen for data that is totally redundant, and has minimal effect on stock assessments. Observers have been onboard fishing vessels on the east coast since the 1980’s, day after day, same boats, same tows, same catch, but somehow this is vitally important information worth risking lives for.

There is nothing vital about it except that it is typical bureaucratic empire building, your science sucks, so you need more information, except that even with more information your science still sucks. President Trump put forth an edict for all government agency’s to reduce the regulatory burden on our country’s industries two years ago. Perhaps you at NOAA didn’t see that memo. Placing observers onboard fishing vessels in the middle of a pandemic the likes of which has not been seen in our lifetimes is not reducing regulations on industry. It is endangering industry. Unless you want to be looked at like Governor’s Cuomo, and Murphy who thought it was a good idea to put Covid sick people into nursing homes, with the easily predictable genocide that caused, I suggest you cancel all observer coverage before you and the observer providers predictably end up being sued for manslaughter.

In the meantime maybe the GAO should do a thorough review of the Fishery science centers and the end result of their work. This would be called a cost assessment benefit analysis, which most industry’s do on a regular basis, to weed out useless protocol’s so they can actually produce a profit, while government just simply demands more money for less results and always claim they need even more money, and that’s why their results suck. Instead of dreaming up ways to increase the staff at NOAA, maybe you need to be thinking of practical ways to reduce the regulatory burden on not
just the fishing industry, but the fishery managers. Fishery management could be really simple if certain vested interests weren’t so intent on making it incomprehensible. It’s time for a serious look at what is going on at the Commerce department and their minions in NOAA/NMFS.

Thanks, Jim Lovgren

Years ago a visitor from Central Oregon stood on the Depoe Bay Bridge, which runs along the Pacific Coast Highway, otherwise known as State Highway 101. She looked out to see a silver boat zipping around in the ocean, and thought to herself ‘that looks fun and I want to drive that boat.’

“I had no prior knowledge of the Coast Guard, but at that time in my life I was looking for a purpose,” said Petty Officer 2nd Class Kelsi Dozier, (surfman #561) from Coast Guard Station Yaquina Bay in Newport, Oregon. “After that family vacation to Depoe Bay and a little video research on YouTube, I reached out to a Coast Guard recruiter.”

The Coast Guard has certified 10 surfmen during the past 8 months. In order to earn the surfman qualification a Coast Guard coxswain requires a lot of hours at the helm while operating in the surf. These weather and sea conditions are most often found between the months of October and April.

“It requires a lot of extra time outside of normal duty hours,” said Petty Officer 1st Class Adam Preiser (surfman # 535), Station Chetco River in Brookings, Oregon. “I had to break-in at two different units and came in on baby leave to scout conditions and push for training opportunities. Surfman training conditions hold a very tight window and you have to get out there when the window is open.”

Preiser’s baby leave wasn’t any normal baby leave either, because his newborn needed to get life-saving heart surgery. Station Chetco River is a 7-hour drive from where the heart surgery was taking place at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland, Oregon. While visiting with his wife and newborn, he saw a weather system forming and knew it would bring the surf needed to train, and so he raced home.

Resiliency is a key factor for both member, family member, and mentor. Coast Guard service members need spouses and support systems to be strong and in place, so when they are on duty, their whole body and mind are on the job.

“Mentors put in a ton of hours to push you toward the qualification,” said Petty Officer 2nd Class Enrique Lemos, (surfman #559), Station Umpqua River. “They put in the same time as me.”

Surfman mentors consistently preach patience, determination, and humility, because earning the surfman qualification isn’t an easy or quick process.

“The most important thing I learned from my mentor was to continue to learn and develop,” said Petty Officer 2nd Class Aaron Hadden, (surfman #560), Station Umpqua River. “Making surfman is not the end result. I have to continue to act like I haven’t made it yet.”

Mentors share mistakes and successes. They offer learning experiences and offer a 360-degree perspective. There is an awful lot of tough love as coxswains work toward the surfman qualification, but that ends up creating a very close bond.

A member’s resiliency is needed most when stick time is at a premium.

“It’s really hard to share stick time,” said Preiser. “It’s like a double-edged sword. On one side it’s healthy competition, and on the other, you want to be greedy because weather changes and boat casualties occur, and you don’t want to miss out.”

The healthy competition spoken of by Preiser was especially present while Hadden and Lemos were trying to qualify at the same time. They ended up earning the qualification on the same day and receiving their pin on the same day. Petty Officer 1st Class Raymond Aguilar (surfman # 557) and Dozier also had to share stick time at Station Yaquina Bay.

“You share a different bond with somebody who is operating at the same level as you are,” said Aguilar.

“Time is divided up fairly in my opinion,” said Hadden. “It’s a friendly competition. You just have to be always there pursuing sign-offs and asking to go out.”

This brotherhood turns into a community composed of past, current, and future surfman and they all live by a creed:

I will, to the best of my ability, pursue each
mission with the commitment, compassion,
and courage inherent in the title of Surfman.

I will endeavor to reinforce the worldwide reputation
of our forefathers in the Lifeboat Community.

I will maintain a guardian’s eye on my crew at
all times, and keep a cool, yet deliberate, hand on the throttle.

I will give of myself, and my knowledge as those
who gave to me; so as the line of Coast Guard Surfman will live forever.

I will ensure that my supervisors rest easy with the knowledge that I am at the helm,
no matter what the conditions.

I will never unnecessarily jeopardize myself, my boat, or my crew;
But will do so freely to rescue those in peril.

I will strive with dedication and determination to bring credit
upon Coast Guard Surfman, past and future.

“Taking care of people and taking care of the crew are key factors in every successful mission,” said Lemos. “You have to invest in that philosophy.”

This is a once-in-a-lifetime process,” said Aguilar. “I will pay it forward on the positive side and will avoid paying it forward with the bad experiences.”

“I want to save people as well as their property,” said Dozier. “I also look forward to being able to pass the knowledge that I have gained to the next watchstander, crewman, and coxswain. Part of my job is to teach others the energy and movement of the waves and how to look at the weather. A surfman has to look at everything and recognize how it will come together and affect the mission.”

For Preiser, The ‘surfman community’ is strong and it goes outside of the Coast Guard. He has known a fellow surfman since he was 5 years old and another surfman was in his wedding.

“The brotherhood begins while training because regulations state we can’t go out in the surf without another boat out there,” said Preiser. “That boat and that crew is our lifeline if something goes wrong.”

Regardless of the different backgrounds, these five surfmen have all come together to protect mariners in the Pacific Northwest.

Preiser hails from The Outer Banks of North Carolina, the birthplace of the original Coast Guard surfmen, the Midgett family. But he didn’t realize or know the significance of his hometown before joining the Coast Guard.

Aguilar joined the Coast Guard out of Santa Clarita, California, and spent time at two different units, Coast Guard Cutter Boutwell and Station Seattle, before deciding to pursue the surfman qualification at Station Yaquina Bay.

“Research showed the challenge of becoming a master at boat driving skills,” said Aguilar. “But the original draw to the Coast Guard was the humanitarian efforts as first responders.”

Hadden began his military career in the Army, where he worked with explosives. He was deployed in Afghanistan for a year before joining the Coast Guard.

Lemos from central California, learned of the surfman career path at boot camp where his company commander, a surfman, told stories of his career at surf stations. His first unit was aboard the Coast Guard Cutter Pamlico, and then he attended Boatswain’s Mate A-school before arriving at Station Umpqua River.

Dozier’s journey began shortly after that trip to Depoe Bay. Her first unit out of boot camp was Station Chetco River in Brookings, Oregon. This was also her first up-close experience with the 47-foot Motor Lifeboat, the silver boat that she saw during her trip to Depoe Bay. She started her career in the engineering department before going to Boatswain’s Mate A-School. She then earned coxswain and heavy-weather coxswain qualification at Station Jonesport, Maine.

“As you begin to understand the surfman community, that is part of what keeps you in it,” said Dozier. “Most public knowledge of what surfman are comes from imagery of boats crashing through waves, but a surfman’s knowledge of history, areas of responsibility, ability to read the ocean, understanding the dynamics and know where the dangers come from, is what sets a turfman apart. It isn’t all about boat driving, there’s also the other side of it that is based around knowledge, experience, and understanding.”

Most cases don’t occur in the surf, but surfman and the crews of the motor lifeboats are the people who can get through any conditions to help the disabled mariners offshore, who would otherwise be drifting helplessly.

Last summer Dozier sat at the helm of a 47-foot MLB and watched the ocean swells approach the Depoe Bay entrance, known as the Hole in the Wall. As a now experienced boat operator, she intently watched the ocean to understand the dangers of entering this particular port. Although intently studying she remembers thinking, “This is pretty wild — a few years ago I was up on the bridge thinking they were nuts for trying to go in there. It looked too small and shallow.”

Dozier loves the history of the surfman and lifeboat community, which in turn heightens her appreciation toward the elite community she is now a member of.

“I enjoy hearing the history of the surfman that came before me like Master Chief McAdams,” said Dozier. “History shows why we are here and why we do what we do. One thing I have learned about being a surfman is it’s not one person or a number, it is a representation of the entire crew.”

Dozier may just be a self-proclaimed country girl, but with her inherent amount of compassion and drive to help others, she carries on the legacy of the creed as one of the Coast Guard’s newest surfman.

