Marketing MPA’s

But 200 feet above the groundfish there are thriving populations of highly migratory pelagics such as yellowtail, tunas and wahoo. They're in the MPA one minute, out the next. Why ban fishing for them? Or why not at least allow no-kill? Well, basically, it's "easier" to ban everything, say the enviros. But it isn't. Their refusal to bend on this issue is likely to derail not just the Channel Islands MPA but the entire network of MPAs proposed for the California coast.

In the needless alienation of anglers fish managers frequently pick up where enviros leave off. Three years ago the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council moved to set up a no-fishing MPA where reef fish such as groupers, snappers and amberjacks gathered to spawn. Such spawning aggregations are highly vulnerable to commercial and sport fishing, and that's why reef fish keep crashing. A no-fishing MPA for the reef-fish complex made lots of sense, and CCA, especially Florida CCA, endorsed it because the council promised to allow surface fishing for highly migratory pelagics. But at its last meeting, after all the public testimony had been heard, the council decided the enforcers' lives would be easier if it just prohibited all fishing. "We felt that they almost defrauded the public," says Florida CCA's director, Ted Forsgren. So CCA sued, eventually winning a settlement in which surface fishing for pelagics was reinstated, but not before lots of hard feelings and bad publicity for MPAs.

MPAs are valuable when they are used correctly, worthless or hurtful when they are not. One of the incorrect uses, standard with the MPAs now being pushed by the environmental community, is promulgating them independently of fisheries management plans. It does no good to save all the fish in part of the ocean if we overharvest them in the rest of it.

"Fisheries are managed as a function of yield stream—based on adjusting some level of output from the stock, quotas, limits, etc.," comments Louisiana State University's Dr. James Cowan, chairman of the Reef Fish Stock Assessment Panel for the Gulf Council. "But fishes within no-fishing reserves are no longer part of the yield stream. If you set aside 20 percent of the harvest potential, now 100 percent of the yield is going to come from that 80 percent. That's one of the tradeoffs, and we don't know enough about these tradeoffs to make informed decisions right now. When [no-fishing] MPAs are established you tend to see a relatively quick recovery of small fishes in the protected area. The forage base recovers, but a lot of the large fishes for which the reserve was set aside are relatively mobile, and if the fishing pressure isn't changed outside the boundaries, they don't recover."

Cowan believes that the enviros are being driven by the "crappy record" of fish managers, a record he claims is fast improving under the new language of the Sustainable Fisheries Management Act, which mandates sustainability. At any rate, there is nothing mystic or unattainable about good fisheries management. It is entirely possible, as Florida and Texas have demonstrated with their spectacular successes with redfish. Although many managers have yet to try good fisheries management (thanks to the fact that the public, including enviros and sportsmen, have tolerated their dereliction), this doesn't mean we need to rush around decorating the ocean with no-fishing signs.

The sad thing is that enviros really could bring back fish stocks if they'd bother to learn what the limiting factors are. In the Northeast, for example, MPAs won't help as long as otter trawls are legal. Otter trawls remove fish stocks while simultaneously destroying their habitat. They "clearcut" the bottom, razing sea fans, coral and all structure that sustains juvenile fish and forage of adults.