52 SEA GRANT COLLEGES 



often as not the fishery is working at the same time, or seriatim, or in an auxil- 

 iary manner, on a number of different fish populations each of which is reacting 

 in a distinct and different manner to both environmental and fishing effort changes. 



When one has the abundance problem in hand one logically would move to 

 the study of the availability problem, which is made up both of abundance of the 

 population and its aggregation in a manner and place which makes it readily and 

 cheaply caught. Events ordinarily do not permit such logical scientific progres- 

 sion. One naust almost always work simultaneously on both the abundance and 

 availability problems. In some great fisheries (North Atlantic cod, Peruvian 

 anchovy, tuna everywhere) quite subtle changes in the environment can throw 

 the aggregation of fish some hundreds of miles from where they are expected, or 

 keep them a few feet below the surface where they are undetectable, or promote 

 scattering and prevent aggregation into commercially practical catching bunches. 



The objective of all of this is prediction. It becomes more clear as we go 

 forward that our ability to predict environmental changes is a key factor, that 

 they cannot be predicted satisfactorily on the basis of measurements in the area 

 of the fishery, that they are often (if not normally) subject to changes going on 

 over the horizon where we are not watching or measuring, and that they are 

 arising from processes we do not yet understand very well even if we could mea- 

 sure them synoptically. This is a reason why fishery people become more con- 

 tinuously interested in the world ocean as a unit and the study of air-sea inter- 

 action processes on a global scale. Involved also are the biological consequences 

 of these gross, and minute, environmental changes, and I could spend the rest of 

 the day illustrating our ignorance of various facets of this aspect of the matter. 



The situation is not at all hopeless or impossible. Quite considerable pro- 

 gress is being made in prediction of this nature in several important fisheries. 

 Often this is still empirical but in some cases even the processes are becoming 

 dimly understood. 



One must always keep in mind that the fisherman, and the industry asso- 

 ciated with him, are making predictions of these sorts on a daily, less than daily, 

 or more than daily basis, on the basis of the best information and understanding 

 available. On a global basis the livelihood of millions of people and the employ- 

 ment of hundreds of millions in capital are risked daily on these fishermen and 

 trade predictions, guesses and decisions. This goes on whether or not there is 

 any science and must do so. If science can improve the predictive ability of 

 fishermen by only one or two per cent, or extend his predictions by one or two 

 days in a direction better than random, the beneficial economic and social con- 

 sequences on a national and international basis are quite enormous. 



THE MULTIPLE-USER PROBLEM 



Since the resources used by the industry are, for the most part, the com- 

 mon-property of everyone, the normal instinct of the individual, the group, the 

 nation, or the region is to keep everybody except itself from fishing on the re- 

 sources. What the individual entity wants is ownership so that it can manage 

 and husband the whole resource and fishery and reap all of the benefits there- 

 frona. This the other individual entities will not permit. Arising out of the same 

 common-property nature of the resources is the attitude of public administrators 

 to their task. If there is any question as to overfishing, the best thing to do (it 

 is often felt by them) is to slow down or stop the fishery until science can ascer- 

 tain the facts. In consequence laws and regulations of great variety impede the 

 development of the ocean fisheries in all directions, and in many (or even most) 

 instances these laws and regulations, and the local, national, and international 

 interactions that arise from them, have little relation to natural happenings in 

 the ocean or conservation need. 



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