For researchers and NGO’s looking to use our Taxon Distribution Maps — here is a quick 2 minute video tutorial on how they work.

And for our previous blog post about this new tool, click here.

If and how well a fishery is managed often depends largely on the economics of that fishery, and central to understanding the economics of a fishery are the availability of data.

The Sea Around Us, in collaboration with the Fisheries Economics Research Unit (FERU), has over the years built extensive datasets of economic information – like ex-vessel prices and subsidies data – which are being made available to policy makers and the public.

Many of the existing price databases today are either incomplete or unavailable to the public. Using the reconstructed catch data from the Sea Around Us, and the economic datasets assembled by FERU, the information we have is well-organized and easy to access.

Further, while the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) publishes processed and product fish prices, they do not present ex-vessel price, i.e., the price at first point of sale a fisher realizes upon sale of their catch. The Sea Around Us does include this price, thus allowing emphasis of the economic value on the core actors of the industry – the fisher.

Therefore, the landed values data the Sea Around Us presents via our website expresses the ex-vessel value (in US$) of the catch to the fisher (i.e., catch multiplied by ex-vessel price), and excludes added value through the economic value chain.

In partnership with FERU, work is ongoing to build and incorporate other economic datasets into the global database of the Sea Around Us.

As Dr. Rashid Sumaila, the Director of FERU writes: “To be able to devise management policies that appropriately take account of fisher behavior and thereby ensure the sustainability of fisheries resources, managers need to have a good knowledge of ex-vessel prices for the species under their management” (Sumaila et al., 2007).

Using our separate fisheries economics tool (bit.ly/1Z4ybDd), researchers and other interested users can find the time series (1950 to currently 2010) of landed values for the various different taxa in the catches from EEZ’s and LME’s. And, by having landed values, Sumaila writes, researchers can better determine the “local, regional and global economic and social impacts of different management policies.”

But the Sea Around Us and FERU also provide another core economic dataset: Data on fisheries subsidies.

While some subsidies can be beneficial to fisheries; Sumaila found, in another paper, that the “amount of subsidies provided by governments of the world to their fishing sector is quite large and that most of these subsidies lead to overcapacity and overfishing.”

With our fisheries economics tool, researchers can examine the amount of money that countries spend on fisheries subsidies, broken down into categories like fisheries services, research and development, tax exemptions and fuel subsidies, among many others.

And more importantly, we also determine whether the subsidies that are used are ‘beneficial,’ ‘harmful,’ or ‘ambiguous,’ the latter meaning it is not always straight forward to determine the effects of the subsidy.

This information is all directly and easily accessible for researchers, NGO’s and governments to use.

References:

Sumaila, U. R., Marsden, A. D., Watson, R., & Pauly, D. (2007). A global ex-vessel fish price database: Construction and applications. Journal of Bioeconomics 9(1), 39–51.

Sumaila, U.R., Khan, A., Duck, A., Watson, R., Munro, G., Tyedmers, P. & Pauly, D. (2010). A bottom up re-estimation of global fisheries subsidies. Journal of Bioeconomics 12:201–225.

 
Want to know where marine taxa that are part of the Sea Around Us global catch data occur around the world?

On our website we now offer taxon distribution maps that we use in our spatial allocation of global catches. Note that these distributions are based on the taxon distributions parameters as described in our methods. If you click on our mapping tool, there is now a tab that allows users to search for these taxon distributions — and see in what regions they are likely to occur. (Figure 1).

Similar to our catch allocation mapping tool, which shows where taxa are caught globally, the taxon distribution map uses the same colour scheme to illustrate the relative probabilities of a taxon’s biological distribution: Red indicates a high probability of occurrence, and, on the other end of the spectrum, blue denotes a low probability of occurrence.

Taxon distribution maps are rendered using a variety of data, with many being provided via our research partners FishBase (www.fishbase.org) and SeaLifeBase (www.sealifebase.org). Several geographic and ecological filters are applied, which includes the type of habitat species are found in — like coral reefs, estuaries, seamounts, continental shelves or slopes etc.. The methods used to derive these distributions should be consulted.

Figure 2 shows the distribution of jacks (family Carangidae), which is a cosmopolitan family.

Our taxon distribution maps are presented to allow users of our catch data to examine one of the key ingredients of our global catch data allocation.

Balanced Harvesting (BH) is a recently proposed approach to fisheries management, and it is touted as a reliable way to preserve ecosystem structure while increasing fisheries catches.

However, many within the scientific community are calling into question the empirical and moral grounds behind such an endeavor.

The logic behind BH follows as such: When fishing pressure is spread across all components of an ecosystem, and targets all taxa depending on their size and productivity – rather than focusing on a few selective species – then the functional structure of that ecosystem is kept intact. This, the theory goes, preserves abundance for future use.

In a paper published in the ICES Journal of Marine Science (Froese et al. 2015), in collaboration with the Sea Around Us, researchers investigated the merits of this theory.

After analyzing several of the methods used in BH research amongst other variables, the authors found “the models used unrealistic assumptions and settings, and that conclusive empirical evidence of BH is lacking.”

With BH, the relative size and species composition of an ecosystem is supposed to be maintained. To do this, fishers would have to catch smaller fish – and moreover, fish that people don’t eat, in order to keep the ecosystem in balance.

