Fringe science

(from the May, 2007 issue of National Fisherman)

Swordfish are severely overfished. Ninety percent of the “big” fish in the oceans are gone. We’ll run out of fish by the year 2048. Barndoor skates are on the verge of extinction. Marine protected areas are the only way to save the oceans.

We’re much too familiar with these kinds of headlines. They’re based on information that is, I presume, presented to the press as mainstream, objective science, and are invariably reported as such, usually attributed to “prominent” or “leading” or “respected” scientists.

But are these doom and gloom pronouncements really a reflection of what a preponderance of ocean researchers believe, based on a compelling body of rigorous research?

Not hardly. Rather, they represent a severely jaundiced view of the state of the world’s fisheries based on various statistical manipulations of the same inadequate data that the fisheries managers have been hamstrung by since fisheries management became a profession.

When you read headlines claiming that we’re running out of fish – big fish or barndoor skates or sharks or all of ‘em - because of too much fishing, it’s easy to assume that the researchers making these claims are basing them on real world observations. You picture them out there dragging their nets in an increasingly fruitless quest for whatever species or species complexes they are researching. You think that, like the archetypical scientist who depends upon “the scientific method” and is a slave to objectivity, fisheries scientists and their “science” are beyond any external influences. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Their predictions of imminent doom always seem to be based upon rehashing of statistics generated by others; either landings or survey data, both of which are notoriously imprecise. Thus, when Dalhousie University researchers Ransom Myers and Boris Worm, with a little help from Our Favorite Charitable Trust (hereafter to be known as OFCT), decided to demonstrate that almost all of the marlin and tuna and swordfish had become casualties of rapacious fishermen, they didn’t do it by going out and counting marlin and tuna and swordfish, they did it by “analyzing” landings of marlin and tuna and swordfish by commercial longliners.

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist – or even a fisheries scientist, for that matter – to know that there isn’t necessarily a constant relationship between reported landings and the abundance of the fish being landed. Commercial fishermen aren’t in business to provide scientists with data. They’re in business to maximize profits, and they’re going to fish where and when and how they can do that. That means that any conclusions based on landings are subject to a significant amount of spin.

And when it comes to survey data, I can’t help but think of “trawlgate” a few years back, when one of NMFS’ oldest and most trusted trawl surveys was shown to be less reliable than we all had assumed.

What this means is that, given enough of the right kind of data, and enough facility in manipulating it, you can “demonstrate” virtually anything. Convenient for the agenda-driven scientists that are grabbing all of today’s headlines, isn’t it? And on the subject of agenda-driven scientists, a little appreciated fact is that the American Fisheries Society, the organization representing just about all the fisheries scientists in our neck of the woods, not only accepts, but encourages advocacy (which is defined as “arguing for a cause, often on behalf of others” in an AFS Policy Statement) in its membership. So much for scientific objectivity.

Couple that with seemingly unlimited access to the broadcast and print media and with all of the credibility that money can buy, and data interpretation that is way out there on the fringes can be – and has been – made to appear as main-stream science.

Whenever you’re confronted with “research” dealing with fisheries, particularly if it’s of the Chicken Little variety, ask a few questions. Is it based on counting fish or on spinning someone else’s data? Has it included all of the relevant data? Are there logical assumptions behind it? Is it in support of a particular, and perhaps controversial, agenda? Most importantly, who’s paying for it?

And finally, there’s a question we should all be asking those well-intentioned folks who are so busy saving the world’s oceans from fishermen. In view of the glaring gaps in our knowledge of the actual status of our fisheries, why are they spending so much money on reworking the same old and inadequate data and so little on increasing what we actually know?

Nils E. Stolpe