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?
Japan Blocks Ocean Conservation Measures
Not many filmmakers follow up an Academy Award-winning performance with an undercover sting operation. But in his continuing effort to stop the worldwide slaughter of dolphins, whales, and other marine mammals, Louie Psihoyos (who took home an Oscar this month for directing The Cove , about a secrect dolphin-killing operation in Japan) is prepared to expose renegade sushi restaurants across the United States for serving illegal whale meat. His first target — a restaurant called The Hump outside the Santa Monica airport — was forced to shut its doors on Saturday after Psihoyos’ team filmed the sale of thick, pink slices of meat and smuggled out DNA samples confirming they belonged to endangered sei whales, prompting federal charges. (Importing the meat of marine mammals is illegal under U.S. law.) Psihoyos, founder of the Oceanic Preservation Society, is now going after restaurants in San Francisco, Seattle, and New York that are rumored to also serve kujira (whale). "Wherever you are," he said in an interview outside The Hump before it closed down, "we will find you." Psihoyos’ crusades are certainly getting noticed in Japan (whose government and news media have attacked his film), but despite the bad publicity, the country continues to push for fishing and whaling policies that environmental groups say will cause further harm to ocean ecosystems and continue to push endangered fish and marine mammal populations to the brink of extinction — and beyond. Already this year, Japan has succeeded in fighting off a ban on exports of Atlantic bluefin tuna. There’s strong scientific evidence that the bluefin is nearing extinction due to overfishing; since 1970, the number of tuna harvested each year has plummeted by at least 80 percent. At the triennial gathering of the UN’s Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) that just concluded this week in Qatar, a proposed export ban on bluefin — backed by the United States and bitterly opposed by Japan, which declared that it would ignore the ban even if it passed — failed by a vote of 68 to 20, with 30 abstentions. Many countries didn’t want to lose the revenue; Atlantic bluefin remains the most valuable fish in the sea, with Japanese brokers commonly paying $10,000 or more for a single fish. Japan consumes approximately three-quarters of the global catch, nearly all served raw as sushi or sashimi. Major bluefin exporters such as France, Spain, and Italy followed Japan’s lead. "The market for this fish is just too lucrative, and the pressure from fishing interests too great, for enough governments to support a truly sustainable future for the fish," says Sue Lieberman, director of international policy with the Pew Environment Group. Regulation of bluefin fishing will remain with an industry-dominated body whose allowable harvest quotas have ignored the advice of its own scientists and proven completely ineffective at slowing the bluefin decline. Following the failure to protect bluefin, CITES then voted down several measures (also backed by the United States and opposed by Japan, Russia, and China) designed to protect endangered shark species from "finning" — a practice in which fishermen slice the fins off of sharks and then dump them back into the ocean to die. Shark fins are prized in some Asian countries to make soup. Scalloped hammerhead, oceanic whitefish, and spiny dogfish were all among the species on the docket for protection by CITES. Japan argued, as it did on the bluefin ban, that regional fisheries groups — not CITES — should manage local shark populations. But in some areas, the rate of species decline exceeds 90 percent, according to studies. Next in Japan’s sights: ending a ban on commercial whaling imposed nearly a quarter-century ago. Despite this prohibition by the 88 member nations of the International Whaling Commission, Japan continues to hunt whales thanks to a loophole that allows for "scientific research" — something environmental groups claim is little more than a pretext that allows continued commercial hunting. Indeed, the Japanese fleet kills more than 1,000 whales annually in the Southern Ocean and then sells the meat in the country’s markets and restaurants. Two other nations, Norway and Iceland, have defied the moratorium outright and followed Japan in establishing their own yearly quotas. Since the moratorium took effect in 1986, according to IWC estimates, more than 33,000 whales have been killed — including the endangered fin, sperm and humpback species (as well as the sei whales being served at The Hump in Santa Monica). The International Whaling Commission (IWC) next meets in June, and two competing proposals are up for consideration. One would suspend the moratorium for 10 years and allow the resumption of commercial whaling. This