Because much of the new catch would consist of these small fish, a large proportion of them would be used as fishmeal for the aquaculture industry. This would be a drastic change from current practices where fisheries try to protect smaller and younger fish in order to maintain reproduction rates.

Moreover, increasing fishing pressure on smaller species and smaller (i.e., younger) individuals of larger species could potentially deplete food consumed by higher trophic predators.

Or, as lead author Rainer Froese writes: “If we wish big fish, we must leave prey for them to feed on.”

Furthermore, the ecosystem is made up of a wide spectrum of other species, many of which are not currently caught, but under BH, would have to be caught.

Using BH would mean that to maintain ecosystem integrity, other creatures – like seabirds, seals, whales, dolphins, and even zooplankton – would have to be targeted regardless of demand. Catching these non-target species would become a “scientific requirement of ecosystem-based fisheries management under BH,” Froese writes.

In a more recent paper published in April 2016 (Pauly et al. 2016), Froese, Sidney Holt, and lead author Daniel Pauly argue that BH not only lacks a firm empirical foundation, but it contradicts a stated mission of the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO).

In the FAO’s own ‘Code of Conduct for Responsible Fishing,’ it stresses selective fishing, stating in one section: “In order to improve selectivity, states should, when drawing up their laws and regulations, take into account the range of selective fishing gear, methods and strategies available to the industry.”

Finally, lead author Pauly discusses a “growing circle of empathy,” whereby there is an understanding that non-human species can have intrinsic rights and value. Many organizations already implicitly acknowledged these. The FAO’s ‘Code of Conduct for Responsible Fishing’ looks to reduce anthropogenic causes of mortality for non-targeted species, and the International Union for Conservation of Nature maintains a ‘Red List of Threatened Species.’

Therefore, a fishing practice like BH, which promotes an approach to fishing that demands the exploitation of all groups in an ecosystem, runs contrary to this growing global awareness and perspective.

“Deliberately increasing anthropogenic mortality across the widest possible range of species would be a huge backward step,” writes Pauly.

References:

Froese, R., C. Walters, D. Pauly, H. Winker, O.L.F. Weyl, N. Demirel, A.C. Tsikliras, and S. Holt (2015) A critique of the balanced harvesting approach to fishing. ICES Journal of Marine Science http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/icesjms/fsv122.

Pauly, D., R. Froese, and S.Holt (2016) Balanced harvesting: The institutional incompatibilities. Marine Policy 69: 121-123.

 
It is no secret that illegal fishing is a substantial problem.

According to FAO, Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated (IUU) fishing accounts for 15 percent of annual global catch. That’s at least 26 million tonnes lost. And it means that an estimated $10-20 billion is also lost annually from the global economy.

While fishing vessels from many countries engage in illegal fishing practices, China’s practices in particular have garnered a lot of media attention as of late.

A story in The Economist titled ”Trawling for trouble” exposes a growing pattern of illegal fishing infractions by fishers from the rapidly industrializing state.

The government of Indonesia is awaiting a Supreme Court decision that would allow them to destroy ten Chinese vessels caught poaching in Indonesian waters in 2014. While it is accepted by many observers that the vessels were inside Indonesia’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), the Chinese government maintains the fishers were, instead, inside “traditional Chinese fishing grounds.”

But Chinese fishers have been caught illegally fishing in other countries as well. The governments of Japan, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam have all detained Chinese fishers in their waters (these waters are also contested by China). And Chinese fishers have also been detained in Russia, North and South Korea and Sri Lanka.

Part of the problem is consumption. According to The Economist, “Chinese fish-consumption per person is twice the global average.” To sustain this massive demand, China’s wild catch is equally as large, at around 14 million metric tonnes, compared to the U.S.’s 7 million metric tonnes. As the fish in China’s coastal waters are already greatly overfished, and continue to be depleted (inshore fisheries have 5-30% of the amount of fish they had in the 1950’s), their fleets are actively encouraged to venture further out into the ocean in search of larger catches.

But foreign policy is another reason for China’s aggressive fishing practices. As the article states: “fish can have strategic uses.” Not only does China have the world’s largest distant water fleet, fishing in nearly every country in the world (Pauly et al. 2014), but China also claims sovereignty over much of the South China Sea, and when a vast fleet of boats extensively operates in these waters, each boat seems to create a physical fact for China’s claims. It seems international rules and norms are being manipulated when one country’s EEZ is described by another country as their own “traditional waters.” Thus, China is one of the few state actors that does not seem to be willing to recognise the globally negotiated UNCLOS provisions for defining and addressing EEZ and territorial water claims.

And this is a fact that is hard to ignore. Yet there are many strategies that can help reduce this practice, as long as flag and host countries are willing to accept and operate within international norms and rules agreed to by the global community. From satellite monitoring, to increased vessel identification, to better enforcement, IUU fishing can be faced head-on.

In future posts we will explore more strategies.

Reference:

Pauly D, Belhabib D, Blomeyer R, Cheung WWL, Cisneros-Montemayor A, Copeland D, Harper S, Lam V, Mai Y, Le Manach F, Österblom H, Mok KM, van der Meer L, Sanz A, Shon S, Sumaila UR, Swartz W, Watson R, Zhai Y and Zeller D (2014) China’s distant water fisheries in the 21st century. Fish and Fisheries 15: 474-488.