Steve LaCombe and James Dwyer, know as fish lumpers, the union men who unload catches at the docks in New Bedford, Mass., wait for a hook from the deck above that will lift baskets filled with cod from the hold of the Narragansett.

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

Scientists confounded by nature, politics

By John McQuaid,
Staff writer

NEW BEDFORD, Mass.

The Narragansett rumbled out of the soft mist before 8 p.m. The captain steered the black-hulled dragger up to the RCC Seafood dock, while crew members and workers from Fish Lumpers Union Local 1749 readied their shovels and buckets to offload the catch.
  At the height of New England’s fisheries boom 10 or 15 years ago, offloading was more like shoveling cash than fish. Gleaming new boats crowded fish docks.
  When the Narragansett trawled over Georges Bank, it could haul in more than 100,000 pounds of fish, filling the hold to the brim with prime cod, haddock or flounder.
  But this evening it was the only boat to bring a catch to New Bedford.
  The workers took off 19,958 pounds of fish to be auctioned off the next morning: small amounts of cod and haddock, but also pollock, ocean catfish, cusk, hake, sea dabs, sole, skatewings, monkfish and a few halibut, with several hundred pounds of lobster thrown in for good measure.
  Once the nation’s richest fishing grounds, Georges Bank has been picked clean of the fish that bring top dollar.
  ‘‘I’ve been unloading boats for years and it’s the worst I’ve seen. It’s terrible, terrible,’’ said Glen Nunes, one of three fish lumpers tossing the catch into buckets down in the icy hold.
  Who’s responsible for the overfishing that wrecked New England’s key fish populations, throwing tens of thousands of people out of work? New Englanders have no one to blame but themselves. Armed with the latest science, public agencies made bad decisions repeatedly, declining to curb fishing until it was too late. It’s the worst such disaster in the United States, but just one of many around the world — a growing list that has sparked a fierce debate about the way humans manage fish and other natural resources.
  Scientists and fishers have attacked the principles that managers have used for the past century, saying they are relics rendered irrelevant by a quickly changing world.
  ‘‘The system is based on a pipe dream. It’s seductive but it isn’t real,’’ said Sylvia Earle, a former chief scientist at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and author of the book ‘‘Sea Change,’’ which urges policy makers to take a more holistic view of ocean resources. ‘‘The way we manage is not the way nature works,’’ Earle said. ‘‘Nature is not a test tube, but we’re treating it like one, and the experiment is failing.’’

Narragansett Captain Joe Favia's face is a study in disappointment as he rests his chin on his hand at the daily RCC Seafood fish auction near the docks of New Bedford. He did not receive the price he hoped for.

The optimum yield
  Fishery managers attempt to control the amount of fishing with a two-part goal: maximizing the catch of fleets while maintaining a large enough population of fish to support fishing efforts year after year. In resource jargon, that level is called ‘‘maximum sustainable yield.’’
  Variations of maximum sustainable yield have guided managers for decades. Current federal law makes the goal ‘‘optimum yield,’’ and requires managers to consider social impacts, such as the effects of overfishing or quota restrictions on fishers and their families.
  The world is considerably more complicated than the parameters these neat, well-defined puzzles would indicate. As scientists run their computer models, unpredictable and often uncontrollable forces such as weather, politics and global capitalism conspire to thwart their best-laid plans.
  The traditional approach is ‘‘based upon the false assumption that science is capable of furnishing information reliable enough to allow a command-and-control approach to ecosystems,’’ said Chris Finlayson, a fishery social scientist who did a study of Canadian mismanagement.
  An influential article published in the journal Science in 1993 argued that the uncertainty in fisheries science, combined with widespread political and economic pressure to exploit the resource, has too often made long-term management impossible.
  ‘‘In such circumstances, assigning causes to past events is problematical, future events cannot be predicted, and even well-meaning attempts to exploit responsibly may lead to disastrous consequences,’’ wrote the authors, three fishery scientists.
  One basic problem, they said, is that scientists and managers are too ambitious: Their credibility is based on their ability to measure changes in fish populations. Often, they cannot.

Mark Leach hauls in cod aboard the Sea Holly in the northern Atlantic Ocean off the New England coast.

