All the Fish in the Sea

Maximum Sustainable Yield and the Failure of Fisheries Management

Carmel Finley

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780226249681
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Science General
• Index: Biological Sciences

Between 1949 and 1955, the State Department pushed for an international fisheries policy grounded in maximum sustainable yield (MSY). The concept is based on a confidence that scientists can predict, theoretically, the largest catch that can be taken from a species' stock over an indefinite period. And while it was modified in 1996 with passage of the Sustained Fisheries Act, MSY is still at the heart of modern American fisheries management. As fish populations continue to crash, however, it is clear that MSY is itself not sustainable. Indeed, the concept has been widely criticized by scientists for ignoring several key factors in fisheries management and has led to the devastating collapse of many fisheries.Carmel Finley reveals that the fallibility of MSY lies at its very inception—as a tool of government rather than science. The foundational doctrine of MSY emerged at a time when the US government was using science to promote and transfer Western knowledge and technology, and to ensure that American ships and planes would have free passage through the world's seas and skies. Finley charts the history of US fisheries science using MSY as her focus, and in particular its application to halibut, tuna, and salmon fisheries. Fish populations the world over are threatened, and All the Fish in the Sea helps to sound warnings of the effect of any management policies divested from science itself.

ONE

The Quest for Rational Fishing

The world does not stand still while scientists put their minds in order. MICHAEL GRAHAM¹

It was not until the 1930s that fishery scientists in Europe and the United States were actually able to prove statistically what should have been obvious, that fishing had the potential to reduce fish populations, sometimes to the point of harm. Some fishermen might have suspected it, and some scientists had certainly thought it for at least five decades. The evidence became clearer after European countries embraced steam engines in the 1880s, substantially increasing their catches—until the catches declined precipitously. By 1902 governments were concerned enough to create the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES), to bring scientists together in hopes that a coordinated scientific plan could be developed to restore the catch.

It was not just European stocks that were declining; fisheries started just decades earlier on the West Coast of North America were showing sharp fluctuations. Scientists suspected the fluctuations meant that too many fish were being taken. The idea was violently rejected in California by the powerful sardine canning industry and in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska by the equally powerful salmon industry. But by 1923 the declines in the catch of Pacific halibut (Hippoglossus stenolepis) were so steep that, after a decade of bickering over which country was responsible, Canada and the United States signed an agreement to manage the catch. The first thing the new International Fisheries Commission did was to close fishing in the winter, igniting a debate over how much the closure would hurt fishermen and whether it would even help the halibut at all. The closure, like most early attempts to manage fishing, was ineffectual because boats were allowed to continue to enter the fishery; if there is a hallmark of American fisheries management, it is the reluctance of managers to limit the number of boats. The total halibut catch continued to decline until the treaty was renegotiated in 1932. This time the commission had the authority to close many halibut nursery areas and to put a cap on the total catch.

The commission and its director, William F. Thompson (1888–1965), made history in 1934 when they issued “Report No. 8,” proving that fishing successively depleted fish stocks—but that declines could be reversed by scientific management. In order to keep catches high, fishermen had to continually pioneer new grounds or new stocks of fish. The halibut catch had originally come from 500 miles of ocean; now its fishermen stretched over 2,000 miles of ocean, from Oregon to the Bering Sea.² The size and weight of the fish had declined, forcing fishermen to fish harder and travel farther. And the banks that had been fished first, in Puget Sound, were more depleted than those in Hecate Strait—which, in turn, were more depleted than the most recently fished banks in the Gulf of Alaska.³ The pattern of progressive decline was clear. And so was the pattern of recovery once regulations were put in place: individual catches were higher, and the catch had stopped declining.⁴

The report showed that fishing caused major changes in the halibut stocks. A female halibut did not mature sexually until age twelve to fifteen years. When fishing was intense, too many immature fish were killed before they could spawn. If fishing could be regulated, the small immature fish could grow; fishermen would ultimately land larger fish—and make more money. Not to regulate the fishery is “sheer economic waste,” the commission’s board of directors stoutly noted in their foreword to the report.⁵ If the commission did not act, Pacific halibut would be destroyed, just as halibut stocks on the eastern coast of North America had been.

