- 2004 Archive -
Garden State Seafood Association Weekly Updates

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To return to the Fishing New Jersey site introduction page: http://www.fishingnj.org
To return to the current Garden State Seafood Association Weekly Update: http://www.fishingnj.org/currentupdate.htm 

For the archive of G.S.S.A. Updates for 2003: http://www.fishingnj.org/updatearchive_03.htm
For the archive of G.S.S.A. Updates for 2002: http://www.fishingnj.org/updatearchive.htm
For the archive of G.S.S.A. Updates for 2001: http://www.fishingnj.org/updatearchive_01.htm

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May 29, 2004
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It’s not about the mercury

In recent weeks the public has been pummeled with conflicting media messages about diets heavy on seafood. On one hand, there is an undisputed and growing body of scientific literature attesting to the many health benefits of the omega 3 fatty acids that some species of fish contain in abundance.* On the other, there have been a limited number of scientific reports, all extremely controversial, most contradicted by other research, and none anywhere near universally accepted, dealing with the supposed dangers of consuming the same species of fish that are so high in omega 3s. Needles to say, the lion’s share of media attention has been focused on the latter.

Were all that was involved a difference in opinion in the scientific community, this would be yet another expression of business as usual in the research establishment, with the attendant media exaggeration of the negative and studious disregard of the positive. However, in this instance activist organizations with an obvious agenda and national politics have raised the rhetoric to unfortunate levels; unfortunate for the consumers who might be mislead into making unwarranted and unhealthy adjustments to their diets and unfortunate for the many seafood businesses that will suffer needlessly.

Looking at one of the activist organizations first, the Turtle Island Restoration Network (TIRN, which used to be the Sea Turtle Restoration Project or STRP) owes much of it’s existence to the supposed threat that pelagic longlining poses for sea turtles.** This is in spite of – or perhaps because of - the fact that the very longline fishermen that the activist save-the-turtle groups have been continuously trying to put out of business for decades have developed techniques in the last two years, presently being implemented in all US pelagic longline fisheries, that reduce sea turtle bycatch by up to 90% or more (see http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/mediacenter/turtles/). And, of course, pelagic longliners target tuna and swordfish. So, in order to continue to advance their anti-longline campaign in the face of regulatory changes that will make that campaign completely irrelevant, and ostensibly to protect consumer health, TIRN/STRP has jumped on the “mercury in seafood” bandwagon (we’d be remiss not to note here that a closed STRP workshop in April of 2002 featured some of the most prominent Pew-funded anti-fishing advocate scientists).

At the same time, a cabal of activist organizations, unhappy with the current administration in Washington, has decided to use President Bush’s policy on power plant mercury emissions to spearhead their attack on his environmental record. (Note that they are doing this in spite of the fact that US power plants have a negligible impact on the total amount of mercury that makes its way into the biosphere each year). Of course, these activist groups recognize that trace amounts of mercury verging on the undetectable coming out of smokestacks aren’t going to mean much to the consumer – or to the voter in November. So they have focused their efforts on convincing the media that the mercury released from those power plant stacks is making its way directly into swordfish and tuna, so let the buyer beware.

All of the overblown media hype not withstanding, there is no definitive proof that the low levels of mercury found in locally available seafood will cause harm to any group of consumers, whether at risk or not. There have been two studies addressing supposed deleterious effects of diets high in fish with measurable levels of mercury. Several weeks back The Wall Street Journal referenced these studies, which examined two groups whose diets exposed them to mercury levels far in excess of those that anyone with anything approaching a normal diet in the U.S. would experience. The first group, in the Faroe Islands, ingested mercury through several forms of seafood, including marine mammals, that are foreign to our diets in the United States. The second group, in the Seychelles Islands, ate the same type of seafood that we do, only they ate a lot more of it.

The Journal reported of the first group “When their children were given 17 neuropsychological tests, some scored slightly below-average on three. Scientists have since disputed whether there was ever a statistical correlation and note that, even if there was, it's impossible to know it was caused by mercury (the mothers were consuming high levels of such other toxins as PCBs and DDT). Either way, the kids who scored marginally below peers on a few tests didn't remotely have ‘learning disabilities’ or ‘brain damage.’” And of the second “While their mothers ate fish similar to that consumed in the U.S., they ate 10 times as much and had an average of six times as much mercury in their bodies. Yet researchers found no negative effects in their children.” The editorial then went into some of the political machinations behind the crisis mongering of the so-called “environmentalists.” The editorial ended with “these environmentalist scares are becoming so routine and over-the-top that they are having less public impact. Americans are figuring out that green activists have abandoned any claim to scientific objectivity as they pursue political power. Ignore their claims, and enjoy your next tuna sandwich.”

So what should a conscientious consumer do? Most importantly, don’t accept the hysterical shrieks of any groups or individuals with other, and most likely hidden, axes to grind. Whether it’s mercury in seafood or another issue, see what the experts on all sides of the issue have to say and then make an informed decision. Don’t be blinded by self-serving claims by any group disguised as operating “in the public interest,” and just as importantly, don’t let the constant over-hyped media alarms desensitize you to what’s really going on.

But please don’t lose site of the fact that the world’s oceans have served for too many years as a repository of much of our waste and refuse. No matter how much hysterical hyperbole is generated by the environmental industry and the rich foundations that support them, we can’t afford to turn a deaf ear to all of the warnings concerning threats to the well being of our inland, coastal or ocean waters.
* Among these are salmon, tuna, mackerel and swordfish – which the astute reader will realize are the species that are being most heavily attacked by the anti-fishing NGOs not only for supposedly posing health risks to consumers, but also for supposedly being harvested unsustainably.

** The Sea Turtle Restoration Project writes in materials trying to drum up support for a demonstration in Sacramento “additionally, swordfish and tuna, two of the species that are highest in mercury are caught using longline fishing methods which maim and kill thousands of sea turtles every year. By joining us you will be helping to reduce consumer demand for these species, thereby helping to protect the highly endangered Pacific leatherback seaturtle from extinction.”

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A nuke causes the environmental degradation and the fishermen foot the bill?

According to an article in the San Luis Obispo (CA) Tribune on May 18 (D. Sneed, Marine reserve cost set at $10 million - Water board discusses plans, wants more study), “as part of a settlement over damage to the ocean caused by Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant” Pacific Gas and Electric would pay to establish a “series of ocean reserves from Point Arguello to Piedras Blancas in which fishing would be restricted or prohibited.” This settlement “would allow the utility to continue to use ocean water to cool the nuclear plant. The huge cooling system circulates 2 billion gallons of ocean water a day, killing larvae and damaging the ecosystem of the discharge cove.”

