The seas have not been tamed, but they may be near exhaustion. Wade into the anger and arguments that wash over the world’s fisheries, and you will find agreement, however reluctant, on a central point: The oceans have fewer fish than ever before, and too many hooks, nets and harpoons going after them.
Midwesterners, seeing increasingly exotic supermarket fish displays and menus dotted with sea bass and sturgeon, can be excused for wondering what all the fuss is about. Luxe species such as salmon and trout have become fish-farm staples, and the benefits of a diet high in fish oils are shouted from the mountaintops of nutrition wisdom.
Surely the more fish we eat, the better?
That depends on the fish. And how it was caught, or farmed, and where.
Sorting it all out isn’t made easier by the fact that fishermen are victims as well as villains, and the officials responsible for preservation also are in charge of “exploiting the resource,” according to critics.
The white knight in this survival story, as cast by SeaWeb, a group that started a national boycott of North Atlantic swordfish 10 months ago, is the U.S. consumer. By keeping juvenile swordfish off the plate and in the ocean, the group says, diners can help revive a decimated population. This would then be a model for recovery of other species.
Sounds sensible, even painless-unless you’re a commercial fisherman, a wholesaler or a fisheries bureaucrat who is trying to keep everyone happy. Or at least equally unhappy.
The boycott has had an effect: Prices and demand are down, public awareness is up. But opponents doubt it has done the fish any good.
“No matter what SeaWeb does, we’re going to go out and catch our quota,” said David Horton, owner of MacLean’s Seafood, a major brokerage in the East Coast fishing epicenter of New Bedford, Mass. “It’s just that when they get to the dock, the fishermen take it on the chin” because the campaign has depressed the price. “Not one single fish is being saved because of what SeaWeb has done.”
John Hoey, senior fisheries scientist with the National Fisheries Institute, a trade group, said the best thing about the “Give Swordfish a Break” action is that it has made the public aware of the problems confronting the oceans. Even so, he said, “a consumer-based, restaurant-oriented campaign is not going to have the same long-reaching effect that a government action or a state-by-state management action would have.”
The poster fish
Mark Kurlansky questions the choice of mascot: “Why the swordfish, of the something like 60 percent of commercial species that are in trouble?” Kurlansky is the author of “Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World,” which describes the commercial extinction of cod on Canada’s Grand Banks (see story on this page).
Fishermen would say it’s because of charisma: Consumers will cozy up to a big-game species like swordfish, Horton said, sooner than they would to, say, an ugly monkfish. Swordfish is ripe for a public campaign in other ways, supporters say: The favored fishing method is often wasteful, and the U.S. is in a position to improve the fish’s lot without going through the international bargaining that complicates preservation of such “highly migratory species.”
“We catch 30 percent of the swordfish caught in the Atlantic-that’s the whole Atlantic,” said Carl Safina, vice president for marine conservation at the National Audubon Society, one of SeaWeb’s backers. So even though swordfish is pursued the world over, the U.S. can make a difference all by itself. “We control a large, very biologically significant region,” Safina said.
Waste is a problem with any mass fishing method, and quotas tend to exacerbate it. For instance, when a boat hauls in a net full of fish from the sea bottom, the change in pressure is going to kill them, Kurlansky said, even if they’re of a forbidden size or species. Overboard they go. In the same way, when a longliner, the favored vessel for going after swordfish in the North Atlantic, reels in its hundreds of hooks after several hours, any fish that bit, however small, are dead too. (This problem of “juvenile dead discards” is one of many addressed in a rebuilding plan due out this month from the National Marine Fisheries Service.)
If you ask who is to blame for the scarcity of swordfish or any other sought-after species, you’ll hear an earful. But the easy answer is: everybody.
“Anybody who’s taking stuff out of the ocean is contributing somewhat to the problems,” Safina said.
Countries and fishermen blame each other. And they’re all partly right. For instance, some recreational anglers sell their catch, which infuriates the more tightly regulated commercial fishermen, who do indeed catch most of the big-game species that sportsmen would love to hook.
But the real culprit is technology. Nets have gotten bigger, lines longer; fish finders are better and satellite navigation lets a skipper return to exactly the same pocket he found fish in before. Weekend anglers have faster boats that can get out to the deep water. Factory trawlers stay out for months, netting, cleaning and flash-freezing.
It’s a long way from the days of two guys in a 20-foot dory, handlining for cod.
Kurlansky, looking at the highbrow popularity of “day-boat” and “line-caught” on modern menus, thinks a return to low-tech might be a good idea.
“If you can actually convince people to pay more for a fish that’s caught on a line than in a net, this is the solution,” he said. “And if you can get them to pay more still for a hand-held line than a long line, that would be better yet. Because the problem in fisheries is how to undo the technology so that fishermen are catching less fish but still earning a good living.”
“I would love to see that happen,” said Joel Findlay, chef/owner of 302 West in Geneva. But too few people are willing to pay for pristine fish, as he discovered with his store. “Eventually I had to close the market, only because there aren’t enough people who appreciate that if you spend a couple dollars more you’re doing it for a good reason.”
The already high price of fish is “the No. 1 issue” keeping seafood consumption flat, about 15 pounds per person a year, according to Sean O’Scannlain, president of Plitt Co., which sells to places like Sunset Foods, Burhop’s and Shaw’s Crab House. “It’s the highest-cost animal protein.”
Regulatory blues
At the heart of the controversy is the fact that marine fish are the world’s last wild food supply. They are not beef cattle (except for those farmed Atlantic salmon), fenced in and easily counted.
