- In the overall context of natural and other causes for mortality of fish from egg to natural death; (yes fish do die of old age – laughable I know) fishing would be an effect so minor so as to question if it had any significant contribution at all.

It the context of set catch limits (quota); the term “overfishing” or “fully fished” are common place.

The question is: how does the more common reference to “overfishing” relate to “overfishing” within the overall context?

By underestimating – indeed failing to identify – the wide range of industries that are profiting from polluting the coastl;ine and rivers and destroying fish nursery areas and breeding habita, by not relating streamflow to fish production and ignoring the wealth of research and dat that does – we are creating economically unsustainable subsidies.

we can argue about the environmental impact of Gladstone Harbour – but the international bad publicity means that it is now costing way more in lost tourism recreational and commercial fish sales than what it is worth.

he reason is not mining nor port development per say – it is bad design. The reason it is badly designed is – in my opinion – a lack of economic analysis and hard nosed rational economic policy.

If companies weant fuel subsidies, tax subsidies and tax cuts on their income then they need to better design solutions. Shell does. It designed floating offshore platforms to both process and ship gas.

A QUANGO called the Port Of Gladstone Corporation – a companies guaranteed and insured by taxpayers – is ‘profiting’ from using their government status and political influence – to do the cheapest nastiest development on public land – Curtis Island – the second biggest island in Queensland. One clearly to me worth far more for tourism than as an industrial estate. it thousand of hecatres of mangroves and seagrass – muc of which is being landfilled wirth more for fish production than industrial rents which will probably be subsidised too.

Xtrata are have also been sent up there by the bureaucrats and will not doubt get federal approval from bureaucrats wanting performance bonuses – but they are nervous as are the pre-exting industries including aluminum. They may lose that portion of their share value that relates to ethical investment and as company they may – if this mess continues – be on the recieving end of the same share value bad publicity.

Economist have the choice of the science they use – i am just asking economists to chose better science – not just the science that a poorl;y regulated science market churns out. How much of the biology that has been used in this argument to date has been peer reviewed – by peers in no way linked to the science?

I hate subsidies – they distort the market.

…Power Point Presentation by Dr Matt Landos which highlights present and future issues other than fishing that need to be dealt with.

Bob, nobody is disputing that there are many non-fishing factors which can and do affect stocks. To do so would be lunacy – it’s bone-jarringly obvious.

You however are (or seem to be) denying that overfishing is possible. That it has ever occurred, or could even in theory occur. You have not made any case whatsoever for this.

Additionally, in your argument you are using the impossibility of overfishing as a premise to lead us to your conclusion – that overfishing is not possible. That’s about as fallacious as it’s possible to get.

Perhaps you can help me here – have you ever found a paper that has compared a fished and not fished area with a control to establish the impact of fishing? I have not – but would be keen to see it

A finally found a link to that Power Point Presentation by Dr Matt Landos which highlights present and future issues other than fishing that need to be dealt with.

http://media.crikey.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Status-GBR-WH-Area-Gladstone-M-Landos-030312.pdf

One of the academic myths about commercial fisheries is that fishermen just fish to kill fish and the more they fish the more fish they catch the more money they nmake. The most successful fishermen in a given fleet fish the least, at the most optimal time for fishing and the market and present the fish in the best condition to get the highest price at the market.

Did you ever think of other possible cause for the declines in fish production you observed and heard about? Did you ever discover where the fish nursery areas were for those species and check their condition?

Prof Bob Kearney, a previous board member of AFMA and a great believer in overfishing, nonetheless once referred to pollution as another ‘catch of fish’.
Is the pollution catch on those fishing grounds you speak of growing faster than the fishing fleet?

Thanks.

1. You are right if Australia also has one of the world’s most productive seascapes. Do we know this? I got the impression while living in Scotland that the biomasses etc etc were much larger in the North sea because of the amount of nutrient in the water and so on – all this only causal of course but I guess the case would need to be established.

2. I was again thinking of my observation of the North Sea fishery. The fishers told me that the boats were getting bigger but more important the motors larger, the GPS systems better and the weather forecasts better. This is what my amateur fishing friends in New Zealand and here tell me.

