Irish Fishers' Knowledge project:
Final Report and Overview of
Findings
Dr Brendan Flynn,
School of Political Science & Sociology, NUI, Galway
Email: brendan.flynn@nuigalway.ie
The 5th Annual Beaufort Marine ‐Economic
Workshop Tuesday October 21st, 2014
Research presented here has been supported by Marine
Institute funding as as part of the Irish Fishers' Knowledge
Project (2008-2013). Interviews were conducted by Dr.
Edward Hind, Ms. Emma Martin and Mr. Gavin Power.
2"
• What was the research project about?
• What is Fishers’ Knowledge (FK) and how can it
be useful to fisheries management?
• Why did this project examine the case of Celtic
Sea Cod and Galway/Aran Nephrops?
• What methodology was employed?
• What findings?
The Irish FK project
• Marine Institute & ESF/ERDF funded with FIF input; 2008-2012 timeline;
interview based study with 2 x PhDs focused on Aran (Nephrops) and
Celtic Sea (Cod) grounds: over 50 fishers interviewed.
• Draws on Canadian research post 1992 Cod Collapse: fishers have tacit
knowledge which can help stock assessment and management
practices....complements conventional top-down natural science driven
fisheries management (which failed)
• Our niche? We offer a qualitative methodology which assumes fishers
have knowledge to add to fisheries management-they are interviewed
individually to promote a reflective process-more like a discovery process
rather than traditional stakeholder participation.
So what is FK?
• Original work by Johannes (et al., 2008) stressed Fishers Ecological
Knowledge (FEK) where fishermen could provide some data on species
behaviour, some measures of abundance (or at least catchability), but also
how fishers developed their strategy over time and how they fish they way
they do. Can also provide historical data on 'shifting baselines' and useful for
guiding management practices such as the exact location of no take areas, or
what gear control measures will be accepted, work well or not.
• understanding and interpreting fishermen rather than fish. WHY fishermen are
fishing the way they are, other than with fairly simplistic assumptions about rational
optimising behaviour.
• FK should not be confused with Fishers Dependent Data collection.
• FK should not be conflated with participatory or co-management models of fisheries
management.
• FK not sufficiently precise to replace methods of stock abundance, but it might help
refine that process.
• FK is probably of much greater help in framing and shaping options for management
decisions.
Why study Celtic Sea Cod and the
Galway/Aran Nephrops grounds?
• Because we were asked to by FIF and MI!
• Because of speculation on impending imposition of a wider Cod Recovery plan
throughout entire Celtic Sea...following model of VIa, which was feared and
opposed by fishing interests.
• Because of a serious perception gap between MI long term assessments of
abundance of Cod Stocks downwards and powerful anecdotal fishermen's
reports of abundant Cod catches in years 2009-2011, creating a discard
"moral" problem and a demand for higher quotas.
• Were the fishermen wrong, misguided, lying? Was the MI missing something
as regards abundance? Who was right as regards Cod stocks, or was that
even the way to frame the problem? Could this gap in perception be
reconciled?
• Aran/Galway Nephrops ground was chosen because it was near, offered a
good first testing case, and was a type of species for which not many FK type
projects had been done (unlike Cod).
Methodology
• Semi structured interviews with identified fishermen (N = 50) .
• Fishers identified using BIM and industry "gatekeepers".
• We sought a range of age groups-retired fishermen were interviewed
• We sought a range of métier groups: fishers targeting Cod; Prawn men for
whom Cod was a bycatch; inshore Cod gill-netters, etc.
• We sought a geographical spread
• Questions were varied- generally started with career history, then moved to
collected data on boat size/engine development, to more specific questions on
gear, on estimations of catches, and then ended with a range of management
type questions.
• While interviewees could vary the conversation, in fact the interviews followed
a fairly set and standardized pattern.
Some general findings
"
"
"
Fishers Have FK!
Narratives of Abundance
While useful for hypotheses generation these are not scientific and cannot replace stock
assessment methods
FK can be relevant for the idea of 'shifting baselines'.
FK can provide evidence on Discards and Bycatch behaviour.
FK can provide information on gear practices-how they use the gear they have. Evidence of
conservation ethic.
FK reveals Fishers' rationality-bounded rationality evident. Do respond to price signals but
also satisficing activity as well.
Two areas to improve FK would be systematic and greater integration of GIS mapping and
stress on quicker turn around of data.
FK provided contextual history of a given fishery; it provides a useful reflection on fisheries
management policies; FK is good at answering why and how questions as regards fisher's
effort; give Fisher's voice in research
Jackson, Jeremy B.C., Karen E. Alexander,
and Enric Sala (2011) Shifting Baselines: "
The Past and Future of Ocean Fisheries.
