New take on past fishing science?

The projected doomsday date for the collapse of world fisheries, outlined in a peer-reviewed, Science magazine research article that took on life of its own in countless alarmist stories about overfishing the oceans, "was not meant to be taken literally," the environmental group Oceana has claimed.

But if Boris Worm, the lead scientist of the 2006 study did not intend the 2048 date to be taken literally, he has indicated that he had an ulterior and non-scientific purpose for it — to gin up interest in the study.

In an e-mail he did not intend for the press, Worm admitted the use of the end-game date for functioning fisheries was as a "news hook." Even Oceana, whose chief e-mailed the press and last week about the figurative use of the 2048 time frame, used it as if the researchers had data documenting what they wrote.

While debunking the relevance of the date cited by Worm and his academic colleagues, Jim Simon, the acting CEO of Oceana, reiterated his belief that the paper, "Impacts of Biodiversity Loss on Ocean Ecosystem Services," was otherwise on the money.

Simon's critique of the paper, published in the Nov. 3, 2006 issue of Science was distributed to major media and a VIP e-mailing list last week.

The expressed purpose of Simon's mailing was to direct substantive attention to a paper published in Science last month by Worm, his former critic, Ray Hilborn and more than a dozen colleagues. Titled "Rebuilding Global Fisheries," the effort attempted to synthesize the status of world fisheries.

The compendium of statistical global research has been cited by the hard-line environmental community as showing a need to toughen up on overfishing and convert to "catch shares," a system of bringing private investment and principles into the management of wild resources.

The recent article also made clear that efforts to make fishing sustainable are working; nowhere in the new study is there a hint of doomsday.

Articles like the 2006 "Impacts of Biodiversity Loss on Ocean Ecosystem Services," where Worm and colleagues reported loss of biodiversity had put the oceans' ecosystems on a fast track to disaster, were condemned by Hilborn in "Faith-based Fisheries."

He named Science and Nature magazines for subordinating scientific due diligence to building circulation, and the large group of academic scientists working under subsidies and grants from the Pew Environment Group and its allies.

Hilborn made peace with Worm for the purpose of co-writing with a large team "Rebuilding Global Fisheries."

Science published it on July 31 with great fanfare. A favored theme of the coverage was the peace between Worm, and Hilborn whose essay on publishing and scientific ethics was published in the November 2006 issue of Fisheries. He excoriated both communities for working backward from desired conclusions.

Simon last week began his e-mail with the observation that "To the New York Times and other news outlets, a recent Science article was a story of human interest — two erstwhile adversaries finding common ground."

He urged the media to shift to the substance of both research papers.

Then Simon reviewed the earlier paper's most memorable point.

"Three years ago," Simon wrote, Worm and his colleagues "famously projected that the world's wild seafood supply was in danger of collapsing by the middle of this century if we continued overfishing at the current rate — in the year 2048 to be precise.

"Although it was never meant to be taken literally," Simon continued, "this conclusion was controversial to some, including one of Worm's biggest critics, Ray Hilborn, a fisheries professor at the University of Washington."

In a telephone interview Friday, Simon said he had inferred that the authors had not meant for the date to be taken literally — as much of the media, including the New York Times and Washington Post, had done in reporting on the two scientific papers.

The New York Times' Cornelia Dean anchored her article on the peaceful cooperative effort to the 2048 date, which rippled around the globe and took on a life of its own in the aftermath of the earlier paper. According to Google, there are 588,000 references to the 2048 date.

The Washington Post cited 2048 in its lead to the story about the earlier paper.

Even Oceania itself tied its coverage to the doomsday date.

It's spring 2007 magazine simply showed the date "2048" as a headline with the explanation below in the subhead: "Scientists predict collapse of world fisheries."

"The End of the Line," a graphically alarmist 2009 movie documentary, sponsored by Oceana and narrated by the actor and founder of Oceana Ted Danson, reiterates the doomsday date in promotional materials and interviews, mixed with ugly pictures of dead fish and hungry children.

The use of the date had a non-scientific goal, Worm conceded in an e-mail that was "mistakenly sent" to the Seattle Times and reported on by the Seattle Times soon after the earlier Science article was published.

Worm wrote to colleagues (and accidentally the Seattle Times) that the projection to the specific date for a collapse of fisheries could act as a "news hook to get people's attention."

At Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where Worm is a marine research ecologist and assistant professor, an assistant told the Times that Worm was mountain climbing and unreachable. Science did not respond to a Times request for its policy on the literalness of claims made in peer reviewed research papers that it publishes.

Jane Lubchenco, the national adminstrator for oceans and atmosphere, who at the time of the initial article's publication, was a professor at Oregon State University, seemed to take the claim literally.

"They are flagging a really serious problem," Lubchenco was quoted by the Washington Times as saying, "but I don't buy that extrapolation."

Lubchenco was a member of a working group, empaneled by the Environmental Defense Fund last year to write a fishing policy action agenda for the incoming Obama administration. The prescription was "catch shares," an approach that converts the publicly owned resource into a commodity, and is the focus of a regulatory transition in the New England Fishery and thus Gloucester.

The policy paper, named "Oceans of Abundance," grounded its radical transformation of the industry on the assertions of Worm and his colleagues.

Lubchenco and her colleagues asserted the existence of a "scientific consensus" that fishing was so altering the ocean ecosystems that food fish would be replaced by "swarms of jellyfish."

This initiative became the de facto policy of the Obama administration after Lubchenco was confirmed as head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. A task force empaneled by Lubchenco is now completing a national survey of ways that catch shares might be used in each of the nation's eight fishery regions.

The New England Fishery Management Council in June voted to make a partial conversion next year to catch shares for the portion of the industry that chooses to organize into voluntary cooperatives known as sectors.

The immediate reaction to the doomsday date paper was intense. Science devoted a large section of a later issue to various criticisms, including Stevan Murawski, the director of scientific programs and the chief science advisor at the National Marine Fisheries Service.

Murawski and his co-writers described part of Worm's paper as containing a "meaningless projection that does not incorporate a large number of complex factors."

In "Faith-based Fisheries," Hilborn wrote that "although the scientific community was unanimous in its condemnation of faith-based teachings in evolution, we need to also reject agenda-driven, faith-based publication in fisheries and revive the peer review and publication process within our own community.

"Let's go back to testable hypotheses and evidence," he said, "and make sure that the peer reviewers know the data and the problem, and are not chosen because of their faith."

Richard Gaines can be reached a rgaines@gloucestertimes.com

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