A Policy for Oceans

But why should flyrodders worry about things like sawfish, turtles, dogfish and skates? First, because the same managers who are allowing them to be erased from the planet preside over species like stripers, bluefish, salmon, steelhead, weakfish, mackerels, billfish and tunas. And second, because, as John Muir noted, "when you tug on a single thing in nature you find that it's connected to the rest of the world." I'm among the very few anglers who enjoyed fly-fishing for cod back when cod existed in reasonable numbers. That, of course, is not the point. Cod are not just a predator fish; they are a forage fish. Under natural conditions they are among the most abundant of all North Atlantic fishes. But ever since 1976 when we stopped the Soviet block from fishing them out, we've been fishing them out ourselves. In 1996 overfishing became illegal under the Sustainable Fisheries Act. Yet the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) has allowed the New England Fisheries Management Council to kill up to four times as many cod as NMFS and council scientists say is sustainable. Three years ago the Conservation Law Foundation, the Ocean Conservancy, the National Audubon Society, and the Natural Resources Defense Council sued NMFS for violating the Sustainable Fisheries Act. They won impressively on April 26, 2002 when US District Judge Gladys Kessler ordered the prompt, draconian restrictions needed for the recovery of cod and 13 other species of Atlantic groundfish. But commercial fishermen complained to their legislators. Under fierce pressure from Congress, Kessler ordered more delays; and now restrictions are weaker than they were before the lawsuit.

What happens to, say, striped bass when the cod are gone? Well, they're opportunists; so they eat more of other things; and stripers were never obligate cod eaters to begin with. But other fish eat those other things, too. What happens to those fish? And what do the fish that the cod aren't controlling anymore eat? Juvenile stripers? Striper forage? And what do the sharks and seals, that used to eat cod, eat? Adult stripers? Americans fish managers don't know, but they need to start looking for answers to these kinds of questions. An intelligent, effective oceans policy must consider marine ecosystems; it cannot continue to deal with fish as single species.

According to the journal Nature, 90 percent of the world's top predator fish such as tuna, sharks and cod are missing at sea. As each trophic level is depleted relationships among species collapse, biodiversity diminishes, and marine ecosystems are driven toward microbes. The US is now exporting jellyfish to Japan where they are used in salads. In the Gulf of Maine fishermen who used to catch cod, haddock and flounder are now catching sea cucumbers.

A national oceans policy must set an international example so that we can leverage scientific management around the globe. Fish don't know about international boundaries or territorial waters. Outside our 200-mile limit "highly migratory species"-sharks, marlins, swordfish and tunas-are tended by the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT), about as competently as Lenny tended rodents in Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men.

"I despair with pelagics because as soon as the signatory nations to ICCAT see two more fish they try to catch them," declares Charlie Witek, chair of the Coastal Conservation Association's New York Fisheries Committee and former chair of CCA's Atlantic States Committee. "The European Union won't do what's necessary to control bluefin tuna harvest on their side. There's interchange with our stock. No one is saying let's do what's right for the resource. It's how can we catch more for our guys. More countries are joining ICCAT, and they all want tuna. The countries that have quotas don't want to give up any fish."

The Bush administration is doing better than its predecessor in trying to get ICCAT to do its job. For example, infuriated by a proposed ICCAT quota on bluefin tuna 6,000 metric tons over the 32,000-ton cap deemed safe by ICCAT's own scientists, ardent big-game angler Donald Evans, who as US Commerce secretary has charge of NMFS, fired off a blistering letter to Pascal Lamy, European Union commissioner for trade. "I am concerned," wrote Evans on April 25, 2003, "that over-fishing by EU member states is reducing stocks of ICCAT species below sustainable levels. The EU is a world leader in supporting protection of the global environment and the sustainable use of natural resources. In the case of Atlantic fish stocks, however, it appears that the actions and positions of the EU and its member states are at a variance with these goal. . . . I am urging you to take prompt action to improve EU compliance with existing ICCAT obligations and to re-consider accepting science-based conservation measures to guarantee a sustainable future for species like the Atlantic bluefin tuna and white marlin."

Evans' letter is certainly an encouraging sign that a decent US oceans policy is possible, and the Bush administration deserves a lot of credit for it. Buy why should the EU listen? No sooner had Evans offered his advice than NMFS (which manages highly migratory species inside our federal waters) was buying into a ruse by US commercial fishermen of the East Coast Tuna Association to short-circuit the recovery of bluefins. The Federal Register of June 5, 2003 carried a notice from NMFS of "a request for exempted fishing permits for tuna purse seine vessels to begin fishing prior to the traditional start date [July 15 rather than Aug. 15] in order to improve market conditions and to allow retention of all incidental catch of bluefin tuna between 73 and 81 inches."

NMFS also seems to be buying into a ruse by swordfishermen to plunder juvenile fish that have reappeared in big numbers after a 1999 lawsuit by the Ocean Conservancy, Natural Resources Defense Council and National Audubon Society forced the agency to close large areas to longlining. Today there are few mature fish, but the stock has recovered to 94 percent of the level scientists proclaim to be "healthy." The presence of all those mini swords just beyond legal fishing range is more than commercial swordfishermen can bear. The two proposals for re-opening closed areas are said by those doing the proposing to be scientific experiments." Our swordfishermen sound like the Japanese who keep gathering all this "scientific data" on minke, Bryde's and sperm whales by slaughtering them for their commercial market.

Americans are setting an even worse example with sharks, especially the spiny dogfish-the world's most abundant and best-studied one. If you want to wipe out a species-especially a species like spiny dogfish which bears dog-sized litters of live "pups" after two-year gestations-target the mature females. At the urging of state and federal managers who touted dogfish as "an underutilized species," that's just what commercial fishermen have done. Mature females-which school together and are bigger than mature males-are now reduced by three quarters; and virtually no new pups have been born since 1995. Still, on June 10, 2003 the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (which manages fish out to three miles) rejected the advice of its own scientists and voted to increase the annual dogfish quota from 4 million pounds to 8.8 million.

Even as they were sponsoring the unsustainable slaughter of dogfish, U.S. fish managers were flitting from one international meeting to the other, lecturing the world about the vulnerability of sharks. The Canadians-who are depleting their own dogfish, along with ours because the populations mix-responded to our new quota by announcing that they wanted to double theirs, too.