  ‘‘If you want to find what the truth is, you hold a series of experiments,’’ said Donald Ludwig of the University of British Columbia, one of the authors. ‘‘But you can’t do that with fisheries. Too many interests are involved. There are constraints on getting data. It’s very difficult to get any kind of sensible scientific experiment going.’’
  Scientists in labs experiment using trial and error. But fishery scientists are, in effect, running a big experiment with fish populations and fishers’ lives. Trial and error, in this case, usually involve waiting to see exactly how much fishing causes a population to fall, then putting the brakes on until it comes back to the right level. The social costs of miscalculations are enormous.
  Fishery scientists and managers operate on a razor’s edge. They must allow as much fishing as possible without allowing the fish population to collapse. And they are usually under pressure to move in the more dangerous direction, to keep fishers working and allow fishing to continue.
  When too much confidence is placed in their work, the results can be disastrous, as they were in Canada’s Atlantic provinces. In Canada, fishing is a vastly more important industry than it is in the United States, and Canada’s fishery management system is strong and centrally controlled by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.
  Some of the agency’s surveys were finding fewer cod than commercial catch figures indicated. But scientists erred on the side of the fishing industry, giving more weight to the commercial figures because they offered a more upbeat picture. They ignored skepticism from some local fishing groups concerned that they were seeing fewer fish.
  They later found a reason for the discrepancy: Instead of being spread out uniformly, the fish populations were abundant only in some areas — and that was where the boats were. Overall, the population was much lower than expected.
  But even then, managers were caught between pressure to keep the catch as high as possible and their own conflicting data. They compromised.
  As a result, managers allowed too much fishing and the population collapsed almost entirely. It will take decades to come back, and it will never support the level of fishing it once did.
  In New England, an equally destructive dynamic developed. National Marine Fisheries Service scientists had been reporting falling populations since the early 1980s. But the Fishery Management Council, bowing to pressure from boat owners, other industry interests and local congressmen, did little.
  ‘‘Scientists have been screaming in the wind for the better part of a decade and were pretty much ignored,’’ said Steven Murawski, a scientist in the Fisheries Service’s Northeast Regional Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass. ‘‘It was just too late to pull these stocks out of the fire by the time there was general recognition of the seriousness of the problem.’’
  It ultimately took a lawsuit to get action. In 1991, the Conservation Law Foundation in Boston filed a lawsuit against the U.S. secretary of Commerce, who oversees the Fisheries Service, claiming that the most recent management plan was illegal because it would not control overfishing.
  ‘The lawsuit was settled in one face-to-face discussion about four hours long,’’ said foundation attorney Peter Shelley. ‘‘It was clear to us that they wanted to lose that case as quickly as possible.’’
  When government agencies resort to being sued to get things done, there is clearly something wrong.
  The underlying ideas behind modern fisheries management date to the 18th century Enlightenment, a time when scientists and philosophers viewed the universe as a kind of giant, whirring timepiece. To understand it, all they had to do was divide it into its constituent parts and study how they fit together, said fishery social scientist Finlayson.
  Modern descendants of these ideas live on in government agencies, which have refined their good points, but also perpetuated their flaws.
  The Fisheries Service, for example, is overwhelmingly dominated by biologists who track population changes in single species of fish.
  The agency gives much shorter shrift to fleet economics, fishing communities, fish habitat, or interactions with other species — things that are arguably just as important, if not more so.
  On top of that, nature often behaves in unpredictable ways that can sandbag scientists and managers, even when they’re doing what they do best — looking at the landings of a single species.
  Take the case of the gag grouper, a fish caught off the Florida coast in the Gulf of Mexico. For years, assessments showed the stock to be healthy. But biologists studying its behavior recently found it is transsexual; all gag groupers start out as females, then some change sex as they reach spawning age.
  Because the males are more aggressive and tend to swim higher in the water, they are fished out sooner. Complicating the phenomenon, females on the cusp of changing sex often start behaving like males, so they’re fished out sooner too.
  While the gag grouper’s total population was generally maintained at fishable levels during most of the past 20 years — meaning there was little rationale to protect it — the percentage of males in the population has dropped from 20 percent to 1 percent, a study showed. There’s plenty of fish. It’s just that they’re almost all females, meaning soon there may not be enough males to sustain the population.
  ‘‘If you continue to fish like this, there is not going to be a fishery in two or three years,’’ said Florida State University biologist Felicia Coleman. The National Marine Fisheries Service and the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council missed the boat on the gag grouper and several species that behave similarly, Coleman says. In some areas, those fish have already disappeared.
  Changes in the U.S. fisheries law, the Magnuson Act, now up for renewal in Congress, will address some of these weaknesses. One reform would better define overfishing and give the Fisheries Service the power to stop it.
  The core of the problem, say fishers, scientists and managers, is not scientific but political.
  In many places, there’s no consensus either to abide by scientific surveys or, more generally, to conserve fish populations over the long run.
  Ideally, reformers argue, the size of fishing fleets ought to be limited and fishing should be restrained at a level safely below that razor’s edge where surprises from nature or politics can cause disaster.
  ‘‘What if you were in the dark, on a mountain road, with precipices and cliffs you could fall over without warning?’’ said fishery scientist Ludwig. ‘‘You’d be cautious.’’