Day Four: Wednesday, March 27, 1996 Managers maneuver at cliff's edge Rough weather, a long night, a bad catch Illegal fishing thrives in vast Gulf Shrimpers snap over fish saver A fallen captain fights for his pride Scientists confounded by nature, politics

MANAGING TO FAIL

In theory, saving the fish is simple: Count them, decide how many you can spare, and limit the catch accordingly. In practice, fishing has proven extraordinarily difficult to manage. The science of ‘counting’ fish is really closer to educated guessing. And when the numbers point to trouble, as they did in the case of the red snapper, the industry and the politicians too often shout down the warnings and guarantee collapse.

Managers maneuver at cliff’s edge

By John McQuaid,
Staff writer

In late October — a time of blustery, changeable weather in the Gulf of Mexico — the government decided it was time for a little red snapper fishing.
  The shimmering snapper, sought after by haute chefs and family cooks alike, is off-limits to commercial fishing in the Gulf most of the year. It was overfished through much of the 1980s, scientists say, and its population still hovers dangerously close to collapse.
  But officials had miscalculated the closing date for the season the previous March, and the commercial catch had come in 210,000 pounds under quota. The solution, requested by the fishing industry, was a 36-hour makeup season.
  From Texas to Florida, hundreds of boats set out in a mad midnight scramble. But the weather didn’t cooperate. Two miles south of Grand Isle, a whistling east wind and 5-foot seas forced Capt. Ron Anderson to turn his boat around and head home.

Red snapper fishers weigh their catch at the dock in Golden Meadow late last year after a frenzied 36-hour makeup snapper season was ordered when regulators closed the regular season too early.

  Three hours before the starting time, officials postponed the derby for two days.
  By the time Anderson made it out, the time limit left him stuck in an area already picked over by boats that had ignored the postponement or gotten an earlier start. He came back with a disappointing 600 pounds of snapper, well under his 2,000-pound limit.
  It shouldn’t be such a hassle to go fishing. But despite the best intentions of the snapper’s caretakers, efforts to preserve it have gone spectacularly awry, endangering both the fish and the livelihoods of the people catching it.
  The struggle to manage the snapper mirrors hundreds of other battles to protect valuable fish populations, situations where the best science has often failed, and a maze of regulations can do more to alienate fishers than save fish.
  In the Gulf, no other fish has gotten more care and attention than the red snapper. Dockside monitors, number crunchers, biologists, economists, anthropologists and regulators have collected reams of data, run complex computer models and written sheaves of rules in their struggle to bring the fish population back from depletion.

Red snapper fisherman Ron Anderson spends a few quiet moments in the kitchen of his Golden Meadow home with his wife, Liz. Anderson favors a new regulatory system for snapper that would give a limited number of fishers a legal right to a set percentage of the total snapper quota in a given year. Part or all of the share could be sold to other fishers.

  It hasn’t worked. The snapper population is bigger than it was at its lowest point, but scientists say it is decades away from complete recovery.
  The snapper’s problems are not unusual. For the most part, marine fisheries are ruled by crisis management that kicks in only after a fish population has dropped dramatically and jobs are being lost.
  The result is an approach one wry observer termed MAD: Management After Depletion.
  ‘‘One of the founders of our field once said that fishery science is based on elegant post-mortems,’’ said Bradford Brown, director of the National Marine Fisheries Service’s Southeast Fisheries Science Center in Miami.
  Science is at the base of the system. But it was a rickety foundation from the start. Scientific data about fish populations is always sketchy, and that makes it vulnerable to political pressures. As fish populations plunge, the politics becomes more desperate and the science more irrelevant.
  ‘‘The management process has helped destroy this fish and it’s doing a pretty good job on us too,’’ said Anderson, who has been on several fishery management committees.
  Twenty years ago, the government barely paid attention to fishing. But when the United States expanded its jurisdiction to 200 miles offshore in 1976, it set up regional fishery management councils — advised by the Fisheries Service — to oversee fishing in its new domain and work with state agencies.
  Overfishing began almost immediately, causing widespread damage before anyone could get a handle on the problem. Agencies have been behind the curve ever since.
  The arrangement wasn’t designed to control the size of fleets, the biggest pressure on fish, or do much about protecting coastal habitat, the other major source of trouble.
  Its decentralized structure is supposed to help build consensus, but just as often it has caused political paralysis.