-USCG-

U.S. Coast Guard 13th District PA Detachment Astoria
Contact: Coast Guard PA Detachment Astoria
Office: (503) 861-6380
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The Department of Agriculture philosophy

For as long as I have been involved in the commercial fishing industry, and that’s going back for what is approaching forty years, there has been a widespread feeling that “things would be better if this industry were administratively housed in the Department of Agriculture (DOA).” Whether at the state level, in state waters within three miles of the coastline, or the federal level beyond three miles, there’s always been a sort of wistful “wouldn’t it be great if we were over there” view of the DOA, and the reasons for this aren’t awfully difficult to fathom. The Department of Agriculture, no matter whether state or federal, is mostly focused on promotion, and fisheries agencies, no matter the level, are regulatory in nature, in organization and in attitude. This is glaringly obvious with the National Marine Fisheries Service, the federal fisheries agency, which in recent years has become almost totally focused to the virtual exclusion of anything else on limiting – rather than enhancing – the commercial production of fish and shellfish.

I started out in the early 1970s in experimental/pilot level aquaculture, running what turned into a fairly large experimental waste heat aquaculture facility on the Delaware River south of Trenton, NJ which was funded by the National Science Foundation. Having finished the course work for a professional planning degree at Rutgers, I convinced the powers that be at the National Science Foundation (the grantor), at Public Service Electric and Gas Company (the grantee), and at Trenton State College (the primary contractor) that I should be “loaned” to the New Jersey Department of Agriculture to work on a state-wide aquaculture development program.

Needless to say, it wasn’t too long before I realized that New Jersey was never going to amount to much aquaculture production-wise. With some of the most expensive land, labor, energy and construction costs in the country, there were a whole bunch of other places where production aquaculture was much more feasible (Back then I had a colleague with a lot of experience doing international aquaculture development. His assessment was that nobody was going to get rich, or even stay in business, trying to do aquaculture in places where there wasn’t a large and ready supply of unskilled labor. With the exception of mollusk culture he was – and still seems to be – right on target.)

Making a long story mercifully shorter, I segued over to capture fisheries, dealt increasingly with industry members there and decided that I’d rather work for and with those guys than with a passel of largely ineffectual career bureaucrats. So I “switched sides” (admittedly the dismal prospects I personally saw for finfish culture had a lot to do with this transition).

While this was going on two prominent commercial fishing industry member from New Jersey, Gösta “Swede” Lovgren, who was the owner of a commercial dock in Point Pleasant Beach and Jim Harry, a clammer (both ocean and bay) from Ocean County, had some major philosophical differences with the Division of Fish and Game in the NJ Department of Environmental Protection about how they were managing their fisheries in particular and New Jersey (and beyond) fisheries in general. They be began to campaign to get fisheries moved to the NJ Department of Agriculture. Part of their strategy was to become involved with the Ocean County (NJ) Farm Bureau and the Ocean County Board of Agriculture.

Having just escaped from most of a decade’s worth of employment in the NJ Department of Agriculture and in that time becoming painfully aware of the lack of a serious commitment in that Department to supporting the fish and seafood program – almost the entire budget was provided by outside funding – I didn’t think that was a great idea in spite of the Departmental focus on supporting NJ agriculture production. I’m the move never happened and New Jersey Department of Protection is still in charge of managing the fisheries in state – out to three miles – waters (the federal Department of Commerce is in charge from three miles out to two hundred miles, the Exclusive Economic Zone or EEZ).

But they were successful in raising awareness in the agriculture community, both in New Jersey and nationally, of the importance of commercial fishing, and are owed a collective industry-wide thank you for the consciousness-raising they did both in and outside the Department of Agriculture in Trenton. A generation later the relations they established are still bearing fruit for the commercial fishing industry.

According to the 2018 State Agriculture Overview for NJ (https://tinyurl.com/y4yk645d) annual crop production was valued at almost $620 million. In 2016, the last year for which landings are valuable, New Jersey’s commercial fish and shellfish landings were valued at $184 million.

While the lion’s share of the credit for this belongs to “Swede” and Jim, there were other industry members who were, and who still are, working at advancing relations between the agriculture community and the fish and seafood industry. Among them would be Jim Lovgren, Gösta’s nephew, past president of the Fishermen’s Dock Cooperative in Point Pleasant Beach, third generation NJ commercial fishermen, founding board member of Garden State Seafood Association, former member of the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council (responsible for managing fisheries in the EEZ from North Carolina to New York) and long-time member of the Ocean County Board of Agriculture. Also Ernie Panacek, manager of the Viking Village Commercial Dock in Barnegat Light, past president of Bluewater Fishermen’s Association, and founding board member and past president of Garden State Seafood Association. And a number of other industry members who have seen significant benefits in maintaining (and growing) our connections with agriculture.

(And I can’t overlook the efforts of a number of researchers and academics at Rutgers School of Environmental and Biological Sciences, formerly Cook College, and especially those folks at the Cook College Cooperative Extension service via NJ Sea Grant. They have maintained a research presence in support of the fishing industry in spite of a well-entrenched academic bias towards more esoteric, less immediately practical research.)

“It was really great to see Brick tie up a whole bunch of loose ends, get the right people together and initiate a program that has the potential to in large part solve one of the biggest problems that is currently confronting commercial fishermen. I support his efforts fully and think I can say the same for the entire membership of the Fishermen’s Dock Co-op in Point Pleasant Beach.”(Jim Lovgren)

“We at Viking Village in Barnegat Light have already been working with the folks at Trinity Seafood in Lakewood, successfully getting 4,000 pounds of donated albacore tuna to people who need a helping hand. We are looking forward to a long relationship with the Brick, Marty and the Folks at Trinity and salute Tyson for providing the much needed start-up funding.” (Ernie Panacek)

Even back then what is known as “bycatch” was starting to attract public scrutiny – or if not the scrutiny of the public, at least the scrutiny of the anti-fishing environmentalists, who were becoming far more active and more well-funded by a handful of so-called “charitable” foundations back in the 1980s.

So what is bycatch?

Our coastal waters and the open oceans are frequented by billions of members of thousands of distinct species of living critters. These are generally invertebrates, fish, birds or mammals (with the occasional occurrence of “oddball” groups like reptiles or amphibians thrown in).

Obviously at least at times members of different species will be in the same bit of water at the same time. Just as obviously different sized members of the same species will be ditto.

It is illegal for folks to disturb, harass, catch, land, kill possess or fondle some of these species either any time or at particular times, either anywhere or in particular locations.

In spite of what some of the misinformed would have you believe, previous generations of fishermen have always worked to reduce bycatch, which according to Merriam-Webster is “the portion of a commercial fishing catch that consists of marine animals caught unintentionally.” It has never been an acceptable part of fishing. This even extended back to the days when our accessible waters and the critters in them were considered to be inexhaustible. Bycatch consisted of those marine animals which, because of species, size or condition were unmarketable and were grudgingly discarded.

With the advent of fisheries management – and of the creation of a multi-billion dollar self-perpetuating fisheries management bureaucracy that often seem more interested in managing fishermen than in managing fisheries – as well as an understanding and appreciation of basic ecological principles the issue of bycatch became much more complex and controversial. For any of a number of sound reasons, and for some unsound reasons as well, laws or regulations were imposed upon fishermen that limited what they could catch or keep. Fish or shellfish of particular species, outside of mandated size ranges, outside of specific seasons, of particular sexes or from particular locations were “forbidden” to commercial fishermen and a large part of the fisheries management establishment was devoted to insuring that these mandates were adhered to. Hence today fishermen are either required to not catch or to return to the seas both those fish and shellfish that are not marketable and those that are referred to as “regulatory discards,” those they are not permitted to have in possession because of season, size or species but would be readily marketable and consumable otherwise.

Bycatch seems to be an issue expressly designed for the anti-fishing activists, as well as for the recreational anglers who thought that they were much more deserving of the bounty of our seas than the non-fishing public. It is a weapon used by individuals and by groups who wish to get commercial fishermen off the water and to get a higher percentage of limited harvests of particular species shifted from the non-fishing public to the recreational fishermen. Unfortunately, however, it is a weapon that can end up harming innocent parties while having none of the anticipated or at least promised conservation benefits:

“Populations of Red Snapper Lutjanus campechanus in the Gulf of Mexico remain overfished, but overfishing has been ended. Historically, rebuilding plans were based almost entirely on the reduction of shrimp trawl bycatch mortality, which was believed to account for 80% of the total juvenile Red Snapper mortality. This estimate was based on the assumption that juvenile Red Snapper had low rates of natural mortality. Bycatch reduction devices were believed to be capable of reducing bycatch mortality by more than 50%, which would enable the stock to rebuild without any other management actions. Over the years, new information has shown that natural mortality rates of juvenile Red Snapper are four times higher than originally estimated, and bycatch mortality is presently estimated to comprise only about 4% of the total juvenile mortality. Hence, bycatch reduction, regardless of the means by which it is achieved, will not be very effective for rebuilding the Red Snapper stock.” (From the abstract of An Updated Description of the Benefits and Consequences of Red Snapper Shrimp Trawl Bycatch Management Actions in the Gulf of Mexico; Benny J. Gallaway, W. J. Gazey & J. G. Cole; 2017, in North American Journal of Fisheries Management at https://tinyurl.com/ralkrkp)

Some anti-fishing groups have attempted to bolster their campaign against commercial fishing by with efforts to eliminate bycatch. They generally employ specious arguments that all boil down to the “fact” that fishermen are not willing to do much to avoid bycatch because it is little more than an inconvenience to them. This is far from truth. A pound of a bycatch species costs a fisherman as much as does a pound of a targeted species; the fuel costs and the wear and tear on the gear and on the boat are the same and the labor in handling the fish or shellfish on board can actually be more.
Because of this, and because of the sheer waste involved, the fishing industry has been committed to reducing bycatch in fisheries in which it is a significant issue as much as is possible, but in particular instances it isn’t possible to reduce the bycatch to zero. In these instances an acceptable alternative would be to find uses for this unavoidable bycatch and people and groups in the commercial fisheries have made sporadic attempts to do so but until recently no one, at least no one that I was aware of, had put together a successful program.