So we have a proposal for an energy company to pay for locking fishermen out of large – and undoubtedly productive – areas of ocean in order to mitigate marine ecosystem damage that a power plant has caused and will continue to cause. That sure sounds like a win-win solution for the energy industry, doesn’t it? But what about the fishermen? More like a lose-lose for them, but thanks to a successful campaign to demonize fishermen by so-called “environmental” NGOs paid for in large part with energy industry dollars, and thanks as well to the accompanying effort to sell the supposed effectiveness of marine reserves for protecting fisheries resources from those rapacious fishermen that was paid from the same checkbooks, the odds are that neither the public nor the politicians are likely to get involved on the side of the fishermen.

How long will it be before the same strategy is suggested for the offshore wind power projects being proposed off the beaches in New England and the mid-Atlantic? How about for other environmentally harmful offshore energy developments and operations? (Go to www.winergyllc.com to get an idea of what’s being planned for New England and the Mid-Atlantic regarding wind power.)

In recent years hundreds of millions of energy dollars have been spent to purchase advocacy research, to direct NGOs and to influence the print and broadcast media in a concerted effort to turn fishermen and fishing into the biggest threat that the world’s oceans face. A corresponding amount has gone into a campaign to make large areas of those oceans fishing free through the imposition of marine reserves (as the Diablo Canyon proposal illustrates, that should really mean “no fishing, but energy development is ok reserves”). If the environmental cost of energy production can be “mitigated” simply by closing large areas of the oceans to fishing, then this investment has obviously paid off for the energy industry.

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In spite of all of the Doom and Gloom from the NGOs

A press release from the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council (Successful Management of U.S. Marine Fisheries Documented, 5/10/ 2004) reports “Over the last several decades, the Mid-Atlantic Council has made remarkable strides to conserve and protect the living marine resources in federal waters off of the Mid-Atlantic coast. Working in partnership with the states and federal government, the Council has made the tough management decisions required to successfully accomplish its mission in building sustainable fisheries. Balancing the rebuilding of fish stocks with the economic and social impacts to recreational and commercial fishermen, the Council has developed effective quota management programs that have reversed decades of overfishing for many of the stocks in the Mid-Atlantic region. In fact, 10 of 12 species for which the Council has primary management authority are rebuilt or rebuilding. Six are fully rebuilt, nine are no longer overfished, and for 11 of the 12 species, overfishing is not occurring.”

The press release is available at http://www.mafmc.org/mid-atlantic/press/2004/pr04-07.htm. The full report is available at http://www.managingfisheries.org/Proceedings/ManagingFishProceedings.pdf.

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And, while we’re on the subject of the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council, setting the record straight again….

In a May 7 fishing column in the Asbury Park Press concerning the lack of organization/coordination in the recreational fishing community, John Geiser wrote “the commercial fishing industry, with its domination of the management councils and its political power, has been able to protect its interests….” This isn’t the first time that Mr. Geiser has written that the councils are dominated by commercial fishing interests, and while we would give serious consideration to wholeheartedly supporting such an arrangement, it isn’t anywhere near accurate in the Mid-Atlantic. We looked at the roster of the Mid-Atlantic Council and verified that there are six members connected to the commercial fishing industry and six connected to the recreational fishing industry. Some domination! (And we have to stress here that after twenty-some years of closely monitoring the activities of the Mid-Atlantic Council we’ve found that in the case of effective participation, it doesn’t matter where its members from, the good ones will weigh the information presented to them and, as long as it’s the right information, will then make the right decisions.)

Fisheries management, particularly when it comes to issues of allocation between the recreational and commercial sectors, is already far too contentious. We don’t need, and it’s not going to help the management process to have, unnecessary resentment generated by misstatements of what are easily verifiable facts.

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More sea turtles and oil

Pew funded Oceana announced the latest in a long line of court actions against the commercial fishing industry (yet again through suing the Secretary of Commerce). This time Oceana was using it’s oil-derived millions to ostensibly reduce sea turtle bycatch in the sea scallop fishery, though that group’s lawyers failed to notice that sea turtle bycatch is a problem that appears to have already been solved – with no help at all from any of the “environmental” groups that seem so intent on saving the turtles – by the participants in the fishery and the Virginia Institute of Marine Science.

While digging around on the web we came across an interesting report compiled by NOAA’s National Ocean Service Office of Response and Restoration entitled Oil and Sea Turtles - Biology, Planning and Response. In the introduction the authors, in writing about the half a dozen species of sea turtles, state

“Few animals are at greater risk from an unfortunate confluence of global changes, widespread disease, and a host of problems of human origin. The latter category includes inevitable human population growth and the consequences of habitat destruction, impairment and entanglement in plastic trash, the persistent belief that turtle flesh and turtle eggs confer nearly supernatural health benefits, the inherent beauty and rarity of turtle shell jewelry, and even the indirect impacts of the breakdown of indigenous social mores within the populations of far-flung islands where turtles also dwell. Among these many risks to the continued existence of turtles is that from oil spills.”

And they continue:
“It is not simply infrequent or episodic spills that threaten sea turtles. Continuous low-level exposure to oil in the form of tarballs, slicks, or elevated background concentrations also challenge animals facing other natural and anthropogenic stresses. Chronic exposure may not be lethal by itself, but it may impair a turtle’s overall fitness so that it is less able to withstand other stressors. What do we know about the toxicity of oil to sea turtles? Unfortunately, not much….

Unfortunately, areas of oil and gas exploration, transportation, and processing often overlap with important sea turtle habitats, including U.S. waters off the Florida and Texas coasts and throughout the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean….

In convergence zones off the east coast of Florida, tar was found in the mouths, esophagi, or stomachs of 65 out of 103 post-hatchling loggerheads (Loehefener et al. 1989). In another study (Witherington 1994), 34 percent of post-hatchlings at “weed lines” off the Florida coast had tar in their mouths or esophagi, and over half had tar caked in their jaws. Lutz (1989) reported that hatchlings have been found apparently starved to death, their beaks and esophagi blocked with tarballs….

Because environmental problems do not respect human boundaries, it is not surprising that sea turtles found in U.S. waters are vulnerable to spills that occur both within and outside U.S. waters. Approximately 1 percent of annual U.S. sea turtle strandings are associated with oil; rates are higher in south Florida (3 percent) and Texas (3 to 6.3 percent) (stranding statistics are summarized by Lutcavage et al. 1997). Rates of contact with pollutants are likely to be much higher than those detected from strandings alone; during the 1986 fishing season off Malta, for example, 17 of 99 loggerhead turtles caught by Maltese fisherman suffered from crude oil contamination, compared to three contaminated with plastic or metal litter but not oil (Gramentz 1988).”