Rules aren’t cutting it
  ‘‘Fisheries have been managed with the same principles for the last 100 years, and look at the fish stocks — they’re a disaster,’’ said international fishery consultant Francis Christy.
  There are now more fishery regulations — international, federal and state — than ever before. Yet fish populations are in worse shape than ever before.
  One good indicator of the trend can be found in the Federal Register, which publishes all regulatory changes, seasonal openings and other parts of the Fisheries Service’s management plans, just a fraction of all the rules and regulations affecting fisheries.
  In 1980, there were 14 regulations listed in the register. In 1984, when the councils first started implementing comprehensive management plans, there were 226. In the first three quarters of 1994, there were 417.
  U.S. fisheries are vast and diverse, and management has worked in some cases, such as many of the bountiful Alaskan fisheries. Gulf redfish, which are not related to red snapper, were decimated a decade ago but are making a strong comeback under a strict management system. But on the whole, the regulatory buildup has slowed but not stopped the depletion of fish populations across the country.
  The Fisheries Service says 80 percent of the species groups it has enough data on to characterize are overfished or fished at their limit, up from 68 percent in 1977.
  During the same period, the country as a whole was catching fewer fish, and the value of those fish fell — except in the West, which experienced a vast expansion in landings of inexpensive Alaskan pollock in recent years. That contraction, along with a quantum shift to larger boats and more mechanization, has put tens of thousands of people out of work, and the trend continues today.
  This is a recipe for upheaval, and it has spawned political fights in fisheries everywhere, including the red snapper fishery.

Gambling the future
  When some fish populations fall very low, any additional pressure can send them spiralling into a collapse from which they might never recover. Fisheries Service biologist Phil Goodyear’s most recent assessment says the snapper population may be on the edge of that cliff.
  If it’s true, he wrote, ‘‘any decline in the spawning stock below current levels should be strongly avoided, as it could lead to precipitous population declines.’’
  Goodyear estimates it will take until 2019 to rebuild the snapper population to a healthy, sustainable stock — and that’s only if a solid plan is put in place immediately.
  Instead, under pressure from the commercial fishing industry, the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council recently voted to allow more, not less, snapper fishing.
  It raised the annual limit from 6 million to 9 million pounds, based on the hope that the incidental catch of young snappers by shrimp trawls will be cut in half starting next year. Forty million young snapper were caught by trawls in 1994, and Goodyear says slashing that number is crucial to the species’ survival.
  The problem is that by-catch reduction has been politically gridlocked for years because shrimping, the biggest Gulf fishery, has a lot of political clout, and managers are swayed as much by political as by scientific arguments.
  ‘‘They’re gambling the future of the fish,’’ Goodyear said. ‘‘But I’ve given up worrying about it.’’

Red snapper’s demise
  The snapper is a reef fish, which tend to congregate on hard bottoms and underwater structures: rocks, coral reefs, oil rigs and shipwrecks. That makes them easy to find and catch in large numbers.
  Snapper are also slow-growing and long-lived; the oldest fish recorded was 53. They were thus easy to deplete: Fishing killed so many adults that those remaining couldn’t reproduce quickly enough to replace them.
  Trawling and overfishing sent the catch plummeting between 1981 and ’87, when the estimated combined commercial-recreational catch fell from 16.9 million pounds to 5.1 million pounds, a decline of nearly 70 percent.
  The council delayed taking serious action until 1990. The chief reason was scientific uncertainty. Because dramatic fluctuations in annual catches can occur even during periods when a fish is not in decline, such drops are often dismissed until it’s too late, a mistake that wiped out key fish populations in New England.
  ‘‘A lot of it was not knowing what was going on,’’ Andrew Kemmerer, Southeast regional director of the Fisheries Service, said of the failure to detect the red snapper collapse sooner. ‘‘The science was slowly becoming more reliable, but the managers were not paying attention to it. Had the council been confronted with the same kinds of information with the same level of precision we have now, things might have turned out differently.’’

