Politically incorrect joke

Ok, I'm not writing as often as I wanted to, but I can make you laugh. I found this somewhere in Facebook and thought it was pretty funny.

So it's wrong if the Japanese fish them, but it's ok if our sonars kill them?

I just found out today about this. In another wonderful display of double standards, the USA Supreme Court reversed a decision by a federal district court in California in which certain restrictions were applied to the use of sonar during military exericises. You also read the last word, right? Exercises!!! They are using sonars in a way that could harm or even cause death of several marine mammals, and they are doing it for nothing? well, exercises may be important, but are they so important that may allow the Navy to go against environmental laws? I don't think so, as does Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

What is funny here is that the U.S. has been against commercial whaling since the moratorium of 1986, and has even certified Japan 3 times under the Pelly amendment. I wonder if deaths due to scientific whaling (I won't get into this debate yet) are wrong, but when they happen for "national security reasons" it's fine. Of course, there was the usual declaration of "there is no evidence...", but there is well documented evidence of deaths related to sonars for at least for one species (beaked whales), like this report says. Sonars were also supects for the death of ~400 dolphins in the coast of east Africa, and the stranding of 35 whales in North Carolina, although it was not possible to link the deaths to the sonar in the last case.

This might not be directly related to what I said I was going to talk about, but I thought I could mention it as an example on how important the environment really is for governments.

On resources tenure and stuff...

Last time I talked about the sad story of open access fisheries and said that I would do this one about resource tenure. However I'm feeling lazy now so I'll leave it for another time.

Update: Here's a small wiki entry on the subject. That should last while I write about this.

The sad story of the open access fishery

Long time without writing, don't you think so?

Today I would like to tell you another story, a sad one. Have you ever heard about open access fisheries? Maybe, but in case not I'll explain: an open access fishery is an absolutely 'democratic' fishery, one where everyone who wants to fish and has a boat can do it, without having to ask anyone for permission. It surely sounds nice and fair, natural resources should have no proprietaries and ownership should remain in the people. However, we all know that this system, though apparently fair, is almost always unsustainable and could easily result in the collapse of a fishery. This open acces situation is not exclusive to fisheries, it affects all natural resources, everywhere in the world (think for example in the deforestation of the Amazon). What might not be so obvious is why this system eventually could lead to such unpleasant results, and that's what I will try to explain.

The idea goes something like this: in an open access fishery, every fisherman can take all the fish he wants. The ammount of fish is limited and as such, the fishery can only support so many fishermen before going down into the pits of collapse, so if all the fishermen agree to catch only enough fishes to keep everything running, the fishery would sustain itself 'forever' and everyone will live "happily ever after". Of course, this doesn't happen. In the real world we have fisheries where people fish more than they should, even if they know that by doing so, they will harm everyone in the process, themselves included. This behaviour, even if it is evidently self-destructive, is quite common anywhere, and it has a reasonable explanation.

In 1968, Garrett Hardin published in Science an influential paper on this very subject titled The Tragedy of the Commons. This paper was very controversial (read it and you'll know why), but it stated clearly how the natural outcome for common access natural resources is depletion. Look, I found this comic strip which explains the idea very well:
(I took it from here)

As you can see in the pic, since individuals have no ownership of the resource, the only way they can guarantee to get a fair share is either to agree to hold resource utilization at a certain level (which, let's face it, hardly works) or to exploit it harder, since if they don't do it, someone else will do it for them. Saddest part? there is no solution for this dilemma, any open access system will eventually lead to disaster.

Bottomline, since the open access dilemma has no technical answer, we have to resort to the other option: resource ownership. It might not be "democratic" but you just saw what happens when things go "democratic". How do we do this? I'll explain it in my next post.

Fisheries management 101

Yeah, I know I said the list didn't have any particular order, but now that I think about it, why not start with the basics? I mean, if you're not a fisheries scientist, this would make your reading easier (=you will keep reading, right?). I will try to explain a few concepts that I will use over an over again. So, is the band ready?

• Fish stock:

Wow, I just started and this is already difficult. There is quite a bit of discussion on how we should define stock. My favorite definition is the one by Ray Hilborn and Carl Walters, and it says that a stock is a group of fishies that is large enough to maintain itself, and where all the little fishies have similar lives (that is, they grow at the same speed, become mature at the same age, eat the same things, like the same tv-shows, etc.). This is a very practical definition, but just because of this, it is a somewhat artificial one. Other people say that we should define stock according to a lot of genetic parameters and that stuff (the idea that we're all part of the same family), and it would be nice but it is also very difficult to establish, so I will use the one I told you before.

• Recruitment:

Ok, this one is easier. In not-so-many words, it means how many of all the baby fishies born in a given year (or any other time frame used) survive and grow up to either sexual maturity, or the age at which they are first caught (the age where they become vulnerable to fishing gear). What definition to use depends on what we want the data for.

• Spawning stock (also known as spawner stock):
  

I guess the name is quite self-explaining, right? It makes reference to the parental stock, the part of the stock who is sexually mature. So, if I say spawning stock biomass, I guess you'll know what I'm talking about... yup, that's right, it is the total weight of the spawning stock.

