Accurate catches and the sustainability of coral reef fisheriesDaniel Pauly and Dirk Zeller

Available online at www.sciencedirect.com

ScienceDirect

1 Muro-ami fishing is a method wherein a coral reef is completely

encircled with a fine mesh net and the reef is then smashed to bits with

stones attached to ropes, such that the fish previously hidden in the

reef’s crevices are caught in the net [6].2 However, the claim by Johannes that the Palau fisheries he described

are sustainable cannot be tested because ‘‘Words of the Lagoon’’, as the

title may imply, does not present any numbers to describe actual

catches.

While there might be differences in details, any definition of

‘sustainability’ must include an element that remains similar

over time. For example, this applies to the catches of coral reef

fisheries, which cannot be sustainable if exhibiting a strong

ascending or descending trend. Thus, despite claims of the

efficacy of ‘data-less’ management, at least time series of the

catch of coral reef fisheries must be known for valid inferences

on their status to be drawn. By contrasting the official and the

‘reconstructed’ coral reef catches of four small island states

(Fiji and Tonga in the Pacific, and Jamaica and St Kitts & Nevis

in the Caribbean), we show, however, that official catch data,

as made available to and by the Food and Agriculture

Organization of the United Nations (FAO) not only strongly

underestimate catches (from 4 to 17 times for 1950–2010), but

also suggest increasing catch trends in 3 of 4 cases, that is, the

very opposite of the trend resulting from the bottom-up catch

reconstructions. Some implications of these findings, which we

think have general currency, are presented.

Addresses

Sea Around Us Project, Fisheries Centre, University of British Columbia,

2202 Main Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z4

Corresponding author: Zeller, Dirk (d.zeller@fisheries.ubc.ca)

Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 2014, 7:44–51

This review comes from a themed issue on Aquatic and marine

systems

Edited by Georgios Tsounis and Bernhard Riegl

S1877-3435/$ – see front matter, # 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights

reserved.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2013.11.027

IntroductionResearch on sustainability has numerous dimensions, one

of them being semantics — for example, what does

‘sustainable fishing’ mean, if anything? Clearly, industrial

fishing, especially trawling, which began around the Eng-

lish coast at the end of the 19th century, has never been

sustainable in the sense that a given stock was exploited

at any given place for a long period [1��,2]. Rather,

trawlers could maintain their unprecedented high catch

rates only by expanding the scope of their operation, first

to the open North Sea, then the wider North Atlantic all

the way to Iceland, where in the 1930s, they began to

exploit stocks which Icelanders perceived as theirs [3].

Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 2014, 7:44–51

Such expansion is a characteristic of industrial fishing, and

has led to a number of distant-water fishing nations to

deploy vessels operating even in Antarctic waters [3,4�,5].

Industrial-scale exploitation of coral reef fisheries

resources, on the other hand, is quite rare outside of

muro-ami operations,1 which however leave only coral

rubble in their wake, and therefore do not need to be

discussed in the context of sustainability. Thus, the

question that could be posed instead is: how sustainable

are small-scale coral reef fisheries?

A famous biologist-turned-maritime-anthropologist, Bob

Johannes, suggested that coral reef fisheries in the tropical

Pacific were sustainably managed, without ‘western

science’ [7], because of the deep traditional knowledge

of the people who had exploited and managed these

resources for centuries [see also [8]]. Work by others,

for example, in the South Pacific [9,10] and in Hawaii and

Florida [11], tends to support this claim.2

However, traditional modes of exploitation of reef resources

have faded away, or have been actively suppressed by

colonial powers [9,10], and while there are numerous

current efforts to revive them throughout the Pacific, the

context within which coral reef fisheries operate is generally

very different from that of pre-colonial (or pre-contact)

times. Thus, these fisheries are currently conducted with

motorized boats and modern gear, and can land fish in port

cities with airports ready for marketing internationally — a

far cry from the situation prevailing before, when lineage or

village chiefs could prohibit fishing on certain reefs, and

where one’s village was the only outlet for the fish caught

during a trip with an un-motorized craft [9,10].

As for the Caribbean, the wholesale replacement of the

Amerindian inhabitants by populations initially lacking a

connection with the sea (mainly Sub-Saharan African

farmers) prevented the continuation of any traditional

approaches to managing coral reef fisheries. Moreover, in

the Caribbean, but to a certain extent also in the Pacific,

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Coral reef fisheries catches and sustainability Pauly and Zeller 45

profound changes in land tenure created a large number

of surplus farmers (i.e. underemployed young men) for

whom fishing became, in recent decades, an occupation of

last resort [12�,13].