is actually a compromise that could reduce the numbers of whales now being killed by setting annual quotas through the IWC, instead of allowing Japan, Norway, and Iceland to continue to bend (or outright flaunt) the rules by setting their own limits. Cristian Maquiera of Chile, chairman of the 88-nation IWC, has called this approach a "paradigm shift" that would achieve some consensus about whaling beyond the rancorous status quo. However, if it’s approved, Norway and Iceland could then start exporting whale meat to Japan, and South Korea has announced it will pursue its own commercial whaling venture. Another proposal, put forward by Australia, instead keeps the moratorium in place and lays out a timeline and regulatory framework to stop so-called "scientific whaling" altogether. Australia has also threatened Japan with legal action at the International Court of Justice unless it commits to ceasing its Antarctic hunts. Many conservation groups, including the Natural Resources Defense Council, are urging the Obama administration to oppose any effort to weaken the moratorium, but which way the United States will go is very much in question. Commercial whaling resulted in the demise of most of the world’s great whales, whose comeback has only begun since the moratorium was implemented. Joel Reynolds, director of NRDC’s marine mammal protection program, says "the whaling ban has been a pivotal step forward in the struggle both to save those species decimated by hunting and to recover whale populations throughout the world." But whales are far from fully recovered and still threatened by ongoing hunts, as well as factors such as military sonar, ocean pollution, and climate change. Activists hope that the whale-meat scandal brought to light by Psihoyos’ sting of the Santa Monica sushi restaurant could help step up the pressure of international public opinion before the IWC vote in June.
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Riddle of the Shells
An eternal wind rips across San Miguel Island, scouring stretches of open sand and bending the blackened branches of shrubs. The most far-flung of a chain of islands that dot the Santa Barbara Channel off the coast of southern California, San Miguel has drawn fishermen ever since the earliest people settled North America. This stark landscape is surrounded by a thriving submarine jungle of kelp that is prime habitat for an array of fish, shellfish, and marine mammals. For millennia, it was the best place in southern California to collect abalone, the giant mollusk that once carpeted the seafloor of the Channel Islands. Now, after decades of over-harvesting, southern California abalone populations are badly depleted, echoing a global pattern in which the bountiful ocean morphs into a sea of ghosts. During the past decade, scientists have come to understand the extent to which overfishing has emptied the oceans. In 2003 an influential study in the journal Nature concluded that many populations of large fish had plummeted to 10 percent of their 1950 levels. The research drew on coastal marine surveys and catch data from Japanese long-lining, an intensive industrial fishing method used in all the world’s oceans except the circumpolar seas. The study showed that predators such as marlin and tuna are now caught when they are relatively small; many don’t live long enough to reproduce. This grim trend is evident on coral reefs, in the deep waters of the open oceans, and in kelp forests off southern California. The sluggish abalone may not be as charismatic as a free-roaming ocean giant like the tuna, but its plight encapsulates the human foibles that have led to devastation of marine life around the world. What had been a highly profitable abalone fishery began to crash in the late 1970s and was completely closed in 1997 to protect remnant stocks from obliteration. Now, a dozen years after the emergency closure, a group of former abalone fishermen is lobbying hard for a renewed harvest at San Miguel Island, the last, best place for the great snails in southern California. The powerful tendency of fishermen and resource managers to take what they’ve seen in their own time as the natural norm is known as the shifting baseline syndrome. It allowed fishermen in the North Atlantic to over-harvest cod for centuries. Each generation accepted increasingly scattered stocks of smaller and smaller fish as the norm, until the population collapsed in the 1990s. The same syndrome explains why advocates of a renewed abalone fishery insist that the population at San Miguel is strong, while ecologists, conservationists, and now even archaeologists see it as the tattered shreds of a once plentiful stock in desperate need of protection. Gary Davis, a marine ecologist recently retired from Channel Islands National Park, has witnessed the abalone’s slide from bounty toward oblivion. When