A recent
essay in the Wall Street Journal asked “Does fishing have a future?” It narrowly focused only on one type of
fishing—sport fishing. Participation in
fishing continues to grow but not as fast as the costs to provide access to
fishing opportunities. Recent initiatives
have marketing recreational fishing to newcomers because new participants to
fishing are offset by similar loss of fishing participants (RBFF 2019). There is no question that fishing has a
future. However, there are many futures
to consider.
Fish and
fishing support human livelihoods, food security, recreation, ecosystem
functions, and human health and well-being in many ways. However, conservation
is complicated because there are so many types of fishing and their
distribution overlaps with so many types of human settlements and human
activities. None of these activities
has as profound an effect on fish than fishing.
Humans have been capturing fish for tens of thousands of years. Stone
Age burial heaps in Africa contained harpoons, spears, fish bones, and a wide
range of terrestrial animals dated from 90,000 to 75,000 years BP, but it’s
only in the last 1,000 years that humans have developed a pervasive culture
around fishing for profit. Today, there are many types of fishing. To manage
fishing, one must first understand the types of fishing, fishers, and
communities, in order to consider from a diverse array of management
actions. By definition, fisheries are
based on the capture of fish or shellfish, even if there is the possibility of
their release after capture. Even though
we’ve been fishing for a long time, we still can improve how we manage fishing.
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George's Bank Cod fishery.
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Commercial
fishing is the activity of catching fish or other seafood for commercial
profit. Fisheries employ 260 million
people and fish are the primary protein source for ~ 40% of the world’s
population (FAO 2016). Over the past 50 years,
annual global consumption of seafood products per capita has more than doubled,
from almost 10 kg in 1960 to over 20 kg in 2014 (FAO 2016). Many nations rely on imports to meet national
demands for seafood products, which complicates the management of commercial
fishing at national level. Much of the
fish harvested for fish meal or fish oil enters international trade markets
rather than local markets.
Paul Greenberg in Four
Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food (2011) describes commercial fishing
as the last wild harvest of wild food, focusing on four fish (bass, tuna, cod, and salmon) that are most commercialized.
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Global trends in capture fisheries and aquaculture FAO (2016).
Recreational
fishing uses a variety of gear types including rod and line to catch fish for
fun and or food. Recreational fishing is
defined as the fishing of aquatic animals (mainly fish) using one or more of
several possible techniques in which aquatic animals do not constitute the
individual’s primary resource to meet basic nutritional needs and are not sold
or otherwise traded on export, domestic or black markets. The objective of
recreational fishing is the overall recreational experience, and catch is only
one important component. The propensity to harvest or to engage in voluntary
catch-and-release varies among cultures, locations, species, and
fisheries. Outdoor recreation in general
and sport fishing in particular are growing enterprises that contribute greatly
to the overall economy. Licenses and
boat registration, taxes on boat motor fuel, and fishing equipment provide the
funding for recreational fisheries management programs. Recreational angler motivations change over
time from catch any, to catch many, to catch big fish, and finally to catch no
fish but pass on knowledge and passion for fishing. At some point many
successful anglers wish to help others catch fish or to help researchers better
assure that the fish and fishing experiences enjoyed in the past will still be
around well into the future.
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Traditional
small-scale fisheries are prominent in many parts of the world. These artisanal
and subsistence fisheries generate about one-third to one-half of the global
catch that is used for direct human consumption (Pauly and Zeller 2016) and
employ more than 99% of the worlds 51 million fishers (Jones et al. 2018). Small-scale fisheries may also be described
as (1) subsistence; (2) aboriginal, or (3) artisanal fisheries. Subsistence fisheries are local,
non-commercial fisheries, oriented not primarily for recreation but for the
procurement of fish for consumption of the fishers, their families and
community.” (Berkes 1988). Subsistence
fishers may forever be the ‘‘forgotten step-child’’ in fisheries management and
are adversely affected by the attention lavished on the commercial and
recreational sectors.
