Report Is Making Waves in Blaming Humans for Fish Extinction
For years, the best minds in the science of fisheries held a conceit: Humans could not drive oceanic fish into extinction. Now, America’s preeminent professional society of fishery scientists has roiled those old waters and concluded that humans can--and are--pushing once-common species of saltwater fish toward the brink.
In a study of North American waters, the 10,000-member American Fisheries Society listed 82 species and stocks as “at risk of extinction.”
The roster includes a surprising cross-section of fishes that are well-known and formerly abundant--some of them staples of long-established commercial and recreational fisheries. Among the West Coast varieties are lingcod, cowcod, bocaccio, giant sea bass, Pacific ocean perch, shortspine thornyhead and eight species of other rockfish.
Published in the November issue of the society’s peer-reviewed magazine, Fisheries, the trailblazing report comes just as West Coast fishery managers set year 2001 catch restrictions for some of these same species.
Faced with evidence of ever-declining fish stocks, the regulators too decided this month to abandon old orthodoxy. Instead of trying to restrict fishing only by the time-worn control of seasons and bag limits, the regulators declared two vast tracts of Southern California coastal waters off-limits to deep-water fishing in recognition of diminishing cowcod.
Beyond the large number of species listed as in jeopardy of survival, the Fisheries Society’s report represents a shift in thinking. The government’s official endangered and threatened species list includes 102 species and stocks of freshwater, estuarine and anadromous fish, such as salmon that live in both fresh and saltwater--but no non-anadromous oceanic fish.
Until now, that was simply the creed of marine science. That also was what regulators assumed when they made management decisions for commercial and recreational fishing: Somehow the ocean was too vast and fish too resilient for humans to entirely extirpate a species. Overfishing could reduce stocks, sometimes frighteningly so, but extinction was not a management consideration.
“It has long been a dogmatic view that extinction of marine fish stocks is an impossibility,” said John A. Musick, lead author of the Fisheries Society report and professor of vertebrate ecology at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science. “Now we’re beginning to realize that we can drive these fish out of existence.”
The report draws an important, if obvious, distinction that fishery managers have not always honored: While some fish grow quickly and reproduce at astonishing rates, others mature and reproduce very slowly.
“We hope now that science can be injected into the process of management,” Musick said in an interview.
Currently, no oceanic species of fish are listed by the federal government as endangered or threatened. Most scientists agree that no known ocean fish has gone extinct in modern times as a result of fishing. However, the National Marine Fisheries Service, the federal agency with responsibility for offshore fish, partly financed the new study and has used the findings to update its list of candidates for further research to determine if government listing is warranted.
The report said the overall worst conditions were in four “hot spots”--Puget Sound, Wash.; the northern Gulf of California in Mexico’s Sea of Cortez; parts of Florida; and the northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico.
“This is our wake-up call,” says Karen Garrison, co-director of the Oceans Program for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “This report makes clear that our power to wipe out marine species exceeds our will to protect them.”
Among common Atlantic species listed as in danger of extinction are Atlantic halibut and Atlantic cod. The list also includes fish in the Gulf of Mexico, such as the largetooth and smalltooth sawfish, and wide-ranging species, including white shark, whale shark, basking shark, dusky shark and sand tiger shark. Five species of anadromous sturgeon also are listed.
The 18 scientists who compiled the study were drawn from academia, from state and federal regulatory agencies and from the private sector. They used the same definitions as federal law for endangered, threatened and vulnerable species. In some cases, 90% or more of a species already is gone.
Not only does the report toss out old wisdom, it suggests that extinction could happen with frightening swiftness. Walleye pollock, for instance, were a staple of Puget Sound’s recreational fishery. From 1977 to 1986, fishermen took more than 400,000 pounds of pollock a year from the southern part of the sound, near Seattle. Recent trawl surveys failed to find a single survivor.
The authors divided species into distinct populations, or stocks, so that Pacific herring are listed as vulnerable in Puget Sound but not in offshore California. Similarly, the popular canary rockfish and bocaccio were listed as vulnerable in California, Oregon and Washington, but not in Alaska.
Twenty-two other fishes were found at risk throughout their range, including the cowcod, a prized and easily caught species of rockfish familiar to California fishermen. Bocaccio and cowcod were abundant in the 1960s but now have declined by more than 95%. Another coastal favorite, the lingcod, is down by 92.5% on the West Coast.
Scientists and fishermen have been sounding warnings about declining West Coast stocks since the 1970s. Fishery managers began responding a decade ago with incremental reductions in catch limits along the coast--restrictions that have, correspondingly, bitten into the livelihoods of fishermen and taken some of the rewards from sport fishing.
Earlier this month, meeting in Vancouver, Wash., the Pacific Fishery Management Council, the regional board with responsibility for bottom-dwelling fish along the West Coast, decided that it must go further.
It voted to prohibit deep-water fishing in about 4,300 square miles of offshore Southern California waters to protect cowcod. The area includes Santa Barbara and San Nicolas islands, their surrounding banks, as well as Cherry, Tanner and Cortez banks--all of them well-known by commercial and long-distance recreational fishermen. A separate off-limits area was designated off San Diego around 43-Fathom Bank.
For 2001, the council restricted fishing to no deeper than 120 feet in these two separate tracts of ocean--too shallow to threaten cowcod.
The California Fish and Game Commission, which shares rockfish jurisdiction in waters within three miles of land, will be asked to conform state regulations to the new rules. Approval is expected, because the boundaries originally were proposed by state Fish and Game Department scientists.
The state also will be asked to prohibit net trawling for spot prawns in these same waters, a bottom fishery that results in the unintentional catch of many rockfish.
Recreational fishermen face another restriction beginning in January. They will not be able to land cowcod anywhere on the California coast. If one is caught unintentionally while fishing outside the new no-fishing zones, it must be discarded, although it would certainly be dead from the pressure change of being pulled up from deep water. The idea is to stop sport fishermen from targeting cowcod. Commercial fishermen still will be permitted to keep as much as 2.6 tons of cowcod, about half the 2000 limit.
Scientists have argued that if all cowcod fishing stopped immediately, it would still take more than half a century for the fish to rebuild its population.
Conservationists generally applauded the new restrictions on cowcod, believing that no-fishing reserves are the last best hope for many species. But they questioned whether the regional Fishery Council, dominated by fishermen and agencies at which fishermen have long held sway, were being too lenient in allowing continued fishing of other troubled species.
Commercial fishermen, for instance, will be allowed to catch nearly 97 tons of canary rockfish, a slow-reproducing fish that once was common from Central California north. Regional regulators ignored their own scientists’ recommendation for a smaller catch after fishermen in California and Oregon said they would be driven out of business by the new restrictions.
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Times researcher Anna M. Virtue contributed to this story.
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Fishing Closures
To assist in rebuilding depleted cowcod rockfish stocks, the Pacific Fishery Management Council has approved two areas of fishing closures. In 2001, no commercial or recreational fishing is to be permitted in waters deeper than 120 feet within the closure boundaries. The regional council also has asked the state Department of Fish and Game to prohibit the commercial trawling for prawns in these areas.
Source: American Fisheries Society