Michelle Sheldon with The Delmarva Farmer, wrote “a Jersey Shore native is trying to help feed the hungry from some of the East Coast’s largest seaports and one the nation’s most regulated industries: Commercial fishing. Brick Wenzel has been rallying for support of a gleaning program like those through which farmers share a portion of their harvests with food banks, food pantries and soup kitchens. Fishermen have always done something like this, Wenzel said. ‘They never formalized it’” (https://tinyurl.com/wronj5k).

But in the past several years, because of pressures that have nothing to do with fishing or the oceans and a lot to do with a burgeoning (yet admittedly controversial) Social Justice movement, the public – and the political – focus has shifted towards issues like food security. Wikipedia states that “the final report of the 1996 World Food Summit states that food security ‘exists when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.’” Particularly when combined with the growing awareness of the many health benefits of a diet rich in marine fish in particular, bycatch utilization has developed a certain cachet.

“We’ve seen the waste take place, we’ve just never been able to do address it,” says Brick Wenzel with America’s Gleaned Seafood. But a new program launched in New Jersey Friday means that some of this wasted fish will be donated to Fulfill, the food bank of Monmouth and Ocean counties (https://fulfillnj.org). “That fish gets turned over to the people in Monmouth and Ocean counties who need it the most. And there are a lot of them,” says former Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno, the CEO of Fulfill. It’s called gleaning – taking extra produce produced by farms and donating it to the hungry. And now the concept will be applied to the ocean. It is believed to be the first such program in the country.” (New Jersey fishermen to donate excess catch to NJ food bank, News12 New Jersey, 9/20/2019- https://tinyurl.com/w6n3ctd).

If anyone were to begin to address the issue of bycatch as an opportunity rather than as a problem, the timing couldn’t be better than it is right now.
Fortunately a commercial fisherman out of Point Pleasant Beach, Brick Wenzel, realized this a couple of years back. Equally as fortunately, Brick has significant experience in local politics in New Jersey, and as equally important, he has also been heavily involved at a leadership level in Ocean County NJ Farm Bureau, and on and on… In other words, Brick was the right guy at the right time. And it helped that he had been rubbing elbows with the New Jersey fishermen who have been so involved in the New Jersey agriculture industry for so long.

In Gleaned Seafood brings bycatch to the needy in the September 20 issue of National Fisherman (https://tinyurl.com/vfjyx5f) Kirk Moore wrote “America’s Gleaned Seafood executive director Martin McHugh used to head the New Jersey Division of Fish and Wildlife. Finding a better way to handle bycatch has long been on his mind. “I wanted to do this when I was (state) director, because we had Hunters Helping the Hungry,” a volunteer effort that delivered venison to the needy, McHugh said. Of course, given the high level of management and regulation on commercial seafood harvest, it has taken a lot of work by Wenzel and McHugh to get a system that all the participants — fishermen, law enforcement, docks, processors and non-profit groups — could buy into. “It’s an ecosystem of people you need to make this work,” McHugh said. The New Jersey state departments of agriculture, environmental protection and his old colleagues at Fish and Wildlife have been especially supportive, he said. State and NMFS law enforcement agents work with the program, observing bycatch pack out into designated containers with tickets for delivery to Trinity. An early test run used 1,000 pounds of scup that were landed at a time of zero market demand and could be used to test the delivery system and processing, McHugh said. Boats working for the program out of the co-op include the draggers Arianna Maria, Kailey Ann, and Amber Waves. Organizers were anticipating squid and sea robins to be in the next round going out to Trinity Seafood (https://tinyurl.com/v9sc36t), a Sysco company in Lakewood, NJ, is another participant in the project and is responsible for processing and handling the donated product.

It’s obvious that setting up this program required a lot of contacts, a lot of credibility, a lot of coordination, and I’d be willing to bet, more patience than most of us would have. And as I covered up above, a lot of groundwork by a handful of committed New Jersey commercial fishing industry leaders going back for at least two decades.

“I feel this is a great example of a responsible use of a natural resource that benefits those most in need. The industry is using its resources, particularly its labor and time, to help reduce hunger and provide a great source of protein. High-priced campaigns, funded largely by the environmental industry to demonize commercial fishermen, have done nothing to help those in need. This proactive campaign does just that.” Ray Bogan, lawyer who represents a number of marine and fisheries organizations as well as active fishing families.

Is it worth the effort? How often do you see positive articles in the general media about commercial fishing? How often are arguments against the “waste” inherent to bycatch used to justify the imposition of onerous – and as we’ve seen most recently in the commercial red snapper fishery in the Gulf of Mexico and the West Coast groundfish fishery (see NOAA Fisheries press release New Fishing Opportunities Emerge from Resurgence of West Coast Groundfish at https://tinyurl.com/rgndgfw and keep in mind that the resurgence that the people at NOAA Fisheries are so intent on patting themselves and each other on their collective backs about happened far before it was due to because the restrictions on fishing that cost so many millions of dollars and caused so much economic misery on West coast fishing families and their communities primarily to reduce bycatch were obviously far more severe – and punitive – than they needed to be). And how many people’s lives would be improved if they had reasonable access to some of the thousands of tons of bycatch that are wasted every year?

Steve Strunsky at NJ Advance Media for NJ.com wrote in Instead of throwing their catch overboard, fishermen are feeding the hungry in N.J. on 11/21/19 (updated on 12/07/19) “Homeless roofer Graig Miller and former Lieutenant Governor Kim Guadagno have at least one very personal thing in common: food insecurity. Miller, a 41-year-old Keansburg resident who described himself as an alcoholic, was among three dozen hungry adults and children gathered for lunch on a recent sunny day inside the soup kitchen and food pantry at Keansburg’s St. Mark’s Episcopal Church. He said the roofing job he thought he’d be doing that day didn’t materialize, so he was free for lunch. It was an Italian seafood stew made with whiting, calamari and stingray literally gleaned from sources that might otherwise have thrown it back in the ocean or, worse, a dumpster, because the market simply did not make it worth the cost of shipping.Awesome,” Miller, a fish lover, said of the fresh seafood dish, a healthy source of protein, rich in Omega-3 fatty acids, vitamins D and B2, and other nutrients. “They did a frigging great job.”

The aptly named Seafood Gleaning Program is the brainchild of longtime Jersey Shore fisherman Brick Wenzel, who landed the program’s first gleaned fish in August after spending two years putting together a production and distribution network. It includes the Fisherman’s Dock Cooperative in Point Pleasant Beach, whose members catch the fish; the Trinity Seafood processing plant in Lakewood, which freezes and packs it for distribution; and the nonprofit Fulfill food pantry, which regularly feeds 136,000 people in Monmouth and Ocean Counties with two warehouses and a network of 289 pantries, soup kitchens and women’s shelters. A $50,000 grant from the Tyson Foods Protein Innovation Fund pays for boxing and labeling.

Despite its health benefits, fresh seafood has been a rarity at soup kitchens and food pantries up to now, even though much of the fish caught in New Jersey and elsewhere goes to waste. But fishermen, business and civic leaders, and volunteers in Monmouth and Ocean counties are trying to change that, with a seafood gleaning program that has served and distributed over three tons of fresh fish at soup kitchens and pantries that had absolutely nothing wrong with it other than a lack of sufficient demand in the commercial marketplace. https://tinyurl.com/t5vcn3f.

Is it going to eliminate bycatch completely? Definitely not, but it holds the promise of reducing it significantly, and at the same time it will address in part the increasingly important issue of food insecurity.

Thanks to the hard work of Brick Wenzel and his colleagues and the generosity of Tyson Foods the pilot program has demonstrated that the concept is workable, but it’s going to take a lot of commitment by a lot of people to significantly scale it up. This is going to represent a significant investment by the commercial fishing industry, but it’s an investment that’s well worth making, both from the perspective of reducing bycatch and from helping people who can use a hand.

If you want a printed copy of this FishNet, it’s available in PDF format on the FishNet-USA website at http://www.FishNet-USA.com/Gleaning_Bycatch.pdf.

© 2020 Nils E. Stolpe

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE June 13, 2017

The Federation of Independent Sea Harvesters of Newfoundland and Labrador (FISH-NL) is calling on the FFAW-Unifor to explain an apparent conflict of interest involving an executive member of the union who won a lucrative marine escort contract with the offshore oil industry.

“Fish harvesters demand and deserve an explanation,” says Ryan Cleary, President of FISH-NL.

The Eastern Princess II, a fishing vessel owned by Nelson Bussey, who serves on the union’s executive board (Inshore, Avalon Peninsula), was apparently hired in recent weeks to escort the Hebron oil platform out to sea.

Marine Escorts are regularly contracted for offshore oil and gas operations to guide marine vessels safely through open water, avoiding fishing gear.

The FFAW decides which fishing boats are hired through the union’s Fishing Guide Vessel Program. It’s not known how many fishing boat owners expressed interest in the contract.

