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Commercial Fisheries News
Volume 35 Number 3
November 2007
FISHER puts industry knowledge to good use
GLOUCESTER, MA – With three successful projects already completed, the Massachusetts Fishermen’s Partnership (MFP) has begun a strategic planning process to forge long-term partnerships between fishermen and scientists interested in understanding the New England region’s marine ecosystem.
According to MFP Executive Director David Bergeron, successful ecosystem-based management, which is a goal of the National Marine Fisheries Service, will require a much broader and integrated approach to marine science than the single-species emphasis of fisheries management to date.
The planning process is geared toward more formally institutionalizing the FISHER Initiative that began in 2003 with funding from the Northeast Consortium. FISHER stands for Fishermen’s Initiative for Scientific Habitat and Ecosystem Research.
Over the last four years, about 10 commercial fishermen from ports in Massachusetts and New Hampshire have participated as research partners in FISHER projects, and another 142 fishermen contributed critical information used in one of the projects.
Scientists from a number of institutions also have participated in the FISHER Initiative, including: the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary; Harvard University; University of Massachusetts Dartmouth School for Marine Science and Technology (SMAST); Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Sea Grant College Program; Boston University’s Marine Program; and Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries.
“FISHER is meant to bring fishermen and scientists together to work on politically neutral but crucially important questions,” said scientist Les Kaufman of Boston University. “In general, because collaborative research is relatively new, there has not yet been enough work on the meshing of scientists’ and fishermen’s questions.”
Kaufman explained that the FISHER vision “is to get a system perspective, (which is) a prerequisite for ecosystem management.”
Brian Rothschild of SMAST made a similar point.
“Fisheries management involves a whole array of disciplines, some that may not even have been thought of, such as systems engineering,” he said. “It’s like the blind man looking at the elephant: If you look at only one piece, you’ll never solve the problems.”
Sand lance
The first step of the FISHER Initiative was getting fishermen and scientists to sit down together in a neutral setting and, with the help of a facilitator, identify projects of interest to both groups.
As the meetings progressed, participants began searching for a keystone species to be the subject of joint research. They finally settled on sand lance because, for a species that feeds everything from whales to cod, yellowtail flounder, and other commercially important species, surprisingly little is known about them.
Sand lance, also known as sand eels, is not a target species for most commercial fishermen and, therefore, is considered politically neutral, so all parties were able to agree that the reported data was reliable.
Furthermore, the species is of particular interest to industry people since the presence or absence of sand eels on the fishing grounds affects the species that fishermen target.
“Whales, sea birds, and fish all rely on sand lance,” commented David Wiley, a whale scientist with the Stellwagen sanctuary program.
“We know there have been fluctuations over a 20-year period, but we don’t know much about the species. We know, for example, when the sand lance are up, so is the presence of humpback whales in the sanctuary, but right whales are down. When the sand lance numbers are down, right whales presence is up and humpbacks are down,” he observed.
Oceanographers also are interested in what the movements of sand lance might reveal about physical ocean processes or, as Pierre Lermusiaux of MIT’s Ocean Engineering department, noted, how sand lance are affected by temperature, currents, and plankton movement.
Projects
FISHER Initiative participants began their collaborative research with a pilot project in which fishermen’s knowledge was used to chart the presence or absence of sand lance on Stellwagen Bank over time.
The MFP recruited 17 fishermen to attend two focus group meetings in 2004 where they contributed to the mapping effort by drawing on charts to indicate where and in what year they had seen indications of sand eels through stomach contents of target species and/or electronic signatures on their sounders.
Ultimately, this project led to a more extensive project that mapped how 142 fishermen have worked on Stellwagen Bank over the last three decades
Sandwich lobsterman Dave Casoni commented that this data is extremely important since the industry is facing marine protected area proposals and offshore development projects. He said that there is a strong need to continue this data collection with additional fishermen.
Another FISHER Initiative project was titled, “An Examination of Biological Processes of Sand Lance and Associative Species on Stellwagen Bank.”
The gear design portion of the project was completed recently. Participants included fisherman Bill Lee of Gloucester, gear technologist Cliff Goudey of MIT Sea Grant, and biologist Les Kaufman of Boston University, who, as team members, worked in cooperation with the New England Aquarium.
As part of the project, they developed selective gear for sampling sand lance and Bill Lee used his cooperative research experience to provide images of sand lance schools on Stellwagen Bank using videotape and echo sounders.