he was a kid in 1950s San Diego, abalones were so abundant that he could gather his daily sport limit of five during a single breath-hold dive off the rocky coast. In 1957, the year he took his first job as a deckhand on a sport-fishing boat, the southern California abalone fishery peaked; 2,500 metric tons of pink and red abalone were landed. At that point the abalone was being aggressively harvested by commercial divers using scuba gear, which allowed them to search for far longer and in deeper waters. As abalone populations were depleted closer to the coast, divers sailed to the more remote Channel Islands in search of more robust stocks. By 1996, the last year before the fishery was closed, the total southern California harvest had shrunk to a paltry 87 tons. When Davis started working at Channel Islands National Park in 1980, he began counting abalone in different sections of undersea habitat. He found that numbers had plummeted compared with those recorded in earlier decades. Populations continued to decline, except in a small reserve off Anacapa Island. These data would eventually help kick-start a movement to create marine protected areas in the Channel Islands and throughout the state, an effort that now has the legal backing of California’s Marine Life Protection Act. In 1997 a ban on taking all abalone south of San Francisco was imposed by emergency order of the California Fish and Game Commission; it was later written into law by the legislature. The state’s Abalone Recovery and Management Plan, adopted in 2005, laid out recovery criteria, but no population in the region has yet rebounded to sustainable levels. Still, the California Abalone Association (CAA), a group of former commercial abalone divers, is pushing for renewed fishing at San Miguel. Chris Voss, a tall man with intense blue eyes, is president of the CAA and a driving force behind its effort to create an abalone fishery co-op, a progressive model in which fishers, in return for the right to harvest in a designated area, work with state regulators to monitor and maintain the resource. Under traditional fisheries management, a quota is set for the total amount of a species that can be caught. That gives fishermen an incentive to take as much as they can as fast as they can, before their competitors get to it — a destructive cycle known as the race to fish. CAA is working with Chris Costello, an environmental economist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In a recent paper published in Science , Costello documented the benefits of giving each fisherman the right to a percentage of the total quota. This individual quota system can halt, and even reverse, the decline of fish stocks. Successful examples include the Alaskan halibut fishery and the abalone fishery in Tasmania, Australia. The problem with applying the idea to San Miguel is that it assumes that the abalone population there is healthy enough to sustain harvesting. Voss has worked as a commercial fisherman since 1975, when he was 14 years old. He didn’t get in on the southern California abalone fishery until 1991, when he won one of a limited number of permits in a lottery. Abalone stocks were already severely depleted by then, but that moment in time shaped his idea of what a healthy population looks like. Researchers who surveyed abalone in the 1960s and 1970s reported densities several times higher than today’s. Despite this, Voss insists, based on his own observations of the shellfish and his idiosyncratic interpretation of data from government biologists, that the population at San Miguel is "phenomenally robust." For him, the state of the abalone now, a mere dozen years after emergency closure of the fishery, is an adequate measure of a healthy population. Different players rely on very different baselines to judge the health of the abalone: Davis has had his eye on the creatures for six decades, while Voss’s perspective covers less than 20 years. Todd Braje, an energetic young archaeologist at Humboldt State University, takes a longer view; he believes it may be possible to glimpse ancient abalone populations that lived as much as 12,000 years ago. "If we’re going to remedy the shifting baseline syndrome," he says, "we need to look as far back in time as we can." The arid sands of the Channel Islands hold relics of some of the earliest human inhabitants of North America. The Chumash people, once one of the world’s most populous hunter-gatherer societies, left their spear points behind in Daisy Cave, a narrow sandstone cleft at the northeastern edge of San Miguel. Eroding dunes reveal an abundance of prehistoric tools, including beautiful fishhooks formed from the shells of red abalone. These hooks could be used without bait: one side, coated in the pearlescent material that lines the interior of an abalone shell, would flash underwater, acting as a