It’s believed that boat owners are paid upwards of $10,000 a day to serve as marine escorts, with the FFAW taking a cut of more than 40 per cent off the top.

Bussey also serves as an “industry director” with One Ocean, a “liaison” organization created in 2006 to represent the “mutual interests” of both the FFAW and offshore oil companies.

FISH-NL has called on the FFAW for almost a week to come clean and reveal details of marine escort contracts, as well as the amount of funding the oil industry pumps into One Ocean or the union directly. The union has yet to respond.

“The fact that a senior executive of the FFAW has received a contract worth a small fortune through the union while also serving on the board of One Ocean raises yet another obvious question of conflict of interest,” Cleary says. “And it’s a question harvesters around the province are asking.”

A spokesperson for Hebron has refused to reveal details of the marine escort contracts, saying the information is confidential. FISH-NL also e-mailed One Ocean to ask how much of its funding comes from oil companies, with no response.

The FFAW-Unifor is generally quiet regarding the offshore oil industry’s exploration and drilling activities off Newfoundland and Labrador, which, for many inshore harvesters, begs the question why.

The media has described the amount of seismic activity set to take place this year off the province’s east coast as “super-sized.”

Seismic activity uses high energy, low frequency sound waves that can penetrate thousands of metres below the sea floor, and while the impact on fish stocks and the marine environment is debatable, the FFAW hasn’t raised any concerns.

That’s alarming, considering fish stocks such as northern cod are still at a critical level, and the Grand Banks in general remain delicate.

The former Obama administration in the U.S. had blocked seismic testing for oil in the Atlantic Ocean, but President Donald Trump is set to allow it — to growing opposition.

Some experts there say seismic testing to find drill sites could harm thousands of animals and affect coastal communities.

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Contact: Ryan Cleary (682 4862)

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE June 7th, 2017

The Federation of Independent Sea Harvesters of Newfoundland and Labrador (FISH-NL) is calling on the FFAW to reveal details of its financial arrangements with the offshore oil industry to address questions of conflict of interest.

“It’s time for the FFAW to reveal how much money the union is collecting from the oil industry,” says Ryan Cleary, President of FISH-NL. “Oil and fish don’t mix, but you’d never say that from the union’s cozy relationship with the offshore.”

The media has described the amount of seismic activity set to take place off Newfoundland and Labrador this year as “super-sized.”

Seismic activity uses high energy, low frequency sound waves that can penetrate thousands of metres below the sea floor, and while the impact on fish stocks and the marine environment is debatable, the FFAW hasn’t whispered a word of concern.

That’s alarming, considering fish stocks such as northern cod are still at a critical level, and the Grand Banks in general remain delicate.

The former Obama administration in the U.S. had blocked seismic testing for oil in the Atlantic Ocean, but President Donald Trump is set to allow it, to growing opposition. Some experts say seismic testing to find drill sites could harm thousands of animals and affect coastal communities

In 2006, the FFAW and local offshore oil representatives formed One Ocean, a “liaison” organization that’s billed as representing the “mutual interests” of both industries.

“To successfully accomplish this, One Ocean must maintain the confidence of both sectors in its ability to remain neutral and promote the interests of both sectors,” reads One Ocean’s website.

But questions have been raised whether One Ocean is funded by the oil industry,

“There can be no confidence without complete transparency,” said Cleary, calling on the organization to come clean. “Has the FFAW been bought and paid for by the oil industry?”

FISH-NL also reiterated its call for the FFAW to reveal details of the “administrative” fee that the union charges fishing boat owners hired by oil companies as marine escorts, as is currently taking place with the tow out of the Hebron oil platform.

It’s said that oil companies pay fishing boat owners upwards of $10,000 a day, but the FFAW — which acts as a middleman through its Fishing Guide Vessel Program — takes a cut of more than 40 per cent off the top.

Harvesters have complained to FISH-NL of the “astronomical” fees charged them by their own union.

One Ocean’s industry board includes three senior FFAW executive members — Keith Sullivan (president), Dave Decker (secretary-treasurer) and Nelson Bussey (inshore director, Avalon).

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Contact: Ryan Cleary (682 4862)

Another push for catch shares

FishNet-USA/May 11, 2016

Nils E. Stolpe

http://www.fishnet-usa.com/

(Don’t get the idea from this that I oppose any fisheries management regime. What I do oppose is having the future of particular fisheries determined by people and/or organizations and/or corporations with no meaningful ties to and no concern about the existing industry and the people in it. Irrespective of whether the decisions have their roots in in corporate, ENGO or foundation board rooms, the halls of academe or “investment” seminars, as the ongoing debacle in the New England groundfish fishery so clearly and tragically demonstrates, if the fishing industry doesn’t have final say in the imposition of measures that its members will be working with, the affected communities will suffer.)

With talk in the air of an upcoming Magnuson Act reauthorization which is coincident with the 40^th anniversary of its passage, the proponents of catch shares in general and individual transferable quotas in particular, are mounting a public relations barrage in a continuation of their efforts to “privatize” our fisheries.

Most recently, the April 19 New York Times Opiniator column How Dwindling Fish Stocks Got a Reprieve by freelance journalist Sylvia Rowley, touted the benefits of catch shares by citing the example of the West coast groundfish fishery. It also quoted catch shares proselytizer and NOAA ex-head Jane Lubchenco, back on the Environmental Defense board after her brief sojourn in the almost-real world of the federal bureaucracy, on catch shares: “If you have 5 percent of the pie, you’d like to see the pie grow.”

Implicit in all of the pro-catch shares rhetoric, as Ms. Lubchenco’s quote above amply demonstrates, is the idea that this particular form of fisheries management is necessary for healthy fisheries. She apparently believes, or wants us to believe, that fishermen who don’t own a part of a fishery aren’t interested in having a larger part of that particular pie.  In fact nothing could be further from the truth. “Successful” fisheries management requires only three things. The first is an accurate determination of the significant sources of mortality on a fish or shellfish stock and the relative magnitude of those sources. The second is ensuring that all of those sources of mortality that can be controlled are controlled. The third is determining on an ongoing basis what the acceptable (sustainable?) levels of harvest are and assuring that those levels are maintained.

Of course this is hardly possible in the context of so-called fisheries management today, which is in reality fishing management. In that context, which we seem to be stuck with, the three requirements are a bit different. The first would be an accurate determination of what the sustainable level of harvest is (i.e. the quota). The second would be the design management measures that insure that the quota is caught but not exceeded. The third would be the enforcement of those management measures.

As far as the fish or shellfish are concerned, how the quota is divided up is irrelevant.

In fact, Ms. Rowley’s words reflect this. She writes that in the years from 2000 to 2015 “the tally of federally managed fish populations that have been rebuilt went from zero to 39” and then a few paragraphs later “the total number of federal fisheries using catch shares rose from five in 2000 to 16 in 2015.” In its annual Status of the (fish and shellfish) Stocks report to Congress for 2015, NOAA Fisheries reports on the overfishing status of fish and shellfish stocks. From 2000 to 2015 the stocks managed via catch shares increased from .5% to 5% but the number of stocks where overfishing was not taking place remained at 91%. The proportion of fisheries managed by catch shares went from an insignificant level to a minimally significant level, yet the overall health of the stocks, as measured by the proportion of them in which overfishing was occurring, didn’t change at all. Could it be that Ms. Lubchenco’s “catch shares revolution” is, to quote Shakespeare in The Merchant of Venice, “full of sound and fury. Signifying nothing?” (Note that NOAA Fisheries recognized 905 stocks in 2000 and 313 stocks in 2015.)

So why are the people at EDF, including Ms. Lubchenco both while she was there, when she was in charge of NOAA and now that she’s back at EDF, so bullish on catch shares if it makes no difference to the critters in question? Perhaps because it allows them to use their tax exempt millions to finance fishing operations and dictate how the fishermen they are financing have to fish, sort of like having fishermen owe their souls to the company store (See The California Fisheries Fund, EDF’s unique way of controlling fishermen and fishing, at California Fisheries Fund Click here

Or perhaps it’s to fatten the bank accounts of EDF and/or its friends, directors, members, etc. From the transcript of a talk by then EDF West Coast Vice President David Festa to the Miliken Institute Global Conference in 2009:

“You know, so how do I – you know, but I know that if I fix all that, I can be profitable in the future. So I pull together investors and I buy the factory and I sink a whole bunch of money into it and, you know, retrain workers and then get paid back on the profits on the other end.

Well, why can’t we do that with fisheries? Well, first – and I hope David will address some of this – first, we have to have commitment from the government to the regulatory change.

And then, second, we have to have capital. And that’s where I think public-private partnerships come in because the government has the mandate and the authority to change the rules, but it doesn’t have as much capital as it once had.

The private sector has the capital but, of course, doesn’t have the responsibility of defending the public trust way the government does. So it’s a perfect partnership.

So that’s the second thing that I think needs to happen.

How much money is to be made out there, and how do we think about the risks associated with this? You know, that’s where we need your help.

Just one statistic, in all of the catch-share fisheries that have transitioned over, the value of that fishery tends to increase by – or the shares in that fishery tend to increase by a factor of four. That’s an average. The current U.S. industry is a $5 billion industry.

So, you know, it’s not – it’s not telecommunications-size money, but it’s real money.”

(In http://www.opc.ca.gov/webmaster/ftp/pdf/public_comment/20110830_Helliwell_email_2_attachment_1_of_2.pdf on page 11.)

