Anecdotes and the shifting baseline syndrome of fisheries.

F isheries have recently become a topic for media with global audiences-but then again, fisheries are a global disaster: one of the few that affect, in very similar fashion, developed countries with well-established administrative and scientific infrastructure, newly industrialized countries , and developing countries. This is quickly summarized: l Heavily subsidized fleets, exceeding by a factor of 2 or 3 the numbers required to harvest nominal annual catches of about 90 million tonnes. l Staggering levels of discarded bycatch, representing about one third of the nominal catch, a large unrecorded catch that perhaps raises the true global catch to about 150 million tonnes per year, well past most previous estimates of global potential. l The collapse, depletion or recovery from previous depletion of the overwhelming majority of the over 260 fish stocks that are monitored by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Fisheries science has responded as well as it could to the challenge this poses by developing methods for estimating targets for management-earlier the fabled Maximum Sustainable Yield (MSY)l, now annual total allowable catch (TAC) or individual transferable quotas (ITQ). If these methods are to remain effective, fisheries scientists need to follow closely the behavior of fishers and fleets, but this has tended increasingly to separate us from the biologists studying marine or freshwater organisms and/or communities, and to factor out ecological and evolutionary considerations from our models. There are obviously exceptions to this, but 1 believe the rule generally applies, and it can be illustrated by our lack of an explicit model accounting for what may be called the 'shifting baseline syndrome'. Essentially, this syndrome has arisen because each generation of fisheries scientists accepts as a baseline the stock size and species composition that occurred at the beginning of their careers, and uses this to evaluate changes. When the next generation starts its career, the stocks have further declined, but it is the stocks at that time that serve as a new baseline. The result obviously is a gradual shift of the baseline, a gradual accommodation of the creeping disappearance of resource species, and inappropriate reference points for evaluating economic losses resulting from overfishing, or for identifying targets for rehabilitation measures. These are strong claims that 1 can illustrate best by using analogies. For example, astronomy has a framework that uses ancient observations (including Sumerian and Chinese records that are thousands of years old) of …