3. I grew up in a fishing family and have watched a few fisheries wiped out by over exploitation -hence my amateur interest.
For me the question on any of these issues is always this (it could be iron ore or fish or timber or even the produce from land. It doesn’t):
(a) Suppose we have a resource that is collectively owned and we decide that having x of it harvested will be of collective benefit; Then
(b) What needs to be determined is the best way of achieving this in order to maximizes total welfare (not just that of fishers or farmers or miners or loggers etc)? This made up of rents to society and returns to fisher people including their utility values from fishing (I have, for example argued for breaking up the Tasmanian abalone industry to support a larger number of divers and their local communities). I don’t believe, for example that farmers or fishers are a special case and should be allowed to continue if their activities are destructive. Nor should they be subsidised because they enjoy fishing any more than café owners should be subsidised because they enjoy making coffee.

Other people might have a different view of the world, but if your model is not based on maximizing welfare then the basis of your argument becomes unclear.

4. I suspect that the worse your estimates become the lower the allowable catch should be if you value the continued existence of the species and all the unknown affects you get from removing anything from the system.

5. It all depends on tipping points (or bifurcations and singularities) and such like. Most dynamic models (which I do know a bit about) of these things can become very sensitive and switch from growth to collapse with small changes. I think this probably underlies some of the crashes we have seen – Newfoundland, Peru etc etc but haven’t studied it.

Similarly national and international environment groups sell memberships by attacking commercial fishing and create Marine No Take Zones – but like the Great Barrier Reef, they offer no protection from pollution.

Re –trawling surely the ‘destruction of seafloor’ as you see it – has to be compared to other things that also destroy the seafloor around the Australian coast. We we flush the toilet in Melbourne and other cities the sewerage mixes with industrial waste and where it flows to the sea it keeps a portion of the seafloor dead. Off the Mississippi delta there is one of the world’s largest ‘dead zones’ –due the accumulation of waste and nutrients from that massive catchment in the Gulf of Mexico.

The open cut mines in Australia, dug so we have an economy and the metals we use everyday cover an area far greater than trawling and within coastal catchments likely have a greater impact. Trawling is the most economically efficient way to catch fish and as trawl grounds around the world have sustained fisheries for up to 50 years the problem appears to be emotional rather than factual. That emotion generates $millions annually for marine environment groups.

Walter Stark, if you reed the reference provided, compared the catches on ecologically equivalent Tropical Reefs and Australia land less than 20kg per sq k pa compared to Indonesia and other countries who land well over 1000 kg per square k.

1) Is this disparity solely due to regulation of our reef fisheries, or might it bear out precisely what John said about productive capacity?

2) No, it’s not “off-topic”. You want to make the argument solely about economics (your alleged area of expertise) and denigrate the work of marine biologists and other real scientists, but you will not be allowed to. Suck it up.

3) Have you had a dive on any of those Indo reefs where they fish a tonne per square k? Have you compared the ecological health (i.e. biodiversity) with our tropical reefs?

Trawling – the most demonised fishery, changes the seafloor, clears the smaller rocks and crushed shellfish and breaks up lots of living things – which attracts fish which are thenm the trawl catch.

Only a “hard-nosed” (I hesitate, but only momentarily, to add feeble-minded) economist could bring the concept of creative destruction into marine ecology. You’re probably better off pretending the sciences of marine biology and ecology don’t exist, or are somehow less rigorous than economics, than flinging out howlers like that.

What a substantial and important contribution you are making.

Hamburgers comes from beef grown on land that has to be cleared of -all native species just about – fenced, fertilised etc, Soy beeen and wheat crops are worse and the chemicals from these farms compromise river and estuarine and marine fish production – so you and i can eat hamburgers.

Trawling – the most demonised fishery, changes the seafloor, clears the smaller rocks and crushed shellfish and breaks up lots of living things – which attracts fish which are thenm the trawl catch. The area worked in a fraction of 1% of the toal cleared and grazed land in Australia – no chemicals and no introduced species.

