Today we caught our first red snapper in a trap for a week. We have seen several on the videos, and I have blogged about
some of the reasons we may not have been catching them. However, the question
came up today, “Why send scientists out here at all? Can’t we just get the data
from commercial and recreational fishermen?”
This question always comes up because sometimes it feels to the science
party that we are maybe spinning our wheels when commercial fishermen make
their living doing this stuff.
The short answer is “not really,” and I’ve explained some of
the reasons in my first post from this cruise. The fishermen are impacted by
factors other than the numbers of fish in the water when they are bringing fish
to market. The price they will get (for commercial fishers), regulations, the
price of fuel, etc. NOAA’s goal is to set the limits for numbers of fish that can
be harvested from the populations while still maintaining a healthy ecosystem. In order for NOAA to collect information on
the overall population, the surveys must be able to capture as many sizes of
each species as possible. They must be able to track the size of the population
over time. Many fish species experience boom-and-bust cycles in their
populations. This is a natural phenomenon which can be influenced by everything
from water temperature to food availability to amount of rainfall. Therefore,
it’s important to get an accurate count of fish numbers without the confounding
factors of price or weather getting in the way. 
Another advantage of fishery-independent surveys is that
these surveys can give the scientific community information about species that
are not currently commercially valuable. There are many species for which we
collect data that are not currently fished. Videos are especially handy tools
for quantifying species which would never be attracted to a baited trap. All of
these species are important to the ecosystem. They may be food for a fished
species. They may be a species which is not currently fished, but a future
fishery may develop. They may be the predators of a currently fished species. The
more we understand about the ecosystem and all of the different species which
inhabit it, the better we will be at predicting trends & preventing crashes
in the stocks of individual species. Despite the fact that the people involved
in a single survey cruise may be frustrated by their idle hands, the endeavor
is creating valuable data for the future of fish populations.
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