(The full report is available at http://response.restoration.noaa.gov/oilaids/turtles/pdfs/turtles.pdf)

In view of the above, and assuming that all other things were equal, it’s hard to see how Oceana could waste it’s resources on yet another expensive legal exercise designed to bedevil commercial fishermen while there’s such a need for basic research aimed at finding out what’s really happening to our turtle populations. But since Pew, with its billions of dollars, has apparently adopted an oceans strategy that doesn’t go much farther than supporting any efforts that  blame most of the ocean’s ills on fishing, it’s equally obvious that all those other things aren’t anywhere near equal.

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Rutgers University workshop on seafood safety
Seafood: Assessing the Benefits and Risks is the title of a workshop being held at Rutgers’ Cook College on June 8. Among the subjects being discussed will be good science and how it relates to food consumption, how seafood consumption limits and advisories are determined, assessing and managing the risks associated with seafood, talking to people about food scares, and how food professionals cab give the media the correct story? This should provide invaluable information for people in food or fish businesses, or for folks who just want to have a better understanding of what’s really behind all of the alarmist headlines regarding seafood consumption. If you are in central New Jersey or the surrounding area, you should consider attending. A downloadable copy of the workshop brochure is available at http://www.events.rutgers.edu/pdfs/2004-0608-seafood.pdf.

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April 13, 2004
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Balance in fisheries –

Over the past several weeks circumstances have conspired to bring to the fore the issue of fairness and balance in fisheries.

Striped bass first - Primary among these is the ongoing drama centered on the East Coast’s rebuilt striped bass fishery and whether a small but vocal group of recreational anglers is going to be able to continue to keep a large part of the ocean closed to their harvest and an even smaller and even more vocal group is going to keep forcing over eight million of the Garden State’s non-fishing citizens to trek to outside New Jersey to legally enjoy what is one of the most delicious and abundant fish found in our coastal waters.

A management recommendation to open the Exclusive Economic Zone (waters from 3 to 200 miles offshore) to the harvest of striped bass has spurred a flurry of renewed interest in the management of this valuable species. It has also provided a graphic demonstration of the extent to which some legislators are willing to go against the interests of the vast majority of their constituents in favor of a small but vocal minority. The interests of those people who don’t want or can’t afford to catch their own fish are being ignored while some recreational anglers’ desire to keep as many striped bass as possible off the plates of the non-fishing public is getting a grotesquely disproportionate level of political support. A major part of these angling activists’ self-serving strategy – which they are trying to pass off as “conservation” – lies in keeping the EEZ closed to striped bass harvesting.

At a hearing of the Fisheries, Wildlife and Oceans Subcommittee of the House Resources Committee held in Washington three weeks ago, two New Jersey Congressman totally ignored the testimony of two of the top managers of our coastal fisheries (John O’Shea, Executive Director of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, and Jack Dunnigan, Director of the NMFS Office of Sustainable Fisheries), whose testimony left no doubt that they were both far less concerned with the mortality of striped bass in the commercial fisheries than they were with the recreational mortality. (In fact, as we reported last month, according the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, the amount of striped bass killed by being “caught and released” by recreational anglers exceeds all of those that are killed by commercial fishermen.) Ignored, as well, was the testimony of Captain Kevin Wark, a commercial fisherman from Barnegat Light, New Jersey. In spite of the compelling testimony by these three experts, both New Jersey Congressmen in their questions and statements completely ignored recreational striped bass mortality and focused solely on commercial bycatch. It was obvious that they were looking for any excuse available, no matter how far-fetched, to maintain the EEZ closure.

One of the primary reasons for opening the EEZ to striped bass harvesting is that it would allow fishermen, both recreational and commercial, to keep striped bass caught out past three miles that now must be discarded.* As it stands, after catching and releasing any number of bass in the EEZ, and after accepting the attendant mortality, both recreational or commercial fishermen may then come inshore and legally catch and keep an appropriate limit. Allowing fishermen to keep EEZ-caught stripers would obviously reduce the overall mortality in the fishery and would have the added benefit of converting what are now dead discards into fish on the tables of recreational anglers or seafood lovers (at least those seafood lovers lucky enough to live outside of New Jersey). And, as has been so graphically demonstrated in the fluke fishery, with the stringent management measures that are in place there’s no chance that the commercial mortality, which is only a quarter of the recreational mortality anyway, would be exceeded.

So we have what appears as if it would be a win-win situation; more striped bass would end up going home to dinner and fewer striped bass would end up needlessly wasted. But this isn’t acceptable to the recreational fishing activists, with their public-be-damned philosophy that every fish in the ocean, as long as it tastes good and “puts up a fight,” should belong to them. It’s unfortunate that they can find such willing political support.
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*Conveniently, members of the Pew-funded anti-fishing organization Oceana have posted on their website information “condemning” the reported bycatch of striped bass in the EEZ by participants in the northeast multispecies fishery. Were the EEZ open to the harvest of striped bass, this needless “bycatch” would have been converted to landings, keeping the fishermen and the consumers happy and preventing the waste of a bunch of fish (see below).
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And then there’s summer flounder - According to the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, “from 1996 to 1999 the recreational fishery for summer flounder significantly exceeded its harvest limit (33%, 60%, 67% and 13%).... recreational landings in 2000 increased dramatically. Recreational landings were 15.82 million pounds, more than double the harvest limit of 7.41 million pounds. 2001 landings, though lower than in 2000, were 11.64 million pounds, exceeding the harvest limit by 4.48 million pounds….  The impacts of these overages on the fishery are significant and extend beyond the recreational sector....  The long-term effect of these overages is a lower TAL (Total Allowable Landings) than would have been possible had the target exploitation rate not been repeatedly exceeded and the stock been permitted to recover at a more rapid rate. As the TAL is divided on a 60%/40% basis to create the commercial quota and recreational harvest limit, respectively, the commercial fishery has had lower quotas as a result of recreational overages. This, in the eyes of many fishermen and managers, is an unacceptable inequity and must be rectified through either the curtailment of the recreational harvest or a mechanism for the re-payment of overages.”  (Addendum Viii To The Summer Flounder, Scup And Black Sea Bass Fishery Management Plan - Allocation Calculations For The Summer Flounder Recreational Fishery, 12/03). It’s important to note here that the commercial fluke fleet has remained on target with its quota for years.

Though a recreational “payback” has not yet been adopted, the result of the recreational anglers not being able to stay within their target quota has been a series of extremely stringent, though obviously much needed, management measures imposed on their fishery.

But rather than just accepting the fact that they are significantly exceeding their quota every year and then working towards management measures that would get them into compliance – a challenge that the commercial fishing industry accepted many years ago - recreational anglers are trying to grab a part of the commercial quota.

Based on a rigorous analysis and a lengthy and sometimes painful process of public deliberations and negotiations, it was decided that 60% of the summer flounder available should be caught by the commercial sector and 40% by the recreational. This split has been in effect since the Summer Flounder Fisheries Management Plan was written. The commercial harvesters have kept to their quota. The recreational anglers haven’t even come close and now they have apparently decided that it would be easier to get more fish from somewhere else than it would be to actually design and implement significant conservation measures of their own.

