Gulf Oil Spill: An Opportunity for Conservation?
On Sunday, the federal government closed a large section of the Gulf of Mexico to offshore fishing. Normally this news would have elated the eminent marine biologist Daniel Pauly — if only it hadn’t come as the result of millions of gallons of oil pollution gushing from the seafloor. The French-born fisheries expert and founder of the online encyclopedia Fishbase has long been a proponent of marine protected zones, where sea life may grow large, breed, and regenerate from its current depleted condition. The Gulf of Mexico, which supplies somewhere between a fifth and a third of America’s domestically caught seafood, depending on who’s estimating, is a prime candidate for such marine protected areas. Pauly, a professor at the Fisheries Centre of the University of British Columbia, spoke with OnEarth about the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf and the as-yet-unknown extent of its impact. >> ONEARTH MULTIMEDIA: See photos from the spill and hear Pauly talk about its impact on sea life The re’s a lot of talk about the effects of oil pollution onshore as the slick reaches wetlands along the Gulf Coast. But what about offshore, where we can’t see it? How is sea life being affected? The first inch of water under the ocean’s surface is full of insects, fish eggs, all kinds of little animals. The first effect of the oil spill is that all those animals will be wiped out. And as waves mix up the slick, there will be oil bubbles in the water column. These will either touch the animals or be ingested by them, and that is deadly for plankton. But these tiny animals are short lived, and they will be replaced very soon. The problem is that larger animals eat the plankton that has been polluted. They accumulate the oil and can concentrate it. Does the oil also suffocate animals? Do they choke on it in addition to being slowly poisoned by it? Yes, if an oil bubble is picked up as if it’s another plankton, the zooplankton that eats it would choke. The larger animals that come to the surface for breathing, such as dolphins and sea turtles, will be affected because the film from the oil slick is uninterrupted on the water’s surface. Their breathing hole or nostrils will become coated in oil, and that will be very bad for them. What about some of the clean-up techniques that are being employed — the controlled burns, the dispersants being added to the water to break up the petroleum. What kinds of effects can those have on sea life? The chemicals in question differ in their effect, but I understand that most of them are highly toxic, and many of them are more toxic than the oil. Fishing is an enormous industry in the Gulf of Mexico. From a food supply perspective, will the spill affect how we eat? It depends how far up or down the market chain you go. I don’t think that at the level of consumers in New York City, for example, there will be any effect, because the market is globally integrated, and people don’t differentiate between different kinds of shrimp. Perhaps there will be a small effect on prices. At the level of communities, that is different. Fishing communities will be strongly affected. And the fisheries that are closed may not be reopened for months and perhaps years, because seafood from the area will taste like oil. Do you have any sense of the overall economic impact that we’re going to see from this? It’s going to be immense, because the fisheries are going to take a huge loss. Sport fishing is also going to be affected. If this stuff reaches western Florida and eventually the Keys, you’re talking about the highest concentration of sport fishing in the world. There’s been some concern that the oil could hitch a ride on the Gulf Stream and end up in the Atlantic. That depends entirely on whether we are at the end or the beginning of the catastrophe. The loop current that circulates through the Gulf of Mexico runs more or less parallel to the Florida coast and goes around and north into the Atlantic. Even the Bahamas might be touched by the oil spill, and then the mid-Atlantic states. On the other hand, the Gulf Stream — it becomes the Gulf Stream from Florida on — is a bit off the coastline, so that could help keep the oil out at sea. But the oil would still be harming sea life, presumably. Would that affect fishing in the Atlantic? The fisheries there would also have to be closed, as in the Gulf, because even fish that stayed under the oil would have to be pulled through a film when they’re caught. But coastlines tend to be more affected than the open ocean. The open ocean is readily recolonized from the sides, so to speak. The temperature of the water is very high, so you can have a quick mineralization of the oil, and you can have also a quick evaporation of the most volatile components of the oil. Basically then you’re left with the harder-to-process part of the oil, which the