Fishermen-Scientist Collaborations

THE PACIFIC COAST FEDERATION
OF
FISHERMEN'S ASSOCIATIONS

From Fishermen's News of January, 2001

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THE ESSENTIAL COLLABORATION:

PROTECTING STOCKS AND OUR INDUSTRY MEANS
GREATER COOPERATION BETWEEN FISHERMEN
AND SCIENTISTS

by Zeke Grader and Natasha Benjamin

At no time in our history has there been a greater need for sound fish stock and fish habitat data then there is today, with so many fish populations in trouble and the industries they support teetering on economic collapse. Overfishing, fish habitat destruction caused by fishing gear, and large bycatch have not been so much deliberate acts, as they
have been acts of ignorance, resulting from a dearth of available information on the stocks and the places they inhabit. True, regional councils, agencies and the fishing industry have often ignored data that would have compelled more restrictive fishing operations. Unfortunately there are many examples where incomplete data or the lack of it resulted in decisions allowing heavier fishing effort than the resource could sustain.

Given the current crises in so many fisheries, the cause often being lack of good information, it stands to reason that more research is needed on the stocks and their behavior with regular assessments to measure population sizes. Of course, research and stock assessments costs money that, at least for fisheries, always seems in short supply. One of the ways to effect cost savings in fishery research is to utilize fishermen, individuals who are constantly on the water and know the fishing grounds. Another way is to utilize their vessels, which can provide less expensive platforms for fishery research than the limited number of specially constructed research vessels. Moreover, allowing fishermen and their vessels engaged in these scientific endeavors to share in some of the research funds helps reduce the hardships brought on by cutbacks in fishing.

In the history of our fisheries, there have been any number of examples of fishermen and scientists working together to get answers about fish. In the 1950's some former salmon gillnetters helped biologists with salmon research on the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. In the 1960's and 1970's, fishermen worked with government researchers tracking albacore migrations and the relationship of presence of those fish to sea surface temperatures. More recently, groundfish fishermen collaborated with university scientists looking at mesh configurations aimed at reducing bycatch, and driftnet fishermen have been working with the scientific community devising methods to keep marine mammals out of their fishgear.

Despite all this, there has, however, been much hesitation from the fishing industry to collaborate with scientists doing research, although it is well known that fishermen have a wealth of knowledge on the status of the fisheries. Indeed, many in our industry believe that any data collected would just be used against them, and are therefore skeptical of sharing information with scientists or even letting them on the boats. There is some truth to this but only when data is used out of context or to carry out some other agenda, or if industry were trying to hide some "dirty little secret" it did not want known.

The fault for the lack of cooperation on fisheries research is equally shared by the scientific community. The two -- fishermen and scientists -- come mostly from different cultures, that is, their educations, their income sources, and their outlooks on life can be very different. Most scientists come from cloistered communities either within government agencies or academia. They are used to talking among themselves and many are incapable of communicating with the outside world. Because of their specialized training, scientists also tend to look down on those with less training or even those from outside their field. They tend to distrust information provided by fishermen as either anecdotal, and therefore not scientific, or self-serving. Most would prefer the confines of a research vessel to a commercial fishing boat.

But are the two groups really that far apart? Don't fishermen and scientists really have more in common than what separates them? Santa Barbara fisherman Chris Miller once described both as being totally dysfunctional and therefore natural partners. Similarly in his new book, The Great Gulf, David Dobbs describes the relationship between fishermen and scientists in New England and the issues over how to count the fish and how many should be allowed to be caught.

In fact, there are many examples of successful collaboration, including the Northeast Consortium, created to encourage partnerships between commercial fishermen, researchers, and other stakeholders to become participants in cooperative research and development of selective fishing gear technology. This program helps bring fishermen's information,experience, and expertise into the scientific framework needed for fisheries management.

What Collaboration Means

In his paper, "Fisheries Science Collaborations: The Critical role of the Community," Doug Wilson (e-mail: dw@ifm.dk ) of the Institute for Fisheries Management & Coastal Community Development North Sea described four models of scientific collaboration between fishermen and fisheries scientists:

The first model defers to the expertise of the scientist for all major decisions and creates a strong programmatic distinction between what is science, and shall be done by scientists, and what are other related activities that can be carried out by others. Various kinds of tagging programs, fishery advisory boards, at-sea research collaboration and many other activities fit this model.
The second model, traditional ecological knowledge, recognizes that fishermen have available to them a unique, local knowledge of the resource that can make a supplementary contribution to fisheries science. Several government,community and environmental groups are engaged in finding, recording and using this knowledge.
The third model, competing constructions, sees collaborations on science as part of an ongoing contestation about the nature and condition of the resource that cannot help but be a part of and expresses the political and legal aspects of management. This is the model that most accurately describes the day-to-day activities of the various stakeholder groups that work with scientists.
The fourth model, community science, is beginning to emerge through efforts at fisheries co-management. These programs involve aspects of all three other kinds of programs. They recognize and seek to incorporate the leadership of scientists, the importance of fishermen's knowledge, and the inherently political nature of management-related fisheries science.

