ESSAY: PROFESSIONAL ISSUES

Faith-based Fisheries

554 Fisheries • VOL 31 NO 11 • NOVEMBER 2006 • WWW.FISHERIES.ORG

The scientific community gave a collec-tive sigh of relief just before Christmas2005 when Judge John E. Jones III ruledthat intelligent design is not a scientifictheory and cannot be taught alongside evo-lution as an alternative scientifichypothesis. There is no better way to uniteany group of fractious scientists than tobring up creationism and intelligent designas alternative scientific hypotheses—scien-tists know that these faith-based ideas arenot scientific and have no place in a scien-tific course. The court’s ruling is a triumphfor the scientific method of hypothesesbeing confronted by data and a setback forthose with a political agenda masqueradingas science.

However, before we congratulate our-selves too much for the triumph of thescientific method over belief, I suggest thefisheries community needs to look at itselfand question whether there is not a withinour own field a strong movement of faith-based acceptance of ideas, and a search fordata that support these ideas, rather thancritical and skeptical analysis of the evi-dence.

This faith-based fisheries movement hasemerged in the last decade, and it threatensthe very heart of the scientificprocess—peer review and publication inthe top journals. Two journals with thehighest profile, Science and Nature, clearlypublish articles on fisheries not for their sci-entific merit, but for their publicity value.Beginning in at least 1993 with an article Ico-authored (Ludwig et al. 1993), Scienceand Nature have published a long string ofpapers on the decline and collapse of fish-eries that have attracted considerablepublic attention, and occasionally gainingcoverage in the New York Times and theWashington Post. I assert that the peerreview process has now totally failed andmany of these papers are being publishedonly because the editors and selectedreviewers believe in the message, orbecause of their potential newsworthiness.

As examples, let me choose papers bywell-established professionals who havelong records of significant work beyond thepapers discussed below and I emphasize theproblem is with the peer review and edito-

rial system, not the authors of the papers.Casey and Myers’ paper on barndoor skate(Casey and Myers 1998) argued that theseskates were headed towards extinction.Analysis by others more familiar with thedata showed that the survey data camefrom areas that are not the core of the rangeof the species (Kulka et al. 2002), and sub-sequent evaluation of the status ofbarndoor skate in New England by theNational Marine Fisheries Service con-cluded they were not overfished (Boelke etal. 2005), hardly headed towards extinc-tion. A review by the CanadianDepartment of Fisheries and Oceansremoved barndoor skates from a list ofspecies that are threatened or endangered.The original paper has not been withdrawnand continues to frequently cited as anexample of near extinction of marinespecies.

Myers and Worm published a paper inNature (Myers and Worm 2003) whichmade the front page of major nationalnewspapers, purporting to show that largepelagic fish stocks around the world haddeclined rapidly and by the 1980s were atless than 10% of their historic abundance.Widely cited in the scientific and popularliterature, this paper raised a furor amongmany scientists specializing in pelagic fish-eries who knew the same data, knew it wasbeing misinterpreted, and knew there was alarge body of other data that contradictedMyers and Worm’s results. At least threeindependent critiques of the paper subse-quently have been published: Walters(2003), Hampton et al. (2005), andPolacheck (2006). The critics are not the“old guard defending their turf,” because itis not as if no one had noticed that thecatch-per-unit effort data Myers and Wormused had declined. Rather these criticshave themselves long been arguing thatsome of these fisheries are now depletedand overfished. What they criticized wasMyers and Worm’s analysis, their highlyselective use of data, and specific conclu-sions about the extent and timing ofdepletion of these stocks, not their concernabout overexploitation.

Conover and Munch (2002) publisheda highly cited paper in Science showing

experimental evidence that size-selectivefishing could induce growth changes in fishstocks and suggested this was a mechanismthat could lead to collapse of fish stocks.The article never looked at actual fisheriesdata to ask if the laboratory selectionregime imposed resembled what happens infisheries, nor did they look at the vast bodyof fisheries data which shows that fish morecommonly grow faster, not slower, whenfishing pressure is high.

A paper in Science (Roberts et al. 2001)purported to show an example of how amarine protected area (MPA) increasedyields outside the protected area, when infact the abundance of fish outside the pro-tected area increased within one year of theestablishment of the MPA. Any competentpeer reviewer would have seen the flaw inthis logic—the theory of MPA impacts onadjoining areas requires at least a genera-tion for abundance to build inside reservesand recruitment to spill out (Hilborn2002). The displacement of fishing effortfrom inside to outside the reserve shouldinitially cause abundance outside todecrease, so the increasing abundance out-side the reserve after MPA establishmentmust have been due to an uncontrolledeffect.