Indeed it may be far more economically efficient and environmentally benign and use way less carbon than sourcing protein from the oceans rather than the land – another study screaming for an objective hard nosed economist.

All animals in Australia including quite recent placental arrivals such as the broad tooth rat bread at much slower rates than elsewhere . Phosphate and nitrogen levels in almost all Australian soils are very low, the energy in runoffs from the land mass must be very low compared to elsewhere.
Tropical waters are mostly not rich environments , they do not have the big up-swellings of nutrients that the southern oceans have.

so on and so on

The worlds third l;argest fishing zone covering some it is most productive landscaopes withless than 1000 offhsore boats???

2. The number of boats doesn’t tell us anything much. What is important is fishing effort which is determined by the size of the boats and the gear.

With the exceoption of the distant waters vessels – less than 12, the rest are 50-70 fotters with a few larger trawklers – but the trawl fleet is tiny too – less than 100 boat in SE.

3. Raw data on costs to the fishers don’t tell us whether license fees are too high, or too low. Most people will pay to catch fish so those exploiting the resource don’t need to be given a great return to keep them doing it at the level that is deemed appropriate. A welfare maximizing license scheme would capture as much of the resource rent as possible for the community. It would, among other things, set the license fee at the level at which the marginal fisher is getting a living wage after cost.

This is weird. Do you expect fishermen to train for three years at sea, buy a boat and license and quota for 500,000 to $1million offhore and 2 to $300,000 open boats bay and estuary and then fish to catch enough to cover quota and licences annual costs – $25 -300,000 offhsore and 5-10,000 inside annually then they need the same return as any business, Fishermen are not a foreign species of neanderthals who enjoying killing they fish – their bank managers only support profitable businesses. That view which I am sure I misinterpreted would be racist nonsense. And then who is going to catch fish commercially so you can eat them or your Mum?

4. Of course you can estimate fish bio-mass.
First you have to know their range in depth and geographically relative to the fishery. Not a single modeled bimomass in Austraklia has anerror of less than 25% ( being generous)and for many with committee guesed catch rate the arror is infinite. I have a reference fro Ric Dersio’s review of school shark fishery if you like – email address is up.

5. If you do not know the range of the fish spatially otr geographically and you do not take into account predation from birds and and mammals how can Australoian commercial fisheries be significant? Or put another way there are over 100,000 Bass Strait fur seals in bass strait that consume 2.5t of the same species of fish landed – around the same size and their population is growing. The maximum bass strait landed catch recorded and with quota TAC – not necessarily caught – was no less than 40,000t. That is without dolphins, whales and seabirds – so there is no likely predator impact fromAustralian SE or any other fisheries . Can provide any refs you like ioff list. my specialty

‘Human hunting has driven many species into extinction and this has happened in very pre-indusrial times and environments.

Australian animals breed at a much slower rate than European, African or American animals of the same size and similar ecological niche, would expect the same applies to fish in our equally ‘low energy’ waters. Some of our coastal fish are quite long lived… The Idea that hunting pressure could not in principle damage breeding stocks is nonsensical.’etc

Australian Arctic and tropical territorial waters are among the richest we just barely fish them. for tropics see Stark http://www.goldendolphin.com/WSarticles/Fishy.pdf The loss of American Carrier Pigeons, ascribed to hunting, was due to the entire netting forests loss of habitat essential breeding – many other species.

The species of fish we fish – with few exceptions, are found world wide. Google their scientific names. Their long levity simply means they lay millions of eggs or have dozens of well developed young a whole lot longer. And lastly before fishing can impact species by catch it has to impact a substantial portion of the range of that species by depth or geographically. No Australian fisheries do – for either depth or distribution. Fresh fish fisheries in Australia are tied to the location of the markets for those particular species – nothing to do wuith their geographic range – ie. School sharks tagged in Australia commonly turn up in NZ and visa versa Remember fish species only became commercial because they could be caught reliably and there wwere buyers – a market for them, Gummy shark are $10 + pk in Vic and little more than $3 in NSW – they do not like them. Visas versa for Mulloway and so on.