Combined with a strong population and income growth,

these trends generated, in the last decades an immense

demand for fish, both local and international, and a huge

increase in fishing effort to meet that demand. Fisheries,

which had arguably not needed any sort of scientific input

[8] became so intensive that they induced massive

changes on the underlying coral reef ecosystem [14��].

We argue that under such conditions (i.e. high-perform-

ance modern gear, disappearance of strict traditional fish-

ing rules, and even international marketing of catch),

notions of ‘data-less’ management become questionable

and likely cannot ensure sustainability, however defined.

Indeed, for such fisheries, sustainability is in many cases

not an issue any more; the challenge is rather the rebuild-

ing of exploited populations [15]. Moreover, whichever

way the challenge is defined, once the notion of ‘data-less’

management is abandoned, the question becomes: which

data are necessary for the management of coral reef

fisheries?

Given the scarcity of resources (both financial and tech-

nical) in most tropical countries that have coral reefs,

highly technical and expensive data regimes, such as

those required for traditional stock assessments and

extensive fisheries-independent surveys, have been and

likely continue to be unavailable and unobtainable. This

leaves these countries with the most fundamental and

most basic of all fisheries data, namely data on total

catches (and secondarily, data on fishing effort). However,

to date, comparative studies of coral reef fisheries have

been generally based on catch (actually ‘landings’) stat-

istics made public by the Food and Agriculture Organ-

ization of the United Nations (FAO), themselves based

on voluntary questionnaires and spreadsheets submitted

annually by FAO member countries [16]. However, these

‘catch’ data supplied by countries are usually highly

incomplete and/or inaccurate [17–20,21�,22–26], especi-

ally for small-scale fisheries such as those exploiting coral-

reef fishes.

Here, we document that the scope of the inaccuracies in

reported landings data implies that the authorities in

question do not know the key variable of the fisheries

they are supposed to manage, that is, the catch. Thus,

they cannot ensure their sustainability, even if they had

otherwise the means to do so (legislation, civil service,

budget, etc.).

Materials and methodsThe catch from the domestic, small-scale (i.e. artisanal,

recreational and subsistence) fisheries of Fiji [27], Tonga

www.sciencedirect.com

[28], Jamaica [29], and St. Kitts & Nevis [30] (Figure 1)

were ‘reconstructed’ for 1950–2010 based on the concept

in Pauly [31] and the approach outlined in Zeller et al.[21�]. The former posits that:

� There is no fishery with ‘no data’, because a fishery, as a

social activity with a ‘fish catching’ component, will

always impact on other sectors of an economy, such as

employment, seafood supply, or fuel requirements.

Thus, it is nearly always possible to infer, if grossly, the

magnitude of the catches of a fishery.

� It is always worse to put a value of ‘zero’ (i.e. to say

nothing about its catch) for the catch of a poorly

documented fishery than to estimate its catch, even

roughly, because subsequent users of one’s statistics

will interpret the zeroes as ‘no catches’, rather than

‘catches unknown’. This even applies to actual entries

of ‘no data’, which subsequently get treated as ‘zero’

catch.

Based thereon, the approach of Zeller et al. [21�] for

reconstructing catches details a 6-step process, general-

ized and summarized as:

1) Identification, sourcing and comparison of existing,

reported catch times series:

a. FAO reported landings data by FAO area, taxon

and year;

b. National data series by area, taxon and year.

2) Identification of sectors (e.g. subsistence), time

periods, species, gears etc., not covered by (1), that

is, missing data components. This is conducted via

extensive literature searches and consultations with

local experts;

3) Sourcing of available alternative information sources

on missing data identified in (2), via extensive searches

of the literature (peer-reviewed and grey) and

consultations with local experts. Information sources

include case studies, anthropological and social

science studies, reports, data sets and expert knowl-

edge;

4) Development of data ‘anchor points’ in time for each

missing data item, and expansion of anchor point data

to country-wide catch estimates;

5) Interpolation for time periods between data anchor

points, either linearly or assumption-based for com-

mercial fisheries, and generally via per capita (or per-

fisher) catch rates for non-commercial sectors; and

6) Estimation of total catch times series, combining

reported catches (1) and interpolated, country-wide

expanded missing data series (5).

