Nobody would deny that experienced professional fishermen, especially the old salt among them, possess a wealth of knowledge on fish and sea, and on what’s going on between the two, accumulating for generations.
This is true all around the globe and in every direction from Greenland to Tierra del Fuego and from Chile to Spain. Nobody would deny that this is not the sort of knowledge that universities graduates gain during their studies, and later on, in their scientific positions. And only a few would deny that fishermen’s knowledge might be useful in fisheries management. How to merry the two – this is the question.
One choice, for example, might be to listen to fishermen and do what they tell you to do. I’d qualify this option, however, with listening only to those fishermen who cannot fish elsewhere and do not share the grounds to be managed with others who are not obliged to the same management. If these conditions are observed, management schemes can be worked out using fishermen’s, along with scientific, knowledge of the life history, ecology and behaviour of the fish concerned.
‘Fishers’ Knowledge in Fisheries Science and Management’ was edited by N. Haggan, B. Neis and I. G. Baird, and published in 2007 by UNESCO (http://publishing.unesco.org). Thirty-three contributors wrote the 23 articles/chapters of the 437p volume. The bulk of those represent individual case studies from many parts of the world. Nonetheless, there are plenty of general conclusions that readers can draw.
Key element
Although Walter Erdelen, UNESCO’s Assistant D. G. for Natural Sciences writes in the Foreword that: “Today, local and indigenous knowledge is widely recognized as a key element in biodiversity conservation…” when it comes to fisheries management it has still got a long way to go, in spite of the fact that, in many areas, scientific knowledge is poor. Those are the fishermen who know when, where and sometimes why their prey species migrate and aggregate, and how conditions have changed and fluctuated over the years.
R. E. Johannes and B. Neis write in Chapter 1 that fishermen’s knowledge has cast much light on subjects such as stock structure and variability, behaviour of pre-juvenile stages, oceanic conditions, spawning aggregations, trends in abundance and local extinctions – in short, the whole dynamics of their fisheries. It is up to scientists to integrate such knowledge into their assessments and use it for critical reviewing of their own findings based on statistics and mathematical models. They still rarely do so – in fact, the opposite has been happening. K. K. Poepoe et al. write in Chapter 6 that government management has displaced management systems based on indigenous knowledge throughout most of the world, for “management should beleft to professionals”.
Knowledge contributors
It is high time for fisheries science to learn to listen to fishermen. If scientists want to understand what makes fish populations tick, and not only try to figure out how many fish there are in the sea, there’s an essential role for the fishermen as knowledge contributors and members of assessment teams.
R. D. Stanley and J. Rice write in Chapter 20 that it is a mistake to focus on fishers simply as data-collectors or a knowledge source, while ignoring their skills in hypothesis formulation, research design and interpretation, and give some convincing examples to that end. Fishermen operate in harmony with fish behaviour, weather and sea conditions, and the market situation; they choose their fishing time, grounds and target species accordingly, which requires practical analytical and synthetical skills that make the difference between successful and mediocre fishermen.
Ian Morris, retired Northern Irish skipper, who has participated in ICES surveys, said that they went to the wrong places using the wrong gear. “When fish swam several fathoms above the bottom, we took good catches of cod with midwater trawls, but the survey vessel used low-opening bottom trawl and missed them. Thus skewed results floated into the ICES’ conception”, he said.
Nobody would admit anything, but the data for management would run away from reality, either way. The more the management feels it is failing, the more it tries to manage – often shooting in all directions.
Wise enough
Involving commercial fishermen at the ground level and using their knowledge of fish movements and net design could demonstrate to them that those who assess and manage their fisheries are wise enough to apply the wealth of fishermen’s knowledge. Where surveys are employed, fishermen should be invited to participate in their design and help to select and determine sampling strata (distinct areas with set numbers of stations).
For two decades the idea of fisheries co-management has been advocated, questioned, disparaged and outright rejected. Among the strongest supporters of this idea have been social scientists, some economists and fishermen, who can see that where fishermen are not involved in the planning, legislating, implementation and enforcement of fishery management it does not work well or misfires. Some of them contributed to ‘Fishers’ Knowledge’.
Talking on parallel lines
However, many opponents of any form of co-management are saying that fishermen are the worst to ask for opinions on what makes for good fishery management. Others are ready to pay lip service to such ideas; they invite fishermen to meetings and conferences, where both groups are talking on parallel lines. Next, the management people return to their computer models and the fishermen back to complaining about assessment and management methodologies and practice that are incompatible with their own knowledge and experience, judgement and common sense.
Enforcing ‘top-down’ management rules contrary to fishing people’s knowledge, experience, and common sense, which hurts them materially to a degree they cannot support and comply with, is both expensive and ineffective. And examples to prove their point are aplenty. In many areas catches are under-reported or vastly underestimated. Fishermen often find themselves in a sort of Catch-22 situation: whether they report true catches or not, they get their quota or effort reduced. One consequence is the wrong data fed to models.
No doubt, without more attention to fishermen’s unrecorded knowledge, gathered over centuries, a vast storehouse of information would be lost. It is the scientists’ responsibility that this does not happen.