bacteria can get rid of in a few weeks or months. Normally when the coast is not touched, tropical waters can clean themselves up in a short time, whereas Arctic waters cannot because bacteria work slowly in cold waters. So for example, Pemex (Mexican Petroleum) had an explosion in the Yucatán Peninsula (in 1979). It did lots of damage, but within two or three years it was kind of gone. Lots of the comparisons with what could happen in the Arctic and even Prince William Sound (where the Exxon Valdez spill occurred in 1989) are not appropriate for that reason. The acute symptoms are just as bad, though. An oiled bird is an oiled bird — it dies. And an oiled landscape stinks, and that’s exactly the same. But the bacteria’s processing of the oil is much more rapid in the tropics, so nature is a bit more resilient. But I must say that the sea grass and other coastal habitats are already stressed in Louisiana, so the oil will not be good for them. The whole system of estuaries and of banks is slowly losing ground in the Gulf. The oil may contribute to the roots of these sea grasses being wiped out, and then the banks where they sit transform into mud flats. It’s obviously going to take time for fish populations to replenish themselves. I know you’ve been a big advocate of marine protected areas or so-called "no take" zones. Should setting up more of those areas be part of our response to the oil spill? The Gulf has just been declared a large marine protected area as a result of the spill — no fishing! It is possible that a massive rebound of the fish population will occur because we are not fishing them. If the fishing is discontinued for a month or two, or a season, we may see massive changes in the Gulf. I would use the opportunity of having to dole out compensation for lost jobs to make some of the changes permanent and to have some areas permanently closed to fishing –especially the areas adjacent to parks on land and to coastal protected zones. And I would establish a quilt of protected, unprotected, and partly protected zones in the Gulf. You’ve described the most advanced fishing boats these days as being so heavily laden with technology that they’re like the Starship Enterprise. They use sonar, GPS, all these wartime technologies to find and kill fish. Can we use any of these technologies to monitor the welfare of sea life? Sure we could. For example if we declare a marine protected area, a big one, as was recently done for the Northwest Hawaiian Islands — this big natural park that has been declared protected by President Bush — people say, "Oh, you cannot monitor it." But you can see a boat from a satellite. So modern technology can enhance the fishing power of fishermen, but it can also help the managers monitor the fisheries. In fact, there are several fisheries in the world that are managed this way. All the boats have a transponder. They give the position to a satellite that monitors them. If a boat doesn’t do that, it’s poaching. From your article " Aquacalypse Now " in The New Republic , it seems like there’s an analogy to made between the lengths we’re going to catch fish, and the lengths we’re going to find oil. In both cases, we’re really at the final frontier, aren’t we? Yes. With oil it cannot be otherwise, because it’s a non-renewable resource. But basically we have exploited natural resources at an exaggerated rate. Natural resources such as fish and trees and such provide a certain interest, so you can leave the capital in the bank and live off the interest. And that you can do forever. But we have extracted more than the interest. In other words, we have gone into the capital. So we have in effect run a Ponzi scheme on natural resources, and we have depleted the ocean everywhere, including in the Gulf where only shrimp and menhaden (a small fish used for fertilizer) sustain seasonal fisheries. What’s the answer when it comes to the future of fish as a food source — to limit consumption? Well, let’s say the sea is inherently limited as to the amount of fish that it produces — at least fish that you can simply catch. And basically, as our demand increases, we have the option of either devastating the resource, robbing the bank so to say, or we can protect it and accept that it will not be meeting the demand, that price will have to go up. But that is OK. Nobody would expect to eat venison everyday, because venison comes from the wild, and the wild cannot supply our needs for meat, for example. But we have decided for some reason that we will have fish everyday. Then we go to the market and we expect to find it. But there is not enough fish to go around. It’s as simple as that. Will we have to limit our demand? If we don’t, nature will, because you cannot argue with nature.
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Gulf Oil Spill: An Opportunity for Conservation?
The Fish is Fresh. It’s Local. So What’s the Catch?
