Concluding a weeklong tour of the West Coast, Kathy Sullivan, the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, spoke in Vancouver on Saturday about oceanic health at the Pacific Fisheries Management Council meeting.
During her visit to Vancouver, Sullivan stressed the oceans’ important role in providing oxygen and seafood.
“We are all ocean people one way or another,” she said during an interview after her address.
The oceanographer also discussed some local topics, including the nearby Columbia River and the health of its salmon. NOAA works with local water managers and tribes to monitor fish passage devices, habitats and predators.
Methods for making statistical assumptions about fishery conditions are fraying, Sullivan said, because they can’t keep up with quickly changing conditions. She would like to see improved modeling capabilities that could guide the future of fishing.
On Friday, she visited a marine debris cleanup event in Long Beach that was also attended by Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, R-Camas. Debris has been washing ashore since a 2011 earthquake and tsunami off the coast of Japan. NOAA heads the research, prevention and impact mitigation of marine debris.
At the opening of the meeting at the Hilton Vancouver Washington, Sullivan touted the upcoming anniversary of the Magnuson-Stevens Act, a 1976 law governing marine fisheries management in federal waters. The act is up for reauthorization in Congress. Its main aims are to prevent overfishing, rebuild overfished stocks, increase economic and social benefits, and keep the seafood supply safe and sustainable. The percentage of overfished stocks has declined, she said, and is now at 17 percent.
“Despite these successes, some of those fishermen who get their quota are still struggling to stay profitable with the different cost structures that come at them. Some of them come from the NOAA side,” Sullivan said. “We need to continue to keep an eye on anything we can do to lower the cost burden from the federal side.”
The work being done to improve the Pacific Ocean’s ecological and economic viability is multifaceted, as Sullivan found during her West Coast tour. She started the week in the San Francisco Bay area where tidal restoration work is being done at Sears Point, Calif. From there, she went to the University of California, Davis’ Bodega Marine Laboratory, where they’re attempting to preserve the endangered white abalone, a shellfish. On Wednesday, she — along with California Gov. Jerry Brown, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown and U.S. Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell — signed an agreement on removing four hydroelectric dams along the Klamath River, which runs through Oregon and Northern California.
“That’s three years of really hard work when a prior agreement unraveled,” Sullivan said. The participants “pulled themselves back together and found an alternate way.”
On Thursday, she went to Newport, Ore., where she talked with fishers about the issues they faced, and went aboard a crabbing vessel.
Changing patterns
During her Hilton Vancouver Washington visit, Sullivan discussed some of those issues facing fishers, and the challenges of changing oceanic conditions.
“It’s getting warmer, and it’s getting more acidic,” Sullivan said. “As it gets warmer, as rainfall patterns on land shift, all of the physical dynamics that shape ocean currents also can shift. The circulatory pattern of the ocean as well as the thermal and salt structure of the ocean, all of that shifts. Sometimes, it’s a small shift. Sometimes, it’s a temporary shift. Sometimes, it could be a larger scale, longer term shift. That has many, many consequences.”
Predator-prey dynamics may be altered, as well as the health of fish stocks. Fish that live in particular temperatures and need particular food will move, which Sullivan said dislocates the seafood supply and local fishing businesses.
“If a farmer plants corn, the corn is probably going to stay in his field. If a fisherman has been fishing here and those (fish) all go there, it’s no longer your fish,” Sullivan said. “The fish will go where they can eat and where they’re thermally comfortable.”
Just imagine if we could understand the dynamics of our ocean ecosystem and the consequences they had on fish, she said. Maybe, “we could have a forecast a season or so out.”
“Maybe that’s a pipe dream, but it might be a realizable dream. In the 1850s, a gentleman was laughed out of the House of Commons for saying to the members of that body that someday it might be possible to know the weather in London 24 hours in advance.”
It’s a long-term solution that should be tackled alongside immediate issues, Sullivan said, though NOAA does not have much budget for that kind of research. Risk-based decision-making is easier in the weather domain where there’s more unanimity around mitigating weather risks, by saving lives and saving property. Managing a resource like fish comes with a more complex set of attentions and values, Sullivan said.
