Decision-Making 



Michael Halminski 



By Carla B. Burgess 



How can you make decisions 

 about protecting and conserving a 

 fishery when you have little informa- 

 tion to base them on? 



Fishery managers and watermen 

 encounter this dilemma daily. 



"One of the most severe limita- 

 tions that everybody runs up against 

 in fisheries and environmental 

 management is lack of good data and 

 information," says Michael Orbach, 

 a Sea Grant scientist, a professor of 

 anthropology at East Carolina 

 University and a member of the N.C. 

 Marine Fisheries Commission. "We 

 really don't know how many 

 fishermen are applying how much 

 effort out there to get the stocks. We 

 don't even know how much is being 

 caught." 



In North Carolina, reporting of 

 the recreational and commercial 

 catch is voluntary, and the annual 

 statistics stem from a lot of sampling, 

 scientific surveying and estimating. 



"We've had fishermen say, 'I've 

 had more oysters in my house than 

 you reported for the entire state,'" 

 says Bill Hogarth, director of North 

 Carolina's Division of Marine 

 Fisheries. 



And neither recreational nor 

 commercial fishermen are licensed 

 — a commercial fishing license 

 applies to the vessel, not the fisher- 

 man. So numbers don't accurately 

 reflect the numbers of people fishing 

 on a given vessel. 



On the license application, 

 fishermen describe their activity as 

 full-time commercial, part-time 

 commercial or recreational (listed as 

 "pleasure"). Of 19,714 vessels 

 licensed for 1991, 9,306 were in the 

 pleasure category, 5,016 described 

 their efforts as full-time commercial 

 and 5,392 listed their efforts as part- 

 time commercial, says Mike Street, 

 the division's research section chief. 



Though almost half of the 

 applicants describe themselves as 

 recreational fishermen, many of 

 these anglers sell their catch. 



A deficit of comprehensive data 

 about fishing efforts and landings 

 often leaves regulatory agencies in 

 the dark. And charged with using the 

 "best available data" on which to 

 base decisions, regulatory agencies 

 are often forced to impose regula- 

 tions that can cut deeply. 



"What the council has to look out 

 for mainly is the health of the 



resource long-term," says Bob 

 Mahood, director of the South Atlantic 

 Fishery Management Council, which 

 develops management plans for the 

 region stretching from the North 

 Carolina/Virginia border south to Key 

 West, Fla. "Any time you severely 

 restrict, you're going to impact people. 



"The council has to make a 

 number of decisions with very shaky 

 or absent information in many cases," 

 says Mahood. "If you don't have the 

 information, you have to take the most 

 conservative direction." 



And the executive director of the 

 N.C. Fisheries Association says the 

 results can be devastating. 



"We're getting more regulations, 

 and things are getting worse," says 

 Jerry Schill. "Maybe we should try the 

 opposite." 



Schill and others representing 

 commercial interests say fishermen 

 themselves are often in the best 

 position to assess problems in a 

 fishery, such as reduced catch. But 

 they often feel if they point out a 

 decline, restrictions will ensue imme- 

 diately. 



"The way we manage fisheries 

 now is crisis management, and we go 

 at it with the attitude that it's going to 



8 JANUARY I FEBRUARY 1993 