On a warm day last fall, I found myself standing in a crooked line with about 20 other people, each of us armed with empty coolers and insulated bags. "Have you had jumping mullet before?" the woman next to me asked. "Never," I said. "I have no idea what it looks like, and I have no idea how to cook it. I’m glad they’re giving us recipes." In fact, I had never even heard of jumping mullet until I received an e-mail message the day before, yet there I was, standing in a parking lot on the Duke University campus in Durham, North Carolina, eager to take it home and throw it on the grill. The message also informed me that although mullet is rarely found in local stores or restaurants, it’s actually a common fish along the Carolina coastline. But what I most enjoyed was learning that this mullet had been caught by Ron Sparks, a fisherman a few hours away who landed his bounty with gillnets strung from his 24-foot boat. I conjured up an image of Ron the fisherman — my fisherman — landing that night’s dinner. I liked it. I was sharing the fruits of Ron’s labor with 400 members of Walking Fish , a community-supported fishery run by five graduate students who study coastal environmental management at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment. Besides Ron, about a dozen other North Carolina fishermen had signed up for the program, agreeing to provide members with a share of their weekly catches for the next 12 weeks. Walking Fish is the first community-supported fishery (CSF) in the Southeast. It’s modeled after two in New England, the oldest of which started in late 2007. Today it is one of about 10 CSFs in the country . Another 10 or so are in the works, all of them on the East Coast. They’re inspired by CSAs, or community-supported agriculture programs, which have become popular across the country. People who join a CSA buy shares in a farm for a set period of time, usually a single growing season. In return, they receive a portion of the farm’s produce. Items are determined by the growing season, which means one month members might receive a load of leafy greens, while another could include tomatoes and corn, or strawberries and cucumbers. In a CSF, the A for agriculture is replaced by F for fishery. Members of the group get access to fresh, locally caught fish, a special treat considering that 84 percent of our country’s seafood is imported, often from places with dubious regulatory enforcement and depleted fisheries. Added benefits include supporting the local economy and creating a greater sense of community. What about sustainability? As I picked up my fish, I felt good about Walking Fish’s big-picture goals. But I had to overlook one not-so-insignificant problem associated with my first delivery from Ron Sparks (and some others thereafter). Mullet is a relatively plentiful fish, but gillnetting — the method by which it was caught — comes with real drawbacks. A gillnet has openings in its mesh designed to trap fish indiscriminately, which leads to a lot of "bycatch," or other types of fish and sea life that are accidentally hauled aboard with the commercially desirable species. Concerned that my mullet dinner might have come at the expense of other marine life, I started asking questions. At first glance, CSFs sound like an automatic win for the environment: supporting a local community and eating local fish limits "food miles traveled," an increasingly common unit of measure among locavores. But I soon learned that, just as on land, "local" doesn’t necessarily equal "sustainable." These fledgling initiatives are works in progress, and although many aim to advance sustainability, Walking Fish is not alone in having hurdles to overcome. "Sustainability is one of the most complicated issues we’ve had to deal with," concedes Joshua Stoll, Walking Fish’s project leader and a student at the Nicholas school. "CSFs are mostly used for economic development," but, he adds, "one of our goals is to engage people in a dialogue about what sustainable means. When fishermen no longer feel villainized and start to feel like an important part of the community, a feeling of responsibility comes with that." Walking Fish encourages environmental stewardship, but it doesn’t require participants to use specific types of fishing methods or gear. Stoll believes those decisions are best left up to the fishermen. It worked in Maine, where CSF fishermen have begun to make changes on their own. ‘Getting the stock back’ Glen Libby is a 33-year veteran of the rugged Maine fishing industry and head of the 12-boat Midcoast Fisherman’s Cooperative. It operates Port Clyde Fresh Catch , the country’s first CSF, which started in 2007. Last fall, 320 families signed up to receive deliveries from Libby and his mates, and he helped coordinate a series of 10 weekly drop-offs throughout Maine. More recently, the cooperative added monthly deliveries to Pawtucket, Rhode Island, and Brooklyn, New York. Since starting the CSF, Libby has made some meaningful changes to the way he catches fish. He and his fellow fishermen in Port Clyde have switched to less-invasive fishing methods and gear, such as larger net sizes that will allow juvenile fish to escape. And they’re working with researchers on new netting to further reduce bycatch. "The bottom line used to be the more fish you catch, the more money you make," Libby says. "It was the road to oblivion. You’re not going to get any more fish because they’re not out there. We’re committed to finding a solution to getting the stock back." Meanwhile, money from CSF subscribers has jump-started other businesses and added jobs, Libby says. "We’ve taken the investment and set up our own processing plant. So now we have filleted fish, shrimp peeled and cooked, and we’ve started a mail-order business." It helps that most fishermen also are paid more under the CSF model — Walking Fish producers earn 28 percent above market price on average — which may allow for greater flexibility in trying out new, more sustainable technologies and methods. The cod controversy The CSFs in Maine and North Carolina haven’t had to deal with anything like the kerfuffle experienced by Cape Ann Fresh Catch last year. The country’s largest CSF, which the Gloucester Fishermen’s Wives Association launched last summer, had 780 subscribers in its first year out of Gloucester, Massachusetts. It didn’t take long before the program ran up against sustainability concerns. Customers were initially told they would get a variety of groundfish: fish that, as the name suggests, live on the bottom of the ocean, such as haddock, halibut, flounder, and