[Coral-List] Cause of current coral reef and many other problems.

[Douglas Fenner]

     You are absolutely correct.

     Fisheries management of modern industrial fishing (which coral reef
fishing rarely is), is a never-ending battle between fishermen and
regulators, over technology.  Govt managers specify a maximum ship size, so
fishermen increase engine size.  Whatever govt restricts, they find some
other technology that is not yet restricted.  They do that for profits.
The irony is that in economics, increased efficiency provides benefits,
lower prices, greater prosperity, etc, which everybody wants, and so is a
goal, but in fisheries increased efficiency causes overfishing and collapse
(see Canadian cod story), so regulators have to try to limit efficiency to
keep from wiping out the resource.  And if they don't, the resource could
be lost for a LONG time.  Canadian cod STILL haven't come back after
decades!  Which is economically inefficient.  There is a smaller version of
the same thing for coral reef fisheries.  I think the public doesn't much
care about fisheries, it isn't on their radar, they have far more important
things to worry about, and on the other side the fishermen, though a small
proportion of the population, are vociferous in their opposition to any
regulation.  (and for many coral reef fishermen in low income countries,
catching fish is the difference between feeding their family dinner, and
starvation, literally, something we relatively wealthy people NEVER have to
face.)  So the politicians hear the fishermen screaming, and silence from
the public, so not surprising what they do.  If they don't do what the
fishermen want, they can end up looking for a new job.  On the other hand,
some things the fishermen want can violate law and lead to lawsuits.  For
instance, when I first came to American Samoa, the federal govt fishing
regulations followed what the fishermen wanted, and allowed industrial
fishing to take increasing numbers of sea turtles.  The regulators kept
increasing the limit of how many turtles could be taken as the fishermen
wanted (real money was involved in the swordfish fishery).  ALL sea turtles
are listed under the US Endangered Species Act, most are listed as
"endangered" and it is TOTALLY ILLEGAL to hurt them in ANY way.  The limit
got up to 900 sea turtles killed or injured a year in the US Pacific fleet
alone.   So some conservation NGO decided to sue, and won in federal court,
and the NOAA regulators clamped down and CLOSED the swordfish fishery,
suddenly the swordfish fishermen were all for anything that would reduce
turtle catch so they could reopen their fishery (they had lost all their
income!), and the fisheries council recommended everything that could
reduce turtle catch (I was on the fisheries council "scientific and
statistical committe" at that time which had a lot of members, and voted
for those measures like everybody else, that recommendation went to the
Council which approved it and it went to NOAA) it was all implemented by
NOAA regulators, the court allowed the fishery to be reopened and I think
they were catching less than 10 turtles a year, in the entire US Pacific
fleet.  All could have been done from the start.  Fisheries issues are
complicated, lots of technical stuff, stock assessment is incredibly
complicated and expensive,and there is a profusion of acronyms that seem to
flourish just for the purpose of making it so no one but the professionals
can understand the issues (that's an exaggeration, but it DOES have that
effect).  Amazingly, in spite of all that, some progress seems to be being
made managing major fish stocks like cod, tuna, and salmon as reported in
peer-reviewed scientific papers, I'm thinking of a Science paper (though
some conservationists continue to say that everything is hugely
overfished), though last I knew several major stocks of tuna had
overfishing occurring for a decade or more.  (mind you, it has been at
least a decade since I last heard about that).
     Like many conservation issues, the fights are near endless.  And we
know that humans have been HUGELY destructive of many or most living wild
organisms and other aspects of the environment.  In many ways, we have laid
waste the environment, and now it is coming back to bite us, heat waves
that kill 10's of thousands of people, forest fires that are so huge that
huge areas of entire continents like North America have unhealthy
smoke-filled air that is among the most polluted in the world, sea level
rise that will immerse buildings in Florida and cause hundreds of BILLIONS
of dollars of damage, domestic chickens weighing more than all remaining
wild land wildlife on the planet, and it goes on and on and we accept it
because most of us have never seen in our entire lives, a single scrap of
the environment that hasn't been drastically changed by people.  And that
applies very much to coral reefs.  And that applies to coral reef
scientists and managers as well.  Where are the last remaining scraps of
coral reef that have had NO human impacts??  Arguably, there are NONE
left.  Some of the least are the NW Hawaiian islands, high latitude, low
diversity reefs that are very atypical of coral reefs and depauperate in
diversity.  Chagos has had 90% of its corals killed by bleaching and a
majority of its sharks killed by fisheries.  Some of the Line Islands, the
southern Line Is, have had up to 99% of their corals killed by bleaching
(Jarvis Is).  Palmyra had its lagoon circulation cut greatly by a causeway
across it.  What proportion of coral reef scientists now alive have ever
seen a truly pristine coral reef in their lifetimes??  DARN few, near 0%.
We as a species are now driving species (mainly on land) to extinction at a
rate comparable to one of the great extinction events in the fossil record
of over 500 million years.  WHAT HAVE WE DONE???

On Fri, Aug 4, 2023 at 2:01 AM Bill Allison <allison.billiam at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I have run into industry consultants who ignore technology as one of the
> determinants of fishing effort even though it is explicitly recognized as
> such in the fisheries economics literature (a no-brainer imho).
>
> On Fri, Aug 4, 2023 at 8:39 AM Douglas Fenner via Coral-List <
> coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov> wrote:
>
>>   And also as Paul Ehrlich wrote, technology.  The tools used in fishing
>> coral reefs today were not available in pre-modern times, no steel hooks,
>> nylon lines, no aluminum and fiberglass boats, no engines, mask, snorkel,
>> fins regulator, tanks and on and on.  Hooks were carved from shells, lines
>> formed from coconut fibers, boats from hollowed out logs, powered by
>> paddling or sails, etc.  NO ONE on this planet uses only the old tools to
>> fish, because it takes a lot more hard work and is much less effective.
>> Overfishing is largely possible because of technology, it would be much
>> harder without.
>>
>> On Tue, Aug 1, 2023 at 4:02 AM John Ware via Coral-List <
>> coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov> wrote:
>>
>> > Hello List,
>> >
>> > As I have been saying for many, many years: The problem is that there
>> > are too many of us  and each of us (including myself!) consume too many
>> > resources.
>> >
>> > John
>> >
>> > --
>> > John R. Ware PhD
>> > 810 Maderia Cir.
>> > Tallahassee, FL 32312
>> > Cell: 928-595-0664
>> > Land: 850-329-6999
>> >
>> > jware at erols.com
>> >
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