Time To Fish Or Cut Bait?

Allow me to ask this question: When your house is on fire, do you start looking for the short in the wiring that ignited the fire or do you run for the hose? I bother to ask because I continue to be dumbfounded over the ongoing hairsplitting and equivocation that's required before the academic community can get behind conservation. Case in point, the loss of ocean biodiversity and the collapse of commercial fisheries.

Last November in the journal Science, a team of researchers made quite an international stir by documenting the importance of biological diversity in the oceans and linked it to the long term sustainability of fisheries. The paper made front page news in numerous news outlets worldwide and was even picked-up by CNN and national and local news. Interestingly, most of the media attention skipped-over the core message of the paper, that healthy fisheries are a byproduct (or ecosystem service) of robust ocean biodiversity. Instead, media reports chose to focus on the articles chilling prediction that if current fishing trends continue, most of the world’s fisheries could be headed for collapse by mid-century.

After the chill came the heated response from the research community. Collapse? What collapse? Let's be certain we all understand what collapse means. Don't you mean reduced, not collapsed? Or depleted. Depleted is a more accurate word, right? And what fish stock will collapse? Surely not all! Oh, and what's the cause? We have to completely understand the cause before we should sound so alarmist! It all made my head hurt. Meanwhile, what is apparent to the lay observer––fish catches continue to shrink, market fish get smaller, and unsustainable fishing practices continue––remains "anecdotal" therefore "unimportant" to the research community.

This week, a follow-up article by the same group of researchers was published in Science to address the backlash. Emmett Duffy, Professor of Marine Science at the College of William and Mary’s Virginia Institute of Marine Science and co-author of the original paper and this week's response, succinctly summarized the criticism on his blog, The Natural Patriot,

In a nutshell (or dare I say, in a clamshell), the criticisms raised do not invalidate the main conclusions of the original analysis by [the original paper]. Fish stocks have declined worldwide over the last few decades, as widely recognized and documented not only in our paper but by the comprehensive assessment of the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization. What is new is our documentation that biodiversity is critical to maintaining the normal functioning of marine ecosystems, and the goods and services that they provide to human society, including the productivity and resilience of global fishery catches.

Despite the nitpicking, Duffy remains positive and actually suspects that the research community is closer to agreement than all the debate suggests. Over on blogfish, Emmett comments,

Although the Science exchange highlights some of the disagreements, I really do sense that the various sectors of the marine scientific community are beginning to come to consensus that diverse, functioning marine ecosystems are critically important to sustainable fisheries, and that effective management will be enhanced by better linkages to the ecosystem context in which fish populations live.

I'll stand with Emmett and hope for the best. I just hope it won't take till we are buying zooplankton at the local fish monger before all the hand-wringing stops and conservation action can begin.