The Future of Fishing, by Don Orth

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.

 

George's Bank Cod fishery.

Source Freshwater and Marine Image bank

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.

 

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.

Recreational angler fishing a dusk.  Source Max Pixel

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.  

Salmon and char are caught in gill nets by subsistence fishers in northwest Alaska Photo NPS  source

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.

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

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