Subunit Meeting 2/11/16, Pauly & Zeller 2016

First thing's first, an announcement.  Brian Gallagher will be stepping down as chapter president so he can devote more time to thesis-writing and graduating.  Good luck Brian!  Stepping up as president is former secretary Emily Liljestrand.  Replacing her is Suzan Shahrestani. You've seen her in several previous posts like our trip to the local STEM Festival and Expo and at the national conference in Portland. Gray Redding will stay on as treasurer.

We spent a little more than the first half of our meeting discussing subunit business.  We have several upcoming conferences including the AFS-Tidewater Annual Meeting in Annapolis MD, and the Larval Fish Conference happening on our own campus in Solomons, MD.  We are excited to be volunteering and possibly fundraising at both of these events.  There're a few more outreach events in the planning stage, a little too early to announce.  Be sure to check back in with us in a month see what springtime demonstrations and festivals we plan to conduct/attend.

But our real reason to meet was to discuss our thoughts about a paper published just last month by Daniel Pauly and Dirk Zeller of the Sea Around Us group at the University of British Columbia.  It was titled "Catch reconstructions reveal that global marine fisheries catches are higher than reported and declining" and it revealed just that.  The two researchers noted that the statistics organized by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (henceforth "FAO") neglected to include small scale fisheries like artisanal and sustenance practices, nor illegal or bycatch.  When they reevaluated the last 60 years of global catch with this additional data in mind, they found an alarmingly different historical trajectory.  Overall, the "reconstructed" catches, made with these other fisheries in mind, were 53% higher than the actual reported data.  They further separated the global catch by geographic region and type of fishery to illustrate where the most overfishing and uncertainty may lie.

Gray praised the paper for it's clear style and straightforward message.  Oftentimes, our discoveries can be clouded by jargon and bogged down in statistics.  But it's no surprise that an article found in a journal called "Nature Communications" would present its findings colloquially.  Though Mike pointed out that for a paper aimed (or at least well-understood) by non-scientists, is was surprisingly devoid of "doom and gloom."  Usually to ignite concern for the current state of fisheries, reports get a bit "hand wavy" (also a direct quote from our meeting).  If you have thoughts, please leave a comment. Is there a fundamental trade-off between optimism and impact?

When we got into the meat and potatoes of the paper, the conversation turned to data, specifically if we agreed with the methods and results.  Hillary pointed out that "poor quality" data was weighted according to it's trustworthiness, so the overall sum would be biased towards information we were more sure on.  Brian speculated if this might have been done better if they weighted measurements by the amount of resources that went into collecting it, as a de-facto measure of quality and reliability.  When we started speculating on, and considering the dependability of data based on fishery type, but agreed that fisheries data is rife with error, even when it is collected by NOAA.  It's no wonder when some of the sought after data is intentionally obscured or falsified. Suzan was reminded of another project by Daniel Pauly and his Post-Doc researcher Dalal Al-Abdulrazzak that used google satellite imaging to find illegal fishing traps in the Persian Gulf.  We concluded that this was pretty and made for some surprisingly lovely images:

Credit: Google Earth by way of www.livescience.com

We ended our discussion of Pauly & Zeller 2016 by thinking about what we could learn from this paper, and what implementation we would promote or consider in our future fisheries endeavors, even if we ourselves would not pursue these avenues of study.  Clearly, as a whole, we need to prioritize collecting data in small countries. Like voting, those seemingly insignificant contributions to the global catch can begin to add up and ultimately make a huge difference. But the UN doesn't have the clout nor incentive to calculate exact numbers. Some studies take time. When it takes too much time, things get put in academic limbo.  And often, as noted by our resident expert and Research Assistant Scientist Barbara Hutniczak who has worked with this FAO data, when there is no requirement to report data, more often than not people won't.  So we put it again to our few readers: How do we get a full assessment of global catch? How specifically do we collect data on illegal catch? Will we need to travel to every single Polynesian island to record their sustenance catches, or will a subsample be sufficient? And my own personal question that we never got around to, for the sake of time: What obligation do we have to manage different geographical and purposed fisheries?

We'll continue to think about these and other issues in the next month.  And when we reconvene, we'll still be looking at the South Pacific, but how we can use shark tooth weaponry to reconstruct historical predator diversity.

Thanks for checking in on us!