Now there’s a novel idea – turning over the ownership of a heretofore public resource to private sector investors so they can profit from the harvest and sale of that resource. Of course Mr. Festa didn’t mention that the world’s seafood supply has become so large and that the transportation of seafood from anywhere to here has become so cheap that the U.S. fishing industry has little or nothing to do with setting prices anymore. So where’s Mr. Festa’s investor’s profits likely to come from? Out of the holds of the fishing boats and out of the pockets of the fishermen, it would seem.

But even more troubling is the control that “outside” groups would gain over fishing – or not fishing.

As EDF’s California Fishing Fund does such a good job of demonstrating, it’s not who owns the fishing permits, it’s who – or what – controls them that matters. Suppose that an ENGO serving as the “company store” for a large number of permit holders in a particular fishery decides that boats should not be fishing in a particular area. If the agreements that the permit holders had with the ENGO allowed it, the ENGO could simply dictate that the boats could no longer fish there. Bye, bye fishing community (or communities)!  To suggest that this wouldn’t happen would be to ignore the devastation that various ENGOs have, with no qualms or compunctions, inflicted on logging communities in the Northwest for almost three decades.

Catch shares schemes are supposed to be designed so that no person or other entity can own over a certain number of permits in a particular fishery. In the first place, over several hundreds of years, corporate law has been evolving more and better ways of protecting the privacy of corporate owners. Piercing the corporate vail isn’t a trivial legal exercise, nor is the ability of a federal agency to do it successfully a foregone conclusion.

But that’s not the worst case scenario. We’re all far too familiar with the apparently unbridled thirst for power and profit that afflicts many of our largest corporations, as we are familiar with the increasing competition for ocean access by a host of industrial interests for mineral extraction, energy development, transmission cables/pipelines, offshore aquaculture, transportation and who knows what else. Many of these corporate interests could afford to acquire – then shut down – fishing rights in large areas, perhaps allowing them to dispense with what to some corporate leaders must be those annoying distractions, fishermen.

As a purely speculative what if, what if the people at Microsoft decided that a large part of their business in the future was going to be in offshore, submerged data centers (see Microsoft Plumbs Ocean’s Depths to Test Underwater Data Center Click here ). Obviously such data centers would benefit from being close to the demand for them – users of the so called “cloud.” And what if the optimum locations for some of these data centers, the wave/tide generators that powered them, and the cables that connected them to onshore internet hubs were in prime fishing areas? What would it take for Microsoft – or a foundation with close ties to Microsoft – to gain control of the permits of those bothersome fishermen who wanted to continue fishing where they had for generations and to have them fish elsewhere, or to have them ride off into the sunset with their saddlebags stuffed with Microsoft dollars? How divorced is this scenario from what Mr. Festa and EDF, ex NOAA Head Jane Lubchenco and, perhaps inadvertently, Sylvia Rowley and the New York Times are pushing.

And what’s to stop them?

(2015 revenues for some larger corporations: Walmart – $482 billion, Samsung – $305 billion, Exxon-Mobile – $268 billion, Apple – $233 billion, Amazon – $107 billion, Hewlett Packard – $111 billion, Microsoft – $93 billion, Google – $74 billion, Dell – $59 billion, Intel – $55 billion, Sunoco – $44 billion. The across the dock value of U.S. commercial landings in 2014 were $5.5 billion.)

It’s interesting to note that Ms. Rowley saw fit to include W.F. Lloyd’s tragedy of the commons, which was popularized by ecologist Garrett Hardin in 1968, as a pro-catch shares argument, though she made it by using what it would be difficult to classify as anything but weasel words, Ms. Rowley wrote ‘overfishing is often seen as a classic case of what economists call the “tragedy of the commons.”’ What Lolyd and Hardin were describing could only be considered unregulated commons, with no limits in place to control their use. Such is hardly the case in U.S. fisheries (or in many other fisheries around the world).

Our domestic fishermen and our domestic fisheries are among the most regulated in the world, and anyone who thinks he or she can draw parallels between any of our federal fisheries and Lloyd’s/Hardin’s unregulated commons should spend an half an hour or so doing some rudimentary background research.* Even the Wikipedia entry for “tragedy of the commons” states in the second paragraph “commons is taken to mean any shared and unregulated resource….” (my emphasis).

Jim Ruttenberg, media columnist for the NY Times wrote in his 05/05/16 column that political journalism had lost sight of its “primary directives in this election season.” One of his three directives was “to resist the urge to put ratings, clicks and ad sales above the imperative of getting it right.” While he was writing about coverage of national electoral politics, this directive should apply to every kind of journalism, and it should apply every day. I hope that Ms. Rowley was paying attention.

____________________

*Background research is something that print and broadcast journalists used to do, or used to have done, in those olden times when “getting it right” was as important as Jim Ruttenberg still thinks it is.

Nils E. Stolpe

FishNet USA/December 4, 2015

“At the global scale, probably the one thing currently having the most impact (on the oceans) is overfishing and destructive fishing gear.” (former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration head Jane Lubchenco in an interview on the website Takepart.com on April 7, 2010.) The Deepwater Horizon oil spill catastrophe began on April 20, less than two weeks later.

Each year in the U.S. hundreds of millions of tax dollars are spent on what is called fishery management. It’s called fisheries management in the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act. The federal administrative entities which implement the mandates of the Magnuson-Stevens Act are designated in the Act as Regional Fishery Management Councils, and the bureaucrats and scientists who are involved in those mandated activities are referred to as fishery managers.

But all things considered, can what the Magnuson-Stevens Act mandates, what the Regional Councils are charged with and what the managers do be considered fishery management?

Let’s consider what management of either naturally occurring or cultured living organisms (other than fish and shellfish) actually entails. The most obvious requirement of managing them is the provision of something between an adequate and an optimum environment, including both the living and the non-living components of that environment, for the species/species complexes being managed. This is regardless of whether the management process is aimed at optimizing the production of one (or a few) species or at maintaining an area in a so-called “natural” state (though how close any area can be to natural, considering humankind’s pervasive impacts on virtually the entire biosphere, is open to argument).

Whether it’s a herd of dairy cattle, a field of poppies, a national park or an entire watershed, the involved individual or collective managers are charged with maintaining an appropriate environment for the organisms/systems being managed.

How does “fisheries” management fit in with this? Quite obviously and not so surprisingly, not all that well.

When we are considering maintaining (or ideally, increasing, though in the U.S., Canada and the EC in particular we’re far from ready for the “giant step” of increasing the harvest) capture fisheries in natural systems, there is a host of both natural and anthropogenic factors that play a significant role in determining the population levels of particular species. Among them are:

· Water quality · Entrainment/impingement  · Water temperature  · Disease/parasites  · Wind direction/duration  · Parasitism  · Upwelling

· Turbidity  · Food availability  · Competition · Predation  · Cannibalism  · Essential habitat availability  · Reproductive success  · Fishing

And there are undoubtedly others.

So what do the people in the ENGOs who, with a bunch of help from their foundation keepers, have become so adept at manipulating the press, the pols and the public do when there aren’t enough fish? They demand that the managers reduce (or eliminate) fishing. This is regardless of the effect of any other factor on the particular fish stock or the effectiveness of reducing or limiting fishing in rebuilding the stock in question (and “rebuilding” the stock almost always means returning it to maximum population levels).

And the managers for the most part go along because they have to do something to justify their positions, and thanks to federal legislation controlling (or eliminating) fishermen is a lot easier than controlling just about anything else. It’s easier politically, it’s easier scientifically, it’s easier economically and it’s easier technologically. So what if it isn’t effective? Thanks to the extensive efforts of anti-fishing activists over the last two decades (see Pew and the media Click here), cutting back or eliminating fishing is just about a guarantee of positive media coverage, and there are few politicians, reporters or members of the public who have enough of a grasp of the involved complexities to know the difference. Besides which there will be enough tilapia and swai and cultured shrimp produced overseas to keep the consumers fed – if not in culinary nirvana.

This has cost and is costing the domestic fish and seafood industry untold millions of dollars every year in uncaught fish that could be sustainably harvested. It is denying U.S. consumers the health benefits and the undeniable pleasures of dining on ocean-fresh, locally produced seafood and it is costing our coastal communities tens of thousands of jobs every year.

With what seems a monomaniacal fixation on the effects of fishing, a fixation which has been successfully – and tragically – spread virtually everywhere in this country, many other factors of equal or greater potential to temporarily or permanently interfere with vital ocean processes or the health of our fish stocks have been largely or completely ignored.

At the time it sounded good, at least to the un- or ill-informed

I started this FishNet with a quote from Jane Lubchenco from less than two weeks before the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe began to unwind in the Gulf of Mexico. At the time she was the newly appointed head of NOAA, the agency in the US Department of Commerce that is in charge of about everything non-military in the US Exclusive Economic Zone. Her academic background was as a tide pool biologist. She was a Pew Ocean Fellow and a member of the Pew Oceans Commission and in keeping with the Pew spin on the oceans and their misuse, appeared to believe that she and her ideas could save the world’s fisheries – from the fishermen.