cod. But they ended up with mostly cod, simply because that’s what most of their fishermen were catching. "The fishing world, the entire marine ecosystem, is very unpredictable," says Niaz Dorry, director of the Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance , a group that advocates for local fishing communities and provides assistance to the Gloucester CSF. "We learned that we shouldn’t have promised what fish people would get." The lack of variety started to annoy members, and some complained that the cod should be avoided for environmental reasons. Cod is one of the most severely depleted fish stocks, with some populations listed as threatened or endangered. The National Marine Fisheries Service, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and other groups advise the public to avoid eating the species altogether. Darry Madden, who subscribed to the program last summer and who heads up Boston Localvores , an online community for local-food advocates, appealed to Dorry for an explanation. Dorry said that Cape Ann’s cod was caught in the Gulf of Maine, where the National Marine Fisheries Service, which evaluates fish stocks, recently removed cod from the "overfished" list, saying stocks have recovered to 58 percent of target level. And yet the agency still says that "overfishing" (which sounds like it should be the same thing, but isn’t by the agency’s definition) is still taking place in the Gulf of Maine and on nearby Georges Bank. The rate at which the stocks are being depleted puts them on track for the more imperiled status (and cod in other parts of the North Atlantic are definitely in danger). To make matters worse, cod is generally caught using trawl nets that are dragged across the sea floor, damaging sea life and resulting in significant bycatch. Just last week, the federal government announced new measures developed by the New England Fishery Management Council to reduce overfishing and rebuild stocks of groundfish, including cod. Madden blogged about her confusion over the amount of cod she was receiving from Cape Ann, and the back-and-forth comments on her post only highlighted the extent to which others were equally confused. "It was really hard to figure out who had the accurate information," Madden says. I can vouch for that. I spent hours poring over National Marine Fisheries Service information about cod stocks only to discover it was inconsistent and in some places several years out of date. Madden had enthusiastically endorsed the CSF on her blog, and she and her partner had been thrilled about joining Cape Ann Fresh Catch. They had all but stopped eating fish, she says, "because who knows where it comes from?" They considered a campaign or even a boycott to pressure Cape Ann to change its methods, but ultimately decided just to resume their personal ban on fish eating. "The more I learned about the fishing industry, the more I realized I don’t know what increased sustainability looks like for modern fishing," Madden explains. "It’s like trying to make modern factory farms ‘sustainable.’ They can’t be. By definition, they’re not." When Cape Ann Fresh Catch offers a new subscription in May, it will continue to deliver cod and will not promise specific types of fish, Dorry says. She doesn’t want the environmental implications ignored, she says, but prefers that the discussions become more personal. "We want to work on projects that tie the consumers to the fishermen," she says. "Then they can have conversations and start applying their ethical values, instead of being told what to do." Educating the eaters That sounded reasonable to me. But then I spoke with Geoffrey Shester, senior science manager at the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch, which issues one of the world’s best-known sustainable seafood advisory lists. He had a different opinion, one that underscores the challenges that CSFs will have to overcome if they are ever to be embraced as sustainable. "CSFs are a great concept and offer a lot of potential," he says, "but if a CSF is primarily giving you cod, you’re contributing to the continued decline of the species. I do think it’s very important to know your fisherman, where your fish comes from, and how it’s caught. With big commodity processors, the fish changes hands many times over, which of course also affects the carbon footprint. But I think with a CSF, people need to wait until the stock is at healthy levels before they start supporting something like that." As CSFs grow, sustainability will certainly continue to be an issue. But with 500 people on Cape Ann’s waiting list last summer, it seems unlikely the cod supply will affect membership this year. Port Clyde and Walking Fish are planning their 2010 CSFs as well, and both expect to expand. Although Walking Fish subscribers might multiply, the spring selection won’t be as varied as it was in the fall, when we had, along with jumping mullet (which I grilled), clams, sea mullet, trigger fish, Southern flounder, gray trout, and shrimp. From those deliveries and the e-mails leading up to them, I learned the difference between types of mullet, what a gillnet is, and how clams are harvested. I appreciated my contribution to a fisherman’s income and sense of worth. But what really excited me was the fish. For the first time in my life, despite having previously lived in coastal cities, I had access to fresh, local seafood from a trusted source. For that opportunity, I’ll be right back in line. But this year I plan to be a little more demanding of my CSF. Like most do, ours has an online forum. I think it’s time we start discussing gillnetting versus hook-and-line fishing as often as we talk about whether to grill or fry.
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The Fish is Fresh. It’s Local. So What’s the Catch?
Spotlight: Ichthyo
A fish’s form is a good predictor of its behavior, says Jean-Michel Cousteau, architect and son of the great ocean explorer. A fish’s story unfolds, he writes, through "the delicacy of bone and its intricate arrangement in service to the living creature." Cousteau’s commentary, along with that of several other great ocean conservationists, accompanies this striking collection of digital X-ray images produced by scientists at the Smithsonian Institution, home to the world’s largest ichthyology collection. This pair of Atlantic skate fish is archived in the company of some 3.5 million aquatic specimens, several hundred of which are artfully depicted in Ichthyo: The Architecture of Fish .
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