July 11, 1999, Sunday Sports Desk

OUTDOORS; Sea Protected Areas Are Source of Debate

By Paul Molyneaux

Konstantino Papoulidis lives to fish.

''I enjoy selling vegetables and meeting my customers,'' he said, standing behind his produce counter in Marathon, Fla. ''But at the end of the day I close the doors, get in my boat, and go fishing. I obey the rules and catch enough to feed my family and friends. I'm not political, but if anybody gets in the way of my fishing, they're going to hear from me.''

 

 

Papoulidis is one of 5 million recreational and 16,000 commercial fishermen in Florida, all demanding a fair share of the ocean's resources. To guarantee a future for fisheries however, many scientists say as much as 40 percent of the world's marine ecosystems need protection. That means closing or restricting many traditional fishing areas and creating, what are becoming known globally as Marine Protected Areas.

The National Research Council, an independent arm of the National Academy of Science, is in the middle of a government-financed, two-year study of the protected areas. The council's committee of 21 international experts is conducting a series of five public forums around the United States coastlines.

In April, members met in Islamorada, Fla., to gather information for their report on the feasibility of protected areas in the United States. The meeting, held 30 miles northeast of Marathon, surrounded by the 3,674-square-mile Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, featured fishermen and scientists in the vanguard of designing marine reserves, a more restrictive step beyond existing marine sanctuaries in protecting ocean habitat and resources.

''Everything else has failed,'' the chairman, Eduarde Houde, said of past policies that have focused on species-specific management. ''Marine Protected Areas are the last resort for fisheries management.''

The committee is reviewing data collected from sanctuaries and areas currently closed by regulation. According to scientists at Islamorada, protected areas represent a new paradigm in fisheries management: one that works. A national fisheries service scientist, Jim Bohnsack, pointed out the results of closing almost a third of George's Bank off the Maine coast in 1994, creating a de facto protected areas. ''Only four years later,'' he said, ''haddock had increased to the point that the trip limit was raised from 500 pounds per day to 2,000 pounds per day.''

Some scientists and environmental organizations favor moving ahead with large closings immediately. But Graeme Kelleher, a committee member and a former vice chairman of the World Conservation Union's commission on protected areas, reminded participants, ''The success of M.P.A.'s depends on cooperation and support from the fishing community.'' Kelleher's experience in the South Pacific has shown ''that if we close half the reef, we get twice the fish. After a while fishermen start becoming advocates, but they have to be involved in the process from the very start.''

The advent of ecosystem management has brought more voices to the table. Scientists, ecotourists, and the public at large are claiming a stake in an area that was once the sole domain of fishermen. In Florida, a region leading the way in protected areas, fishermen, regulators, the tourism industry and conservationists have forged a fragile compromise on a 185-square-mile ''no take'' marine reserve in the Gulf of Mexico near the Dry Tortugas. They hope it will protect spawning aggregations of important species of snapper and grouper, and increase the overall fish population throughout the Keys.

Elsewhere, fishermen have been less agreeable to closed areas. In New England, inshore regulatory closings have led to angry meetings between regulators and user groups left with no place to fish. Even in Florida, fishermen pressured Gov. Jeb Bush to drop Felicia Coleman from the Gulf of Mexico Fisheries Management Council because of her advocacy of a 500-square-mile closed area off Tampa.

Florida's recreational anglers support conservation but are leery of no-take zones. Islamorada's John Brownlee, a senior editor of Salt Water Sportsman magazine, sees M.P.A.'s, ''as a tool, but not a panacea for all the problems in fisheries today. We need to move slowly.

''Recreational fishing is mostly catch and release now, and has a $6 billion economic impact in this state,'' he said. ''You don't want to just start shutting that down. We need to look at traditional management tools. In Florida, for instance, we haven't even tried quotas for the commercial snapper/grouper fishermen.''

Vito Calomo, a longtime New England trawlerman and now executive director of the Gloucester Fisheries Commission, agreed that traditional measures should be given a chance before ''we draw lines all over the ocean.'' Calomo testified at the committee's first meeting in Washington. He acknowledged that fish need safe havens, but suggested a different way of creating them. ''I told them we need to go back to gear restrictions,'' he said. ''If fishermen didn't have the gear to tow over rockpiles, they wouldn't go there and those would be your marine reserves.''

Dr. Les Watling, a scientist at the University of Maine, who recently helped create maps identifying 26 percent of the seabed in the Gulf of Maine and George's Bank as priority areas for protection, responded to Calomo. ''If I thought the fishing industry was serious about matching gear to habitat,'' he said, ''I would be the first to join them. Yet there are fishermen who insist in going in those critical areas with rockhopper gear and flattening them out.''

Peter Gladding, a Key West commercial fisherman, tried to strike a tone of compromise. ''These fish belong to everyone,'' he said. ''As commercial fishermen, we have the first responsibility to protect them.'' But he believes, ''There's no such thing as nonconsumptive use. Catch-and-release fishing has a mortality rate of 5-10 percent. Every time a snorkeler touches a bit of coral it dies. That's not nonconsumptive.''

And Calomo is concerned that large protected areas and other regulations will favor recreational fishermen and more highly capitalized, increasingly mobile commercial operations and cause the disappearance of small inshore owner-operators, the last large group of independent food producers in this country. For consumers, that will mean a loss of access to the freshest fish.

Every region has its own particular problems to resolve in creating a regulatory strategy. Both Brownlee and Gladding, are part of the working group designing the 185-square-mile protected area near Florida's Dry Tortugas. ''I like M.P.A.'s,'' said Gladding. ''But I don't trust the Government. We've heard 20-2020: 20 percent of all our fishing grounds closed by the year 2020. This is only the tip of the iceberg.''

But everyone agrees that something needs to be done. ''There's too many fishermen chasing too few fish,'' said Brownlee. ''If we're going to accomplish anything, everybody's got to come to the table ready to gore their own ox.''

Everyone, including Konstantino Papoulidis.