Supporting this anti-conservation strategy is John Geiser, a fishing columnist for New Jersey’s Asbury Park Press. In a column on March 21 he wrote “The time-frayed argument that disinformation specialists from the commercial sector use to justify a 60-40 split in the fluke quota is that the 1,400 commercial fishermen satisfy the non-fishing public's demand for fluke. The claim is that, while there may be four million fluke fishermen out there wringing their hands that they have to make three fishing trips to catch one legal fluke, there are 250 million persons in the nation demanding fluke fillets at $9 a pound in the supermarket or $25 in the restaurant. This is utter nonsense. There are no non-fishermen calling their legislators or lobbying for more fluke when the commercial quota is reduced. Whoever heard of a member of the non-fishing public appearing at a fisheries management hearing pleading for the chance to buy an extra fluke to take home for dinner?”

Not too surprisingly considering his past scribblings regarding commercial fishing, Mr. Geiser is a bit off base in several of his assertions. In the first place, as we wrote two paragraphs above, the justification for the 60:40 split is and always has been the deliberations that the management bodies went through when deciding on that allocation.

And, we’ve never heard of anyone even remotely associated with the commercial fishing industry making “hand wringing” or any other sorts of claims about four million fluke fishermen.

Then, his contention that “there are 250 million persons in the nation demanding fluke fillets at $9 a pound in the supermarket or $25 in the restaurant” is “utter nonsense” might itself much more accurately qualify as utter nonsense. The seafood market in the United States, like almost all of our other markets, takes care of itself. If fluke fillets sell at retail for $9 a pound – they do – and if patrons are willing to pay $25 for a restaurant meal featuring fresh fluke, then that’s exactly what those consumers are demanding (perhaps Mr. Geiser was napping through those Introduction to Economics lectures when the topic was “supply and demand.”)

As far as “no non-fishermen calling their legislators or lobbying for more fluke when the commercial quota is reduced” and not having “a member of the non-fishing public appearing at a fisheries management hearing pleading for the chance to buy an extra fluke to take home for dinner,” we can only respond with a resounding “say what?” As set forth in the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, “It is further declared to be the policy of the Congress in this Act…to assure that the national fishery conservation and management program…. involves, and is responsive to the needs of, interested and affected States and citizens.” It doesn’t say, nor does it imply, that anyone has to attend “a fisheries management hearing” or any other meeting to have his or her fish catching or fish consuming needs responded to. Fortunately for the vast majority of both fishing and non-fishing U.S. citizens, fisheries management isn’t the “be there in person to have a say” popularity contest that Mr. Geiser believes – or would like his readers to believe - it to be (perhaps Mr. Geiser was napping during the “representative democracy” classes in high school Civics as well).

And finally, regarding Mr. Geiser’s use of the term “disinformation specialists,” we’ll leave it up to our readers to decide who most deserves that appellation.
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Striped bass and disinformation hand in hand, who’d have guessed it? – An anti-commercial fishing… oops, we meant a fisheries conservation organization called “Stripers Forever” has made available on their website a letter sent to John O’Shea, Executive Director of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, requesting “that the ASMFC deduct at least 2,000,000 pounds from the striped bass commercial quotas for 2004,” based on the imagined commercial bycatch. The letter was signed by Brad Burns, president of the organization.

In the justification for this request, Mr. Burns writes “Recent estimates by NMFS that the bycatch of striped bass in the multi species trawl fishery off New England is 1 ½ to perhaps more than 2 million pounds confirm the reports we’ve heard for years about that fishery.” Neither we nor anyone else we’ve contacted with any familiarity with striped bass management on anything approaching a professional level was familiar with these purported NMFS estimates. In fact, NMFS representatives have emphatically stated that the agency never produced them. The closest we could come to the actual source of these mysterious estimates was the above-mentioned Pew-Oceana website, where the Pew-Oceana “scientists,” using a statistical methodology that wouldn’t pass muster in an elementary fisheries course, extrapolated a commercial striped bass bycatch mortality in the multispecies trawl fishery of from 1.13 to 2.15 million pounds.

Normally it would be hard to imagine how anyone could accidentally misidentify Pew-Oceana’s naïve attempts at fisheries statistics as estimates by the National Marine Fisheries Service, but we’ve grown accustomed to such “mistakes” by so-called marine conservationists.

Perhaps the next time John Geiser is on the lookout for disinformation specialists, he should set his sights a little closer to home.

(An interesting addendum to this is the fact that Thomas Fote, listed as the vice president of Stripers Forever, is the New Jersey Governor’s Appointee to the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission. Stripers Forever describes itself as “a not for profit organization dedicated to making the striped bass a gamefish.” Reading further, we find “by eliminating commercial exploitation of the #1 recreational saltwater fishery on the east coast, over 3,000,000 recreational anglers will enjoy the social and financial benefits that will come from an improved striped bass population.” We wonder how New Jersey’s over 8,000,000 non-fishing consumers – or John Geiser’s “250 million persons in the nation” - will feel if they can never eat a striped bass, not just in New Jersey but anywhere. We also wonder, considering that each state gets only one “public” appointee, how good a job Mr. Fote is doing in representing the full range of New Jersey’s citizenry, not just his recreational fishing cronies, at the Commission.)

While we can’t expect balance from people or groups advocating particular positions, we should be able to count on it from people who are elected or appointed to represent large and diverse constituencies. There are hundreds of millions of people who, while they don’t fish, have as much right to our rich fisheries resources as anyone else. It’s up to the fisheries managers to insure that their rights to those resources are protected to as great an extent as the rights of those who fish for a hobby. To expect otherwise is to misunderstand our fisheries management legislation, our fisheries management process and what our government is all about.
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For an eminent fisheries biologist’s view of the expansion of recreational fishing, see The Problem With George or The Role of Development in Fisheries Management by Peter A. Larkin at http://www.fishingnj.org/artgeorge.htm.
 
