Coastal Conservation Association (CCA)

As Good As It Gets?

By Ted Venker
TIDE
Mar/Apr 2005

All dads take a certain delight in telling their kids stories about how it used to be. In their day, dads had to walk uphill both ways to school, usually in the snow and/or rain. Baseball players were better, school was tougher, gas was cheaper, and a dollar was a fortune.

The purpose of the stories is usually to make the captive audience (spoiled children) realize just how spoiled they really are. Unfortunately for dads, kids quickly figure out the game and learn to ignore whatever useful message was intended. Whatever dad keeps talking about might as well have happened on another planet.

Parents want a better life for their kids and it is not called “progress” for nothing. I wouldn’t wish cloth diapers on my worst enemy, for example. However, there are some things from dad’s day that should tell us that we ought to be doing some things differently. And better.

Dr. Russell Nelson, CCA’s consultant to the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council, unwraps a dirty little secret of fisheries management in this issue with an article on Maximum Sustainable Yield (MSY). His article reveals that when dad talks about how the fish in his day were bigger, and there were more of them, he is telling the truth and MSY is the reason why.

If you are like me, you may have to read the article two or three times to fully understand it, but it is eye-opening to realize what it all means. Most stocks achieve MSY when they are reduced to 50 percent of the level they would achieve in the absence of all fishing. On top of that, when a fish stock is at the biomass that produces MSY, it is composed mostly of smaller fish. The federal fisheries system is intentionally managing to achieve a smaller population of smaller fish in order to increase yield.

It is not so different from the timber industry where old growth forests are regarded as wasteful since they are not growing much on an annual basis. The timber industry prefers young pine trees that add millions of cubic feet of timber each year until they hit a certain age when their growth slows and they are cut down. Young, fast-growing pine trees are good for the timber industry, not so good for anything that wants to live in a real forest.

The federal fisheries management system acts like a factory to manufacture smaller populations of small fish that grow quickly so they can increase yield for the commercial fishing industry. Not such a good deal for recreational anglers. As recreational anglers using the least efficient gear, we get exactly zero benefit from this system of management.

The danger now is that we are moving into an era of lowered expectations. We are experiencing “generational memory loss,” a situation in which old anglers profess how much better things were back in their day and younger anglers dismiss the stories as the exaggerated tales of their fathers. As a result of MSY, we are redefining what constitutes a healthy fishery. Anglers are being asked to settle for smaller pieces of a smaller pie, and they may not even realize it.

Don’t think so? Ask your dad or grandfather what a big trout meant to him back in his day. Or redfish. Or summer flounder. Or striped bass. Ask him where they used to catch them and how hard he had to work to get them. You will probably be surprised at the answers, but you should believe them.

If you feel like you are being asked to settle for fish that your dad would have thrown back, you’re not alone. When CCA fights for the restoration of historic age and geographic distribution for a species, we are refusing to accept that fewer and smaller fish are as good as it gets.

MSY is symbolic of the problems we face in fisheries management and CCA is working to shift the philosophy from one that manages exclusively for commercial yield to one that manages for abundance, but it takes time, resources and dedication. CCA decided long ago that the answer is not to lower our expectations, but to demand that fishery managers raise theirs.

After all, the kids are the ones who are supposed to be spoiled, not the dads.