lure. The islands also reveal the remnants of ancient feasts. Fragments of sea urchin test — the delicate domes that once encased the bodies of these tasty invertebrates — lie scattered like bits of broken porcelain. When sunlight breaks through the clouds it brings out the gleam of abalone shells, whose meat was a staple food for the Chumash. Combing through Chumash middens on San Miguel and the neighboring islands of Santa Rosa and Santa Cruz, Braje has analyzed shifting patterns in the size and abundance of abalone shells. His work shows that the Chumash feasted steadily on abalone for thousands of years, both devouring and coexisting with the great snails. (Part of this, of course, had to do with technological limits: prehistoric people lacked scuba gear, and many abalones would have remained beyond reach, producing larvae that could repopulate shallow areas close to shore.) Braje has studied heaps of ancient, whopper-size red abalone shells that tumble out of sand dunes like a collection of calcified ladies’ hats. Such finds are scattered across several of the islands, but San Miguel holds the densest concentrations of red abalone shells. Southern California is home to seven species of abalone, five of which have been commercially fished. Black abalones grow in the intertidal zone and are particularly vulnerable: they can be pried off the rocks by anyone willing to get wet feet. Reds and pinks live farther out, below the tide line. Together, these two species sustained the fishery for decades. Hopes for its renewal focus on the red abalone, the most resilient and widespread abalone species. Yet over much of its traditional range, populations are so depleted that the once ubiquitous creatures are hard to find. The white abalone, California’s deepest-dwelling species, was once abundant off the Channel Islands, with as many as 10,000 per hectare (2.47 acres) in some stretches of rocky habitat. In the 1990s Davis supervised an intensive search for abalone using scuba divers and a manned submarine. Whites had become a rarity; he and his colleagues found fewer than two animals per hectare. The species is now listed as endangered. To understand why high densities are vital to a population’s long-term health takes some basic knowledge of abalone sex. A good-size female red abalone will pump out about four million eggs a year. But unless breeding adults live in high density on the seafloor, sperm and eggs become so dispersed that they’re unlikely to connect. To achieve breeding success, abalones must generate enough larvae and juveniles to satiate all the fish and lobsters that will snap them up, with enough surviving to establish a new generation. Even where abalones are present in large numbers, they may produce viable numbers of offspring only once every four or five years. Fishery biologists didn’t realize until the 1990s that nature had programmed the abalone to play reproductive roulette. Earlier regulations had set minimum size limits for harvesting. "We were removing all the large animals, and that’s where the reproductive capacity lies," Davis explains. The biggest abalones produce the most abundant spawn. They also bring the highest prices. (In the last year of the legal fishery, such animals sold for $500 a dozen. Today, sizable red abalones can sell for $100 each on the black market.) In a 30-year lifespan, an animal may get four or five chances to produce offspring that live long enough to carry on the breed. In its Abalone Recovery and Management Plan, California’s Department of Fish and Game (DFG) laid out the critical numbers to be used in assessing the health of abalone populations. The guidelines relied on studies of red abalone in northern California (where only a limited sport harvest is allowed and the use of scuba gear is forbidden) and other stable stocks scattered around the globe. Studies from California, Australia, and New Zealand show that abalones need to be in dense aggregations of 6,000 to 8,000 per hectare to be sustainably fished. Once the density falls below 2,000 per hectare, reproduction essentially ceases. If the number plummets below 1,000, the abalone is unlikely to recover without active human intervention — for example, by moving large, mature animals closer together, a strategy that showed some promise during a 1980s experiment with pink abalone from Santa Barbara, one of the southern Channel Islands. A healthy population should also have a mix of large, medium, and small animals. If an area holds large abalones but no younger ones, that’s a signal of reproductive failure. During the past three years, surveys of unprecedented thoroughness have been conducted in the waters surrounding San Miguel. Former abalone fishermen put on their diving gear and worked together with DFG biologists to collect the data. They found that red abalones at San Miguel are scattered, occurring