As the quotation demonstrates, she was so concerned with the supposed evils of fishing that she assumed that everything was more than fine with our federal policies regarding the safety of our offshore energy systems. I won’t rehash it here but I’d strongly recommend that you go over the FishNet on this issue I did while the Deepwater Horizon well was still gushing an eventual 5 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, Fish and Oil: NOAA’s Attitude Gap, Click here (and delayed Exxon Valdez impacts were still being revealed by researchers in the agency she now headed – see http://www.nwfsc.noaa.gov/news/features/delayed_effects_oilspill/index.cfm.) Perhaps if Dr. Lubchenco and the people she brought with her from the ENGO world weren’t so myopically focused on overfishing, offshore oil wells would have received some of the governmental scrutiny that was, and still is, so illogically directed at commercial fishermen. What are the chances that doing so would have saved the U.S. taxpayers a few bucks and spared the Gulf of Mexico – and the businesses that are dependent on its ecological integrity –the possibly irreversible damages caused by the huge oil spill?

The situation vis-a-vis on-board observers is the most dramatic indication of how skewed perceptions have become regarding ocean/fishery protections. In just about all federally regulated fisheries there are requirements for on-board federal observers, who are increasingly being paid for by the vessel owners/operators. These observed trips range in frequency from 100% coverage of all of the vessels in a fleet to vessels being assigned to carry an observer on a trip once a month or so, and with charges – often to the vessel – approaching a thousand dollars per day at sea. In fisheries in which landings are severely limited, observer costs can force vessels into bankruptcy.

These observers are there to track the catch and bycatch of the vessel to insure that quotas are not exceeded and that the take of protected species are accurately accounted for. There are also requirements for at-sea and at-the-dock reporting, so the catch of a vessel may be reported three separate times.

Surprisingly, or perhaps not so surprisingly considering the attitude of federal policy-level folks like Dr. Lubchenco, there are no requirement for any official observers on oil tankers, drilling rigs or other offshore vessels or structures that could have a negative environmental impact in our EEZ. As we have seen in a history of maritime accidents extending back for at least a half a century, these disasters can cause hundreds of millions of dollars or more in damages.

The following table is from The International Tanker Owners Pollution Federation Limited website (cached by The Wayback Machine at http://tinyurl.com/osw5slv). These were only spills from tankers, not drilling rigs or pipelines. Note that the Exxon Valdez spill, while included, ranked only number 35 in spill size. Note also that the authors assumed that offshore spills “caused little or no environmental damage.” The cached version of the website was from 2007/08.
The table below gives a brief summary of 20 major oil spills since 1967. A number of these incidents, despite their large size, caused little or no environmental damage as the oil did not impact coastlines, which is why some of the names will be unfamiliar to the general public. The Exxon Valdez is included because it is so well known although it is not the twentieth largest spill but rather the 35th.

Position     Shipname              Year                Location                               Size (in tonnes)

1        Atlantic Empress          1979      Off Tobago, West Indies                    287,000

2           ABT Summer             1991     700 nautical miles off Angola            260,000

3     Castillo de Bellever        1983   Off Saldanha Bay, South Africa           252,000

4         Amoco Cadiz               1978        Off Brittany, France                          223,000

5             Haven                       1991             Genoa, Italy                                    144,000

6           Odyssey                      1988  700 nautical miles off Nova Scotia      132,000

7        Torrey Canyon             1967             Scilly Isles, UK                               119,000

8           Sea Star                      1972             Gulf of Oman                                 115,000

9       Irenes Serenade            1980       Navarino Bay, Greece                      100,000

10         Urquiola                     1976          La Coruna, Spain                            100,000

11      Hawaiian Patriot          1977  300 nautical miles off Honolulu         95,000

12      Independenta               1979           Bosphorus, Turkey                        95,000

13     Jakob Maersk                1975          Oporto, Portugal                             88,000

14         Btaer                            1993         Shetland Islands, UK                     85,000

15       Khark 5                         1989 120 nautical miles off of Morocco       80,000

16     Aegean Sea                    1992             La Coruna, Spain                         74,000

17      Sea Empress                1996             Milford Haven, UK                      72,000

18        Katina P                     1992        Off Maputo, Mozambique               72,000

19          Nova                         1985    Off Kharg Island, Gulf of Iran            70,000

20        Prestige                     2002              Off Galicia, Spain                       63,000

35      Exxon Valdez             1989     Prince William Sound, Alaska           37,000

As we saw in the Deepwater Horizon episode, effective federal oversight was sorely lacking, and I’ve yet to see much progress there other than some bureaucratic rearranging and changing the name of the agency in charge. Human nature is human nature, whether the human is on an oil tanker, an offshore drilling rig or a commercial fishing vessel. But the potential for damages with the tanker or the drilling rig can range into the many billions of dollars while a fishing boat might kill a couple of thousand dollars’ worth of over-quota fish. And the income earned by a drilling rig or tanker every year is many orders of magnitude greater than the fishing vessel. Yet we don’t have a federal observer on the bridge of every tanker or on board every rig in the Gulf.

(It’s important to note here that the Pew Charitable Trusts, which has been directly responsible for much of the anti-fishing efforts over the last two decades, is largely controlled by heirs of Joseph Pew, the founder of Sun Oil/Sunoco.)

Gulf of Maine cod – again it’s not just fishing, and again it’s Jane Lubchenco

“We need a rapid transition to sectors and catch shares. Catch shares are a powerful tool to getting to sustainable fisheries and profitability. I challenge you to deliver on this in Amendment 16, to include measures to end overfishing. I will commit the resources to my staff to do their part to ensure Amendment 16 is passed in June. We are shining a light on your efforts and we will track your progress. There is too much at stake to allow delay and self-interest to prevent sectors and ultimately catch shares from being implemented. We are shining a light on your efforts and we will track your progress. There is too much at stake to allow delay and self-interest to prevent sectors and ultimately catch shares from being implemented.” (Ms. Lubchenco on April 8, 2010 while telling the New England Fisheries Management Council how her policies were going to fix the New England groundfish fishery – by Julie Wormser on the Environmental Defense blog EDFish/.)

What she said the day after her less than prophetic statement that fishing was the biggest threat to the world’s oceans was yet another demonstration of Ms. Lubchenco’s commitment to the naïve idea that just about any problem with the world’s oceans could be solved by adequately controlling fishing.

Six and a half years after her “catch shares revolution” that she kicked off by inflicting it on the New England groundfish fishery, the fishery is in a shambles and New England has lost much of it’s fishing infrastructure. This has all happened as fishing effort has been reduced so many times that far too many fishermen can no longer afford to fish for their own quota or to buy or lease quota from other fishermen in similar straits. So what was wrong with Ms. Lubcheco’s foresight this time?

The recent media mini-frenzy brought about by the release of a study relating the decline of codfish in New England to increasing ocean temperatures will give you some idea. The study was titled “Slow adaptation in the face of rapid warming leads to collapse of the Gulf of Maine (GOM) cod fishery.” Not incidentally, it was funded by the Lenfest Foundation, the fisheries-related grants of which are “managed” by the Pew Trusts.

For an idea of the misdirected zeal with which the people at Lenfest pursue their “scientific” objectives, in their report on Subsidies to U.S. Fisheries, Lenfest researchers R. Sharp and U.R. Sumaila (who was also a Pew Oceans Scholar) list “Fuel Subsidies” as the largest category. They describe these as “exemptions from federal and state fuel taxes and some state fuel sales taxes.” In reality they are refunds of federal and state highway use taxes available to fishermen or any other commercial/industrial users who are “exempt” from the tax. This is because they do not use the federal/state highway systems (http://tinyurl.com/RoadUseTax).

Sharp and Sumaila also include “sales tax exemptions,” which also aren’t fishing-specific subsidies but exemptions from sales taxes which are provided to any businesses for qualified purchases. The authors apparently believe that having fishermen pay taxes that the federal and state governments don’t intend them to pay would eliminate a “harmful subsidy” and “could improve the health of fisheries in the U.S.”

The following quotes were taken directly from the paper (my emphasis added):

· Recovery of this fishery (GOM cod) depends on sound management, but the size of the stock depends on future temperature conditions.

· Based on this analysis, the Gulf of Maine experienced decadal warming that few marine ecosystems have encountered.

· The Gulf of Maine cod stock has been chronically overfished, prompting progressively stronger management, including the implementation of a quota-based management system in 2010. Despite these efforts, including a 73% cut in quotas in 2013, spawning stock biomass (SSB) continued to decline.

· The Gulf of Maine is near the southern limit of cod, and previous studies have suggested that warming will lead to lower recruitment, suboptimal growth conditions, and reduced fishery productivity in the future.

· Gulf of Maine cod spawn in the winter and spring, so the link with summer temperatures suggests a decrease in the survival of late-stage larvae and settling juveniles. Although the relationship with temperature is statistically robust, the exact mechanism for this is uncertain but may include changes in prey availability and/or predator risk. For example, the abundance of some zooplankton taxa that are prey for larval cod has declined in the Gulf of Maine cod habitat. Warmer temperatures could cause juvenile cod to move away from their preferred shallow habitat into deeper water where risks of predation are higher.

· The average weight-at-age of cod in the Gulf of Maine region has been below the long-term mean since 2002, and these poorly conditioned fish will have a lower probability of survival.

· Temperature may directly influence mortality in younger fish through metabolic processes described above; however, we hypothesize that predation mortality may also be higher during warm years. Many important cod predators migrate into the Gulf of Maine or have feeding behaviors that are strongly seasonal. During a warm year, spring-like conditions occur earlier in the year, and fall-like conditions occur later. During the 2012 heat wave, the spring warming occurred 21 days ahead of schedule, and fall cooling was delayed by a comparable amount. This change in phenology could result in an increase in natural mortality of 44% on its own, without any increase in predator biomass.

