McHUGH: MARINE FISHERIES OF NEW YORK 



words, MacKenzie has said that although the 

 methods used by oyster planters in New York 

 were relatively efficient as compared with meth- 

 ods employed in most other parts of the country, 

 they could have been much better, and rehabili- 

 tation is possible. This conclusion may be chal- 

 lenged by oystermen, for the studies on which 

 it is based did not consider adequately the eco- 

 nomics of oyster planting. 



The second most important food fish of the 

 early days was the shad, entirely a wild crop. 

 This fishery has declined just as sharply as the 

 oyster fishery, and the causes are entirely by 

 man: deterioration of the environment in the 

 rivers where spawning takes place and the young 

 live their early lives, overfishing, and lack of ef- 

 fective management measures. The decline of 

 the menhaden industry also can be attributed 

 to overfishing, but in this case in areas to the 

 south, not under the control of the State of New 

 York. 



The prospect is bleak. The history of the fish- 

 eries of New York, as in so many other coastal 

 States, is a history of mismanagement, or per- 

 haps more accurately a classic example of no 

 effective management at all. As in other coastal 

 States, there has been no dearth of attention 

 to the matter by the public and by government. 

 The laws of New York State include many lim- 

 itations upon fishing and upon degradation of 

 the aquatic environment, but the history of the 

 fisheries does not attest that these laws have 

 been eff'ective. Perhaps the best that can be 

 said is that if there had been no laws, the de- 

 cline probably would have been more rapid and 

 more severe. 



Two solutions to these problems are popular 

 today. The first begins with the premise that 

 all the problems of the domestic commercial 

 fisheries are caused by foreign fishermen. The 

 proposed solution is that the United States should 

 assume ownership, or at least trusteeship, over 

 the fishery resources of the continental shelf by 

 extending its zone of jurisdiction unilaterally to 

 200 miles, as several Latin American countries 

 have done. It is argued that the matter is urgent 

 and that we cannot aff'ord to wait for interna- 

 tional action at the Law of the Sea Conference 

 in 1973. Supporters of this view, who include 



most, if not all, people in the fishing industry 

 on the Atlantic coast, believe that nothing useful 

 to them is likely to emerge from the 1973 con- 

 ference, if indeed any agreement on fisheries is 

 reached, or if the conference materializes at all. 

 Meanwhile, if we take no action, they argue, 

 the situation will deteriorate rapidly. 



This argument is open to question for several 

 reasons. Not the least of these is the sorry his- 

 tory of our own attempts to manage the living 

 resources of coastal waters over which we have 

 always had control. This has been demonstrated 

 very clearly for the coastal waters of New York 

 in the present paper, and the record of most of 

 our maritime States is equally bad. Only when 

 we have been compelled to do so under inter- 

 national agreements, as in the salmon fisheries 

 of the Pacific coast, has the United States suc- 

 ceeded in managing any major coastal fishery. 

 If we move unilaterally to extend our fishery 

 jurisdiction, there is nothing in the record to 

 demonstrate that this will amount to anything 

 but a hunting license to destroy the living re- 

 sources of a much broader zone of the sea. 



The second popular solution arises out of the 

 long standing controversy between recreational 

 and commercial fishermen. Most saltwater sport 

 fishermen probably would support a move to ex- 

 tend the width of the fishery zone. In addition, 

 they would welcome restrictions of various kinds 

 on domestic commercial fishermen, on the 

 grounds that the commercial fisheries take large 

 quantities of fish which are more valuable as rec- 

 reational resources, or that commercial fisher- 

 men destroy the food supply or the spawning 

 grounds of recreational species. These tend to 

 be emotional issues in which facts are ignored 

 or distorted and uninformed opinions prevail. 

 Where the sport catch has been demonstrated 

 to exceed the commercial catch greatly, as is ap- 

 parently true for species like bluefish and striped 

 bass, the question arises whether sport fishing 

 is not more in need of regulation than commer- 

 cial fishing. The growing sport fisheries are 

 under much less control than the commercial 

 fisheries are, but from a scientific point of view 

 they are equally in need of control if manage- 

 ment is to succeed. 



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