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It isn’t all the fishermen’s fault? – In a seeming breath of fresh air, marine biologists at a Royal Society meeting in London reported that “overfishing is not the sole cause of dramatically declining fish stocks in the north Atlantic Ocean, or worldwide. Environmental changes such as climate warming may be just as important.” Michael Heath, a biologist at the Scottish Fisheries Research Services' Marine Laboratory in Aberdeen, and UK chair of the international project Global Ocean Ecosystem Dynamics (GLOBEC) was quoted as saying “Marine ecosystems, particularly in the northern Atlantic, are much more vulnerable to natural fluctuations than previously realized." This is a point we’ve been making, and that the anti-fishing activists have been maliciously ignoring, for years. Relating changes in the fisheries in the North Atlantic to similar though more pronounced changes in the Pacific, "there is evidence for significant decadal-scale biological changes, which have major consequences for the abundance of natural resources," said Grégory Beaugrand, a marine biologist at the Sir Alister Hardy Foundation for Ocean Science in Plymouth. (Climate findings let fishermen off the hook - Overfishing isn't the only reason fish have disappeared, Q. Schiermeier, Nature News Service, March 3, 2004)
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Pew expanding its anti-fishing influence – Over the past three years the Pew “Charitable” Trusts have donated $5 million to the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership (TRCP). Represented on its Board and Policy Council are organizations that most of the people in the commercial fishing industry are far too familiar with; the Coastal Conservation Association, Environmental Defense and the American Sportfishing Association. In the first public utterance we’ve seen from the TRCP, Chairman Jim Range, in an article in the hunting and fishing magazine Field and Stream, comes out strongly supporting Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) and opposing the various permutations of the Freedom To Fish legislation that have been or will be introduced “If MPAs can be a useful tool in management it doesn’t seem a good idea to make it impossible to use them.”  It seems as if Pew has bought yet another ally in its ongoing efforts to zone our coastal and offshore waters and to zone both recreational and commercial fishing out of large areas of them.

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And a last word (wishful thinking) on mercury – An editorial in the Wall Street Journal (The Mercury Scare, Review and Outlook. 4/8/04) starts “If you've read a newspaper lately, chances are you've seen an ad claiming that millions of women who eat tuna and other fish with mercury are poisoning their children. That sure sounds bad. Only problem is, it's a whole lot abalone. About the only thing the ads do prove is that trusting ‘environmentalists’ in a political debate is harmful to your health and the national well being.” The editorial emphasized the results of the most comprehensive studies of the effects, or the lack thereof, of seafood-borne mercury on a population with seafood consumption patterns similar to ours in the U.S. (except increased by an order of magnitude). The study was done by University of Rochester researchers in the Seychelles Islands (http://www.fisheriesresearch.org/rochesterrelease.htm). The Journal piece ends with “the silver lining here may be that these environmentalist scares are becoming so routine and over-the-top that they are having less public impact. Americans are figuring out that green activists have abandoned any claim to scientific objectivity as they pursue political power. Ignore their claims, and enjoy your next tuna sandwich.” In between is about as good a synopsis of the politicization – and the accompanying, artificially generated media hysteria – of what is as close to an environmental and consumer-health non-issue as we’ve ever seen.
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Seafood safety workshop coming up - Rutgers Cooperative Extension is holding a one day workshop, Seafood: Assessing the Benefits and Risks, at the Campus Center at Cook College in New Brunswick, NJ on June 8. We’ll provide more details and the final agenda in the next update, but if you are a food or seafood professional, reserve the date.


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- Deep sea coral
- Cod sampling in the North Sea
- Climate change and fisheries
- Catch and release mortality of white marlin
March 12, 2004

Deep sea corals: a cause whose time has come or if at first you don’t succeed, try again? - Five or six years ago a handful of anti-fishing activists led by Pew funded Elliot Norse tried to stop our most efficient methods of fish and shellfish harvesting by fantastically equating them to forest clear cutting (which we must reiterate is an ecologically acceptable tool of forest managers). They even enlisted the aid of some short-sighted and self-centered commercial fishing groups – whose members, of course, used competing gear – for their campaign. All of their doom and gloom predictions to the contrary, however, centuries of use by generations of fishermen and a great deal of scientific scrutiny have shown bottom trawling and dredging to be acceptable methods of harvesting seafood in most ocean areas. After an international conference examining the issue was held in St. Petersburg, Fl several years back, the claims of Dr. Norse et al, and their campaign to arbitrarily ban bottom trawling and dredging in large areas died the death they so richly deserved.

Subsequently, members of the same anti-fishing claque – again lavishly supported by the oil-rich Pew “Charitable” Trusts – began to chant the Marine Protected Area mantra to anyone willing to listen. Having failed to “engage” the public with their fishing as clear cutting campaign, they then attempted to convince the public that the world’s oceans’ ills could only be cured by banning fishing in huge areas, drawing torturously strained comparisons with the National Park system. These efforts were likewise accorded their much-deserved level of public inattention.

So, having struck out with fishing bans supported by their clear cutting and marine protected area campaigns, the same anti-fishing activists have now settled on “saving the oceans” by protecting recently discovered (invented?) deep water coral reefs from – you guessed it – trawling and dredging.

It seems that these deep water coral reefs, which no one either imagined had existed prior to the spectacular and expensive failures of the two previous anti-fishing campaigns, or had cared that they did, have virtually overnight been acknowledged by members of the anti-fishing claque as among the most important areas in the world’s oceans. Now they would have us believe that the future of our fisheries, and perhaps of modern civilization as we know it, is dependent on the immediate and complete banning of fishing over them. And the same researchers, funded by the same charitable foundations, uttering the same doom and gloom prognostications via the same heavily orchestrated media relations campaigns, are now totally committed to this, their latest attempt to destroy the commercial fishing industry and to convince the public that when it comes to the world’s oceans, the only bad guys are commercial fishermen.

A Google search turned up almost half a million hits on “deep sea coral.” While we didn’t check, it’s probably safe to say that virtually all of the links were to materials created in the last five years (and we should note here that the “save the deep sea corals” campaign has itself evolved in this time frame; it is now “save the corals and sponges”).

Looked at in a vacuum, it would be difficult to imagine how deep sea corals and sponges, their supposed overriding importance to the ocean ecosystem, and the dire threats posed to them by fishing activities could have been overlooked for several hundreds of years of intensive ocean exploration and then reached this level of prominence in less than a decade. However, when considered in the context of other recent anti-fishing campaigns, it’s not that difficult at all. There’s now a well-funded and highly effective machine in place for selling such ideas; first to the grant-hungry research community and then to the public. The funding is there, at a time when government research dollars have all but disappeared, the researchers are there in greater numbers every year and hungrier than ever, “advocacy” is now accepted as part of the less rigorous scientific disciplines (a group to which, unfortunately, fisheries science in the U.S. is a charter member thanks to the American Fisheries Society) and influential media reps have been groomed for the last several years to be receptive to any “blame it on fishing” scenario that comes down the pike – while at the same time being characteristically forgetful of the last dire predictions from the same people and organizations. So here we go again.

