By John Pappalardo
An anchoring principle of the Cape Cod Commercial Fishermen’s Alliance, which has held fast for more than three decades, is this basic belief:
The more that fishermen are involved in ocean science, helping define questions, seeking out answers, the better that science becomes. And science that people on the water believe is credible is the crucial element we need to make our fisheries sustainable, our habitat protection successful.
So when we joined fishermen, scientists, and fisheries managers a few weeks ago at the Sandwich pier to celebrate a $2 million grant to Fishermen’s Alliance that will fund dozens of fishermen’s efforts to partner with federal researchers, providing a wealth of great data about changing conditions in the Atlantic, well, that was one of those quiet signature moments that make the work worthwhile.
As my colleague Doreen Leggett reports in this month’s emag, this grant money, coming via the state-funded Massachusetts Technology Collaborative’s Innovation Institute, will ensure that scores of fishermen will be equipped with environmental sensors attached to their fishing gear, lobster traps, trawling nets. They’ll be reporting back on things like salinity, temperature, how the ocean’s depth changes these baselines. Myriad data points will build a mosaic of information that fishermen can use to help target where they want to go, and help fisheries managers better understand what’s going on out there, identify and maybe even respond to inevitable changes.
That’s great enough. There’s yet another personal reason to be glad and even proud about all this: Dr. George Maynard, leading this effort at NOAA Fisheries in Woods Hole, is one of many Fishermen’s Alliance alums who have gone on to great career growth after sharing life, times, and work here with us.
Way to be, George.
The oceans have always been mysterious, unpredictable. But as climate change continues to express itself, it seems that human impacts are creating even greater uncertainty.
Take for example this phenomenon called “warm core rings” that seem to be much more common and dramatic in the Gulf of Maine than ever before. In essence they are nodes of the warm offshore river we call the Gulf Stream that break off and slide west, warming up pockets of the closer water by 10 degrees or more. They arrive with little warning, rapidly, profoundly altering what’s happening, whether fish stick around, gear can stand up to the swirl, the area can sustain vegetation.
We can’t do much about these rings, but we can identify when they happen, warn fishermen of their arrival, and try to understand whether they are yet another expression of warming seas, yet another argument to try to slow down climate change.
That’s just one example of a great creative overlap: Fishermen want pragmatic information, to be smarter and more successful in their work. Scientists pursue understanding, to be smarter regardless of what their research reveals, to get at truth for its own sake.
Every time we find a way to combine those two goals, we become better. That’s our anchor.
(John Pappalardo is CEO of the Cape Cod Commercial Fishermen’s Alliance)