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| Salmon and char are
caught in gill nets by subsistence fishers in northwest Alaska Photo NPS source
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The
diversity of fishing practices and take complicates conservation and management
strategies. We don’t often appreciate
the diversity of fishing practices and behaviors. While we know there is no such thing as the
average angler or the average boat or typical fishing day, we often assume as
much to simplify analyses. Regulations
on fishing must be compatible with the type of fishing. Effective management and conservation
require that we know our fishers well because the diversity of perceptions and
fishing styles influence how they will comply with fishing regulations.
Back to
the question “does fishing have a future?”
The answer is yes, fishing has many futures.
First, marine commercial
fisheries are frequently assessed because catching capacity increases and new catch information is constructed (Branch 2011; Pauly and
Zeller 2016). Big data, electronic monitoring, and artificial intelligence will influence future commercial fishing. Large valuable commercial fisheries
are better managed via catch shares, and consumers are beginning to demand ecolabelled seafood (Lim et al. 2018).
The future of commercial fisheries will persist due to an ever rising demand for seafood, in particular tuna, but it will be harder for newcomers to enter into commercial fishing.
Second, the future of subsistence fishing is most uncertain because of a lack of monitoring. Consequently, food security for millions is at risk in the small-scale fisheries where the dominant protein sources is from locally caught seafood. The long-term future of many subsistence
fisheries will depend on our global efforts to address
effects of global climate change on many islands. For example, consider the Atafu atoll in Tokelau (below) where all households participate in fishing and local reef fishes are a vital component of diet and tradition (White et al. 2018). Effects of warming on reefs will have a substantial influence on subsistence fishing here and many similar islands.
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An aerial view of Atafu atoll in Tokelau. It is the smallest of
Tokelau’s three atolls with a land area of only 2.5 square kilometers. Photo:NASA
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Finally,
recreational fisheries on traditional species, such as trout, walleye, and
bass, can be better evaluated. Avid anglers adapt and switch fishing locations
depending on their perceived success. With a few exceptions, the general public
is unaware of the status of fish that support recreational benefits, especially
in urbanized regions where a minority of residents fish. And there’s the
dilemma. Better monitoring and management will happen only if people show
political will and desire to demand it. If the majority of the population does
not fish then there’s insufficient support for fishing. The future of
recreational fishing is expanding to non-traditional species. For example, microfishing targeting many
species as opposed to many fish are on the rise. In Mark Miller’s Fishing
Through the Apocalypse, he provides a number of vignettes that illustrate how fishing
in unusual places in our increasingly human-dominated world can provide new
experiences.
References
Berkes F. 1988. Subsistence fishing in Canada: a note on
terminology. Arctic 41(4):319–20.
Branch, T.A., O. P. Jensen, D.
Ricard, Y. Ye and R. Hilborn, 2011 Contrasting global trends in marine fishery
status obtained from catches and from stock assessments Conservation Biology
25:777– 786, DOI: 10.1111/j.1523‐1739.2011.01687.x.
Food and Agricultural Organization
of the United Nations (FAO) 2016. The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture
Jones, B.L., RK.F. Unsworth, S.
Udagedara, and L. C. Cullen-Unswrorth. 2018.
Conservation concerns of small-scale fisheries: by-catch impacts of a
shrimp and finfish fishery in a Sri Lankan lagoon. Frontiers in Marine Science https://doi.org/10.3389/fmars.2018.00052
Lim, K.H., W. Hu, and R.M. Nayga,
Jr. 2018. Is Marine Stewardship Council’s
ecolabel a rising tide for all? Consumers’
willingness to pay for origin-differentiated ecolabeled tuna. Marine Policy
96:18-26.
Pauly, D., and D. Zeller. 2016. Catch reconstructions
reveal that global marine fisheries catches are higher than reported and
declining. Nature Communications 7, 10244.
Recreational Boating and Fishing Foundation (RBFF).
2019. 2019 Special Report on
Fishing. 75 pp. Available at https://tinyurl.com/RBFF2019SpecialReport
White, R., A.R. Coghlan, A. Coulter, M.L.D. Palomares, D. Pauly, and
D. Zeller. 2018. Future of fishing for a vulnerable atoll: Trends in catch and
catch-per-unit-effort in Tokelau’s domestic marine fisheries 1950-2016. Frontiers in Marine Science 5:476. doi: 10.3389/fmars.2018.00476
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