An article in the Boston Globe about the study reported that “the authors… say the warmer water coursing into the Gulf of Maine has reduced the number of new cod and led to fewer fish surviving into adulthood. Cod prefer cold water, which is why they have thrived for centuries off New England. The precise causes for the reduced spawning are unclear, the researchers said, but they’re likely to include a decline in the availability of food for young cod, increased stress, and more hospitable conditions for predators. Cod larvae are eaten by many species, including dogfish and herring; larger cod are preyed upon by seals, whose numbers have increased markedly in the region.” (Climate change hurting N.E. cod population, study says, David Abel, October 29, 2015.)

While Mr. Abel neglected to mention it, post-larval cod up to maximum size are also consumed by adult spiny dogfish, as are the fish and shellfish that cod feed on. From Bigelow’s and Schroeder’s classic Fishes of the Gulf of Maine, “voracious almost beyond belief, the dogfish entirely deserves its bad reputation. Not only does it harry and drive off mackerel, herring, and even fish as large as cod and haddock, but it destroys vast numbers of them…. At one time or another they prey on practically all species of Gulf of Maine fish smaller than themselves….”

The authors of the report recognized a number of temperature-related factors which might have been contributing to the GOM cod decline and went so far as to state that the earlier warming in GOM surface waters in 2012 “could result in an increase in natural mortality of 44% on its own, without any increase in predator biomass.”

So a group of researchers published a paper in Science that showed that it wasn’t just fishing that was responsible for decreasing populations of cod in the GOM. That’s a good thing, right?

But then, according to an article in The Plate, National Geographic’s food blog, the study predicted that “if fishing mortality is completely eliminated (that is, a complete closure of the cod fishery, such as took place in Newfoundland), Gulf of Maine cod could rebound in 11 years. If some fishing is allowed, recovery would take longer: from 14 to 19 years, depending on how fast the water warms.”

Hard as it is to credit, in spite of all of the indications of the severity of the effects of warming on the GOM cod that the authors identified, the paper that they published in what is supposed to be one of the most important scientific journals in the world couldn’t get past the “it’s got to be fishing” creed as espoused by Ms. Lubchenco and others that has turned managing fishermen into the only “effective*” tool in the fishery managers’ toolbox. Not only has fishing, according to them, reduced this stock to its current depleted status, reducing fishing even further or eliminating it appears in their collective estimation to be the only way to fix it.

I have to get into some fisheries management basics here before proceeding farther. First off, the goal of fisheries management is to have enough fish in a stock after fishing to be able sustain itself (most simply, removals from the stock = additions to the stock). This amount of fish is represented as Bmsy, the biomass (B) that is required to produce the maximum sustainable yield (msy).

If we are dealing with a static environment Bmsy will remain constant. But when the environment changes – as when the temperature changes – with fish that are approaching either end of their comfort range Bmsy will change as well (the authors of the paper provided us with a number of factors related to water temperature which I reproduced in the bullet list above that would explain at least some of these changes). Thus, as the water temperature in the Gulf of Maine (GOM) increased, the cod Bmsy decreased. In plain English, the GOM is capable of producing fewer cod today than it was ten years ago.

For another fishery management basic, all of those factors that account for mortality in a fishery are considered either natural and indicated by M, or due to fishing, indicated by F. For convenience (meaning the scientists don’t have a clue and it’s too much trouble to figure it out what it really is) M is usually assumed to be constant.

“However, in most cases, a single value—usually 0.2—for natural mortality is assumed for stock assessments, despite evidence to the contrary (Pope 1979, Quinn and Deriso 1999, Jennings et al. 2001).” From A Review for Estimating Natural Mortality in Fish Populations, Kate. I. Siegfried & Bruno Sansó

“The traditional assumption of a constant M may be appropriate when only mature fish are of explicit interest in the assessment.” From Estimating Natural Mortality in Stock Assessment Applications, edited by Jon Brodziak, Jim Ianelli, Kai Lorenzen and Richard D. Methot Jr., NOAA Technical Memorandum NMFS-F/SPO-119, June 2011. (I have to point out that in a GOM that’s getting hotter a constant M isn’t even appropriate when “only mature fish are of explicit interest in the assessment.” – NES).

Because, according to management dogma or due to management convenience, natural mortality remains constant by definition regardless of what it actually is, when a stock decreases it must be due to fishing. Accordingly, in spite of the authors having provided at least seven reasons why natural mortality for GOM cod is increasing as GOM temperatures are increasing, and in the face of the inarguable fact that the amount of cod fishing and the cod fishing mortality have plummeted at the same time, the authors conclude that reducing fishing for cod even further than it has been or eliminating it will “fix” the cod stocks.

Predation has and will continue to increase as the water temperature rises. The condition of the cod has declined and will continue to decline as the water temperature rises. Spawning success ditto. Also the survival of late-stage larvae and settling juveniles. And prey availability. And predation on the cod will increase. An example that the authors note is that seals, which are apparently quite fond of a diet rich in cod “have increased markedly in the region.” (For the significance of seal predation on cod stocks, see Seals threaten Scottish cod stock recovery at http://tinyurl.com/SealPredation-Cod.) Yet cutting back on fishing effort again and again and again is still the modus operandi of choice for recovering the GOM cod stocks, regardless of its impact on New England’s fishermen, fishing communities and fishing traditions and regardless of its lack of impact on the recovery.

That’s about all that needs to be said about the efficacy of fisheries management as espoused by the anti-fishing claque and as embraced by our modern fisheries management regime.

This definitely doesn’t bode well for fishing in any waters that are or will be warming, and that supposedly is or is going to be all of them, but it’s fishing-centric management at the most painfully obvious.

In how many fisheries being “managed” is that the case today? More importantly, in how many of fisheries in which natural mortality has increased due to ocean temperature increase has the permitted fishing mortality been correspondingly adjusted downward? As ocean temperatures continue to increase, how long will it take the fisheries management establishment – at least that part of it that doesn’t depend on foundation funding for hundreds of millions of dollars of “lets keep on beating the overfishing drums” funding, many of them provided by Pew – to admit that the whole idea of “overfishing” and its actual causes needs to be reconsidered.

* “Effective” from the managers’ perspective because it’s all they are allowed to do to manage fisheries.

When the commercial fishing industry didn’t agree with NOAA/NMFS on the status of the monkfish stocks

(Part of the ongoing controversy with New England/Gulf of Maine cod is centered on the difference in opinion between members of the fishing industry and the management establishment about the health of the stocks. I thought it might be instructive to review how a similar disagreement, only this time dealing with monkfish, was resolved fifteen years ago.)

In Framework Adjustment #1 to the Goosefish (monkfish) Fishery Management Plan published in 2001 it was announced that the directed monkfish fishery off the Northeast states would be permanently closed in 2002 due to the low number of fish that were being captured in the annual Northeast Science Center’s bottom trawl surveys (http://www.nefmc.org/library/framework-1-2). The participants in the directed fishery disagreed with the survey results and objected strenuously to the proposed closure, reporting that there were plenty of fish available, and for whatever reason(s) the NOAA R/V Albatross was not capable of catching them. Participants in the fishery – primarily in the Mid-Atlantic – formed the Monkfish Defense Fund (MDF) which convinced NMFS leadership that the fish were there but were not being taken by the researchers. A collaborative industry/NMFS pilot survey validated the industry’s claims that the stock was more plentiful. As a result, Congress provided funding for a collaborative, comprehensive NOAA/NMFS/MDF monkfish survey, again using commercial vessels with a history of successful participation in the monkfish trawl fishery and using their experienced captains and crews and their own gear to conduct the survey. On board the commercial vessels would also be NMFS and state personnel and academic researchers.

The first large scale cooperative monkfish survey took place in early 2001 with two modern trawlers, F/V Drake (out of Portland, ME) and F/V Mary K (out of New Bedford, MA). The commercial vessels did catch the monkfish that the Albatross couldn’t and provided a more accurate biomass estimate. The difference in the monkfish catch between the commercial vessels and the NOAA/NMFS vessel was significant enough that the managers reversed their decision to permanently close the directed fishery. Subsequent cooperative monkfish surveys on commercial vessels were held in 2004 and 2009. The series stopped after the 2009 survey because NOAA/NMFS personnel decided that their new survey vessel, R/V Bigelow, would adequately sample the monkfish stock.

And for an update on spiny dogfish….

(If you missed it, in Dolphins and seals and dolphin, oh my! from this past January I wrote about the almost totally ignored impacts of predation on commercial and recreational fish stocks in New England and the Mid-Atlantic (http://www.fishnet-usa.com/Dogfish%20and%20seals%20and%20dolphin.pdf). Since then the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council has recommended that the spiny dogfish Total Allowable Catch be reduced significantly, based on the results of an assessment update which evidently couldn’t find a whole bunch of these highly efficient predators that were there until a few years back (for a discussion of how efficient they are follow the previous link). Last July Dr. James Sulikowski’s research group at the University of New England in Biddeford, Maine published The Use of Satellite Tags to Redefine Movement Patterns of Spiny Dogfish (Squalus acanthias) along the U.S. East Coast: Implications for Fisheries Management which reported the results of their work to more accurately describe the spiny dogfish stock(s) of the Northeast U.S. (http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0103384),

But before getting into their research I’m going to take a slight detour to discuss the Northeast Fisheries Science Center’s two annual bottom trawl surveys, the primary data source for the assessments of commercially and recreationally important fish species from Cape Hatteras to Maine. These surveys are so influential in assessments because they collectively comprise a time series going back to the early 1960s. In that time NOAA vessels have made approximately the same number of tows of approximately the same nets of approximately the same duration over approximately the same pieces of bottom on approximately the same dates every year. The annual variations in the numbers/weights of the various species being sampled are assumed to be an (approximate) indication of the variations of the total populations of those species. The nets that are used fish on the bottom and don’t sample the entire water column.