• Maximum sustainable yield (MSY):

This is a rather tricky concept, but it is very important to know more-or-less what it means if you want to ever grasp what is wrong with fisheries. The main idea goes like this: on one hand, the more fishies you have, the more eggs and fishies that could be born, at least theoretically. On the other, the more fishes you have, the less food there is going to be for each fish, these won't grow as large and more of them will die of starvation, so the more fish you have, the less fish you have (well, this is a little more complicated, but you get the idea). If these two things happen, then there should be some kind of theoretical optimum value where we can take the largest yield, and ensure we will keep getting such large yields into the future. If we fish more, then less fishies will be born and we will have less, but if we fish less there will be less and less food, so we won't get as many fat fishes and our yields will be smaller.

So far everything sounds perfect and we shouldn't have any problems with fisheries, but there are lots of issues with this. There's for instance, uncertainty, that is, we can never know for sure how many fishes there are in the sea, so we don't know for sure where the optimum is and how close (or far) we are from it. But there is even a bigger problem, maybe you noticed that I was mentioning the word 'theoretical', which obviously implies that we're not even sure if such an optimum value even exists! Things in nature vary just too much for us to sit and hope that they will behave the same way over and over again, that's a little bit too much optimistic. I guess you can get an idea on how some fishery managed only by using the MSY idea can easily get out of control and collapse. If you don't, you can ask me :)

• Total allowable catch (TAC):

One of the most famous concepts in this whole area of fisheries, a TAC is a quota set by the managers to the fishermen, and it states how much can be caught during a given year. There are lots of ways in which TACs are set, how they are distributed among fishermen and other things, but I won't get into it now.

• Marine protected area (MPA):
  

This is a very trendy thing these days. The idea behind it is very simple, and so far it seems to work. As its name implies, an MPA is a place where no fishing can take place, so every fish living there will be safe from us. In a way, it works the same way as a national natural park almost anywhere. There are some issues though, like for example, how do you design a reserve for species like tuna, who travel thousands of miles during their migrations? well, I will talk about that some other day.
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Ok, I think that is enough for now. If you know what the things above mean, you will easily understand the subject of the following discussions.

Please, let me know if you understood or not.

So, what is this going to be about?

Ok, enough babbling discussion, let's get down to it: what am I going to write about? Well, as a matter of fact, I am interested in fisheries management, so I think that's going to be the main topic.

After trying to explain what I do to thousands of people, I realized that almost nobody knows s**t about fisheries management. Most of the fisheries knowledge rests within fishing communities or gathering dust in those boring books and papers only scientist read, so I thought that I could try something else. I'll try to explain a few fisheries concepts in the way I would like them to explain me.

I will try to write about several things on the subject, and that includes explanations of basic ideas and concepts of fisheries management, explanation of some current (and not-so-current) debates and my opinion, maybe some news that I see somewhere else, and also some more babbling discussion of my own.

Just to give you an idea, current debates include marine protected areas (MPAs), open access and rights-based systems and individual transferable quotas (ITQs), application of the FAO Precautionary Approach, assessment-driven management strategies or model-driven management strategies, etc. I'm not going to explain any of those here (yet, here=this post not this blog), but if you cannot resist your curiosity, just google it and you'll get tons of info.

That said, I'm not sure what the "real" first post will be about, not because I don't have ideas, but because I have quite a few. Here's a preview of things to come (in no particular order):

• what does "recruitment", "stock", "maximum sustainable yield (MSY)" and a few more things mean?
• how do population models work? how is assessment conducted?
  
• the Interamerican Tuna Commission (IATC) and Colombia
• "traditional" management strategies (like MSY) and why are they wrong (are they?)
  
• ITQs pros and cons
• ITQs debate in Japan (could ITQs destroy community-based management)
• current status of the world stocks
• the MPA narrative
• Japanese scientific whaling: what's all that about?
  
• etc.

See? there's a lot to talk about.

Ok, so I started a blog...

I have always thought blogs were a complete waste of time. Everytime I thought about blogs, I thought of cooking recipes, movie reviews, travel spots, computer geeks, teenagers posting their latest myspace-pictures, amateur journalists and writers, and frustrated poets. I mean, not exactly the kind of things I would be interested in doing, right?

Wrong! I've been lazy, that's all. There are thousands of things you could write about, things that could (actually) interest other people, things that could mean something for someone. During this last year I've been seeing a lot of blogs of researchers explaining their research, so I thought "I could have some of that". But then again, my research is not something that you can easily make a conversation about. I'm not sure how many people could be interested in knowing if I could estimate this population parameter, simulate that population behavior or finally maximized catches and minimized risk at the same time... Nah, that sounds boring, I'd rather go and read the cooking recipes.

So, you may be wondering why did I start this in the first place. Well, the thing is that I love explaining things to people. I cannot tolerate those arrogant scientists that always speak in technical terms that only them can understand. I believe that science is fun and as such, should be taught in a fun way, which leads me to my second motivation: since a lot of people think science is boring, they tend to ignore it and widen the gap that already exist between scientists and non-scientists. If everything in science was abstract or stayed in the lab, that would be ok (well, not really) but let's face it, this world is going to hell and the least we could do is at least try to know why. That's why I believe in the concept of 'popular science' (remember Carl Sagan?) and the huge responsability that we, scientists, have with people. We need to reach out and let people know what we're doing.

And then I started a blog...