Fishing council questions monument’s spillover benefits

The Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council is again challenging the reported benefits of the Papaha­naumokuakea Marine National Monument — this time by directly questioning the legitimacy of a recent study on the spillover effects the monument’s expansion area has on marine life.

The Scientific and Statistical Committee, one of several advisory bodies to the council, also known as Wespac, in a meeting Tuesday spent about an hour criticizing a Science journal study that found that Papahanaumokuakea, covering the federal waters around the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, benefits not only marine life within the monument, but beyond its borders.

The authors of the study, which was published in October, essentially found that the number of yellowfin and bigeye tuna caught by fishers just outside and near the monument had increased significantly since the monument was expanded in 2016, even after considering population trends that had been taking place before the expansion.

The study received wide media coverage and was seen as a boon for conservation and marine protected-area advocates — and a problem for the fishery science community.

“Going to their basic conclusion that (tuna abundance) had increased more next to the monument than at a distance, we don’t find that. We don’t have the same basic results,” said Ray Hilborn, an SSC member and researcher at the University of Washington’s School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, in an interview with the Honolulu Star-Advertiser.

Hilborn, who was the primary presenter during Tuesday’s meeting, and other scientists had tried to replicate the findings of the study but could not. The committee said the inability to replicate the findings calls into question the study’s legitimacy.

SSC members also complained that the study didn’t explore other possibilities for why fish abundance may have increased.

“There could well be other environmental drivers we need to look at,” said SSC member Milani Chaloupka during the meeting. “The bottom line here, why Ray and others are doing this work, is that science has got to be about reproducibility. Just because someone publishes a paper and it gets lots of press all over the place because it’s got some catchy findings, things have to be reproducible.”

The SSC’s rebuke of the study set off an argument over proper data collection and interpretation.

John Lynham, a professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa’s Department of Economics and one of the study’s authors, called SSC’s critique a “total misrepresentation” of the study.

“I think Mr. Hilborn is being very selective in the data he is cherry-picking and how he is spinning it,” Lynham said in an email to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser. “It also doesn’t seem to match up with what any member of the general public can check by going to NOAA’s (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) website.”

Lynham noted that the study’s authors were not invited to the SSC meeting, but would have welcomed the opportunity to clarify any misunderstandings.

Wespac, a quasi-governmental body that has jurisdiction over fishery management plans for Hawaii, American Samoa, the Mariana archipelago, the Pacific Remote Island Areas and other federal waters, has long been a staunch opponent of marine protected areas in the Pacific Ocean.

There are four protected monuments in the Pacific, and the council has voiced its opposition to their creation and expansion; it opposed Papahanaumo­- kuakea’s expansion in 2016, and in September argued against a proposal to expand the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument, which encompasses federal waters around Baker, Howland and Jarvis islands; the Johnston, Wake and Palmyra atolls; and Kingman Reef.

In 2020 the council asked former President Donald Trump to lift the commercial fishing ban in the monuments.

Wespac members have argued that local economies in the Pacific are suffering because of an ever-shrinking fishing industry, in which fishers are being pushed out of more fishing grounds for the sake of conservation.

In Hawaii the longline fishing industry targets primarily tuna and brings in about $100 million annually.

That opposition has been met with its own pushback from environmental groups and elected officials, including Hawaii’s congressional delegation. The monuments have provided significant opportunities for environmental and cultural conservation and scientific exploration, they argue.

Fishery scientists, Hilborn said, aren’t even convinced that marine protected areas are providing any conservation benefits, and say that even if U.S. fishers are being blocked from fishing grounds, foreign fishers with less interest in conservation efforts will just take over.

The U.S. will then meet its seafood supply by buying the fish from foreign fleets.

“The U.S. and Australia stand out in how cautious we are, because we’re concerned about the environment, but all that means is that we’re importing more food from countries that don’t care about the environment,” Hilborn said. “Why are we doing this if all we are doing is exporting our environmental impacts somewhere else?”