Bluefins, Weak Hooks and Tech-Savvy Fishermen

Back in 2007, Dan Foster, a biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, was looking at a problem. Bluefin tuna, a population that had declined precipitously since the 1960s, had legal protections in its Gulf of Mexico spawning ground. But fishermen seeking yellowfin tuna and other legally catchable species sometimes snagged bluefins by mistake. Foster was looking for a way to make that stop.

“The first thing we did is went and talked to the fishing industry,” he said.

What he heard from fishermen was that, because bluefin are enormous — one fish can weigh as much as 500 pounds — they sometimes bent the fishhooks that snagged them and managed to escape. So Foster and his colleagues went looking for a way to make a hook that was a bit less rigid — strong enough for yellowfin but too weak to hold its big cousins. They brought the idea to Mustad, a major fishing hook manufacturer, and found that the company had wire in stock and could easily adapt it to the size needed for tuna fishing.

“It was basically the necessity of trying to do something very quickly and simply, rather than try to come up with a new alloy of metal that would bend easier,” Foster said.

NOAA recruited fishermen to help test the weak hooks and found they reduced the accidental catch of bluefin by 56 percent. So, in the spring of 2011, the government mandated the use of the new hooks. Fishermen seem to have adapted with few complaints. Foster said many of them are actually pleased to have a new way to avoid bluefin, since it is common for the big fish to die on the hook and drag miles of fishing line down to the sea floor with them.

Not everyone is crazy about the weak hooks solution. Pew Environment Group, for example, argues the hooks need more testing and may have unintended side effects, such as catching more undersized swordfish, which are also legally protected. On the other side, some fishermen question whether strenuous measures to protect the bluefin are really necessary in the Gulf, especially since some other nations are much more lax about regulating the fishing industry.

Still, the process of adopting the weak hook demonstrates how new technology can emerge from collaboration among regulators, scientists and fishermen that works to everyone’s benefit.

Dean Pruitt is a commercial fisherman in Madeira Beach, Fla., who has been working on boats in the Gulf since he was a kid. Years ago, he said, guys like him figured there were plenty of fish and didn’t care much for conservation efforts.

“Today the fishermen are completely in a different state of mind,” he said. “Every fish we throw back alive is one fish we’re going to have later, and he’s going to reproduce and reproduce.”

Pruitt sits on the board of the Gulf Fishermen’s Association, which mostly represents commercial fishermen who catch grouper, kingfish and other small species. He knows a lot of fellow fishermen who have helped scientists from NOAA or from environmental groups conduct studies. He has a friend working with PEW on testing “green stick,” a Japanese fishing technique that the environmental group believes may be a better than weak hooks at saving protected fish.

“If it works, it’ll be great,” Pruitt said.

Glen “Rabbit” Brooks, the president of the Gulf Fishermen’s Association, took part in a study last year to see how long fishing lines needed to stay in the water to catch the grouper he was looking for.

“It was these very expensive little electronic gadgets that we put on our hook rigs,” Brooks said. “When anything bit, it would stop the stopwatch.”

What they found was that it didn’t take long at all to catch grouper. They don’t move around much, so they tend to bite a hook pretty much as soon as it shows up. On the other hand, if the gear stayed down for long, it would catch — and likely kill — protected creatures like sharks and turtles as they swam by.

“If your gear’s only down there 45 minutes, there’s very little chance that you’ll catch a turtle,” Brooks said. If you do happen to catch one in that amount of time, there’s a good chance you can release it alive. If you leave the line down for five hours, it’s a different story.

Brooks said the study convinced him to adopt “turn and burn” style fishing — dropping three or so miles of fishing line in the water and then starting to pick it back up almost immediately. At the time that the study was done, he said, most fishermen would put down lines and leave them for an hour or so before retrieving them.

“Once we did the study, we had some of the scientists come down from the Pascagoula Lab [which NOAA operates in Mississippi] and give presentations,” Brooks said.

Brooks said fishermen he knows have become more receptive to research-based evidence about fishing techniques in the wake of a fairly traumatic experience in 2009 and 2010. The region’s regulatory organization, the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council, shut down longline fishing — the standard method used by commercial fishermen in the area — for a year and a half because of problems with the turtle population. Brooks said he and his colleagues had to switch to a different, less efficient style of fishing.

“We were able to continue working, but everybody about starved to death,” he said.
After the ban went into effect, Brooks said, the fishermen came up with a lot of ideas to reduce turtle deaths, but by then it was too late.

Now, he said, many fishermen have decided to get out in front of potential regulations by developing innovative techniques and working with scientists to prove their value.

In the Gulf and elsewhere, the range of technological innovations that have emerged in recent years is kind of dazzling, from magnets that repel sharks from fishing lines to tracking devices that let consumers go online and trace their fish back to the boat that caught it, verifying its legal, sustainable origins.

Not everyone is on board with conservation measures, technology-based or otherwise. Foster said that, in any group of fishermen he works with, there are some who support the kinds of efforts he works on and some who oppose them.

“I think you see a whole spectrum of opinions,” he said.

Bob Jones, executive director of the Southeastern Fisheries Association in Tallahassee, Fla., falls on a different part of the spectrum than Pruitt and Brooks. He sees the fishing industry being singled out because of pressures from environmental groups. Jones said fishermen are a relatively benign force compared to seismic testing by oil and gas companies, which has been implicated in the death of whales and other marine mammals.

“We kill one turtle, they want to put us in jail,” he said.

Jones said he doesn’t see the unintentional killing of non-target species as a big issue in the U.S., and believes much of the industry’s bad press comes from other countries’ practices. But he said his organization doesn’t want to fight against all regulation. Instead, it aims to have the government to conduct scientific tests to back up whatever conservation measures are put in place. If there’s no good science, he said, rules tend to err on the side of protecting species at the expense of fishermen.

Bart Niquet, a fisherman from Lynn Haven, Fla., is another doubter about government regulations.

“According to scientists, bluefin are scarce,” he said. “According to fishermen, there’s more out there than they’ve ever seen.”

Still, Niquet sees a certain amount of value in the work being done by conservation-minded scientists and fishermen. Not long ago, new regulations (based partly on the sort of work that Brooks took part in) limited the length of fishing line that Niquet could use to four miles, or 750 hooks. The idea is that, with shorter lines, fishermen can pull them in more quickly, reducing damage to turtles and protected fish. Niquet said instead of putting out two lines a day, his boat now does five or six. It’s more work, he said, but he gets a better price for the fish he brings in now.

“Our fish, when they come on board, are just red hot,” he said. “They’re really alive.”

While Niquet is annoyed at some aspects of technical change and grudgingly appreciative of others, Brooks said his group is pushing hard for more change. Unlike yellowfin fishermen, operations like Brooks’, which go after smaller fish, aren’t required to use weak hooks. But Brooks said his group has been working with manufacturers, trying to figure out a way to make a smaller version of a weak hook that would work for them.

“We just want to fish sustainably,” he said. “We don’t want to be catching anything that is listed endangered or protected.”

Main photo credit: TANAKA Juuyoh/Flickr