Estimates, guesses
  Fishery biologists are studying something they can neither see nor measure directly. Fish populations are, after all, under water, spread out over wide areas. During spawning, they release millions of eggs, a fraction of which will survive for reasons scientists can only guess at.
  It takes years or even decades to gather reasonably comprehensive data, which must be painstakingly assembled from historical catch statistics, data on length and age gathered by dockside agents, and sampling by government research boats equipped with trawls.
  Agencies don’t have the time and resources to identify problems before they turn into full-blown crises. They usually focus on the most economically important or most depleted fish. Or both, in the case of red snapper.
  When they assemble their data, it is almost always inaccurate.
  Commercial fishers often underreport their catch, because they don’t want to fill a quota, or exceed a trip limit. Data from sport fishing boats are even sketchier, gathered from projections of data gathered from voluntary surveys.
  Once they have data, scientists must try to fit it into a model of how the fish population is structured by age and how it changes year to year. But to fill in the gaps, scientists make assumptions — in some cases, assumptions built upon assumptions.
  Take the problem with shrimp trawls. According to Goodyear’s assessment, they are the main reason the snapper remains in such bad shape. He estimates they kill more than 85 percent of all baby snappers each year.
  To get that number, Goodyear combined three pieces of information. He took data from sample trawling done by research vessels that break down how many fish of each kind are caught on a given run. He took data on the activity of shrimp boats operating in the same area. He made a guess at the rate fish die of natural causes. He crunched it all in a computer model to estimate how many fish there were to start with and how many were left after the trawls got to them.
  Goodyear defends the process, saying data from many sources corroborate each other in his model. But he concedes it is based on assumptions that could be wrong; that’s the nature of the scientific method.
  It’s no surprise that snapper fishers dispute his findings.
  ‘‘There’s plenty of fish out there. The Goodyear report is just plain wrong,’’ said snapper boat captain Wayne Werner of Golden Meadow.
  Goodyear says it’s a difference in perspective. There are more fish because regulations have had some effect, he says. In addition, an unusually high number of baby snapper were born in 1989. Such short-lived fluctuations are common in fish populations. They do not change the long-term trends, but they do often undercut arguments for restrictions on fishing — another reason action was delayed in New England.
  But Goodyear’s assessment is based on data stretching back 20 years, collected over the entire Gulf of Mexico. He says fishers aren’t wrong, but that they haven’t analyzed the big picture.
  Scientists and managers must look at the long term. They want to maintain the size of the fishing fleet and keep the fish population at sustainable levels, so that revenues remain consistent and there are enough fish year after year.
  Fishers usually have their eye on the short term. Because many fishing fleets are too big, the pressure is great to fish as much and as quickly as possible, even when populations are low.
  Moving a decimal point in a scientific assessment can mean the difference between recovery and virtual extinction. It also can mean millions of dollars.
  ‘‘It’s a two-edged sword," said Environmental Defense Fund scientist Rod Fujita. "If you err on the side of conservation, you’re attacked. If you err on the side of too much fishing, the fish disappear.’’
  Fishing industry groups now routinely attack assessments that don’t favor their goals, and they often succeed in delaying and sometimes torpedoing measures to protect fish populations. If an industry is big enough, it can appeal to members of Congress. Members have routinely intervened in New England and in the Gulf to undermine the Fisheries Service and the regional management councils.
  Elected officials usually share the same short-term goals of keeping constituents working and their businesses operating. In the process, any credibility and authority the science has is undermined.

