It may come as a surprise to some readers, but rockfish is not one type of fish. Rather, it describes dozens of different species of fish — often members of the Sebastes genus which live amongst, you guessed it, rocks. Rockfish are also part of a larger class of fish generally referred to as groundfish which encompass many species of fish that generally live near the ocean floor.
This collection of fish sparked the interest of Sitka Seafood Market Co-Founder Nic Mink and best-selling author Paul Greenberg, not because of what they’re called, but rather because of what they’ve caused: sweeping reforms in fisheries management and conservation.
These lowly (dwelling) fish set Nic and Paul on a journey to understand how their steep population decline in the second half of the twentieth century caused impressive impacts on policy and gave rise to what is known as Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) across the United States.
First, Nic spoke to one of California’s most prominent fisheries scientists, Dr. Jenn Caselle, to learn about the nuts and bolts of the rise of MPAs.
Caselle is a research professor at the Marine Science Institute at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where her research is broadly focused on the ecology of coastal marine organisms, their role in nearshore ecosystems, and the response of these ecosystems to environmental change and human impacts.
Caselle has spent much of her career studying and implementing MPAs. Her field-based monitoring program of kelp forests to assess long-term changes due to climate and anthropogenic impacts has become the basis of MPA monitoring throughout California and the West Coast of the United States.
While MPAs became popularized in the U.S. in the 1980s and 1990s, the concept of restricting areas of the oceans for harvest has been around for centuries. So, Caselle explains, when fishermen observed depleted rockfish stocks in the 80s, the chief mechanism used to protect these species was the somewhat radical, but not-so-new MPAs.
In these protected areas, fishing would either be prevented or significantly curtailed, allowing fishing populations to rebound and critical habitats to be protected.
“One of the big questions,” says Caselle, “is how effective are these marine protected areas in perpetuating fish stocks and actually giving fishermen more opportunities to fish, not less?”
She says that it can be hard to generalize, but as an ecosystem protection device, Caselle believes that MPAs are meeting their goal of protecting an entire habitat rather than one particular species which no other fisheries management tools do. However, she says that one of the “biggest challenges” is determining which of the changes that they’re seeing are due to implementing the MPA and which are due to climate change.
“Climate change is just causing our systems to change so dramatically, and so quickly … so when we’re trying to assess what the MPA is doing, we have to disentangle those two things,” says Caselle.
So, while MPAs do seem tentatively effective in biodiversity and habitat protection, challenges remain in understanding their impact on fisheries, especially in the face of climate change.
To better understand what fishermen are seeing on the ground (and on the water), Nic spoke to Mike Conroy, executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations (PCFFA). Conroy has been a fisherman on the West Coast for over 30 years and he says that he’s still unsure if it’s clear whether MPAs are the answer to overfishing.
Conroy says that while MPAs do seem to improve bottom habitat, he wonders how effective they are for the fish population. “We were told that one of the long-term benefits of MPAs was going to be this ‘spillover effect,’ but a recent study just came out and showed that we’re not seeing that,” says Conroy.
This spillover theory suggests that MPAs would lead to increased populations of specific fish populations within the boundaries of an MPA. As populations increased to the carrying capacity of that area, the idea was that the excess population would spill over into areas outside of the MPAs, thereby providing a benefit to recreational and commercial users of that space. However, Conroy says based on his reading and on-the-water observations, “MPAs can have conservation benefits. But the net effects both inside and outside of MPAs may be smaller and harder to detect than you might think.”
Conroy explains that he sees the success of stock revival in the last 40 years as a result of science-based management efforts within the fishing industry itself. At the same time that MPAs were beginning to appear, state and federal management agencies responded to the same population decline by setting catch limits at acceptable biological levels for sustainable yield of the resource.
Conroy’s distrust and skepticism of MPAs is warranted. He describes the sour taste that was left in the mouths of many California fishermen after they were invited to participate in the development of MPAs only to be cut off from their livelihood. He says that fishermen drew on maps and shared generations of their hard-earned fishing knowledge only to have prime fishing grounds that they helped to identify taken away. He and other fishermen were left feeling that the process was opaque and misleading.
Just up the coast, the fishermen of Port Orford, Oregon, realized that the creation of a marine reserve off their coast didn’t have to be a zero-sum game. Where some fishermen had previously found frustration, they saw an opportunity.
Aaron Longton, of Port Orford Sustainable Seafood, is a longtime fisherman and advocate for sustainable fisheries. He, along with other fishermen, watched the creation of MPAs along the California coast and anticipated that an MPA would be coming to their area soon. Rather than wait to see how they would be affected by an MPA, the fishermen took a proactive approach and set out to be part of the process of developing their own MPA.
“We’re in a blue state where we take care of business when it comes to conservation,” says Longton. He goes on to say, “We knew it was going to happen and we really wanted to have an effect rather than to be affected. So we engaged.”
Longton recalls that sitting down with fishermen to decide which fishing grounds they would give up forever was, “certainly not the normal procedure amongst fishermen.” Yet, he says that this novel collaborative approach was essential to the future of their livelihoods.
“We wanted to engage and make sure that the placement was practical, not only for the sustainability of the resource but also for the fishermen that depend on it,” he says.
The fishermen collaborated with scientists and groups such as Ecotrust to start a nonprofit which then led the effort to cite a marine reserve in their area. “Everybody signed off on it,” says Longton. The resulting Redfish Rocks Marine Reserve is small in comparison to others along the coast but encompasses more habitat benefits comparatively. When paired with a larger MPA surrounding the reserve, it creates a larger hybrid solution that serves both the ecosystem and the fishermen that depend on it.
“The marine reserve has zero impact, zero take,” says Longton, but the surrounding MPA does allow crabbing for Dungeness crab and trolling for salmon while prohibiting recreational or commercial hook-and-line fishing for groundfish species. “So there’s minimal impact in that area,” explains Longton.
What’s more, the nonprofit invited the OSU marine fishery team to operate a field station within the reserve to study its impact alongside a similarly-sized control area. “We didn’t want to lock up these areas without learning anything,” says Longton, so inviting scientists allowed them to be involved in the process like they hadn’t before. “We get to participate in the science and also shape what are the questions, what can be the solutions, and have our experiential knowledge brought into that,” he says.
The result? Fishermen working with scientists to rebuild overfished rockfish populations has been a resounding success story. A notable win is the rapid rebuild of canary rockfish which were concerningly depleted in the 1990s, but since the creation of the reserve have recovered so substantially that fishermen are now able to return to harvesting them 40 years ahead of schedule.
Fishermen are able to harvest canary rockfish 40 years ahead of schedule.
Longton notes that in addition to improving their business, the reserve has also helped to mitigate the potential income loss that’s associated with “locking up” 20% of their nearshore fishery and has given fishermen hope for the future.
It’s not news that living in the era of climate change can be disheartening — especially when it’s hard to know if the solutions that we’ve devised are having an impact, or if the only impact we can observe is that our “solutions” are sewing conflict and distrust. That’s why success stories such as Redfish Rocks Marine Reserve give us hope that collaborative solutions can yield surprising resiliency and inspiring results for our collective future.
This article is adapted from the sixth episode of the podcast series Fish Talk produced and edited by Alana McKeever.