Washington: Island Press. "
•
"Shifting baselines is a truly fundamental and revolutionary idea,
but the revolution has not yet happened because the challenges
are enormous. There are at least three impediments to change.
First, it is not enough to measure only what we see today because
some of the most important changes happened before scientists
began to measure them. Consequently, it is essential to adopt a
truly interdisciplinary approach, using a wide variety of data to
estimate past changes and understanding those changes in a social
and historical as well as scientific context. Second, shifting
baselines challenges long-established goals for management based
on simplistic concepts such as maximum sustainable yield (MSY). It
illustrates how past practices have destroyed healthy ecosystem
structure and function, lessons that must now be incorporated
into fisheries management. Third, shifting baselines makes us
uncomfortable because it places all of us squarely within nature
and holds us accountable for both past destruction and shaping
the future." (Jackson and Alexander, 2011, p.3)
FK and Shifting
Baselines idea"
"Narratives of abundance also fit well with the literature on 'shifting
baselines' (Jackson, et al, 2011) which argues that different generations of fishers
have varied awareness of abundance of species reflecting increased fishing effort
over time. Younger fishers do not miss fish species that are long gone, these having
been fished out be previous generations! In the Aran case
study, we gathered clear historic evidence that the fishery there has shifted its
baseline from a complex and diverse white fish type grounds, to one now heavily
dependent on Prawn catches, with white fish populations seemingly much smaller.
This historic shift was less evident in the Celtic Sea Cod case study."
IV: How big would the cod be?
F28: Yeh, as simple as that. Simple as that.
F28: You're talking from 2 to 5 or 6 pounds.
IV: So the cod would have been gone in '89 you say?
IV: This would be the 50s, 60s?
F28: The real cod, yeh. The big cod.
F28: That would be in the 70s.
IV: would that always have been good?
F28: That was always good until the late 80s, early 90s.
That was the spot all the smaller boats used to go to, and
then the big fellas, I can't say now, then the big boats
came in.
F28: oh yeh. And the bream then he went away. He
dropped off completely in '74 or '75 inside and outside the
island.
IV: And where would the bream be?
F28: The biggest bream country that time would be just
off the big island here and off here.
IV: How many small boats would have been there?
IV: And they've never been seen again?
F28: There could be anything up to 10 or 11 of say
between 30 and 36 foot long boats.
IV: They'd be all Spiddal boats?
F28: No, Spiddal and Galway. Now there's only 3 of us
working it, 3 off the 30 foot mark.
IV: With the cod and pollock, you said they dropped off
when the trawlers came in, did it drop off over a few
years?
F28: No, it would be a miracle. I don't know if you know
where the aeroplane went down, about 4, 4 and a half
miles off there, there's a rough there. About back there
and again very close here there is another rough running
that way. There was gurnard there and silver (hake?)
there and the odd one on the banks
there, just the odd one.
IV: The odd one on the Inverin Bank.
F28: No, about 1 year. 1 year. Once they started to get
them, they paired, and you know the area of that Bay, it's
only 6 miles wide.
F28: Yeh, but you don't get them now. You don't get a
bream now. The old man used to go out in the currach
and used to be bringing them in and salting them and
selling them here. It's a tragedy. There's no bream left.
IV: They must have been pulling in some amount of fish.
IV: And they'd have been?
F28: Oh God's sake.
F28: They were plentiful.
IV: They took them all out? Hundreds and hundreds of
boxes a day?
F13: We used to fish for whitefish in the North Sound years before that
and even Galway Bay. One of the best bays in Ireland for whiting. The
Scots boats used to come in from Scotland, and I just barely remember
them. There used to be white fish. And my father and all the Aran
trawlers it used to be great just for whiting. Now. Well the way it is
withthe white fish is it goes. It goes from the Bay St Patrick's Day and
then you get a month at the back of the island, but that's it then.
F8b: Well it's not what it used to be.
IV: You just don't see it do you?
"
F8b: You do, but there's nothing exciting. The Scots were the first to
come here. And this place was only second to Iceland at one time.
IV: This would have been the 60s would it?
IV: It used to be a great white fish fishery?
F8b: Well they were there before the French were there.
F13: Oh yeh it was.
IV: And that would have been?
IV: But that's it. It ended the end of the 60s you were saying?
F13: that's right. Ah no, but in the 80s.
