Sharing the catch is good for fishermen -- and fish -- study shows
Scientists report on an alternative to cutthroat competition, finding that a quota system giving fishermen exclusive rights to a portion of the catch can preserve fisheries and help stocks recover.
DUTCH HARBOR, ALASKA — After years of dismal reports about collapsing fish stocks and failed fisheries management, scientists Friday will report that they have discovered how to reverse the trend: Give fishermen exclusive rights to a portion of the catch.
The approach runs contrary to prevailing notions of cutthroat economic competition evident in, for example, "Deadliest Catch," the television series premised on fishermen braving rough seas to catch as much crab as they can in just a few days. But a team of ecologists and economists say sharing, not competing, can make fishing safer, preserve fish populations and even help stocks recover.
"It's good for the fish, it's good for the fishermen, but it's not so good for TV shows," said Steven D. Gaines, a marine ecologist at UC Santa Barbara.
The Alaskan king crab fishery switched over to "individual fishing quotas" several years ago, following the success stories of Alaskan halibut and cod and other fisheries in New Zealand and Iceland -- where shares of the catch have been parceled out to existing fishermen, permitting them to fill their quotas in a more rational way.
On Friday, Gaines joins a pair of resource economists, who analyzed fisheries around the world, in publishing a study in the journal Science that shows how these quotas granted to individual fishermen or fishing cooperatives appear to be working.
The team studied more than 50 years of catch data from 11,135 fisheries worldwide that another team of scientists had compiled to show that nearly a third of the world's commercial fisheries have collapsed, such as the cod off New England and many bottom-dwelling rockfish off California.
Scientists predicted that if overfishing, pollution and habitat destruction continue unabated, all of the world's fisheries would collapse by 2048. A fishery is considered collapsed if catches fall to 10% of historic highs.
But the small fraction of those fisheries -- 121 to be exact -- that switched to individual quotas were only half as likely to collapse, according to the study led by Christopher Costello, a resource economist at UC Santa Barbara.
The authors, who include economist John Lynham of the University of Hawaii, also found that this quota system not only can reverse the trend toward collapsing fisheries but also can help them return to thriving enterprises. Sometimes it can take years or decades for a fishery to turn around, given the time it takes for depleted stocks of slow-growing fish to rebuild their populations.