The publication of “Report No. 8” made the scientific reputation of both Thompson and the commission. Just a decade after its formation, the commission had found the key to managing fish and fishing. It was the first time an international agency had voted to restrict fishing, and the data proved it was successful.⁶ The Smithsonian published a paper by Thompson the following year, summarizing the commission’s findings. There was a favorable review on “Report No. 8” in the ICES journal. Thompson was on his way to becoming one of the most widely known and respected fishery scientists in North America.⁷ He was forty-six when the report was published in 1934. Four years earlier, Stanford University awarded him his doctorate and the University of Washington appointed him director of its then Department of Fisheries. The Halibut Commission was a part-time appointment that paid $2,000 a year, a reflection of the difficult times of the Depression, when markets for fish collapsed.⁸

Halibut are among the largest fish in the sea. Most are twenty-five to thirty-five pounds, but they can grow much larger, and the historical record is full of landings of fish weighing several hundred pounds. Halibut are found on the continental shelf of the North Pacific Ocean and the Bering Sea, from mid-California to Alaska, and west along the Asiatic coast to Hokkaido, Japan. The largest concentrations are on the northwest coast of North America, in the international waters between Canada and the United States.⁹ Halibut dwell near the bottom of the continental shelf and are caught by fishermen laying long lines of baited hooks on the ocean floor.

The fishery began in the 1880s, as the transcontinental railroads opened eastern markets to Pacific goods. The collapse of the Atlantic halibut fishery opened a market niche for the snowy white, firm-textured Pacific fish. The fishery began in Seattle but quickly expanded outward, from the waters of Puget Sound north. At the same time, British Columbia fishermen were laying gear in the Inside Passage; fishermen from both countries pressed north into the Gulf of Alaska. It was a long way from home, storms were frequent, and at first boats fished year-round, using large schooners to carry a fleet of small dories to the fishing grounds. It was very similar to the way European fishermen had fished for Atlantic cod for hundreds of years on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. The early technology may have been rudimentary, but it was an industrial fishery in every sense of the word, capable of depleting the stocks on the near-shore banks.

Boats could fish intensely in one area; when catches dropped off, the schooner could sail to a new location and repeat the process. As the fishery expanded, small gas engines replaced the clumsy sails on the dories. The schooners installed more powerful winches and twelve-volt generating systems to power deck lights for night fishing. The first sign of biological concern came as early as 1899, from British Columbia, which was resentful of the way Seattle boats harvested fish in their waters.¹⁰ In 1911 the province went to Stanford University, the West Coast’s preeminent school of zoology, and hired the department’s chair, Charles Gilbert, to mount a scientific investigation into halibut. Gilbert hired one of his students, William F. Thompson, to begin the grueling work of establishing the basic facts of halibut biology.

Gilbert (1859–1928) is considered by many biologists to be the intellectual father of American fisheries science. But it is Thompson who is considered the master practitioner, the man who designed the practical ways to compile and analyze fisheries statistics.¹¹ The work of both Gilbert and Thompson substantially shaped American fisheries science—and so did the singular fish they began to study.

Born in St. Cloud, Minnesota, in 1888, Thompson and his family moved to Everett, Washington, in 1903. He majored in zoology at the University of Washington from 1903 to 1906 and came to the attention of the leading American ichthyologist, David Starr Jordan (1851–1931). Jordan, noted educator and peace activist, was president of Leland Stanford Jr. University in Palo Alto, California. He offered Thompson a scholarship and a position as his research assistant. Thompson transferred to Stanford and graduated in 1911 with a B.A. degree in zoology. He published ten papers on the taxonomy of marine fishes during 1910–14, mainly as a junior author with Jordan. Gilbert arranged summer jobs for him with the California Department of Fish and Game Commission (1911) and with the British Columbia Provincial Fisheries Department of Canada (1912–13). Thompson conducted an intensive study of halibut for the province between 1914 and 1917, and published seven landmark papers.

The first halibut research cruises were onboard fishing schooners. It was slow, difficult, and dangerous work. “The decks were always so slippery and slimy that it was necessary to lash the fish down ‘fore and aft’ to guard against the rolling movements of the vessels as they lay in the trough of the seas,” Thompson wrote.¹² As the halibut study wound down in 1917, Thompson was hired as director of research for the California Department of Fish and Game Commission. He would preside over one of the largest and most tumultuous fisheries in the world. He was twenty-nine.