How Collaboration Is Working Out In Practice

Four examples of on-going or planned collaboration between fishermen and scientists in the U.S. are:

In Massachusetts, a commercial fishing trawler is being used to assess stocks of monkfish. The complaint had been that the previous trawl surveys done by the National Marine Fisheries Service had not targeted the areas where fishermen were operating, particularly in the deeper waters, and therefore got skewed results. The trawl survey that took place in October was the first step in a collaborative research effort by the Monkfish Defense Fund (an industry group), NMFS, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and Rutgers University. According to the report on the survey in the January issue of National Fisherman, the investigation showed that surveys specific for monkfish can lead to a better understanding of the fish.
In Southern California, the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary Foundation is sponsoring its "Collaborative Marine Research Program" that will involve commercial fishermen in cooperative research and resource assessments (see: http://cinms.nos.noaa.gov/cinmsRFP.stm). This is an outgrowth of the current stakeholder process, involving fishermen, at the Channel Islands around the proposed establishment of marine protected areas(MPAs) within this national marine sanctuary.
In Rhode Island, three separate collaborative studies are underway to assess the growth rates, egg production, movement and survival of lobsters in Narragansett Bay and offshore. This research, funded by NMFS, is a collaboration between the Rhode Island Lobstermen's Association and scientists from the University of Rhode Island. To the north, in Maine, of course, lobstermen there are engaged in a novel experiment in co-management that will, of necessity, require at some point collaboration between fishermen and scientists.

On the west coast also, the University of California's Marine Council has initiated an inter-institution research initiative that it hopes to conduct with the fishing community, aimed at assessing current statewide coastal observations to better understand ocean productivity. Called the California Coastal Ocean Observation System (CalCOOS), it proposes to expand the infrastructure of new platforms complemented by shore-based, shipboard, aircraft and remote sensing capabilities, "intended to create long-term, high quality physical, biological and chemical data sets to aid in fishery management and ocean protection effort.
The data collected under CalCOOS could provide a basis for assisting California in the implementation of its Marine Life Management Act (MLMA) helping to create science-based resource management plans. Further, the development of a system of marine protected areas (MPAs) called for under state law will require circulation models and description of the variability (spatially and temporally) of the sources and abundance of fish and invertebrate larvae. Without such measurement, there is no scientific basis to justify the creation or argue the validity of MPAs. In this way, CalCOOS underpins the management needs of the government and the fishing industry in a scientific and politically neutral approach to the protection of fishery resources and sustainable fisheries. CalCOOS proposes to work with the fishermen in a variety of ways, including use of commercial fishing boats as vessels of opportunity for routine and rapid response observations, training fishermen to deploy instrumentation and become part of the scientific process.

As part of the CalCOOS process, fishermen would work closely with scientists, graduate students and University of California extension personnel to create assessments and participate in a two-way exchange establishing the basis and rationale for the science that will ultimately guide fishery management, including stock and habitat protection, and the creation and evaluation of MPAs. This exchange and participation by the fishing industry is the critical element for CalCOOS success (for more information, go to: http://www.calcoos.org ).

The Institute for Fisheries Resources (IFR), in association with Kier Associates, has developed a watershed Resource Information System (the KRIS system, see: http://www.krisweb.com) for the Noyo River in Mendocino County on the northern California coast. It is a watershed information system modeled after the highly-successful Klamath Resource Information System, hence the name KRIS, that provides GIS and other sophisticated mapping data, plus relevant studies and literature and other pertinent information, all in a peer-reviewed format on compact discs (CD-ROM) and on the Internet. The program is intended to help agencies, landowners, and the public, including the fishing industry, better understand specific watersheds. In the case of the Noyo and the other Mendocino County watersheds, it is hoped the information will provide scientific guidance for resource protection and fish restoration.

Collaboration is Essential to Our Future

But beyond specific projects where fishermen and scientists have collaborated, either in the past, currently or planned, on-going relationships need to be established between the various university, government and private research institutions and fishing associations up and down the coast. While the CalCOOS proposal above does anticipate on-going collaboration, most of the projects have been in response to one crisis or another, whether, as it was in the early days, to discover where the fish were in order to make fishing operations more efficient, or as now to determine stock population levels to better manage fishing effort generally. The formation of on-going relationships between fishery researchers and fishermen will not only make for better response to fishery and ecosystem needs, but will help us anticipate changes in ocean and fish stock regimes and plan for them. Such relationships could truly be symbiotic, with benefits to both the fishing industry and the fishery research community.

Finally, by establishing on-going relationships between fishermen and scientists, we are not proposing or suggesting in any way the type of relationship that exists between some industries and some scientists, where the researchers are simply a paid arm of industry either conducting research and development for industry owned-patents or becoming industry advocates ("biostitutes") as we have seen among some "scientists" for the coal and oil industries paid to refute global warming.

The long-term survival of our most ancient of industries depends on accurate, objective data, even if it isn't what we want to see, in order to make sound management and business decisions. In our efforts to make all of our fisheries sustainable, to end overfishing, to reduce unwanted bycatch, to protect essential fish habitats, to recover and rebuild threatened or depleted fish populations, our success will depend on sound scientific information. The quickest and least expensive way to gaining that information will be through the collaboration of fishermen with scientists.

Zeke Grader is PCFFA's Executive Director; PCFFA is the west coast's largest organization of commercial fishermen. PCFFA's Southwest Regional office is reachable at: PO Box 29370, San Francisco, CA 94129- 0370, (415)561-5080; PCFFA's Northwest Regional office is reachable at: PO Box 11170, Eugene, OR 97440-3370, (541)689-2000. Natasha Benjamin is on staff with PCFFA's affiliate organization, the Institute for Fisheries Resources. Our email is: fish1ifr@aol.com.