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Commercial Fisheries News
Volume 33 Number 2
October 2005
Ames receives MacArthur Fellowship
 STONINGTON, ME - Fisherman and researcher Ted Ames of Stonington has been awarded one of this year’s 25 fellowships from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
The MacArthur Fellowships, which are commonly called the “genius awards,” recognize people who show creativity, originality, and potential.
Each fellow receives $500,000 over five years and the money comes with “no-strings-attached,” allowing the recipient to use the support as each sees fit.
Ames is credited with “fusing the roles of fisherman and applied scientist to respond to increasing threats to the fishery ecosystem,” according to the MacArthur foundation’s press release.
Citing his detailed studies of cod spawning and fishing patterns, Ames’ work “paints a scientifically compelling picture of the complexity of the fish population structure in the Gulf (of Maine) and identifies new strategies for individual and institutional marine management in the region,” said the foundation.
“I am truly honored, blown away,” said Ames, 66, in an interview following the Sept. 20 announcement of the 2005 fellowships. “For an old fisherman in Downeast Maine, this is just great. Now I can do this work that I’ve been trying to pick away at but been limited by money.”
That, in fact, is exactly what the MacArthur Fellows Program has in mind.
Fellowship program
The awards are based on three criteria: exceptional creativity; significant promise for important future advances based on a track record of accomplishment; and fellowships must be able to relieve constraints that prevent the recipients from freely working on their most innovative projects, to do what might not be done otherwise.
The foundation’s confidential selection process does not include taking applications for the fellowship program or interviewing potential fellows. Instead, it invites individuals from wide-ranging fields to serve as nominators. An anonymous selection committee then forwards its recommendations to the foundation’s board of directors.
The foundation named the first MacArthur Fellows in 1981 and since then, 707 people, including this year’s group, have received the award. Recipients have included scientists, historians, poets and novelists, artists and composers, and people working in public service.
The foundation does not require any reports or evaluation from the recipients. The grant is paid in quarterly installments over five years.
Use funding
Ames said he had no immediate thoughts on how he will specifically use the money.
The first task on his agenda was to take up the lobster traps that he’s got in the water and to consider greatly cutting back his effort next season.
“The reality is that I’m 66 years old and my body is starting to give out. I can’t stand up to the physical demands of fishing regularly,” he said, “and it’s been hard to haul (traps) with all of these other things (taking time).
“Now I can put more energy into those rather than saving some for on the water,” Ames said.
He described a list of ongoing and potential projects that included doing more spawning grounds research with additional gadoids such as haddock and pollock and further work to develop the relationship between cod and forage species such as alewives.
He is in the process of setting up the Zone C lobster hatchery in Stonington, which is expected to be fully operational by next spring, and is involved with planning the Downeast Groundfish Initiative, an effort to rebuild groundfish stocks and restore access to a small scale, nearshore fishery in the coastal communities in Downeast Maine.
Ames also serves as chair of the board of directors of the Penobscot East Resource Center, a community-based organization that provides support to local groups involved in community-based marine management and fishermen-based stewardship, and is a founding member of the Stonington Fisheries Alliance.
Common threads run through all of Ames’ work, beliefs that have come to define him both as a fisherman and a researcher. They are some of the same values pointed out by the MacArthur program in a biography describing Ames.
These include: stewardship of resources; an ecological approach to management; fishermen involvement; and the connection between healthy fisheries and economically stable coastal communities.
Background
Bringing together the roles of fisherman and applied scientist has been a natural evolution for Ames.
Growing up on Vinalhaven, and later living in Stonington, he has always fished commercially for lobsters and groundfish.
Income from fishing, along with a GI loan, helped to pay his way through the University of Maine. In 1971, he completed his master’s degree in biochemistry, with a specialty in tissue culture.
At the time, which was before the passage of the 200-mile-limit, fish stocks were down, a result of the pulse fishing effort by the foreign fleets.
So, Ames worked at the Jackson Laboratory, and then, recovering from a serious car accident, taught high school chemistry for 10 years. As soon as he was physically able, he returned to fishing, gillnetting and later dragging with the Dorothy M.
He described that time in the ‘80s as a period of incredible abundance, landing 50,000 pounds of groundfish a week out of 40 6-1/2" mesh gillnets.
But, he reflected, “We so abused the system we don’t have abundance like that anymore.”
Transition in ’90s
By the late 1980s, Ames said that awareness began to dawn as he and fellow Downeast groundfishermen saw the consequences of the species by species fishing style.
“We could see we were killing ourselves,” he said. “We would build up one stock and then strip it down.”
Ames sold his boat in 1990, and opened a water-testing lab in Stonington, which he ran until 1994, when he returned to lobstering.
In those years, he also got involved as executive director of the Maine Gillnetters Association, representing the group on harbor porpoise issues in the federal fisheries management arena. He gave up that post in 1995, when his wife, Robin Alden, became commissioner of the Maine Department of Marine Resources.
The experience, however, showed Ames that fishermen’s knowledge was not respected in the management process. He didn’t consciously set out to change that situation. But it convinced him of the need to include fishermen’s local ecological information and knowledge using a rigorous methodology acceptable to the science community, what the MacArthur Foundation recognized as his “trademark approach.”
Research
The impetus for Ames’ first cod spawning grounds research came when he was working with Charlie Saunders, who was president of the Maine Fishermen’s Cooperative Association. Their idea was to help sagging groundfish stocks by starting a hatchery. Eventually a state license fee increase was passed to help pay for a feasibility study.
“The trouble was,” Ames said, “no one knew where the spawning grounds were. So I said I could take the time to go out and do the legwork.”
Saunders and Ames made up a list of the best Gulf of Maine cod and haddock fishermen who worked those grounds, old-timers with unique knowledge that would be lost if not recorded soon.
“I had to develop a protocol to validate those interviews,” Ames said.
Those dual undertakings became the basis of his first peer-reviewed papers and set him on the course that he follows today. He has four or five papers in progress that he hopes will lead to a clearer understanding of the fish population so it can be better managed.
He wants to pursue more work on the linkage between species such as alewives and herring, the forage base that may be what holds groundfish to particular bottom. That interrelationship could help to explain why there has been so little rebuilding by groundfish stocks off the Downeast Maine coast, he said.
The MacArthur Fellowship will make the work possible.
“I can’t see dramatic changes for us. It’s going to be life in the slow lane.
“There is just a wonderful crew of people along the shore and I’m proud to be part of them,” Ames said. “I’m not out to save the world. But I want to try to help it happen here, locally. I can do that now.”
Susan Jones
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