Catch Shares Are Catching On

Fish first appeared in our oceans around 525 million years ago. In 1950 their descendent species remained plentiful. But just 50 years later populations of the larger ones we love to eat had plunged by 90%. In an evolutionary blink of an eye, we hungry humans had gotten so good at foraging for fish that we had overrun their pace of self-replication.

As populations declined we waded increasingly deep into piscatory propagation. At the eco-lunatic extreme, we’ve emulated land-based CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations) creating aquatic equivalents that have produced similar unintended eco-damaging consequences. At the eco-logical extreme we’ve learned how to create complex coastal ecosystems optimized to produce the fish we love to eat. An example is Veta La Palma, briefly profiled in a clickable “learn more” at the bottom of our home page.

We’re also taking another eco-logical approach: becoming game wardens. If it works we will greatly increase seafood quantities we can sustainably harvest, restore abundance to vast undersea ecosystems edging continents and islands, and revitalize economies of coastal towns, while letting Mom Nature do most of the heavy lifting.

This post is about a key component of an emerging wild fish management system.

Initially, fishery managers emulated the tactics of wardens managing hunted land-dwelling game like deer and moose. Three of the components worked pretty well.

These other two…not so much. They had unintended consequences.

Fishing seasons motivated fishermen to catch as many fish as possible in-season without regard to impact on fish stocks, resulting in aggregate quotas being exceeded. They perpetuated what economists call a tragedy of the commons, where the incentives of individual users guided by their self-interests deplete the resource through their collective actions.

A vicious cycle ensued: aggregate catch maximums were exceeded, so fishing seasons where shortened, often down to just a few days, and per-trip catch limits reduced. Commercial fishermen came to despise regulators and despair that fishing would ever again provide them a decent living.

These two rules also caused other dire unintended consequences: more fish died, fisherman were compelled to fish in conditions that risked their lives, fishing costs rose, and fishermen’s financial returns fell. Here are some of the reasons why:

In the late 1970s, first in the Netherlands, then in Iceland, Canada and New Zealand, fishery managers began having success with an approach that aligned fishermen’s incentives with the restoration of over-fished seafood stocks and began to remedy the tragedy of the commons. Guided by the best science about protecting fish and their habitats and by their own fishing experience, they worked to create a virtuous cycle where each year would provide more fish to catch until abundance was maximized. Under the catch share system, fishermen became eco-logical fish population nurturers, working with nature to help it provide more and more food for us.

What, you ask, were the innovations that led to these alternative outcomes? They were to abolish fishing seasons and per trip catch limits and replace them with:

Because fisherman owned a percentage of the catch, and because stringent compliance measures made cheating both hard to do and not worth the risk of being caught, fishermen’s interests were aligned with common interest: the more abundant the commons became, the more fish fishermen were able to catch. All boats rose.

The approach has caught on and is working well in American waters, especially in areas with a large proportion of commercial fisherman to recreational anglers. According to the Environmental Defense Fund, catch share systems have allowed more than two-thirds of the seafood supply in the U. S. to become sustainable, with over 100 species on a path to recovery.

This approach also addresses the unintended consequences of fishing seasons and daily quotas listed above. In addition it leads to active participation by fishermen in reducing bycatch, reducing the mortality rate of bycatch, and fishing more efficiently. For example, here are some of the things Gulf of Mexico red snapper fishermen agreed to do:

Larger fish populations that allow us to catch more fish as they continue to become more plentiful is of course great for us, whether we depend on fish for our livelihoods, sustenance or dining pleasure. But there are also important aquatic and terrestrial benefits.

Fish excretions provide more nutrients to seagrass and algae than any other source. They boost seagrass and algae growth rates and expand the amount of area these bottom-of-the-food-web plants occupy. This increased marine biomass in turn provides more food for ocean creatures higher in the food web that ultimately make it into the bellies of the big fish we eat.

Research on the absence and reintroduction of key top-of-the-food-web species on ecosystems suggests that restoring them would have a positive impact on the size of and biodiversity in their ecosystems.

There are many competing uses for land suitable for growing crops now fed to livestock. If we can increase the percent of fish and decrease the percent of grain fed livestock meat we eat, we can free up arable land for more efficient food-producing use, as the diagrams below show:

Fish stock restoration can be accomplished without requiring hard-to-achieve international agreements. Most fishing for over-fished species gets done within 200 miles of shore in waters that are under the uncontested jurisdiction of single countries who can set and enforce their own seafood restoration policies in their Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs)

Ecologists focusing on assessing ocean ecosystem health, while deeply concerned about the increasing damage we are doing — especially through increasing ocean acidity and temperature — are nevertheless encouraged because sea bed ecosystems are much more intact than those on land, making restoration more possible. In support of this assertion they point to 514 documented extinctions of land dwelling animals since the year 1500, versus just 15 documented ocean animal extinctions.

Finally, they are encouraged by the speed at which fish stocks protected by effective science-based fishery management are now rebounding.

You may be asking yourself why a site focused on farming would, right off the bat, tackle fishery management. Here’s why:

The success of catch share systems in stimulating fish population growth is not only dependent on the ecosystem’s ability to recover and on successfully keeping fishing fleets catches at or under quota. It also depends on aspects of system design and implementation such as: