Oregon Sea Grant Video Transcript:
1. Question: What were the origins of modern fisheries management?
Response (Carmel Finley, UC San Diego): " After World War II, between 1945 and about 1958, fisheries was really in the forefront of a lot of foreign policy issues, not only with the United States but with Japan, with Latin America, with a number of foreign countries. And a number of policy decisions were made during that time that very much reflect these Cold War concerns and the understanding of science at this time."
2. Question: On what basis have fisheries been managed?
Response (Fikret Berkes, Natural Resources Institute, U. Manitoba): "We used to manage fisheries for fixed yields, for maximum sustainable yield. And the idea was to keep catches at a predictable level year after year. What we've found out, that in fact that leads to a loss of different stocks within a resource. Because, naturally stocks themselves go up and down."
3. Question:What's wrong with managing for stability?
Response (Dan Bottom, NOAA Fisheries): "We can't control every aspect of the lifecycle of the salmon. We can control it in a hatchery in fresh water, but once we release it, it has to withstand all kinds of disturbances in the estuary and in the ocean until it comes back.
"The problem, and the way we've managed in the past, is we've tried to force a system into a static stable condition that actually, in the long run, makes them much more unstable. The rest of the natural world has adapted to disturbance, so…ironically, when you try to stabilize it you make it less stable because pieces start falling out that are not capable of living within that narrow range that you've produced.
"Great examples have been some of the problems that occurred during Hurricane Katrina. The loss of the wetlands in that area is a very good example. The problems with the mangroves that have been destroyed in the areas in Asia during the tsunamis. All provide a resilience to those systems under…under catastrophic disturbances, in those cases, and the loss of that resilience that…the, uh…when we try to stabilize those systems by constructing massive structures on them by putting seawalls in those sorts of things end up actually making the systems the opposite of resilient; maybe what we'd say more brittle."
Question 4: What are some things that might jeopardize salmon resilience?
Response (Dan Isaak, USDA Forest Service): "Climate change is potentially going to have a huge effect on the resilience of aquatic ecosystems, because it's going to fundamentally change the world in which fish live. So, their distribution of habitats, when they exist in space and time, how they can access those habitats, all of the physical drivers that create those habitats, sustain those habitats, those potentially are gonna start to change in a way that they haven't changed before. And so we might actually see…some fishes being pushed to the brink of extinction; other fishes are gonna have increasing amounts of habitat created for them. So it's gonna create this dynamic flux in aquatic ecosystems all around us that…in a lot of ways is gonna be very difficult to predict."
Question 5: How have fishing communities become resilient?
Response (Irene Martin, Salmon For All, & St. James Episcopal Church): "I guess my definition for resilience would be survival. How…how do families in an occupational group survive from one generation to the next? And, what have I seen going on that helps that survival?
"When the dams went in, the summer Chinook runs they depended on started to really drop, they used their cannery connections on the Lower Columbia to buy permits in Alaska and fish very much for the same companies in Alaska that they'd fished for in the Columbia.
"And they've since carried that adaptation further. Um, in the 1990s when the ESA listings of salmon on the Columbia caused seasons to be curtailed, they carried that one step farther and some of them invested in other permits, in Alaska crab permits, shrimp permits, a variety of other permits. So they developed, basically, portfolios of permits based on an earlier adaptation that occurred, you know, back in the thirties and forties.
Question 6: How are salmon naturally resilient?
Response (Michael Healey, CALFED Bay-Delta Program): "All of the salmon species exist as small, relatively isolated breeding populations. And the resilience advantage of that is that several of those populations can be wiped out by some natural or manmade disaster. Uh, but there will still be others left that can re-colonize those areas, once they become suitable for salmon again.
"Second is that salmon have a relatively high reproductive capacity. So, again, if a population gets knocked down as a result of one of these disturbances, they can fairly quickly recover its abundance.
"Third is that many salmon populations exist in what we call a metapopulation where these small individual spawning groups are actually interconnected by the movement of animals among them. And…and in a metapopulation you can often have a situation where only some of the populations are actually productive and the others really sinks. They're receiving individuals from other productive sites. Salmon tend to have have relatively high genetic variation. And we know from studies that salmon can adjust genetically to changing environments quite quickly so they're able to track patterns changing environmental characteristics genetically.