IV: So people could still, your father could still go out and get plenty of
white fish
F8b: I'd say there was halibut, everything. They reckoned it was only
second to
Iceland what they were fishing. They reckon in the Gregory Sound, you
used to get halibut, you wouldn't even fit them into the boat, they were
that big.
up to the mid-80s say?
F8a: Yeh, but the climate's changed now.
F13: Yeh.
IV: You wouldn't get any halibut now?
IV: That would be just half a mile off, very close?
F8b: 2 since I've been fishing out there. 2 good ones.
F13: Oh yeh. Because he got the net caught, first tow, but seine-net
fishing you could go very close. Seine-net fishing you could do on the rock
like. Not trawling, because you'd bang the doors, you'd lose the gear right
away. Seine-net was way better fishing than trawling. You'd get twice.
And then the back of the islands used to be an aeroplane, and old steam
trawler, that was a great fishing area.
IV: What about monk?
F8b: Still there will be a time that monk will come on the ground.
Wouldn't be
too bad.
IV: Why did people stop using seine-nets?
IV: What I was gonna say to you was at any time while you were on it has
there
been a fish that's crashed, back in the 70s and 80s, but come back, do you
get me?
F8a: Megrim, we weren't getting any megrim, but they're plentiful now.
IV: But there weren't any in the 70s and 80s?
IV: What's the fish that has taken the biggest hit in this area here? Off
Aran? Inside?
F8a: No.
F8b: the prime fish I suppose. Black sole and turbot.
IV: But they came on in the 90s.
IV: They've been hammered have they?
F8a: yes. And the monk.
One final point:
the value of FK narratives of shifting baselines as a heuristic device for
getting fishers to accept that their fishing grounds need better
management, which may include ambitious long term goals such as
greater biodiversity, resilience and trophic level balances.
Bibliography
Bundy, A., & Davis, A. (2012). Knowing in context: An exploration of the interface of marine harvesters' local ecological knowledge with ecosystem
approaches to management. Marine Policy.
Boudreau, S. A. (2011). Documenting the local ecological knowledge of lobster fishermen in southwest Nova Scotia.
Boudreau, S. A., & Worm, B. (2010). Top-down control of lobster in the Gulf of Maine: insights from local ecological knowledge and research surveys.
Marine Ecology Progress Series, 403, 181-191.
Carr, Liam M., and William D. Heyman. (2012) "“It’s about seeing What’s actually out there”: Quantifying fishers’ ecological knowledge and biases in a
small-scale commercial fishery as a path towards co-Management." Ocean & Coastal Management (2012).
Cinti, A. W. Shaw, J. Torre (2010)‘Insights from the users to improve fisheries performance: Fishers’ knowledge and attitudes on fisheries policies in Bahı´a
de Kino, Gulf of California, Mexico’, Marine Policy 34 (2010) 1322–1334.
Jackson, Jeremy B.C., Karen E. Alexander, and Enric Sala (2011) Shifting Baselines: The Past and Future of Ocean Fisheries. Washington: Island Press.
Jackson, Jerem B.C. and Karen E. Alexander (20110 'Introduction: The importance of Shifting Baseline', pp.1-7 in Jackson, Alexander and Sala (Eds) (Op.Cit.)
Johannes, Robert E., Milton MR Freeman, and Richard J. Hamilton (2008) "Ignore fishers’ knowledge and miss the boat." Fish and Fisheries 1.3, pp.257-271.
Neis, Barbara (1992) "Fishers' ecological knowledge and stock assessment in Newfoundland." Newfoundland and Labrador Studies 8.2 (1992).
Nenadovic, Mateja, Teresa Johnson, and James Wilson (2012) "Implementing the Western Gulf of Maine Area Closure: The Role and Perception of Fishers’
Ecological Knowledge." Ecology and Society 17.1, p.20.
Maurstad, A. (2002). Fishing in murky waters—ethics and politics of research on fisher knowledge. Marine Policy, 26(3), 159-166.
Murray, G., Neis, B., & Johnsen, J. P. (2006). Lessons learned from reconstructing interactions between local ecological knowledge, fisheries science, and
fisheries management in the commercial fisheries of Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. Human Ecology, 34(4), 549-571.
Mathew, S. (2011). Fishery-dependent information and the ecosystem approach: what role can fishers and their knowledge play in developing countries?.
ICES Journal of Marine Science: Journal du Conseil, 68(8), 1805-1808.
Wiber, M. G., Young, S., & Wilson, L. (2012). Impact of Aquaculture on Commercial Fisheries: Fishermen’s Local Ecological Knowledge. Human Ecology,
1-12.