Thompson’s focus of study was sardines and what we would now call the ecological implications of the catch of Sardinops sagax caerulea. The fishery was growing exponentially, and California struggled to get a handle on how many fish were being caught. Production was 75,000 cases in 1915, but propelled by the demands for protein during World War I, it soared to 1.4 million cases, making sardines the largest commercial fishery in the United States.¹³

1 William F. Thompson was a graduate student in this 1915 photograph, showing him measuring halibut on the back deck of a schooner. Declines in the fishery were so precipitous that the Province of British Columbia hired Charles Gilbert, chair of the Department of Zoology at Stanford University, to investigate. Thompson was Gilbert’s best student. Courtesy of the Archives, School of Aquatic and Fisheries Sciences, University of Washington.

A tsunami of data poured into the laboratory at Long Beach, where Thompson set up a system to gather information about the catch, the size and age of the sardines, the kind of gear that had caught it, and where the fish had been taken. This was augmented by samples taken by scientists at the docks each day, providing additional data about the length, weight, and sex. Writing in 1920, Thompson called it a system without parallel in any country.¹⁴

Like many fish populations, sardine numbers are always fluctuating. When survival conditions are good, there are lots of sardines. But the population can drop drastically when conditions are poor. Sorting out the various year-classes in the catch, based on samples, was difficult because the sizes of the year-classes were so variable. Thompson’s solution was more research and more samples, so biologists could develop a system of weighting the statistics to correct for the sampling errors. At the same time, he and other biologists continued their work in the basic biology of the fish.¹⁵

Thompson was well aware that in Europe fisheries biology was moving toward large-scale, cooperative, international investigations, such as those sponsored by ICES. While detailed hydrographic and plankton work was clearly of value, it was more detail than scientists needed to estimate how many fish could safely be harvested. He thought it was impossible for a small, developing state like California, with its fledgling scientific program, to undertake such an expansive study of the sea. And he thought that such a detailed study might not be necessary. Expansive studies, wrote Thompson in 1922, “would have been tunneling the mountain by removing it in its entirety.”¹⁶ The state had to limit its resources to what was most important, measuring the variances in abundance and the effects of fishing. Fisheries science had to be efficient, focusing on the most practical problems.

A critical distinction for Thompson between his work and the work undertaken by European scientists was that he was dealing with fishing on virgin stocks. It was easy to mistake natural fluctuations in catch as declines, and managers needed to be wary of imposing “arbitrary and reckless restrictions.”¹⁷ Managers were as reluctant as fishermen to restrict fishing.

When the Halibut Commission was finally created in 1923, Thompson was the logical and prestigious choice for director. Canada and the United States had squabbled for more than a decade before halibut stocks had declined enough to make some sort of action mandatory. Aggregate landings were still going up—but so was the catch of small and immature fish, the seed corn of the future harvest.¹⁸ And when the catch from each area was broken down, it was clear that the landings were kept high by catches in recently pioneered waters. It was a critical piece of information about the impact of fishing on fish stocks.

Thompson’s findings found special resonance among European scientists because they replicated a pattern that had been found as fishing expanded across the North Sea—declines on the home banks continually pushed boats to pioneer new waters in order to keep catches high. As early as 1891, poor catches at home drove British fishing boats deep into the Atlantic, to the waters off Iceland, a journey made with every spare inch of the boats stuffed with coal. Icelandic waters were the extreme end of the range for the steam trawlers, a journey that could only be made in summer, since the winter fogs were too hazardous and the boats not large and powerful enough for the North Atlantic winter storms.¹⁹

Boats with the added expenses of steam engines and coal to power them could not make a living on the fish they could catch in their home waters. Steam engines had revolutionized fishing. Men no longer had to use their bodies to haul heavy, wet nets from the sea or to rely on sails to maneuver. Fishing remained a hard and dangerous life; boats frequently sank, and fishermen did not make much money. A big steam trawler could catch eight times what a smaller boat could, and the newly completed railroad lines took cheap fish to the ready markets in the growing industrial cities. The small-boat fishermen complained, but fishermen always complained when new and more efficient gear was introduced. In 1863 a British Royal Commission had scraped regulations restricting fishing because the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Quest for Rational Fishing
• 2. The Confrontation at Bristol Bay
• 3. The Pacific Fisheries Frontier
• 4. The Fish War with Japan
• 5. Shaping Fisheries Science
• 6. The Line in the Water
• 7. The Road to Rome
• 8. The Meeting in Rome
• Conclusion: Fishing “Up” to MSY
• Notes
• Index