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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Sunday, February 20, 2005

Management of ocean resources gets closer look

By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post

WASHINGTON — Recent studies show that larger, older fish produce more eggs and surviving offspring than younger fish, researchers said yesterday, adding that policy-makers need to protect broader swaths of the ocean to preserve these efficient spawners.

Steven Berkeley, a research biologist at the University of California at Santa Cruz who described his findings at the annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science here, said sustained overharvesting of Pacific rockfish and other species is undermining these populations' ability to recover.

"We're really running up a debt, and it's becoming harder to repay it," said Berkeley, who found that a 31 1/2-inch Bocaccio rockfish produces 10 times as many larvae as one that spans nearly 20 inches, and the larger fish's offspring were more than three times as likely to flourish.

"We really do know what we need to do; we just have to find the conviction to do it," he said.

Such recent findings are fueling an effort to get federal and regional officials to reassess how they manage ocean resources. Scientists are now pushing for an ecosystems-based approach, in which policy-makers take into account how human activities affect vulnerable sea populations on a broad level, not just on a species-by-species basis.

Jeremy Jackson, the Ritter Professor of Oceanography at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif., said he and other scientists began to scrutinize how the oceans are used, once they realized key species were disappearing.

"I really did realize a dozen years ago everything I studied no longer existed," Jackson said. "It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize this is something profoundly new and different."

Some of this research is already reshaping management decisions: This month, federal authorities voted to bar bottom trawling, a commercial fishing practice that scours the ocean floor clean, in nearly 386,000 square miles of the north Pacific Ocean around Alaska's Aleutian Islands. Environmentalists, who had successfully sued the federal government for failing to protect the area's ocean habitat, used images of the recently discovered Aleutian coral gardens to press their case.

Oceans experts have said evidence is mounting that authorities need to take action to maintain the sea's biodiversity.

Craig Smith, a professor at the University of Hawai'i's oceanography department, said continued whaling threatens to devastate dozens of rare species on the sea floor that live on remains known as "whale falls" for as long as a century.

Smith and others have studied the succession of animals that feed on dead whales at the bottom of the ocean. Continued whaling by the Japanese and others threatens this critical food source.

Whaling has reduced the North Atlantic whale fall habitat by 75 percent, Smith said, which could in turn drive a third of whale fall-dependent species to extinction. Even whaling at a more sustainable level could cause 15 percent of these species to disappear.

But many politicians are reluctant to curb fishing and other commercial and recreational sea activities, scientists said, because organized constituencies lobby hard against such limits.