These four examples illustrate a failureof the peer review system and lack of thebasic skepticism needed in science, and areunfortunately but a few of the many papersnow appearing with similar sensational butunsubstantiated headlines. The peoplewho knew the data used in the Casey andMyers paper and the Myers and Wormpaper clearly were not involved in thereview process, or the editors chose toignore their opinions. The completeabsence of skepticism by the reviewers of

Ray HilbornHilborn is the Richard C. and Lois M.Worthington Professor of FisheriesManagement at the School of Aquatic andFisheries Sciences, University ofWashington, Seattle. He can be contactedat rayh@u.washington.edu.

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the Roberts paper is a concern. TheConover and Munch paper demonstratedthat growth is a heritable trait, but failed todemonstrate anything about how commer-cial fisheries operate. It did pose a testablehypothesis, but the paper did not includethe real fisheries data to see if there wassupport for the hypothesis.

A community of belief has arisen whosecredo has become “fisheries managementhas failed, we need to abandon the oldapproaches and use marine protected areasand ecosystem-based management.” I fearthat this belief has shaded the peer reviewprocess so badly that almost any papershowing a significant decline in fish abun-dance or benefits of marine protected areashas a high probability of getting favorablereviews in some journals regardless of thequality of the analysis. Critical peer reviewhas been replaced by faith-based support forideas and too many scientists have becomeadvocates. An advocate knows the answerand looks for evidence to support it; a sci-entist asks nature how much support thereis for competing hypotheses.

Much of the problem lies in the kindof journals Science and Nature havebecome: commercial enterprises coveringa broad range of scientific issues. In aspoof of a Science article published on theNew York Times web site, one of thefictitious authors is quoted as saying“journal editors favor bold claims, becausethese attract press attention and helprecruit further bold papers, which in turnis a tonic for circulation and advertising”(www.nytimes.com/2006/01/17/science/17frau.html?ex=1295154000&en=9ca2921bc

88fe0e3&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss). Given the high prestige of Scienceand Nature and the impact publication inthese journals has on promotion and grants,one cannot blame authors for making boldclaims. Perhaps those of us in fisheriesshould simply not give articles in thesejournals the prestige they now enjoy.Because of their general coverage, Scienceand Nature must have problems identifyingappropriate reviewers for an individualpaper. While there is no easy solution tothis, a good step would be for journals topublish the names of reviewers whorecommend publication. That would atleast make it clear if these journals arerelying on a small group of like-mindedreviewers who have little expertise relevantto technical papers. Finally, the fact thatdiscredited papers continue to be widelycited is aggravated by the fact the rebuttalsfrequently are not published by the originaljournal and may appear in gray literature ortechnical journals. The high-profilejournals need to be especially sensitive tocritiques of articles they have published andto formally withdraw discredited papers.

Although the scientific community wasunanimous in its condemnation of faith-based teachings in evolution, we need toalso reject agenda-driven, faith-based pub-lication in fisheries and revive the peerreview and publication process within ourown community. Let’s go back to testablehypotheses and evidence, and make surethat the peer reviewers know the data andthe problem, and are not chosen because oftheir faith.

LITERATURE CITED

Boelke, D., T. Gedamke, K. Sosebee, A.Valliere, and B. Vanpelt. 2005. Final skateannual review. New England FisheryManagement Council. Newburyport,Massachusetts.

Casey, J. M., and R. A. Myers. 1998. Nearextinction of a large widely distributed fish.Science 281:690-692.

Conover, D. O., and S. B. Munch. 2002.Sustaining fisheries yields over evolutionarytime scales. Science 297:94-96.

Hampton, J., J. R. Sibert, P. Kleiber, M. N.Maunder, and S. J. Harley. 2005. Declineof Pacific tuna populations exaggerated?Nature 434:E1-E2.

Hilborn, R. 2002. Marine reserves and fisheriesmanagement. Science 295:1233-1234.

Kulka, D. W., K. Frank, and J. Simon. 2002.Barndoor skate in the Northwest Atlanticoff Canada: distribution in relation totemperature and depth based oncommercial fisheries data. CanadianDepartment of Fisheries and Oceans2002/073.

Ludwig, D., R. Hilborn, and C. Walters.1993. Uncertainty, resource exploitation,and conservation—lessons from history.Science 260:17,36

Myers, R. A., and B. Worm. 2003. Rapidworldwide depletion of predatory fishcommunities. Nature 423:280-283.

Polacheck, T. 2006. Tuna longline catch ratesin the Indian Ocean: did industrial fishingresult in a 90% rapid decline in theabundance of large predatory species?Marine Policy 30:470-482.

Roberts, C. M., J. A. Bohnsack, F. Gell, J. P.Hawkins, and R. Goodridge. 2001. Effectsof marine reserves on adjacent fisheries.Science 294:1920-1923.

Walters, C. J. 2003. Folly and fantasy in theanalysis of spatial catch rate data. CanadianJournal of Fisheries and Aquatic Science60:1433-1436.