"They're even more plastic phenotypically, another characteristic. While all the genetics takes a few generations to shift in relation to a change in environment, phenotypic change can occur very quickly in response to changing environments.
"Another characteristic that's important for resilience is the ability of these fish to be opportunistic about their use of habitat. So they will quickly take advantage of new habitat opportunities that are created for them.
"That's been particularly important for the wide distribution of salmon. We have to remember that ten thousand years ago much of North America was covered by ice and there were no salmon there. And in that relatively short period of time, as the glaciers receded over the last ten thousand years salmon have migrated into and occupied habitats that are essentially thousands of miles upstream in rivers that didn't exist ten thousand years ago.
"So, they do have this tremendous capacity to take advantage of their surroundings, to roll with the punches, you might say. Because the environments that they occupy are dynamic they have developed ways to capitalize on that dynamism and make it their own."
Question 7 : How can we foster resilience of resources and communities?
Response (Fikret Berkes, Natural Resources Institute, University of Manitoba): "More than other fisheries, salmon has to involve a…a broader public discussion, because… because it's on the coast, it's inland you've got recreational fisheries, you've got…you've got Native fisheries, so there…there are many user groups. You need more than just mere public participation; we need deliberative methods where you…where you involve a broad range of…of players, such as people who visit marine labs and who are knowledgeable and interested, who are going to help decision makers define the problem, talk about what kind of evidences would be relevant and… and help make some decisions, because these are not scientific decisions."
Question 8: Why should society be interested in resilience?
Response (Court Smith, Dept. of Anthropology, Oregon State University): "We should all be interested in the concept of resilience, because it adds a little different twist to the way we think about things. And if you look at the way that we've organized our thoughts on resilience, we have a human system interacting with a biocomplex system. If humans are going to survive over a long period of time, it's kind of our view you need to be able to adapt to change and disturbance, rather than trying to make everything stable as we have with our current policies.
"We tend to, you know, in fishery management, you know, try to stabilize the fishery resource so we can have it nice and predictable. We do the same thing with our agriculture. We're facing tremendous changes, in terms of climate, economic systems, globalization is moving all kinds of species around the world. So there's lot of very dynamic changes going on to which humans have to be really skillful in adapting, rather than trying to make the world over in some kind of image that they have for the future."
Question 9: How are religious groups approaching resilience?
Response (Irene Martin, Salmon For All,and St. James Episcopal Church): "A lot of churches have now become quiet sensitive and…and are calling themselves greening congregations. So they're looking at, you know, how are we heating the church? What's our source of light? What can we do, in the environment and the existing, what's our footprint on that environment?
"And then there are wider umbrella groups. Interfaith Network for Earth Concerns in Oregon, for example, and Earth Ministry in Washington, that are playing a more active role in… in leading diverse groups of churches; not just one denomination necessarily, but diverse groups of churches. And people who are not necessarily affiliated with a church, but have the same sorts of…of thoughts about it."
Question 10: What steps can society take to improve salmon resilience?
Response (Pete Bisson, USDA Forest Service): "Three things that we can do as a society to…to promote resilience are to allow for forest recovery in areas that are appropriate within watersheds. And those really include the riparian zones of headwater streams and, where we can, the floodplain of large river systems. So that's one key.
"The second key is to maintain the kind of complexity of habitats that the…that the fish developed in. These are…This is an area that has a remarkable diversity of habitat types because of our long and… and varied disturbance history. So we want to keep those things around. And the comment that one of the other speakers made about removal of beaver is very apropos here, because those kinds of…of habitat…created habitats that are called biogenic, they're created by animals and plants, are extremely important for…for fish as seasonal environments.
"And then the third the third leg of resilience in fresh water ecosystems would be… a connectivity. And in the case of the smaller streams that means upstream, downstream connectivity so that part of the stream doesn't get blocked by some… some human development, such as a bad road culvert, or something like that, that blocks movement up and down the stream.
"Or in the case of floodplains it might mean removing those things that prevent connections between the river and it's floodplain. And that includes things like riprapping the banks or building up dikes and levies to prevent the… the river from spreading out during the times that normally it floods."
(end of interviews)
© 2007 Oregon Sea Grant,
Oregon State University