The country-specific technical reports cited above (and

available under ‘publications’ at http://www.seaaroundu-

s.org/about/) provide details on how the approach of

Zeller et al. [21�] was applied to each specific island. As

Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 2014, 7:44–51

46 Aquatic and marine systems

Figure 1

Fiji Tonga

Jamaica St. Kitts & Nevis

N

50-metre depth

IFA

EEZ

Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability

The four examples of coral reef fisheries dependent island countries examined here, that is, Fiji [27] and Tonga [28] in the western Pacific, and Jamaica

[29] and St. Kitts & Nevis [30] in the Caribbean. Each has an Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ; black line, medium blue waters) extending beyond the

coastal and coral reef areas emphasized here. Maps show the 50 m depth contour (in red) indicative of ‘reefy’ areas, as well as the Inshore Fishing

Areas (IFA, dark blue) defined as those waters that are either less than 50 km from shore, or less than 200 m deep, and whose adjacent land is

inhabited. The IFA represents the general area used by small-scale fisheries in a country, which usually extends beyond the areas of living coral reefs.

Note that the offshore banks (e.g. Pedro bank) to the south-west of Jamaica are regularly and intensively fished by Jamaican small-scale fishers, and

hence are also treated as IFA, despite being more than 50 km from Jamaica.

two (Fiji and Tonga) of the four examples had original

reconstructions ending before 2010, these reconstructions

were carried forward to 2010:

Fiji: To update the reconstruction for Fiji [27] to 2010

from the original end year of 2009, the 2010 FAO data

were used as the reported catch baseline. In recent years,

essentially all target-species catches that were landed

were also reported, thus only large-scale commercial

by-catch and discards were unreported for 2010. Landed

by-catch and discards for 2010 were calculated based on

the proportion of 2009 landed by-catch and discards,

respectively.

Tonga: The reconstruction for Tonga [28] originally went

to 2007, and required carrying forward to 2010 by using

Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 2014, 7:44–51

the FAO data as the reported landings component. The

ratio between the FAO reported component and total

reconstructed catches for 2007 was applied to the FAO

data for 2008–2010 to estimate the total reconstructed

catches for these years, that is, proportionality was

assumed. The unreported catches for 2008–2010 were

then assumed to be the difference between the reported

FAO data and the estimated total catches.

The key references used for the reconstruction of catches

of each country (Table 1) are presented by fisheries

component, these being large-scale commercial (or

‘industrial’), small-scale commercial (i.e. artisanal), sub-

sistence, discards and recreational/tourist. This allows for

rapid comparison of the source type. Since the reconstruc-

tions were conducted by these fisheries components, and

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Coral reef fisheries catches and sustainability Pauly and Zeller 47

Table 1

Key references used for the reconstruction of catches of the four island countries examined here, presented by fisheries components

used during the reconstruction

Fisheries component Fiji Tonga Jamaica St. Kitts & Nevis

Large-scale commercial [40,41] [42–44] [45–48] N/A

Small-scale commercial [49–51] [44,52,53] [48,54–57] [58–61]

Discards [62] N/A [63] N/A

Subsistence [50,64–67] [50,68–74] [75–77] [78]

Recreational N/A N/A [79,80] [81–84]

Other [85–87] [88] [89,90] [91]

then summarized for the present purpose into coral reef

and no-reef fisheries using taxonomic affiliation with coral

reefs, we refrained from presenting the data anchor points

graphically, as this would create a disconnect with regards

to the present reef versus non-reef emphasis.

Figure 2

Coral reef fisheries

Coral reef fisheries

Non- reef fisheries

Non- reef fisheries

Fiji

Jamaica

FAO

FAO

19500

10

20

30

40

50

60

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

1960 1970 1980

Year

Cat

ch (

t •10

3 )C

atch

(t •

103 )

1990 2000 2010

1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010

Time series of fisheries catches from 1950 to 2010 for Fiji and Tonga in the P

showing in each case the reconstructed coral reef fisheries catches (light gr

billfish catches; dark grey), with official catches as reported by FAO on beh

www.sciencedirect.com

Results and discussionEach of the four islands had small-scale (coral reef)

catches that were strongly underreported in official stat-

istics. Irrespective of how one feels about the methods

and assumptions used in the catch reconstruction

19500

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1.0

1.2

1.4

1.6

1.8

2.0

1960 1970

Coral reef fisheries

Coral reef fisheries

Non- reef fisheries

Non- reef fisheries

St Kitts & Nevis

Tonga

FAO

FAO

1980

Year

1990 2000 2010

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010

Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability

acific (top), and Jamaica and St. Kitts & Nevis in the Caribbean (bottom),

ey), as well as non-reef fisheries catches (mainly large pelagic tuna and

alf of each country overlaid as a solid line.

Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 2014, 7:44–51

48 Aquatic and marine systems

Table 2

Key data for the four island countries examined here, presenting size of the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), size of the Inshore Fishing

Area (IFA)a, human population (1950, 2010), and average coral reef fisheries catches, averaged for the 1950s and 2000s.

Country EEZ (km2) IFA (km2)a Human population Mean coral reef

catch (t)

Source

1950 2010 1950s 2000s

Fiji 1,280,000 43,300 287,000 905,000 41,000 29,000 [27]

Tonga 665,000 7800 46,000 106,000 4400 4600 [28]

Jamaica 263,000 13,400 1,380,000 2,700,000 44,000 30,000 [29]

St. Kitts & Nevis 10,200 630 44,000 50,000 1600 840 [30]

a The Inshore Fishing Areas (IFA) is defined as those waters that are either less than 50 km from shore, or less than 200 m deep, and whose adjacent

land is inhabited This definition is a slight modification from that in [92].

summarized in Figure 2, the scale of official under-

reporting was substantial. This is especially true for earlier

time periods, where the reconstructed total catches were

between nearly 4 fold higher for St. Kitts & Nevis to over 17

fold higher for Fiji compared to reported catches (Table 2,

Figure 2). However, even by the 2000s, three of the four

countries continued to miss substantial coral reef fisheries

catches in their reported data (between 50% and >100%;

Table 2, Figure 2). Fiji, whose more recent reporting

efforts are commendable, was the exception.

Besides the quantity of unreported catches, the differ-

ence in the trends could not be starker. In contrast to the

FAO data, which in three of the four countries show a

steady and gradual increase in catches over time

(Figure 2), the reconstructed coral reef catches show

distinct, early time period peaks, ranging from the late

1950s (St. Kitts & Nevis) to the late 1970s (Jamaica),

followed, in all cases, by a strong decline.

In other words, the actual trajectory of coral reef fisheries

catches over time of our four countries, and by inference, of

other coral reef islands (see e.g. [19,22,26]), will usually be

radically different than suggested by official (FAO) data.

Thus, we suggest that inferences on the sustainability of

reef fisheries based on FAO data, however sophisticated

their rules for identifying the coral reef fraction of the catch

that countries report may be (as done, e.g. in [32]), cannot

provide the basis for detailed comparisons and/or infer-

ences on the status of reef fisheries.

Rather, assessment and comparisons of coral reefs fisheries,

in term of their sustainability or other metrics, should rely

— until the FAO member countries supply better catch

data on their coral reef fisheries — on primary catch data

[33,34], on carefully filtered secondary data [35] or on

bottom-up reconstructed data, as presented here.

Although there are some diverging opinions, as there are

on any issue, it is widely agreed that catch data are the first

and most important type of information one can obtain

about a fishery, for a number of reasons, the primary ones

being:

Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 2014, 7:44–51

1) Catches, when expressed as a weight per time for a

number of taxa, provide a scale for the fishery, and

anchor it onto the biology of the species reported in

the catch;

2) Catches, when re-expressed in terms of the ex-vessel

value of the catch, allow the economic contribution of

the fishery in question [36] to be evaluated and

assessed against the potential cost and benefits of

management intervention; and

3) Time series of catches allow, under certain conditions

and assumptions, for preliminary assessments of a

fishery using catch-data methods [37,38].

However, for these properties of catch time series to

apply, catches must be accurate, which is the real point

of this contribution. We suggest that authors, before

conducting comparative studies on coral reef fisheries,

should perform catch reconstructions as summarized

here, and as detailed in the cited papers.

Finally, we would like to argue that coral reef fisheries can

be made sustainable, as they are generally small-scale in

nature (with few exceptions, such as export oriented live

reef fisheries or muro-ami1 fisheries), and therefore they

have more local community linkages compared to large-

scale fisheries. This allows for community based initiat-

ives and local-scale management or co-management [39],

which can ensure sustainability. But again, this requires

that catch is regularly and comprehensively monitored/

estimated and accounted for [21�].

AcknowledgementsThe work leading to this contribution was funded by the Sea Around Usproject, a scientific collaboration between The University of BritishColumbia and The Pew Charitable Trusts.

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