The total area sampled is identical from year to year, and the area sampled does not necessarily represent the full range of the species (or stock) being sampled.

The assumption is that the catch of particular species each year is going to be proportional to the total population of that species. Hence, if the trawl survey took 5,000 pounds of scup, for example, in one year and 3,000 pounds of scup the following year, in year two the biomass of scup would be estimated to be 60% of what it was the previous year (the weight used is often the average of several recent years – as specified in the FMP).

This seems to be reasonable if the distribution of the species (or stock) doesn’t change significantly from year to year. But what if it does? What if, for example, the population shifts to the north and to the east, which would be one of the expected reactions to warming ocean temperatures? It seems obvious that the part of the population sampled by the trawl survey(s) will no longer by representative of the total population as it is today, only as it was. And considering that not all of the species sampled are restricted to living in close association with the bottom but at times might move up and down in the water column, it might well be that with a changing temperature regime some species will not be equally susceptible to capture by the bottom tending gear utilized in the trawl surveys.

Getting back to the University of New England spiny dogfish work, from the abstract of the report, “vertical utilization also suggests distinct diel patterns and that this species may not utilize the benthos as previously thought, potentially decreasing availability to benthic (bottom tending gear as used in the NMFS bottom trawl surveys) gear.” In Conclusions the authors write “the results suggest that the estimated spiny dogfish movement patterns calculated from satellite tag data are possibly spatiotemporally asynchronous with the NEFSC bottom-trawl surveys, thus a potentially large percentage (horizontal and vertical “availability”) of these sharks may be unaccounted for in this survey.”

What would be a consequence of underestimating the total biomass of spiny dogfish off the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast states? Obviously one would be underestimating what they were eating, which includes both codfish and the species that codfish eat. But as fishing management is accomplished today, spiny dogfish predation is irrelevant, because even if it were known, nothing could be done about it. The spiny dogfish fishery must be managed like all of our other fisheries, with a harvest limited to what would yield MSY every year. This is in spite of the fact that spiny dogfish are worth pennies a pound to the fishermen while the other commercial species like cod whose populations spiny dogfish are significantly impacting are worth at least an order of magnitude more.

While the Magnuson-Stevens Act, the federal legislation that controls fishing in the U.S. Exclusive Economic Zone, pays lip service to the Optimum Yield in a fishery, something which should allow fisheries to be fished to below the MSY level if that is economically or socially warranted, the Act actually precludes that. As I wrote in 2009:

“One of the requirements of the Magnuson Stevens Act, the federal legislation that controls fishing in the US Exclusive Economic Zone, or more accurately one of the implied requirements of the Act, is that all fisheries be at the level that will produce MSY.

The first of the 10 National Standards that are applied to Fishery Management Plans put in place through the provisions of the Act is “conservation and management measures shall prevent overfishing while achieving, on a continuing basis, the OY (Optimal Yield) from each fishery for the U.S. fishing industry.”

From the Act (16 U.S.C. 1802, MSA § 3): 104-297

(33) The term “optimum”, with respect to the yield from a fishery, means the amount of fish which—

(A) will provide the greatest overall benefit to the Nation, particularly with respect to food production and recreational opportunities, and taking into account the protection of marine ecosystems;

(B) is prescribed as such on the basis of the maximum sustainable yield from the fishery, as reduced by any relevant economic, social, or ecological factor; and

(C) in the case of an overfished fishery, provides for rebuilding to a level consistent with producing the maximum sustainable yield in such fishery.

(34) The terms “overfishing” and “overfished” mean a rate or level of fishing mortality that jeopardizes the capacity of a fishery to produce the maximum sustainable yield on a continuing basis.

The definition of OY supposedly allows for departures from the MSY. However, as even the casual consideration of the above section of Magnuson indicates, that is not the case, or more accurately, that is only the case when a stock isn’t at the MSY level. In that case the stock is considered to be overfished, and if it is considered to be overfished, it must be “rebuilt” to the MSY level by having the

Watch Dr. Steve Cadrins presentation “Strengthening the Scientific Basis of the 2006 Management Requirements: Optimal Yield from Mixed-Stock Fisheries” Click here

harvest level reduced.

But will having every stock of fish in the U.S. Exclusive Economic Zone being managed at the MSY level be economically, socially or ecologically “optimum?” Will it automatically provide “the greatest overall benefit to the Nation, particularly with respect to food production and recreational opportunities?” Economically and socially, emphatically no. Is it even possible? Ecologically a not so emphatic “maybe.” Considering all of the good intentions, all of the effort, all of the pain and suffering and all of the money – both from the public and the private sectors – that is being expended in efforts to reach what are perhaps undesirable and unattainable goals, the results of being tied to the Magnuson concept of OY can be and in demonstrable instances are far from optimum. (from MSY and effective fisheries management, http://www.fishnet-usa.com/maximum_sustainable_yield.htm).

One of the demonstrable instances in which the results are far from optimum is having spiny dogfish at the MSY level in waters off the Mid-Atlantic and New England.

So why is it important to call it fishing management or fishermen management or something similar?

Because no one has much of a clue of the effects of water quality or water temperature or wind direction/duration or upwelling or food availability or of much of anything else on fish stocks. As a matter of fact they lump all forms of non-fishing mortality together, call it Natural Mortality – as opposed to Fishing Mortality – and assume that it is a constant. Natural Mortality plus Fishing Mortality is by definition equal to total mortality. So obviously the authors at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute can report that fishing mortality is what’s driving the Gulf of Maine cod population, because that’s what fisheries science and their models demand. It doesn’t matter how many codfish the burgeoning stocks of spiny dogfish eat nor does it matter how much of the prey species that codfish depend on is left after the dogfish get done with them, because codfish mortality that isn’t due to fishing doesn’t vary. All that varies is fishing, and the only way to have more fish is by reducing fishing. And if it can’t be reduced enough, then stop it.

The only way real fishery management has a chance of working will be by identifying and quantifying all of the major forms of mortality on each fish stock being managed, and by either controlling at beast or at least allowing for all of those other sources of mortality – which in no way in the natural world can add up to a constant year after year.

Once we’re at that point we’ll never have to look at a fishery that continues to decline, regardless of how much we cut back on fishing mortality, and force the fishermen to continue to pay the price for other factors that we either can’t or that we feel that it’s too inconvenient to control.

As I concluded in MSY and effective fisheries management six years ago (cited above):

“The so-called conservationists involved in fisheries would have us believe that there’s some sort of “natural balance” possible in our inshore and offshore waters and that, if fishing is reduced adequately across the board, this mythical balance can be reestablished. That is far from the case.

In their Rousseau-inspired misconception of what the oceans should be, they look at anthropogenic effects as categorically bad, with fishing in general and not harvesting every stock at the MSY level in particular among the worst. This is not necessarily the case. Fishing can be an effective management tool. In the case of species like herring, menhaden and dogfish, allowing – or encouraging – harvest levels above what would be considered “sustainable,” and then maintaining the populations at lower than maximum levels by carefully regulating harvest might be all that is necessary to return “overfished” stocks of much more valuable species back to their OY levels.

Take, for example, the current situation regarding the New England groundfish complex. Fishermen have been hit with a seemingly interminable series of harvesting reductions extending back well over a decade. These cutbacks have been so severe that, if the most recent “management” proposal by NMFS is instituted, boats will be allowed to fish only 20 days a year.

This is due to the fact that several of the groundfish stocks haven’t been recovering as they were expected to (at least by the managers) following previous drastic reductions in fishing effort. At the same time, as we’ve seen above, the stock of spiny dogfish, notoriously voracious predators on groundfish and their prey species, have been allowed to increase unrestrictedly. And the even larger Atlantic herring stock could be impeding the groundfish recovery as well.

Reduce the number of spiny dogfish? Of course not. The Magnuson Act won’t permit it. Reduce the number of herring? Ditto, but for political rather than biological reasons.

But what if we could? Using such an approach, the economy will benefit, the ecosystem will benefit (through increased biodiversity), and the fishing communities that are dependent on “balanced” fisheries will benefit as well.

And there are other fisheries that are facing ever more stringent harvesting restrictions each year because they aren’t performing as the fishing-centric computer models predict that they should. The summer flounder fishery in the mid-Atlantic is one. What’s the impact of spiny dogfish on the summer flounder stock?

An EEZ that is being managed to provide the optimal harvest from a complex of interacting species would seem to be preferable to what we have today. The way we’re doing it today, our most valuable fisheries are increasingly subject to the depredations of other, less valuable species that enjoy the protection of a management regime that is totally stacked against rational management. If fewer spiny dogfish, fewer Atlantic herring or fewer menhaden will mean an increase in more valuable, more desirable or more threatened species, then why shouldn’t the people responsible for fisheries management be provided with the administrative wherewithal to allow this? Legislation mandating that they can’t isn’t benefitting anyone beyond the few anti-fishing activists who have built careers on saving fish stocks that clearly don’t need saving, and it’s certainly not benefitting the ecosystem. So why do we have it?”

March 28, 2014