Perhaps after this one flops, the next anti-fishing campaign will focus on saving a newly rediscovered population of mermen and mermaids from the commercial fishing fleet. We can hardly wait.
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Avian flu and mad cow disease aren’t the only things that can cross an ocean or two – An article in the February 27 issue of Fishing News (D, Linkie, “Why research ship can’t find any cod - it’s got the wrong gear, wrongly rigged”) reports that the government research vessels used to assess cod stocks in the North Sea are using “unsuitable and incorrectly rigged” trawl gear. Commercial fisherman Fred Normandale “saw the gear in use when he spent five days aboard the new £25 million fisheries research vessel CEFAS Endeavour in August 2003, when the boat fished the central North Sea grounds. He tells FN: ‘It is unbelievable that when the scientists are attempting to gather accurate information on the level of bottom living cod stocks, which determine future TACs, CEFAS Endeavour is using a semi-pelagic trawl, rigged in such a way as to catch virtually no cod.’” And, with what might sound eerily familiar to all of those folks who were involved in the R/V Albatros trawl warp debacle two years ago, “CEFAS says that the gear is deliberately left the same each year so as to provide year on year comparisons. Scientists say that if the gear was changed it would not be possible to say whether differences in catches were due to changes in the stocks or in the gear.” It’s kind of hard to imagine that the continued use of ineffective gear can be justified because “it’s what we’ve always used,” but that’s evidently the case in more than one government fisheries agency. 
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Then there are some researchers who can get it right – In “The tangled web: global fishing, global climate, and fish stock fluctuations” (M. Barange, F. Werner, I. Perry and M. Fogarty; 12/03 Global Change Newsletter; International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme - available at http://www.igbp.kva.se/uploads/NL_56_8_Barange.pdf) the authors write of the dismal “fishing down the foodweb” theories advanced by another part of the anti-fishing claque, “this overwhelmingly negative view of marine fisheries ignores well known management successes, and underestimates the role that the environment plays in the rise and demise of living marine resources.” Supplying examples of environmental “forcing” of fish stocks, the authors put the “blame it all on overfishing” attacks in their proper perspective.

They write “World oceans have showed signs of warming over the last five decades. Ocean warming will have direct consequences for species distribution and spawning habitats, and indirect consequences for food web stability. Failure to appreciate that the environment is changing, with poorly understood consequences for marine resources, may lead to unsustainable management…. In summary, although dramatic reductions in fish stocks have occurred due to over-exploitation, we should not forget the considerable successes of fisheries management, nor the role of environmental variability in determining both successes and failures. In the end, the concern should not be whether fisheries are simply despoilers of the oceans or puppets in the hands of the climate, but rather how to best meet the increasing human protein needs in a sustainable manner.”

(For a much more comprehensive work on this subject, see Gary Sharp’s recently published “Future climate change and regional fisheries: a collaborative analysis” available via the United Nation’s Food and Agricultural Organization’s website at  http://www.fao.org/DOCREP/006/Y5028E/Y5028E00.HTM)
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Live To Fight Another Day????? - Virginia Institute of Marine Science researchers John E. Graves, Andrij Z. Horodysky, and David W. Kerstetter have been looking at the mortality of caught and subsequently released marlin using archival pop-up tags (tags which record light, temperature, and pressure data at one to four minute intervals, are released from the fish after five or ten days and then transmit their data via satellite to the researchers). An article from the International Big Fish Network reported that of 40 white marlin tagged by the VIMS researchers (we assume they were all recreationally caught), seven died within ten days. This represents, at the minimum, an overall 18% catch and release mortality level. All of those mortalities occurred in the 20 fish caught on “J” hooks. Those caught on circle hooks all survived. Another publication by the same researchers reported that 5 of 21 white marlin, almost 24%, released from the recreational fishery died. “Three of the mortalities occurred within one hour of release, one at fifteen hours, and the longest time at liberty before death was 64 hours.” Again, there were no immediate mortalities among the six fish caught with circle hooks. (“Tracking the Fate and Habitat Preferences of White Marlin Released from Commercial Fishing Gear with Archival Pop-up Tags,” http://www.microwavetelemetry.com/Fish_PTTs/graves_article.htm). The reported white marlin mortality in this catch and release fishery using standard “J” hooks ranges from 30% to 35%. This research certainly puts the catch and release exhortation “live to fight another day” in it’s proper perspective, as well as showing how wrong is the commonly held – at least amongst catch and release aficionados – belief that if a released fish swims off it will survive. And it should have significant implications for the recent campaign aimed at “protecting” white marlin from commercial fishing while glossing over the impact of recreational fishing (by way of background, during a 2002 Ocean City, MD fishing tournament 1080 marlin were caught and released).

Based on this work, we have to seriously question the low catch and release mortality estimates that are part and parcel of most of our fishery management plans. If a third of the marlin, which are large and vigorous fish, die after being handled and released by professional researchers in the open ocean, what must the mortality be, for example, for striped bass caught by amateurs in shallow, turbulent, turbid and obstruction-laden waters? In the current striped bass FMP it’s estimated to be only 8%, a highly unlikely percentage in view of the results of this research.

(Also note that while the title of the VIMS article linked above indicates that it deals with “white marlin released from commercial fishing gear,” of the 24 fish tagged, only two were caught by commercial longline gear and 22 were taken on recreational fishing gear.)  
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- New Executive Director at G.S.S.A.
- That sky keeps on falling – this time it’s oceanic sharks
- Striped bass and recreational fishing “overkill”
- New England Seafood Producers Association responds to Faroe Islands seafood study

February 8,2004

Jeff Reichle, President of the Garden State Seafood Association announced today that Greg Di-Domenico has started as the Executive Director of the New Jersey based trade organization. Jeff, who is President of Lund’s Fisheries in Cape May, said of the appointment “Greg will round out the team we have put together at G.S.S.A. His abilities in organizing, in managing and in repre-senting fishermen and shore-based seafood businesses, coupled with our Washington and Trenton representatives and our state-of-the-art communications system, are going to benefit industry members far beyond New Jersey’s borders.”

Greg, who left his position with the Monroe County Commercial Fishermen in Marathon in the Florida Keys, is looking forward to the challenges of his new position. “While I’m sure that many of the issues that we were facing in Florida have their equivalents in the Mid-Atlantic, and the small boat inshore fisheries are similar, I’ll now be working with fishermen with larger vessels in fisheries ranging from Cape Hatteras to the Hague Line as well. And learning how to deal effec-tively with a new Council will add its own set of challenges. But a lot of the hard work has al-ready been done because Garden State Seafood Association is already recognized as an effective voice for the fishing industry.”

Greg is a graduate of the University of Rhode Island’s Marine Affairs program and spent several years working for North Carolina’s Division of Marine Fisheries. He’ll be living in Cape May and will also be working with the National Fisheries Institute’s Scientific Monitoring Committee. He can be reached via email at gregdi@voicenet.com.

