We keep hearing that we should “follow the science.” Sometimes, though, scams are coated in scientific veneer.
A good example is the “science” associated with the distribution of Federal disaster funds to Alaska’s crab-fishing industry. These funds (more than $200 million) are available if and only if Alaskans agree that the crabs succumbed to some sort of “natural” (or undetermined) causes associated with climate change, regime shift, borealization, starvation, disease, etc. (see Magnuson-Stevens Act, Section 312(a), which defines “Allowable Causes”).
Under that definition, any finding that the crab populations crashed due to overfishing or that their habitat was degraded by fishing activity is not allowed. In short, any “man-made” causes within the control of fishery managers are not eligible for compensation. This compensation formula is a classic Hobson’s choice, a free choice where only one thing is actually offered. In this case, crabbers are told: “Tell us what we want to hear, or you get nothing.”
The result is a bizarre kind of science where everything, even trawl-caught bycatch, dies from natural mortality. The North Pacific Fishery Management Council modelers for the Bristol Bay red king crab (RKC), which abruptly slid from one of the top commercial fisheries on the planet to being closed in 1983, offer this illustrative bit of analysis:
“Natural mortalities of the Bristol Bay RKC populations were estimated to be three to six times higher in the early 1980s than during other periods. This trend probably contributed to the collapse of the population in the early 1980s.”
“…. it is clear that Bristol Bay RKC experienced a pronounced shift to high natural mortality during the early 1980s. Contributing factors to this high natural mortality may include environmental change, disease, predation, bycatch, and handling mortality.”
What is clear from the above is that fisheries science in Alaska has been deformed by a system of perverse monetary incentives. When PhD scientists are forced to claim that fishing bycatch and handling mortality are forms of natural mortality, we know that something is fundamentally wrong.
It is likely that no other fisheries model in the world tries to mask the effects of overfishing with such a clumsy ruse.
Contents of a U.S.-Soviet Joint-Venture red bag delivered by an American trawler to the Russian processor, Chasovoy. Photo by Doug Smith, former NMFS observer.
Here is an early 1980s observer photo of trawl bycatch, interpreted by our Alaskan scientists as an early 1980s spike in natural mortality.
According to the observer’s logbook, this catch and several more like it were taken from a water depth of 55-75 m off Black Hill – Port Moller during August-September 1981. The National Marine Fisheries Service –Alaska Department of Fish & Game (NMFS-ADFG) model includes such bycatch as a source of natural (not fishing) mortality that caused a spike in natural mortality, resulting in the collapse of the population in the early 1980s.
In order to eliminate the need for such blatant scientific subterfuge, we recommend the legal requirement that disaster funds be available only for “natural” disasters be eliminated. After all, fishermen need the funds just as badly, whether the collapse is caused by Mother Nature or by management miscalculations leading to overfishing. As it stands, the “Allowable Causes” requirement is merely a framework upon which to hang a skein of untruths and outlandish hypotheses masquerading as “science.”
A popular term these days is “gaslighting.” The NMFS-ADFGS model, which is contorted to convince us of something untrue — that bycatch waste is a type of natural mortality — qualifies only as gaslighting.
Dr. C. Braxton Dew is a fisheries biologist with more than 40 years of experience, 25 of which were with NOAA Fisheries. You can read more about this issue here and here.
