FORAGE FIRST!

NCMC Releases New Report, "Taking the Bait," Providing Blueprint
For Fishery Councils to Protect the Ocean Forage Base

By Pam Lyons Gromen,
Fisheries Project Director

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Fewer and thinner bluefin tuna arriving in New England... Stress-related disease affecting the majority of striped bass in the Chesapeake Bay... Emaciated seabirds washing ashore in record numbers on the West Coast... These are just a handful of stories that have recently appeared in scientific journals and news articles. Though seemingly unrelated, the theme of each incident is eerily similar - ocean predators are not finding enough to eat.

From a young age, we are taught that predator-prey relationships are the links that build a food chain, and these chains interlock to form an ecosystem’s food web. When a link in a chain is missing, the impacts reverberate throughout the ecosystem. Within the ocean, the most familiar players are the big carnivores that comprise the top or apex of the food web, but seldom recognized are the crucial mid-level species that feed on plankton and plant material and transfer this energy to the large ocean predators by becoming food themselves. The animals that fill this crucial ecological role are collectively called forage fish.

The most important forage species in U.S. waters are krill, squid, and a variety of small, silvery schooling fish that include herring, sardines, anchovies, menhaden, butterfish and alewives. Though the populations of these species are generally large, there are actually more species of apex predators than there are of forage fish, making the abundance of each forage species that much more critical.

With large-scale fisheries in place for many of the major prey species in American waters, it is imperative that we investigate how fishery management bodies take into account predator-prey relationships when determining the allowable harvest for the fishery. In a newly released report entitled Taking the Bait: Are America’s Fisheries Out-Competing Predators for their Prey?, NCMC examines current federal Fishery Management Plans (FMPs) for forage species, administered by three separate regional councils, and compares them to a set of components needed to safeguard each species’ ecological role as prey.

We found that while each regional fishery management council in some way recognizes the importance of prey species within their respective management plans, none of the three council’s plans includes all the elements needed to preserve an adequate forage base for predators.

Not Seeing the Ecosystem for the Fish

The movement to manage fisheries in an ecosystem context, by regarding the integrity of the ecosystem as the top priority, is not new. In 1996, Congress issued a mandate to NMFS to convene a panel of experts to investigate the use of ecosystem principles in fishery management and to recommend how such principles could be implemented to manage fisheries in a more sustainable manner. NCMC President Ken Hinman was one of the experts asked to join the Ecosystem Principles Advisory Panel, whose final report to Congress, entitled Ecosystem-Based Fishery Management, was published in 1999.

Recognizing that time, resources and legislative changes would be required to fully adopt a comprehensive ecosystems approach to fisheries management, the EPAP advised that “an initial step may require only that managers consider how the harvesting of one species might impact other species in the ecosystem. Fishery management decisions made at this level of understanding can prevent significant and potentially irreversible changes in marine ecosystems caused by fishing.” The panel flagged three actions as particularly important, the first of which was to consider predator-prey interactions affected by fishing. (The other two were to consider the effects of bycatch and to minimize fishery impacts on habitat.)

In the seven years since the release of Ecosystem-Based Fishery Management, little has been done to explicitly account for predator-prey relationships in management decisions. With few exceptions, fishery councils are still using a single-species approach, managing each species in its own separate box without looking outside at the bigger picture, the ecosystem of which each is an inextricable part. The hesitancy to move forward on these issues is variously explained as the result of waiting for additional science, or funding, or new legal mandates. Unfortunately, the current state of our oceans demands that we take precautionary action now.

A Blueprint for Change

In writing Taking the Bait, NCMC hopes to create a catalyst for change so that the EPAP’s recommendations can finally begin to be implemented. NCMC’s report builds on the premise that change to ecosystem-based management need not be endlessly complicated but can evolve incrementally from current practices.

Within the report, a simplified blueprint of four recommendations for amending FMPs for key forage species is provided:

The blueprint provides guidance that can be applied across the board for all three plans. In addition, NCMC conducted a detailed analysis and critique of each regional forage FMP and makes a number of plan-specific recommendations. If implemented, these changes would be a giant step forward for ecosystem-based fishery management, as they would better safeguard the forage base for predators, many of which, such as cod, sharks, rockfish and tuna, are suffering from depleted populations after years of overfishing. The success in rebuilding these stocks will certainly rely on the availability of adequate prey as their numbers increase.

Taking the Bait will be distributed to the New England, Mid-Atlantic and Pacific Regional Fishery Management Councils, as well as organizations and individuals who are concerned about the ocean forage base or are working to promote a paradigm shift to ecosystem-based fishery management. We anticipate that this report will be a starting point from which we can engage the scientific, environmental and fishery management communities on how we as a nation can better understand and appreciate the ecological role that each species plays in the ocean ecosystem and guard these roles accordingly, before we unravel the food web that supports a vital living resource for the American people. We can begin by putting Forage First.

NCMC Marine Bulletin -- Summer 2006

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