Rules unfathomable
  While merely analyzing the snapper population has sparked bitter fights, attempts to protect it have confused and angered snapper fishers, the very people who ought to be supporting the effort.
  The rules have changed year to year and sometimes month to month. For most workers, this would be like having their office moved and hours changed on a regular basis, with their pay going up and down constantly, all dictated by people rarely if ever seen.
  The tough regulations started in 1990. An overall quota was put in place for the first time. Special permits were required to fish for reef fish. To allow the fish to grow and reproduce, regulators established size limits for both commercial and sport fishing — currently, a minimum of 15 inches. Recreational fishers also got bag limits — seven fish at first, now five.
  As the regulations took hold, fish became more plentiful, and it took less and less time to catch the limit. The commercial season, 95 days in 1993, shrank to 51 days last year.
  The short season is a headache for fishers. Competition for fish is intense, and finding them is harder. Because so many fish arrive at the docks at the same time, the price drops, sometimes as much as $1 a pound in a single day. It’s also hard to measure the catch accurately as it comes in — hence the 36-hour mini-season last year.
  The quotas also are unfairly applied. Though sport fishers technically operate under a quota, officials do not have the resources or a system to count the sport catch. As a result, sport fishers often exceed it by large margins — 40 percent in 1994, according to the Fisheries Service.
  As managers struggled to limit fishing, the system grew more and more complex.
  In 1992, trip limits took effect, starting at 1,000 pounds for all boats. The next year, managers shifted to a two-tiered system in which 131 ‘‘historical’’ red snapper fishing boats were authorized, with a 2,000-pound-per-trip limit. All other commercial boats had their catches capped at 200 pounds per trip.
  The red tape caused mistakes. In 1992, for example, officials were overwhelmed with permit applications. So they waived the permit rule. Suddenly, anybody could fish for snapper.
  ‘‘I had outboards fishing around me,’’ Anderson said.

Some quit, others hope
  Riding this regulatory merry-go-round has proved too much for many snapper fishers.
  Jim Gerard lives on his boat, the Long Gone, usually docked in Leeville. He had been fishing for five years, often taking huge snapper catches, when he took a job on a supply boat in 1989, was injured, and did not return to fishing until 1992.
  Meanwhile, the Gulf Fishery Management Council had declared that the sought-after snapper ‘‘endorsements’’ guaranteeing a 2,000-pound limit per trip would go only to fishers who had caught 5,000 pounds of snapper for the past three years.
  Gerard was shut out, stuck with a 200-pound limit.
  For others, all the paperwork proved overwhelming. Golden Meadow fisherman Leon Elliot captained two boats during the same period. But he was unable to produce a key logbook he said he never knew he had to fill out, and he couldn’t get an endorsement either.
  ‘‘A lot of us are not very educated and that kills us right there. This stuff is so complicated,’’ Elliot said.
  Around the world, agencies are giving up on the management-by-regulation approach, and managers want the snapper to be part of the change.
  Under a proposal already approved by the Gulf Council, the snapper would be one of the first fisheries in the country to get a new system called an Individual Transferable Quota, a legal right to a fraction of the total catch set each year that the fisher can sell or lease.
  The change would simplify the regulatory web. A boat could take fish any time of year, as long as it didn’t exceed its annual quota.
  Snapper fishers are divided on the concept. Anderson avidly supports it. But others fret that it will unfairly shut out some, like Gerard and Elliot. Others fear it will end up costing them money. After creating quota shares that have value, the government may want something in exchange to finance the program.
  But congressional opposition may torpedo the new snapper program. Managers have been ordered not to implement it while Congress wrestles with the issue. The House has voted to ban a key element of the plan — the transferability of the quotas — and the Senate is leaning toward creating a moratorium on them.