The agencies and agreements that have sprung up to manage this unpredictable resource have another difficulty. They have to try to preserve fish and exploit them at the same time.
“The National Marine Fisheries Service used to be called the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries, and a great chunk of its mission was actually to promote the fisheries,” said Steve Murawski, chief of the stock assessment group with the fisheries service at Woods Hole, Mass. “It’s only more recent times, when some of the stocks have become depleted, that it has gone to more of a regulatory agency. Of course, this is a hard pill for the industry to swallow.”
Worldwide, the fate of many big-game fish is in the hands of the International Convention for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, which sets quotas for all sorts of migratory species, sharks and swordfish among them.
But in the 30 years ICCAT has existed, Audubon’s Safina said, “its management has been 100 percent ineffectual in preventing declines and depletions of the fish under their purview.”
Whether or not ICCAT and the fisheries service can effectively rebuild fish stocks, the job is theirs. Though SeaWeb insists Americans can rescue North Atlantic swordfish, international enforcement is vital for other species.
Over the years the fisheries service has indeed restricted gear types, closed off areas, cut down on days at sea, reduced catch and prohibited things like spotter planes. A fisheries rebuilding plan in the works is likely to restrict things even further. And fewer fishermen will take to the seas.
The swordfish fleet in New Bedford already is out of action 4 months of the year, Massachusetts wholesaler Horton said, “because they catch their quota and they tie up; they don’t fish.”
Diners’ dilemma
Kurlansky, who has written articles on overfishing in addition to his cod book, has wrestled with the problem of what advice to give consumers, without much success. “But if you know a species is in trouble, it might be a good idea to back off on buying it.”
John Hoey of the National Fisheries Institute is wary of encouraging not-quite-fully-informed consumers to take matters into their own hands. He thinks they should let chefs and retailers worry about it.
They should be able to assure customers that their suppliers are registered with the Interstate Shellfish Sanitation Commission, for example, and are licensed by the state or the Food and Drug Administration.
But are there any species that people shouldn’t be eating any more?
Hoey sighed. “I would not eat a species that I thought, based on my own review or what I had heard, was in serious trouble, but had no management.” (A management plan is a set of regulations tailored to a species.)
Safina agreed, sort of. “Not every management plan is an effective management plan,” he said. “But in my seafood guide I was conscious of that same fact: If there’s a management plan in place, it’s better.”
The future of fish and fishermen
The oceans are vast and many fish are prolific. They can bounce back if they’re left alone. Striped bass along the Atlantic Coast were in desperate straits until a 5-year moratorium took effect.
“And presto-change-o, we had a phenomenal fishery here, with millions of people participating, recreationally and commercially,” said Michael Nussman, lobbyist for the American Sportfishing Association. He also is one of three U.S. commissioners who will do the negotiating at a November meeting of ICCAT in Madrid.
Other species pose bigger problems. For Atlantic bluefin tuna, for instance, “it turns out that even if we stopped fishing for 10 years, and got all the other countries to stop fishing, we couldn’t recover,” said Rebecca Lent, chief of the Highly Migratory Species Division of the fisheries service. She is proposing zero fishing for an entire generation of bluefin tuna-35 years.
Nussman doubts that will wash internationally. “They’d look at you like you were crazy if you said, `Let’s just go close that fishery,’ ” he said.
William Dugan, whose Superior Ocean Produce in Chicago sells “a ton” of various tunas to such places as Spiaggia and Charlie Trotter’s, worries about his supply, and about his suppliers. “Most of these people have grown up with a real love of the sea,” he said. “They more than anybody else want to protect the environment, on the whole.”
Don’t forget, Horton said, that fishermen are “only one part of the equation.
“If people were really concerned about the stocks of fish,” he said, “they would put as much effort into (reducing) pollution of the ocean and creating more habitat.”
Dugan and others say fish farming is taking pressure off wild populations, though it comes with its own concerns. Some scientists worry, for instance, that when farmed salmon escape, interbreeding with the natives reduces the wild population’s ability to spawn and survive.
Such tactics also have their limits: “They’re not farming tuna and swordfish, as people may not have noticed,” Dugan said.
Regardless of whether nations and fishermen sort out their differences, Kurlansky has no doubt that overfishing will end one way or another.
“If it is allowed to continue,” he said, “there just won’t be any more fish.”
SOME BETTER CHOICES
Swordfish and other marine fish are not the only ones at risk, Carl Safina emphasizes in a chart he compiled for Audubon magazine. Some wild salmon are in dire straits, for instance, and dredging for wild scallops tears up habitat. But that doesn’t mean you should stop eating all fish and shellfish. The following, extracted from Safina’s chart, are largely in good shape.
– Lobster. Intense fishing pressure takes nearly all American lobsters as soon as they attain legal size, but they are caught in habitat-friendly traps.
– Summer flounder (or fluke). Strict management is helping this East Coast flatfish recover, although it is still considered overfished.
– Halibut. Severely depleted in the Atlantic, halibut are faring better in the Pacific, especially in Alaska’s well-managed longline fishery.
– Dolphinfish (also called mahi-mahi or dorado). It’s widespread and abundant, but dolphinfish has virtually no management anywhere, even though fishing is intensifying.
– Squid. Squid mature fast, allowing them to withstand heavy fishing pressure.
– Crab. They are generally in good shape, though Alaska king crabs are overfished.
– Striped bass. Half of those sold now are farmed, and the share may soon increase to 75 percent. Striped bass remains abundant on its native East Coast after a fishing ban let them recover.
Species information adapted from Audubon magazine’s “Guide to Seafood.”