“We are correlating whale tagging data with the data on sand lance distribution,” Wiley said.
As part of the project, participants provided sand lance to the aquarium for an exhibit and further research.
Added Kaufman, “Because of the link with the aquarium, we were also able to take high-speed footage of sand lance feeding.”
Food web
Kaufman also was the lead scientist on a project titled, “Ecosystem Effects of Trawling on Groundfish Communities: Catch Composition and Food Web Dynamics With Respect to Long-Term and Rolling Closures on Stellwagen Bank.”
The project came out of questions posed by Gloucester fisherman Paul Vitale, who had noticed that there were an abundance of predators in spawning rolling closure areas when the areas were reopened. He wondered if dogfish and skates were feeding on the spawning cod.
Vitale said, “I wasn’t trying to change the world, just trying to say, ‘Hey, have you looked at this fact?’”
The results of the research provided “more evidence of local dynamics than expected, perhaps lending support to the idea of area management,” said Kaufman.
He added that the project yielded an important methodological finding.
“It is difficult to design a sampling method that can deal with all the clutter on the bottom,” Kaufman said.
He added that he thought he could just take a bottom topography map from the US Geological Survey developed by cartographer Page Valentine, “draw transects and randomly sample.”
However, Kaufman said, “I learned that the fishermen know the bottom.”
For example, when Kaufman suggested an area on Valentine’s map indicated sand, Paul Vitale’s father, Leo Vitale, said that it was rock. Kaufman initially found that hard to believe.
“Thirty seconds after setting the trawl, we were hung up. The net was retrieved, all ripped up,” Kaufman said. “I thought Leo would be angry, but no, he had a big smile on his face. He said, ‘OK. We go home. That’s it for the week.’”
Kaufman added that the project produced another result that won’t come as a surprise to local fishermen.
“On Stellwagen Bank, dogfish are an incredible nuisance for both the scientists and the commercial fishermen trying to make a living,” he said.
Partnership’s role
As FISHER has evolved, the Massachusetts Fishermen’s Partnership has served as project initiator, coordinator, and fiscal administrator.
When a fisherman comes to the partnership with ideas he would like scientists to investigate, Olivia Free, the MFP’s project coordinator, looks for scientists at local universities or government agencies and contacts fishermen with appropriate vessels and equipment for the intended project.
Sometimes MFP staffers help write grant applications. At other times, they make the fisherman-scientist match and step back unless needed.
The MFP also functions as the facilitator when the project is in progress, Free explained, helping to communicate fishermen’s concerns to the scientists and explain scientist’s needs or wishes to the fishermen.
At times, this communicator role may extend to helping with the analysis of the research results.
While in most cases the scientists write the actual project reports, a critical aspect of the collaboration is that they agree to discuss their analyses with their fishermen partners before submitting the reports.
Occasionally, fishermen partners express a dissenting view to the MFP rather than to the scientist, so the MFP communicates those views to the scientists.
Funding constraints
Grants for this kind of interdisciplinary research can be difficult to find. New England is fortunate to have the Northeast Consortium, which funnels federal funds to cooperative fisheries research projects and at least partially funded all three of the FISHER projects to date.
However, the consortium’s budget is much smaller than the demands for funds.
And if a project does not have supplementary funding, it can be hard for participating scientists to spend sufficient time on them since the consortium requires that fishermen get 75% of consortium funding.
Using results
Ultimately, both the fishermen and scientists involved in FISHER agree that the goal of the multidisciplinary, collaborative research is to collect reliable data about the ecosystem and use that information to improve fisheries management.
“The more the target audience is involved in the process, the better management policy and tools will be,” said Free.
Nevertheless, the MFP is realistic about just how difficult that can be.
“By the time high-quality scientific data that fishermen can buy into is produced and vetted for use in management, things have changed,” Free commented.
Nevertheless, as Marblehead lobsterman Jay Michaud noted, it is vital to have fishermen interviewing fishermen in order to foster better understanding of research, build trust, and gather high-quality data.
Madeleine Hall-Arber
Madeleine Hall-Arber is an anthropologist with MIT Sea Grant. She also served as the social scientist helping with the FISHER pilot project in which fishermen mapped the presence and absence of sand lance and later worked on the project mapping fishermen’s use of Stellwagen Bank.
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