Ecological TradeOffs in the Eastern Pacific Ocean

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Ecological Trade-Offs in the Eastern Pacific Ocean
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Different Types of Gear and Their Bycatch

• Longline
• Purse Seine

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Yellowfin Tuna School
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Medium Artisinal (MA) longline vessels. 359 as of
May, 2001.
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Advanced Artisinal (AA) longliner
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Longliner in Samoa
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Olive ridley sea turtle, hooked by a Costa Rican
mahi-mahi longliner.
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Speedboat
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3 Methods of Purse-Seine Fishing

• 1. Dolphin Sets
• 2. School / Unassociated Sets
• 3. Floating Objects
• 3.a. Logs
• 3.b. Floating Aggregator Devices (FADs)

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Dolphins trapped in purse seine net
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Dolphin Mortality in ETP, 1960-2000
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Backdown Procedure
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Purse Seine Discards
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Tuna discards
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Assumptions for Discussion

• Assume tuna will be caught in the EPO and eaten
• If not by you, then by millions of school kids
  who eat tuna sandwiches
• Working class Mexicans, for whom tuna is a wage
  good

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Questions

• 1. What kind of purse seine fishing?
• What is the bycatch?
• What are the species and ecological
• trade-offs?
• Floating object?
• School?
• Dolphin?

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• 2. If only school (unassociated) sets, which
  minimize bycatch, then what happens to overall
  supply of tuna for consumption and to prices?
• Who bears the burden?
• School kids?
• Working class?
• What happens to real incomes and nutrition?

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3. Which purse seine set type has the greatest
ecological impact?
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• FAD discards are in deep waters, so fall to
  bottom of ocean and not available to surface
  ecosystem
• Takes 300 years to recycle and become available
  to surface ecosystem

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4. Which gear type, purse seine or longline?

• If longline, then sea birds and sea turtles are
  incidental mortality.
• Save dolphins, sea turtles, or sea birds?
• Purse seiners are capital intensive and owned by
  larger companies or state companies.
• Longliners are smaller and more likely owned by
  smaller companies.

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5. Which is more important, flipper or an
endangered sea turtle or endangered albatross?

• What types of values do we place on each?
• Anthropogenic? Other?
• Values expressed through democratic or other type
  of political process?
• Are values of all citizens equally important?
• What if Red State citizens dont care?
• Prices formed through market activity?
• Most profitable set type and only use values
• Total economic value?

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5. Which ecosystem do we degrade?

• Where do we get the protein? From grains and
  soybeans in mono-cultured, chemical farms on the
  great plains or river basins of the world?
• What about those ecosystems?

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5. Which ecosystem do we degrade?

• Trade-offs are not just within an ecosystem, such
  as EPO, but between ecosystems on a global scale
  because of globally inter-connected markets

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Which ecosystem do we degrade?
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Theres No Free Lunch

• Only trade-offs among ecologically damaging
  choices