Pseudo-science SeafoodNews.Com
Opinion posted September 2, 2021 Seafood News dot com.
[Editors Note: This Opinion is in response to "Trawling Costs Outweigh the Benefits, and Alaskans are Paying the Price" published yesterday.]
“Pseudoscience.” A collection of beliefs or practices mistakenly regarded as being based on scientific method.
Today I came across an interesting piece of pseudo-science written by a “Campaign Manager/Scientist” of a Big Enviro group (Oceana). He starts the piece by claiming to be a just “browsing the Fisheries Service database, ruminating about bycatch.” Right, the Big Enviro campaign manager was “just browsing.” The truth that is he was mining government records for data he could cherry pick to support a carefully drafted hit piece on a Big Enviro target. No big surprise. We see this kind of thing on the cable channels all the time. Political tools, cable network tools, frequently hire pseudo-science peddlers to try to shape public opinion on this or that issue. I didn’t think much of it until I got further down the piece and realized he was writing about my ship. This pseudo scientist from Big Enviro was bashing the ship we built to reduce bycatch and harvest fish with the lowest carbon footprint in the Bering Sea, maybe even the world. Why is Big Enviro bashing my beautiful ship, I asked myself?
I’m not sure as to the why, but as I read further it occurred to me that this “Opinion” piece by someone calling himself a “scientist” was an excellent example of a modern pseudo-scientist deploying pseudo-science, false and misleading information, in order to fool readers into supporting a Big Enviro political objective. Let’s look at some examples of how he did it.
The browsing scientist writes that my ship took 552 Chinook Salmon as bycatch in a single week. That’s what the data shows. It’s true, it happened. But the data also shows another interesting fact that he decided to omit. That the same ship took a total of 691 Chinook Salmon for the entire 10 weeks it fished in the gulf this year. That means the ship took 139 Chinook total for the other 9 weeks for an average of 2.2 Chinook per day as bycatch, while harvesting about 150,000 lbs. of target species per day. That’s a Chinook bycatch rate of about 0.0146% That’s impressive and it’s not accidental. Our captains and crews work hard to reduce Chinook bycatch and it pays off when we can achieve numbers like these. What would a real scientist conclude from this? Probably that the ship was doing really well with its Chinook bycatch reduction methods, but this is fishing and nature is what it is and once in a while the ships get lightning strike hits no matter what they do. A real scientist would ask what new methods of fishing or gear have we deployed to get a bycatch rate of 2.2 Chinook per day, and seek to deploy those methods among the rest of the fleet. The pseudo-science peddler, on the other hand, ignores the 2.2 fish/day bycatch rate, writes only about the 552 fish lightning strike and tries to fool the readers into thinking that my ship was out there, day in day out, killing all the Chinook in the ocean.
Next the browsing scientist writes that my ship’s discarded halibut bycatch was 35,000 lbs., which would be “worth almost $150,000 to local halibut fishermen.” This is simply false, but it’s peddled in such a confusingly pseudo-scientific manner that appears to be true so long as the reader barely scratches the surface. Ok, lets scratch a little harder than that. The truth is that only about 35% of these halibut are over 32 inches, the minimum length for retained legal harvest. So that’s about 12,250 lbs. gross wt., about 11,000 lbs. dressed wt. That yields a gross revenue of $49,621.00, and a net revenue to the fishermen of roughly $16,537 after expenses, food, fuel, etc. That’s $16,537, not $150,000 to the local halibut fishermen. The browsing scientist is only off by a factor of 9.
The browsing scientist also writes that trawling for the three million pounds of Arrowtooth target species that produces this bycatch only produces $7,000.00 of benefit, and that’s in the form of Alaska State landing tax. Is it true, or did the browsing scientist leave something out? Let’s see. Three million pounds of Arrowtooth harvest yields about 1.95m lbs. of frozen product after a shipboard processing recovery rate of .65. That yields a gross revenue of about $1.4m. About 2/3 pays overhead and 1/3 goes to crew share, so that’s about $472,000 for the crew. That’s $472,000 crew pay to 45 hardworking, middle class, American fishermen. It looks like the browsing scientist left this part out. He left out a few other things too, like the food production and carbon footprint benefits of our ship.
Our Trawl Catcher Processor:
3,900,000 fish meals,
$472,000 wages to 45 American crew
161 liters fuel/mt retained catch.
(Includes processing carbon footprint)
$7,000 landing tax to the state
Versus
A Halibut Catcher vessel:
25,000 fish meals plus
$16,537 crew wages to 3 crew.
1,095 liters fuel/mt retained catch, est.
(Does Not include shore processing carbon footprint)
Browsing scientist, real science is obviously not your forte. But thanks for giving us all an example of what modern pseudo-science looks like. It’s good to read these kinds of things from time to time. It reminds us that the Elmer Gantry types are still out there trying to fool the people, only these days they come in the form of browsing scientists using pseudo-science instead of that old time religion. And Big Enviro, please take another look at what our crews and new boat have really achieved with bycatch and carbon footprint reduction. The real science shows that we have made some really good reductions in both with this ship. Hopefully you will appreciate the honest progress we have made and there will be no call for any more pseudo-science hit pieces.
Dennis Moran
President, Fishermen’s Finest Inc.
STORY TAGS:
Opinion,Fishermen's Finest,Dennis Moran,trawling,Alaska