Fish Galore!

Last week, Knauss fellows joined almost 4,000 other fish enthusiasts for the 141st American Fisheries Society Annual Meeting in the bustling Washington State Convention Center in downtown Seattle.  With thirty (30!) concurrent sessions, we learned about a wide range of topics including fisheries genetics, climate impacts, food production, management challenges, and life history patterns.  Being a marine mammal enthusiast myself, I sought out talks focusing on West coast habitat mapping, bycatch engineering, and modeling predator foraging requirements.  After four days of posters, presentations, and socials, we all came home having learned tons about the wonderful and complex world of fish and fisheries. 

Two of the presentations that I found most inspiring were talks on instituting turtle bycatch offsets and a general overview of food production sustainability.  The first was explaining the concept of applying an offsets program (typically used in emissions or pollution contexts) to ameliorate turtle bycatch in Hawaii and Mexico.  We learned that the commercial Hawaiian fishery is only allowed to harm a small number of turtles per season and has exhausted all bycatch avoidance and mitigation options trying to meet that goal.  The only other measure left is instituting mandatory fishing closures, costing more than $40,000 for every turtle that would be saved.  On the other side of the Pacific, research has shown that simple gear modifications in the small-scale Mexico fishery can lower bycatch considerably.  However, the fishermen cannot afford new gear.  So, the idea is that the Hawaiian fishery would essentially pay for the Mexican fishermen to save more turtles, totally less than $1,000 per turtle saved.  While not perfect and subject to many of the classic problems of other offset models, I appreciate this idea because it relies on finding an economically efficient solution.  While we may not always be comfortable with economic trade-offs, policy-makers, industries, and communities speak the language of dollar signs and it behooves the environmental community to align economic and conservation incentives where possible.

The second talk that stood out for me was given by the notorious Ray Hillborn.  Engaging the crowd with jokes and a friendly demeanor, Hillborn spoke about the importance of eating low on the food chain.  He has nearly finished the enormous undertaking of compiling the environmental impacts (water quality and consumption, land use, pollution, and biodiversity loss) for common meat and dairy products.  While this isn't necessarily new, Hillborn emphasizes that eating certain kinds of fish (herring, anchovy, sardine, squid) can be even more sustainable than being a vegetarian.  This scoring is based on the idea that catching fish does not require huge amounts of water or land and does not inherently produce pollution.  (Though I will admittedly be very curious to read his publication to determine how he measures the biological and economic impacts of bycatch).  Hillborn's dream is to walk into a chain or fast food restaurant and be confronted by a chart that delineates the impacts of each menu item.  An environmental "nutrition facts," if you will. 


Attending the AFS meeting in Seattle was certainly a great learning experience and a highlight of the fellowship.  The fisheries field (like many others) is astonishingly broad, with experts and grad students clamoring to make contributions to an ever-expanding library of facts, theories, models, caveats, and predictions.  If you didn't get the chance to attend, ask your fellow fellows what they thought!  If you did attend, what talk inspired YOU the most?