Australian animals breed at a much slower rate than European, African or American animals of the same size and similar ecological niche, would expect the same applies to fish in our equally ‘low energy’ waters.

Some of our coastal fish are quite long lived.

A common pattern for extinction of longer lived slow breeding animals is a slight increase in the mortality rate for new ‘unestablished breeders’ , a decline in numbers that is barely noticeable because the older already established breeders live for such a long time , this is a process that after decades results in a population were virtually all are very old and then they suddenly all go at once.

The Idea that hunting pressure could not in principle damage breeding stocks is nonsensical.

Herein lies the rub. It may be hard to understan d but the rewards of tackling the problem could be significant – as you may see if the third part is posted.

Others have shown a remarkable ability to come to grips with looking at at the economics of Australian fisheries from a new angle – and see the potential for the research that is needed – research for economists,

Sadly Prof James Kirkley has passed away, but though not in agreement with myself or others he spent time on fishing boats and enagaged thoughtfully over years. I am just tryiong to shift this discussion from the USA to Australia.

For naturalists and others economics is a ‘hard read’ – so I am trying to make natural history and fisheries an easier read – but it still takes effort from all,

I suggest you look at Menakhem Ben Yam’is website more carefully and read his CV. in summary economics of fish markets and a widely distributed fish population combined with rapid degradation of coastal fish habitat – not fishing -determines the catches in Australian fisheries. Because economists were not involved in analyzing the nature of Australian fisheries and the role economics determines in the species selection – species are selected for commercialisation because they are reliably abundant seasonally or year round – common sense the reference there but economic analyses of the historic markets and the role of price in determining catches would lead to more efficient management.

KImported csience and economics does not apply – in my opinion – so I am trying to make a case for economists to revisit the underlyinmg assumptions of Australian fisheries economics using the wealth of existing data – as yet untapped – and then looking at the appropriateness of the science used – also imported.

‘ It is easy to get swept along with Bobs spiel but it is also easy to understand that large vessels using modern technology and sophisticated nets are able to capture vast numbers of marine animals. Those that do not comply with whatever regulation or licence are chucked back in dead, by-catch they call it. Divers I know say that Port Phillip Bay is like a ploughed field as the scallop fishermen work their trade.’

Under quota management gear used by boats is deregulated and huge NZ tyrawklers working of the west coast of Tasmania caught more than 50 Australian fur seasl over a copuple of months – from memory – in that late 1990′s. The CSIRO trialing midwater trawls caught dolphins off Flinders Island, and then again off Maria Island. A lot more marine mammals are likely killed by siesmic testing – which i sahre the fault with because we drive cars that use fuel – much like we eat fish.

Bar a few offshore fisheries most of Austraoia’s fisheries were and are – thoug maybe not by value anymore – coastal. The ‘inbetween’ is Orange Roughy which there is only 230t of quota annually for. Ex Austral;ian and US researchers aged thios fish at 26 years from its ear bones – standatrd peractice -n and related it appearence and disappearence to sea temperatures. Toothfish are a southern hemisphere deepwater ‘Cod like fish’

Gor the fisheries that started the dicussion – well they are coastal – rivers esruaries and on the continental shelf.

You think so?

I find it near-illegible, and when I take the time to tease out the meaning it’s a series of poorly defined terms/premises, unsupported assertions, and correlation-as-causation, all in defence of a quixotic and predetermined conclusion that fish catch has no effect on stocks.

I agree that habitat plays a massive role in sustaining fish stocks. That is self-evident really. But at a given level of habitat health, and particularly with certain species and fishing methods, the harvest will just as self-evidently affect stocks.

Also, to blame onshore/inshore human activity (other than fishing) for ecological problems depressing fish stocks is to completely ignore the ecological effects of fishing. The effect of overfishing is not limited to the removal of x number of y species – it’s arguably far more about the “trophic cascade” effects on the ecosystem.

If Bob could be much more specific about what he means (in general), and provide references for some of his specific claims, it would be a big improvement.