O P I N I O N
Environmental Bullies
How Conservation Ideologues Attack Scientists
Who Don’t Agree With Them
World record tuna tournament average catch of 747 pounds, Nova Scotia, Canada, September 1971. The largest, center, weighed 991 pounds. Red Boutilier photo
March 11, 2016—The following is an excerpt from a commentary from Dr. Molly Lutcavage, the head of the Large Pelagics Research Center in Gloucester, Massachusetts. It was originally published on Medium.
Back in the 90s, bluefin fishermen said that spotter pilots could see, in a single day, as many adult bluefin that were supposed to exist in the entire western Atlantic in just a few surface schools in the Gulf of Maine alone. No federal fisheries scientists would fly to validate the fishermen’s observations, so Dr. Scott Kraus, director of the right whale research group and whale aerial surveys, stepped in to find out. And he hired me to run the surveys after an inquiry about his sea turtle data. I’d completed an oceanography PhD, two postdocs, and recently left a job in the Dept. of Interior as an endangered species scientist to get back to research, which I loved. I had been studying leatherbacks, a warm bodied turtle, and bluefin tuna were a warm bodied fish. And incredibly interesting. My UBC postdoc supervisor, Dr. David R. Jones, was an expert on their blood. And there were huge gaps in biological understanding - in other words, a scientific frontier to explore!
In his clumsy communication to discredit our survey work, Carl Safina made no attempt to confirm the scientific credentials of the scientist running the study (me), nor her highly respected collaborator, Dr. Scott Kraus. In fact, by doing our job as scientists, using aerial survey methods to investigate real-time, surface abundance of bluefin schools, we were disrupting the ocean conservation group’s efforts, especially that of Safina, to list Atlantic bluefin tuna as an endangered species. Apparently, by whatever means necessary. The published spotter survey results eventually provided independent observations that rebutted Safina’s portrayal of western Atlantic bluefin as an endangered species down to a few thousand individuals. The study established the local assemblage as larger than one hundred thousand giant bluefin, at the surface alone.
Since our first research projects over 25 years ago, my lab and our collaborators and students have built a diverse body of peer reviewed science covering extensive aspects of the biology, life history, physiological ecology, reproduction, diet, oceanographic associations, and fisheries dynamics of Atlantic bluefin tuna. We published over 75 research studies on western bluefin. Most of it was new, or challenged the status quo of bluefin biology used in stock assessment. We documented a lower age at maturity, extensive, Atlantic-wide mixing, complex annual migration patterns, and effects of prey dynamics and ocean conditions on their movements. This holistic body of research showed the western Atlantic bluefin population to be far more resilient and larger than that being represented by some NGO’s. Yet this substantial scientific body of evidence, most of it noted by historic studies by Frank Mather and Peter C. Wilson, has been conveniently ignored by those with ideological agendas, even today.
Enviro Bullies rarely confront their targets face to face. Since the 1990’s, they’ve made pretty impressive attempts to mislead about bluefin science. And to influence US fisheries managers, politicians and the direction of research funding, all the way up to the White House. We stuck to our research goals, but when Congressional earmarks funding the Large Pelagics Research Center (LPRC), and its role model, the Pacific Fisheries Research Program, went away, we faced vastly downsized research budgets. Actually, just when the Centers had amassed a substantial body of credible, cutting edge fisheries science, and established their true worth, both pelagic fisheries science Centers went off the cliff, into real extinction. Meanwhile, major funding began streaming in to some ocean-focused NGO’s, and their spokesperson scientists.
In 2013, former students, collaborators and I witnessed the Pew Oceans Campaign and partners mislead, in their press releases and statements to US and Canadian fisheries managers, experts’ consensus regarding the status of the Atlantic bluefin population in Pews Fact Sheet representation of Best Available Science. And more specifically, that LPRC’s peer reviewed research that challenged their take away message, that the Atlantic bluefin population trajectory was downward, and that they were in danger. They labelled our work as well as consensus science from the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT), as “unsubstantiated hypotheses”. Amanda Nickson, director of the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Bluefin Campaign, phoned from Vancouver to berate my colleagues and I for responding to the Pew Fact Sheet, which dramatically misrepresented science. We had corrected it with our own fact sheet, and they were not happy to be called out by credentialed bluefin experts.
Maybe it’s because National Geographic’s Wicked Tuna reality show, on roll out, put me up against Safina’s video blurb about the overfished, endangered bluefin on the show’s website. What can you do when a lauded environmental writer, one with a PhD in seabird ecology, that receives accolades and is often the go to authority on Atlantic bluefin for the New York Times, National Public Radio, high media profile journals Science and Nature (even though he’s not exactly running a research lab, is he?), lacks the ethics most of us practice when we conduct science. To claim to be an expert where you are not, to mislead the public, to falsely disparage those that don’t support your ideology, to repeatedly and falsely allude to a woman scientist being bought by fishermen, “in their pockets”, whatever works, when his ideology or views expressed in books or blogs or lectures are shown to be false. Is this what conservation leadership has become? Incidentally, another blatant attempt to disparage and mislead was accomplished by Pew and their scientists in Quicksilver, by Kenneth Brower, published in National Geographic Magazine March 2014 story on Atlantic bluefin tuna.
The quotes looks pretty familiar:
Tuna science, always politicized, has recently become much more so. As it is no longer possible for ICCAT to simply ignore scientific advice, there is now an effort to massage the science. “There are inherent uncertainties about these stock assessments,” Amanda Nickson, director of global tuna conservation at the Pew Charitable Trusts, told me. “We’re seeing a mining of the areas of uncertainty to justify increases in quota.”
Industry-funded biologists propose that there might be undiscovered spawning grounds for Atlantic bluefin. It is possible, of course, but there is no real evidence for the proposition. The idea seems awfully convenient for an agenda favoring business as usual.
Wow, “awfully convenient for an agenda,” in this Nat Geo story repeating Pew’s positions and only their scientists that support it, Drs. Barbara Block and Safina. So now we have even more evidence that their representations are wrong. Jee, National Geographic Society Research and Exploration had actually funded two of my research projects. Let’s see if they print a correction.
Here we are again, Carl Safina. Yes, you’re certainly not the only enviro bully out there, not the only one wrong again, but this time, I’m calling you out. Let the ocean conservation community represented by Pew tuna campaigns and their chosen scientists see the latest, peer reviewed science finding on Atlantic bluefin tuna spawning areas in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, early edition on 7 March 2016 “Discovery of a new spawning ground reveals diverse migration strategies in Atlantic bluefin tuna (Thunnus thynnus)” by Richardson and coauthors.