Too Much Lobster (And Too Few Cod)

• Author: Craig M. Pease
• Position: Ph.D., a research scientist, teaches at the Vermont Law School Environmental Law Center
• Pages: 18-18

Page 18 ❧ THE ENVIRONMENTAL FORUM Copyright © 2009, Environmental Law Institute®, Washington, D.C. www.eli.org.

Reprinted by permission from The Environmental Forum®, July/August 2009

By Craig M. Pease

Too Much Lobster

(And Too Few Cod)

It is sometimes instructive to focus

not on what you can see, but on

what you cannot. Such was my rath-

er eerie experience several years ago,

when traveling for the f‌irst time along

the coast of Maine. Everywhere we

turned there was lobster — lobster

boats, lobster traps, lobster buoys,

lobstermen, and lobster for sale.

But where were the cod? A rich

cod f‌ishery once stretched along the

Atlantic seaboard from Cape Cod to

Newfoundland. Yet I saw nary a sign

of commercial cod f‌ishing. Eventu-

ally, I asked a local where I might buy

some fresh cod, and was directed to a

building ensconced in a maze of side

streets, where a f‌ishmonger sold me a

small piece of cod, though not before

complaining of increasing prices.

Alas, the history of the New Eng-

land cod f‌ishery is not unique. e

collapse of f‌ishery after f‌ishery over

the last several decades led to the

2007 amendments to the Magnu-

son-Stevens Act, which governs the

management of U.S. coastal f‌isheries.

ese changes required the National

Marine Fisheries Service to set ex-

plicit harvest and management goals

for the f‌isheries they manage, and to

report annually on their progress in

preventing overf‌ishing. All Atlantic

cod f‌isheries are below their goals, and

are thus classif‌ied as “overf‌ished.”

Earlier this year, NMFS released

two documents central to its ongo-

ing ef‌forts to implement the 2007

amendments. Perhaps surprisingly,

the 2008 Status of U.S. Fisheries re-

port asserts that over three quarters

of U.S. coastal f‌isheries are not over-

f‌ished. Yet the status report merely

states conclusions, providing little

indication of the data and analyses

on which they are based. To f‌ind

these, a good starting point is the

Guidance on Annual Catch Limits

to End Overf‌ishing, f‌inalized earlier

this year. Alas, it is technically dense.

e apparent complexity of the

science belies the simplicity of the

central question: Are we catching too

many f‌ish? Although f‌isheries man-

agement science is deep and sophis-

ticated, there is no consensus. Opin-

ions range from optimistic, roughly

aligned with NMFS, to pessimistic,

arguing that nearly every commercial

f‌ishery in the world is overf‌ished.

One key point of dispute is this:

What is the appropriate baseline,

describing a recovered or “normal”

f‌ishery? In managing cod, should our

goal be its abundance

30 years ago, 3,000

years ago, or some-

thing in between?

In their wonderful

review of ocean en-

vironmental history

published last year,

John Pinnegar and Georg Engelhard

summarize the quite decent ecologi-

cal data on many f‌ish, turtles, sharks,

and whales, going back centuries and

even millennia. ese sources include

written reports of early travelers, the

size of cod vertebrate recovered from

the middens of indigenous humans,

newspaper accounts of shark attacks,

records of whale landings at major

ports, and economic data on f‌ish ex-

ports.

e changes in ocean ecology seen

over such long times are dramatic.

Early Atlantic coast explorers regular-

ly caught cod f‌ive to six feet in length.

G.A. Rose’s 500-year reconstruction

of Newfoundland cod populations

using catch and export data shows

gradually decreasing cod abundance

and increasing catch, starting at the

industrial revolution. Robert Steneck

and colleagues f‌ind that for most of

the last several thousand years, the

Gulf of Maine keystone species was

cod, but that by the 1970s, because

of overf‌ishing, the new keystone spe-

cies was sea urchins, with a concomi-

tant increase in lobsters, known col-

loquially as “bugs.”

In setting f‌ishing goals, the Mag-

nuson-Stevens Act requires NMFS

to use the “best scientif‌ic informa-

tion available.” But which data set is

“best”? e excellent cod abundance

and catch data, collected with careful

and systematic protocols, which alas

only go back to about 1980, when

sea urchins already dominated? Or

the more sparse and admittedly ad

hoc data sets, allowing one to piece

together cod ecology stretching back

several millennia? Accounting for

f‌ishery politics, it is entirely under-

standable why NMFS choose the f‌irst

data set. But in truth, neither data set

is “best.” ey are complementary.

e 2007 amend-

ments forced scien-

tists, albeit implicitly,

to decide an inher-

ently political and

ethical question:

Should our goal be to

restore the Atlantic

cod f‌ishery and ecosystem to its con-

dition of 30 years ago (already domi-

nated by sea urchins and lobster), or

3,000 years ago (dominated by large

cod)? is question is beyond the

ken of science. When Congress foists

political questions onto unsuspecting

scientists, rather than deciding these

questions themselves, it weakens

the role of science in environmen-

tal decisionmaking. If only scientists

could remand such inherently politi-

cal questions back to Congress and

political appointees, where they be-

long.

Craig M. Pease, Ph.D., a research scien-

tist, teaches at the Verm ont Law School En-

vironmental L aw Center. He can be reached

at cpease@ve rmontlaw.edu.

S   L

e act requires

the “ best scientic

information availa ble,”

but which is best?