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That sky keeps on falling – In the latest Pew Trusts funded assault on commercial fishing (ac-cording to two Associated Press articles, his conclusions were based on “analyzing” the catch of sharks in the Gulf of Mexico), Dalhousie University researcher Ransom Myers claimed that the current status of oceanic white tip sharks required “a drastic reduction in the amount of fishing." Hardly surprising, considering where Dr. Myers – and his funding – is coming from; he has been the co-recipient of well over a million dollars from the Pew Trusts. And his “not extinct, but there's virtually none left” quote in one AP article and his “what we have shown is akin to the herds of buffalo disappearing from the Great Plains and no one noticing” in the other, are charac-teristic of the overblown rhetoric that seems to be mandatory part and parcel of the recent spate of crisis mongering in dealing with ocean issues. The “virtually none left” quote is kind of puzzling to anyone with an appreciation of the precision possible with the English language, but talking extinction – no matter how many qualifiers you associate with it - and evoking the spirit of thun-dering herds of buffalo is probably going to pull at a few of the uninformed public’s heart strings.

However, getting away from the thundering herds and the tugged heart strings, what’s the real story concerning these sharks? Dr. Michael Sissenwine, Chief Scientific Advisor and Director of Scientific Programs for the National Marine Fisheries Service, said of Myers’ study “in respect to open-water sharks, we've eliminated any direct fishing. I wouldn't put a lot of confidence in the specific (study) numbers, it's only the Gulf of Mexico, and the species being discussed here has a broad range. To know what is happening to this population, one needs to know what is happening everywhere.” Of course, with the ban on fishing for the sharks, the last thing any fisherman is going to want to do is catch one, so fishing gear and fishing techniques have been modified sig-nificantly to avoid them, and sharks that were once among the targeted catch are now seldom and unwillingly taken. That would sure make a difference in Dr. Myers” catch statistics, wouldn’t it? But should anything like the real world of commercial fishing intrude on the doom and gloom predictions of the anti-fishing claque? After all, where would the foundation funded anti-fishing campaigners be without their “clear cutting” and “strip mining” and “remember the buffalo” man-tras?

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And speaking of mantras – Most people involved in fisheries on the East Coast are aware of the incessant chanting from recreational interests about the horrendous waste of striped bass by commercial fishermen. Of course, these chants are always connected to demands to shut down the commercial striped bass fishery, making the highly sought after species the sole property of our selfless recreational fishing colleagues whose interests supposedly begin and end with striped bass conservation. Well, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) has profiled striped bass in their January publication, Fisheries Focus, and in that profile in Figure 2 we see that in 2002 of the total striped bass catch, 17.35% were harvested by commercial fishermen, 4.46% were discarded by commercial fishermen, 48.49% were harvested by recreational fisher-men, and 29.67% were discarded by recreational fishermen. We have a hard time accepting that our management system allows recreational fishermen to discard almost twice as many striped bass as are allowed to the non-fishing public through commercial harvesting. We have an even harder time accepting the fact that those same recreational fishermen want even more of a re-source that belongs to everyone.

With the supposed increase in catch-and-release fishing, isn’t it time that fisheries management plans begin to realistically account for the attendant recreational fishing mortality? As the ASMFC profile shows, in some fisheries the managers are beginning to get a handle on the actual mortality levels involved, but what are they doing with those levels? And what of other recrea-tional fisheries, where catch and release mortality, which can range up to 25%, seems to be pur-posely ignored? (A good example of this would be the offshore big game fishery, a fishery in which 500 white marlin can be caught in a single tournament and in which thousands of boats participate, yet one in which the well-heeled participants have convinced the managers that a fleet of less than 200 domestic longliners should bear virtually the entire management burden.)

Increases in recreational fishing effort are encouraged and supported by federal and state gov-ernment (in large part because of the fisheries management establishment’s major financial de-pendence on a federal tax on the sale of recreational fishing and boating fuel and gear – see http://www.fishingnj.org/netusa4.htm). The recreational fishing fleet, because of the indestructi-bility of today’s fiberglass hulls, gets bigger every year. The widespread yet completely illusory belief that catch-and-release has no impact encourages recreational fishermen to far exceed what should be their allowed harvest for many fish stocks. All of these factors have made the manage-ment of our recreational fisheries far less than effective, and commercial fishermen and the non-fishing public have been paying for it. At least in the striped bass fishery the members of the ASMFC have identified the real problem. The non-fishing public should benefit from the solu-tion.  

(Get the ASMFC profile at http://asmfc.org/publications/fisheriesFocus/2004/january2004.pdf)

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NESPA Press Release

The New England Seafood Producer’s Association responds to recent Faroe Islands study

Seafood consumed by women in Faroe Islands unlike U.S. Consumption

Contact: Laura Pierce  (617-646-1027/978-223-5734)

Boston, MA (February 6, 2004) – The New England Seafood Producers Association announced today it is deeply concerned regarding the release of the recent study by the Harvard School of Public Health concerning the brain function of teenagers in the Faroe Islands and alleged link to seafood.  The media coverage resulting from this study fails to communicate to consumers the difference in the type and quantity of seafood that is ingested in the Faroe Islands, where the study was conducted.  The study’s participants often eat large portions of seafood such as whale meat that is much higher in fat and mercury content than that consumed in the United States.  Whale meat has been found to contain over 150 ppm compared to the FDA limit, 1 ppm.

“This study troubles us because it assumes that individuals in the United States eat similar varie-ties and amounts of seafood as the participants of the Faroe Islands study,” said Corey R. Lewandowski, executive director of NESPA.  “The seafood ingested in this study is primarily whale meat, which is not consumed in the United States.  Furthermore, seafood consumed in our country is far lower in mercury than that eaten in the Faroe Islands.”

Consumers should also consider another study recently released that followed 779 mother-infant pairs from the Seychelle Islands (2003) that measured the effect of methylmercury in fish on fetal development. The fish eaten by these women had approximately the same levels of mercury as those eaten by consumers in the United States.  The mothers in the study ate fish 12 times a week, almost 10 times more often than the average American.  The results showed that children moni-tored from before birth to nine years of age faced no detectable risk from the low levels of mer-cury their mothers had been exposed to from eating ocean seafood. 

“Consumers must take all information into account when making serious decisions that can affect their health.  Reviewing this study in a vacuum does little more than scare consumers away from one of the healthiest proteins,” said Lewandowski.

There is powerful evidence that U.S. consumers should continue to eat a vast array of seafood products and enjoy the health benefits that come from making seafood a staple in one’s diet. Sea-food is low in fat and high in the omega-3 fatty acids that help protect against numerous diseases. 

It is critical that consumers be armed with all the fact regarding seafood consumption before mak-ing any drastic changes in their diet. 

NESPA will further research and monitor the findings of this study and provide additional infor-mation as it becomes available.
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The New England Seafood Producers Association (NESPA) is a non-profit organization repre-senting the interests of New England's shore-side seafood industry. Formed in 2002, the organiza-tion’s objectives are to sustain the seafood industry by defending and promoting the historical right to harvest and process seafood in New England as well as educate consumers on the benefits that come from consuming seafood.

