In determining the health of fish populations, accurate information is essential. But the state of Hawai’i, to which falls the responsibility to collect data on catches of all fish landed in Hawai’i (including fish caught in federal waters), has a history of not cooperating well with the requests of the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council to improve the quality of information the state requires fishermen to provide.
On at least two occasions, the state Department of Land and Natural Resources’ Division of Aquatic Resources has agreed to require – and then has backed away from – improved catch report forms.
Now the state has once again promised to require more and better reporting from its fishermen. Whether this will be enough to satisfy the regional council’s needs remains to be seen.
Garbage In, Garbage Out
NMFS and the regional council are concerned over indications that bottomfish stocks in the Main Hawaiian Islands maybe in poor health, but the dispute over data has consequences for bottomfish management in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands as well. That is because all commercial fishermen (including those having permits to fish in the limited entry areas of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands) report their catches to the state Division of Aquatic Resources. Without good data, determining the health of the fish stocks becomes difficult, if not impossible.
When the regional council adopted its bottomfish fishery management plan in 1986, it considered establishing data reporting requirements for vessels fishing in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands over and above the requirements imposed by the Division of Aquatic Resources. In the end, to avoid creating “new data reporting burden for fishermen” the council decided that, with recommended improvements, the state data collection system would be sufficient for making the kind of determinations needed in its annual fishery report. If the improvements did not occur, then the regional council would consider imposing its own data reporting requirements, the plan stated.
The hoped-for improvements in state data collection did not occur. By all accounts, the data generated by the state’s present catch reporting requirements are inadequate.
Where are the deficiencies?
The state has no idea what the total bottomfish catch is. Only commercial fishermen are required to file monthly reports. Some 4,000 fishermen possess commercial licenses, while the actual number of fishermen deriving part of their income from fishing may be three times that number. Any fishermen selling any part of his catch is supposed to obtain a commercial license and file the required reports, but few do. Thus, the catch figures reported to the state are generally thought to be far smaller than actual hauls. How much of a difference there is is anyone’s guess.
Even when reports are filed, they are prone to be inaccurate. Reports are to be filed monthly. When reports come in late, as occurs frequently, they often will reflect little more than the fisherman’s best guess of when and where his haul was caught.
The catch report forms provide blanks in which the fishermen are to write the names of the species caught. This leads to further inaccuracies in the reports, since common fish names can refer to more than one species of fish.
Resistance
From the time the bottomfish fishery management plan took effect to the present, the state’s weak data collection system has been regularly criticized by the National Marine Fisheries Service and the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council. In fact, in the late 1980s, NMFS’ Honolulu laboratory abandoned research on bottomfish in the Main Hawaiian Islands because “the data was so very poor and inadequate,” and, in any case, “essentially all waters were outside the area of federal jurisdiction.”1
By 1990, the Bottomfish Plan Team (an advisory panel to the regional council) recommended that fishing vessels in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands be required to keep logbooks that met federal reporting needs, including information on vessel interaction with protected species such as sea turtles, monk seals, and dolphins. In 1991, this recommendation was seconded by the council’s Scientific and Statistical Committee. That same year, council staff reported, “All council advisory groups have previously agreed that collecting improved and comprehensive data on the important managed fish stocks is urgent. The council must now encourage the state to help create a requirement for all fishermen (‘recreational’ and ‘commercial’) to be licensed and report or cooperate with surveys to determine essential catch and effort information.”
In June 1992, the state published the Hawai’i fisheries Plan for 1990-1995. That plan, prepared by a private consulting firm, was emphatic in its criticisms of the Division of Aquatic Resources’ data collection efforts. “There is growing concern over the adequacy of the information available to assist management decisions, particularly in the inshore areas of the [Main Hawaiian Islands].” Among the recommendations contained in the plan was that the state “develop a sound division of labor between the DAR and the NMFS to collect and analyze the fishery and biological data needed to produce a management plan for MHI bottomfish. “To provide some handle on the amount of fish caught by unregulated recreational fishermen, the state was urged to “through contract, develop the methods and procedures for a creel-sampling program capable of providing reliable statistical information on catch and effort from recreational subsistence fishermen, and other users as needed.”
Toward the end of 1992, the state and the federal regulators appeared to be in agreement on a revised catch form. At the council’s meeting of December 7, the new forms were approved along with the council’s urging that they be put into use at the earliest possible date. Later that month, then Land Board Chairman William Paty (also a member of the Council and its former chairman) instructed Henry Sakuda, administrator of the Division of Aquatic Resources, to “implement” the new forms.
Backing Off
But two months later (roughly coinciding with Paty’s departure from the DLNR), Sakuda informed Gary Matlock, acting regional director of the National Marine Fisheries Service, that the state would stick with its old forms. At the time, Sakuda said, the state was preparing bid specifications for printing our commercial fishery catch report forms for the next fiscal year…. With little time to make changes, I have decided to stay with our present form for now.” More important than changing catch forms, Sakuda told Matlock, was the need to “attain complete issuance of commercial fishing licenses to those that sell their catch” and to get fishermen to file their monthly reports in more timely fashion. In any event, he added, “severe budgetary restrictions imposed on our current programs by the ‘no growth’ fiscal policy preclude us to make the necessary changes to our existing system at this time.” If WesPac desired better information, Sakuda said, the council would have to collect it on its own.
In response, council staff drew up proposed regulations that would improve the catch report forms for vessels fishing in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. But when the new form was submitted to Matlock last summer, he refused to sanction the change.
Resolution?
In January 1994, Sakuda, under pressure from NMFS, made a new proposal to the regional council: the state would reintroduce an earlier catch form (Form C-3 dating from the late 1940s) which, with an additional form reporting trips and sales figures, would address the regional council’s desire for improved data. In early February, the Division of Aquatic Resources began mailing the forms and explanatory letters to commercial fishermen.
Whether that will be enough to meet the data demands of the regional council is uncertain. The forms, if properly filled out, may allow a better determination of catch per unit effort. However, the forms continue to require fishermen to write down names of fish caught, instead of having the fish names printed on the forms. In addition, there is no place to report interactions with protected species.
Regional council staff will be reviewing the data as they come in. If, at the end of the year, the data continue to be of poor quality, the council may try again to impose stricter reporting requirements. With a new regional director at NMFS (Matlock left earlier this year), the council may receive a more sympathetic hearing on its request than it received in the past.
1 Draft rules for minimum size for opakapaka, Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council (March 1993), page 12.
— Patricia Tummons
Volume 4, Number 9 March 1994
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