Perhaps We're Ready for Abundance

To get there, start by protecting the small fish.

As a surfer living in New York City, it never occurred to me that I might see a whale. I didn't think I was missing them because the surf season wasn't whale season or because I didn't get out in the water all that much.  

I didn't think I would see a whale because twenty years ago, it never occurred to me or anyone else I knew that you could see whales in New York. It's not like people spoke about whales or even those good ol' days when you used to see them. I had never heard it mentioned as a possibility. It never came up.  

As for dolphins in the East River, fuhgetaboutit.

Moving to New York in the late 90s was an interesting time for someone drawn to the water. Being a surfer in the city put me in a small group. Something about changing into a 5mm hooded wetsuit under the boardwalk in Long Beach and walking across a snow-covered beach didn't appeal to the masses.  

I remember telling people that a friend of mine and I rode his wave runner up the Hudson, and they looked at me like I was insane.  

We also used to do a fair amount of fishing when the striped bass were running. It's hard to get people in the city to look surprised, but walking down 2nd Ave holding a bass by the gills did the trick. After all, the keeper size for a striper was about 26" if I remember correctly. These were not small fish.

Now, there are beaches in Hoboken, a triathlon that swims in the river, and whale-watching tours.

When I arrived, the Hudson and other waterways around NYC had come a long way, and another twenty years have continued the positive trend.  

I moved out of the city in 2008 but still visit frequently. For all the ocean news I write about, it's hard to think of something I share more excitedly than a post about dolphins in the East River.  

It is just incredible to me.

Understanding Abundance, Preserving Baselines

It's important when we start seeing wildlife populations coming back that, in general, we no longer know what true natural abundance is.

Examples of nature's abundance have become so rare that most of us will never see them. We only see places that seem to be thriving relative to what we have in our daily lives (which has become nearly nothing from a biodiversity standpoint).  

But that snorkeling trip to Hawaii or Belize that looks like a healthy reef with a ton of fish? It really isn't. Yet, even this can be a mind-blowing and even life-changing experience.  

Nature is cool like that.

Palmyra Atoll - The Baseline

"How do you know what an intact marine ecosystem is supposed to look like if you don't have a baseline? Palmyra can become an international baseline."

Kydd Pollack - TNC 

As experts from The Nature Conservancy in the protected Palmyra Atoll point out, those compromised places we see will become the baseline if we lose examples of true abundance.

The Palmyra Atoll comprises almost 13 million acres of protected ocean ecosystems and may be the most abundant reef on the planet. This is despite having to recover from utter destruction during WWII and a massive bleaching event in 2015.

I came across this video a while ago, but I think of it often when articles or experts talk about species bouncing back.

Inevitably, those headlines are quickly followed by someone with an economic interest in pointing out that they should then be allowed to harvest more of said 'abundant' species.

As wildlife returns to urban environments like the East River, it can be easy to think that abundance is back. After all, if there are dolphins in the East River and sharks in the lineup in Long Beach, then the open ocean must be doing even better. Right? 

Plus, people begin to ask, how many sharks do we really want out there anyway?

The Misleading Huge Schools of Little Fish

The article below, published recently by Slate, caught my eye this week. Last week, I wrote about small-scale fisheries, but what about just small fish?  

+We All Know We Should Save the Whales. What About the Sardines? - Slate

This article isn't really about sardines. It should have been titled 'What about the Menhaden?' But then everyone would have just asked, 'What's a menhaden?' and moved on.

The point of this article is that a glimpse of abundance can be deceiving.

Little fish swim in schools by the millions. When you look at one, you are in complete awe of the ocean's ability to produce massive numbers of living things.

But these enormous schools of fish can be deceiving.

"It's extremely difficult to gauge abundance," Theresa Labriola, the Pacific project director at Wild Oceans, noted. "It can be really deceptive when you see a lot inshore and you see bluefish nipping at menhaden in the fall."

Like many aspects of the ocean economy, a few people are reaping the economic benefits of our public commons, and these people have enormous political clout. But you don't hear much about these little fish relative to salmon and tuna. And my guess is the companies prefer it that way.

"By volume, more menhaden is harvested than any other species on the Atlantic coast of the United States, the vast majority by the Omega Protein Corporation."

One of the largest fisheries in America is dominated by one company?

Really? 

Of course, the track record of these companies, and even the government overseers, to manage these natural resources is poor at best.  

There used to be an massive sardine fishery off the coast of California. Let's see if you can guess what happened there.

"The California sardine fishery has become legendary in American folklore. The fishery began before the turn of the last century, peaked in the 1930s and began to collapse after -World War II. It is a classic case of the rise and fall of a fishery dependent on a pelagic species, of overcapitalization of an industry, and of too many fishing boats using new technologies to harvest a fragile, if not dwindling, resource. Its collapse spawned the rapid development of similar fisheries in Peru, Chile and South Africa, each of which then underwent essentially the same kind of growth and decline as the California sardine fishery."

+The Collapse of California’s Sardine Fishery (Ueber & MacCall, 1990)

And speaking of Peru.  

Just a few months ago, the fisheries world was watching Peru's anchovy fishery - the world's largest anchovy fishery and the world's largest fishery by volume.  

It was closed.

The pressure to open fisheries can be extreme. After all, they are economically important to the people that fish them, the people that eat them, and national economies. The closing of the first anchovy season is estimated to cost Peru over one billion USD.

Perhaps We're Ready for Abundance

"Although there was much talk of pollution and its effects, another theme that ran through the meeting of state, Federal and academic specialists was the belief that the tide of public concern had turned. They seemed agreed that both the government and public had become sufficiently disturbed to take the bold steps needed to clean up the river."

+Life Abandoning Polluted Hudson (Oct 6, 1966) - NYT

In 1966, the feeling around the table was that the public and the government were tired of watching the Hudson River destroyed by industry.

People decided they wanted abundance. Sixty years later, the whales have returned.