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Swordfish and tuna and salmon, oh my!*

November 18, 2003

Unless you’ve spent the last two weeks in complete isolation from the mainstream print and broadcast media, by now you’ve been afflicted with some of the widespread “don’t eat aquacultured salmon because of PCBs” hype. And, of course, that was preceded by a few weeks with widely circulated admonitions to “limit your intake of tuna and swordfish” because those species contain high levels of mercury.

The average consumer couldn’t be blamed for being somewhat at a loss about what a healthy diet should really include. For the last several years we’ve heard that a diet rich in omega 3s is a virtual guarantee of a longer and a healthier life – and, of course, among the best natural sources of omega 3s are fatty fish species including salmon, swordfish and tuna. But now that same consumer is being warned away from those very same species. What’s going on?

In a nutshell, quite a bit. But could it be that very little of it has much to do with concerns about healthy diets?

An aquaculture industry-sponsored group, Positive Aquaculture Awareness (PAA), has updated a report on its website addressing the issue of PCBs in aquacultured salmon. According to Laurie Jensen, President of PAA, the report, Farmed salmon, PCBs, Activists and the Media, addresses “the latest efforts of the activists to mis-characterize the results of the January 9 Science study that was funded with US$2.5 million from the antiaqua-culture Pew Charitable Trusts and widely reported in the media.”

Appended to the PAA report are several pages of quotes from governmental, academic and industry experts in the fields of food safety and nutrition disputing the Pew study and to how the media responded to it. While we urge you to go to the PAA website (http://www.farmfreshsalmon.org/) to download the full report, we’ve repro-duce a few of what we consider the more salient quotes here:

Eric Rimm of the Harvard School of Public Health in Cambridge, Mass., points out numbers alone may suggest farmed salmon's benefits still outweigh any risk. One in two Americans die every year from car-diovascular disease, while the risk of developing cancer from contaminants remains uncertain and un-documented. (Los Angeles Times, 01/09/04)

PCB's have not been proved to cause cancer in people, and industry workers who were exposed to higher levels did not have a higher cancer rate, said Dr. Michael Gallo of the Cancer Institute at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. (New York Times, 01/09/04)

“We've looked at all the data and our advice to consumers is not to alter their consumption of farmed or wild salmon,” said Terry Troxell, director of the FDA Centre for Food Safety and Nutrition. “Salmon is an excellent source of Omega 3 fatty acids, vitamins and proteins,” he said. “These [contaminant] lev-els are extremely low and are not of public health concern to us.” (ABC News, 01/09/04)

The agencies charged with protecting the public health in the U.S., in Canada and in several E.U. countries have come out unequivocally in favor of the continued consumption of salmon, both cultured and wild-caught, and have stated that the levels of PCBs found by the authors of the study in Science should be of no concern to con-sumers.

It seems almost unnecessary to point out that the study that brought about all this furor focused on yet another segment of the fish and seafood industry was funded by the Pew “Charitable” Trusts.

In their report the PAA link the salmon PCB issue to so-called environmental organizations with anti-aquaculture agendas in an arrangement that sounds surprisingly similar to that linking the Sea Turtle Restoration Network’s anti-longlining campaign to their sudden interest in, and hyping of, concerns with the amount of mer-cury in swordfish and tuna and the fuel used by the fishermen that catch them. And, of course, global warming.

In the latest exercise in the fantastical by the Sea Turtle Restoration Network, Robert Ovetz writes “amongst fisheries targeting high value species, ‘it is now common for direct fossil fuel energy inputs alone to exceed nu-tritional energy embodied in the catch by at least an order of magnitude…. Among the fisheries with the most inefficient ‘edible protein return on investment,’ vessels targeting shrimp, tuna and swordfish are at the bottom of the list…. the most efficient fish species to target are small deep sea species such as menhaden and mack-erel.... longline fishing is… also a major contributor of climate warming carbon dioxide gases.”

Mr. Ovetz fails to mention a fact that every seafood consumer is aware of; that tuna and swordfish (and shrimp) are among the most expensive and most in-demand seafood products available. Consumers willingly pay the high prices they command, and factored into those prices are the costs of the energy it takes to catch them, proc-ess them, and get them to the table. If consumers were willing to substitute mackerel (at well under a dollar a pound) or menhaden (at a couple of hundred dollars a ton), we suspect that they would have done so. To sug-gest, as Mr. Ovetz does, that energy efficiency rather than consumer demand should be driving the world’s fish-eries is patently absurd. It’s about as absurd as trying to blame global warming on a fleet of fishing boats. But, in the Sea Turtle Restoration Network’s quest to “save sea turtles” by destroying longline fishing, absurdity doesn’t seem to be much of a consideration. (Nor does accuracy. Menhaden, as tens of millions of commercial and recreational fishermen, marine scientists, marine science students and anyone else who spends any time around the water knows – but the Sea Turtle Restoration Network’s Mr. Ovetz doesn’t - have nothing to do with the “deep sea,” spending their entire lives in estuarine and inshore waters.)  

In fact, it’s difficult for us to determine whether the Sea Turtle Restoration Network’s goal really is to save tur-tles or to destroy a fishery. The National Marine Fisheries Service and the East coast longline fleet have been engaged in a cooperative program for over three years to develop and implement turtle conservation technolo-gies applicable to longline fisheries worldwide - see http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/mediacenter/turtles/. This pro-gram has been gratifyingly successful, its results are being widely exported to, and accepted by, the longline fleets of other fishing nations, and it’s based on solid science and documented performance rather than irrelevant and overblown conjecture. It’s hard to understand how drawing insupportable connections between a style of fishing and melting ice caps can be considered more effective than supporting a program that has resulted in 90% reductions in turtle interactions, but that’s what the Sea Turtle Restoration Network is doing..

So, we’ve got a media-generated tempest over PCB levels that the concerned government agencies recognize as safe. And we’ve got an organization supposedly in existence to save sea turtles ignoring a pioneering effort that will do that most effectively while at the same time trying to lead a consumer health “crusad” and drawing spu-rious connections between commercial fishing and global warming. And how much other anti-fishing and anti-aquaculture activism is based on what it’s hard to see as anything but obvious misdirection?

Could it be that some of the organizations and individuals engaged in these ongoing campaigns have interests and/or agendas that aren’t immediately apparent? Could it be that their primary concerns aren’t with healthy consumers or healthy fisheries or healthy oceans? We certainly hope not, but their recent actions do raise these questions.

*With our most sincere apologies to Dorothy, the Tin Man and the Scarecrow.

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To return to the Fishing New Jersey site introduction page: http://www.fishingnj.org
To return to the current Garden State Seafood Association Weekly Update: http://www.fishingnj.org/currentupdate.htm