at densities ranging from 160 to 1,600 per hectare, well below the levels needed to make a population self-sustaining. Large, impressive animals dominate, but young ones are rare: according to Davis, they are found at less than a tenth of the numbers thought to show successful growth of new generations. Recreational divers who visit San Miguel today see the red abalone as fabulously abundant. Yet a couple of decades ago, the population there was 10 times denser. "The comparison people make with the other places they’ve seen in their personal experience makes San Miguel look like it’s still okay," Davis says. "That’s true even for people who’ve been involved with abalone for a long time." The big animals that so impress divers at San Miguel today represent the last remnants of a once bountiful stock. Braje’s research suggests that the chilly, nutrient-laden waters around San Miguel have long held southern California’s greatest bounty of abalone; because the area is so remote and so biologically rich, it was among the last to be affected by overfishing and retains more large abalones than any other place. The prehistoric evidence tells us to expect abundant abalone at San Miguel: recovery, when it comes, should be noticed there first. Working with several colleagues, including Paul Dayton, a noted marine ecologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Braje co-authored a paper for the journal Ecological Applications that draws on an unconventional mix of ecology and archaeology. They compared patterns in the size and abundance of abalone shells in ancient middens on San Miguel, Santa Rosa, and Santa Cruz with catch records from the twentieth-century commercial fishery. The sites with the greatest abundance of ancient, outsize red abalone shells match up with the most productive locations for commercial fishers. San Miguel holds by far the greatest concentration. Braje believes that the archaeological record can help fill critical gaps in our understanding. Many marine scientists remain skeptical about how much they can learn from ancient relics, and he is the first to admit that archaeology cannot meet the detailed standards demanded in modern biological surveys. But quantitative data often extend back only a few decades, while human interactions with ecosystems have been going on for millennia. For Braje, seeing the retrospective study of the abalone catch in a peer-reviewed ecology journal was a rewarding breakthrough. His leap beyond the traditional boundaries of archaeology is part of a broader movement that looks to the deep past to understand and restore depleted fisheries. Important clues have come, for example, from the bones and scales of great cod and sturgeon, caught hundreds of years ago on the banks of the North Atlantic, and from eighteenth-century ships’ logs, which record an unimaginable abundance of sea turtles in the Caribbean and whales in the Pacific. Braje and his colleagues found that during the commercial fishing of the twentieth century, San Miguel’s waters yielded more than twice as much abalone, by weight, as Santa Rosa’s or Santa Cruz’s. That relative abundance appears to have held for thousands of years, regardless of shifting ocean temperatures that affected populations elsewhere in the Channel Islands. Braje suspects that the cooler waters around San Miguel and off the southern coast of Santa Rosa represent critical abalone habitat. The animals growing in this area may help to keep populations stocked farther to the east. The take-home lesson is that San Miguel should not be used as an indicator of population health in the rest of the Channel Islands. A truer test of an abalone rebound would be an increase in density, along with a rise in the number of younger animals, farther south and east along the island chain. That makes sense to Davis. "San Miguel is clearly a source of replenishment for a much larger region," he says. "It’s at the tail end of the cold water that comes down from the north in the California Current, so it’s in the right position to serve that role." Advocates on both sides of the debate see a lot riding on San Miguel. For commercial divers, it represents perhaps the only chance to fish for abalone again in their lifetimes. For conservationists, it is the last hope to restore the abalone’s former abundance. The abalone fishermen, Davis suggests, are like the buffalo hunters who clung to a cherished way of life after all the herds had been shot. "These guys would like to keep hunting and gathering," he says, "and I’d like to see the integrity of southern California coastal ecosystems rebuilt, so they can keep doing that." But this remains a distant goal. "We’re down to the last little center of population," he says. "It’s like the seed corn. Do we want to keep it, or sell it?"
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Riddle of the Shells