HALIBUT RESEARCH: Part II

The second part of this research focuses on preferences that commercial halibut fishermen have about at-sea monitoring alternatives. The following is a presentation that was given at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology in Santa Fe, New Mexico, during March 2017. Please contact ecfigus@alaska.edu for reference and citation information.
Read the page for slide descriptions. Click on the photos for an enlarged slideshow version.

Pacific halibut are a demersal righteye flounder, which means they spend much of their time near the seafloor, as depicted in the picture here. Halibut have a wide range (roughly from California to Japan). As you can see from the map on this slide, halibut’s range covers all of the AK coastline south of the Bering Strait. Halibut are apex predators—so very few things eat them besides humans. This is a good thing, since they are relatively slow-growing (reaching maturity between 8 and 12 years of age) and they are relatively long-lived (with some indviduals living into their 50s). Halibut are one of the largest teleost fishes in the world, able to grow to over 400 pounds and 8 feet length. This makes them a great candidate for photo ops and today, there are important subsistence, sport, and commercial fisheries for halibut in Alaska.

Halibut is an extremely high value species. As you can see on this slide, halibut together with black cod and crab species only account for 2 percent of total Alaska seafood by volume, but account for 18-20 percent of the labor income and economic output produced by the Alaska seafood industry. So halibut are both biologically interesting and economically critical to Alaska fishing economies. I study how the halibut fishery is managed.

The history of commercial halibut fishing in Alaska goes back to the 1890s, and includes a multitude of important fisheries management decisions. For the purposes of my research, three key management measures must be understood...The first key management measure took place in 1923, when Pacific halibut stocks first became jointly researched and managed through an international agreement between the US and Canada. This joint body is called the International Pacific Halibut Commission, or the IPHC. At that time, back in 1923, the halibut fishery first became limited in terms of where and when fishermen were allowed to go fishing. The second key management measure occurred in 1995, with the introduction of individual fishing quotas, or IFQs. IFQs essentially privatize the right to fish, which controls who can fish. The third and most recent change I want to highlight, took place in 2013, when the halibut fishery became incorporated into the federal observer program. This altered how fishermen are monitored out on the fishing grounds. My research addresses this third key regulatory shift.

The Observer Program aims to systematically collect data about species encountered at sea by halibut fishermen, but not landed. These are called bycatch. Observers are one way to gather more comprehensive data from the directed halibut fishery, with the potential to provide a representative snapshot of interactions that fishermen have with all species in the ocean while targeting halibut.

The new observer program is costly and has been met with some dissatisfaction, as well as a series of logistical challenges of deploying human observers on small vessels. (Read slide) In response to these challenges, the North Pacific Fishery Management Council has made steps to implement an electronic monitoring option in the halibut fleet.

To date, opinions like the one on the previous slide have been documented in the context of public testimony at fisheries management meetings, but managers are lacking a more comprehensive understanding of fishermen’s opinions and preferences about collecting data on the water. In light of the challenges faced during implementation of the restructured Observer Program, our research aims (read slide) in a reliable and structured manner to better help managers make informed decisions.

This research is in progress, so objectives are presented that have been completed. These include (read slide)

In order to achieve these objectives, in-depth, recorded interviews were conducted with halibut fishermen in Southeast Alaska.

Southeast Alaska forms IPHC halibut management area 2C. Halibut fishermen in four communities were asked to participate, (read slide)

78 individuals participated in the interview project and (read slide)

During interviews, information was collected about each participant’s fishing practices and general experience. Participants were then asked to rank and discuss four alternative methods for collecting data about their fishing practices (read slide)

These results are being analyzed using a multiple criteria decision analysis, or MCDA, method. MCDA is based on the idea that it is an oversimplification to treat all social preferences in terms of an objective that can be expressed in quantitative or monetary terms. MCDA allows for more complicated or nuanced objectives to emerge, and reflects a decision process that has multiple, quantitative and qualitative objectives. MCDA is not linear, but has fundamental concepts. A recent paper by Estevez and Gelcich highlights these concepts in this figure. My research works laterally, and backwards, to address the data collection issue in the halibut fleet after management decisions have been made, and while they remain ongoing.

The Analytic Hierarchy Process, or AHP, will be used to evaluate pairwise comparisons from interviews. The AHP is a form of MCDA that decomposes the decision problem into a hierarchy of sub-problems. AHP allows for evaluation the relative importance of its various elements by pairwise comparisons. The AHP converts these evaluations to numerical values (weights or priorities), which are used to calculate a score for each alternative (Saaty, 1980). A consistency index measures the extent to which each fisherman has been consistent in their responses.

This is an excerpt of a ranking exercise from interviews.

Results of the ranking exercise suggest that project participants were mostly interested in self-reporting catch and bycatch. However this method is a simple measure of central tendency, and nothing more. I wanted to understand this ranking more deeply.

This brings us to my second objective (read slide). Each interviewee was asked to rank their preferences when comparing each of these monitoring alternatives with one another. These are pairwise comparisons.

This is an excerpt from a pairwise ranking exercise during the interviews.

When results from these pairwise comparisons were run through an AHP in Excel, using the geometric mean of my participant group…Results were similar to the simple ranking exercise, but they have weights attached to a hierarchy of preferences (read slide). These preferences then seem very clear. Whether I measure basic ranking or pairwise comparisons of the full interview group, clear and strong preferences emerge for the status quo and against human observers.

But at the onset of this project, I was interested in seeking out potential nuances of preference among the larger group, And this brings me to my third objective, (read slide)

So I asked the question (read slide)

Fishermen were grouped by fishing characteristics, to see if those characteristics may influence preferences.

Participants fishing on vessels over 55 ft in length assigned twice the weight to a preference for observers than the overall group. I am not sure why this is but I will be looking into it further over the summer.

I also asked the question (read slide). At this preliminary stage I began by reviewing my interview notes to group the themes of criteria that participants noted as influencing their preferences. I have organized the five most common themes referenced across each alternative for you today.