If you were the lobster czar and could prescribe any measure you choose to manage the resource, what would you do?
Thanks to a new computer program developed by Rhode Island lobsterman Richard Allen, the opportunity for lobstermen to be armchair managers has arrived. Allen developed the program, called LobSense, with support from a Pew Fellowship in Marine Conservation so members of the lobster fishing community could make scientific calculations based on the same model that guides fishery scientists in making their regulatory recommendations.
The primary tool used by regulators to manage the lobster fishery is the “egg-per-recruit” model developed by National Marine Fisheries scientist Josef Idoine. For years, he was the only one who could use and understand the number-crammed tables the model generates. Allen used his fellowship funding and the help of Idoine, Australian fishery scientist Rick McGarvey and computer programmer Paul Gaertner to build a graphical interface based on the same model that non-scientists can use. Instead of tables, it produces graphs that directly compare the results of different hypothetical regulations. Perhaps the biggest attraction is that it can answer “what-if” scenarios by crunching the numbers in a few minutes as opposed to days or weeks.
“It’s a tremendous model. It does for lobstermen what Windows does for computers,” says Steve Train, chairman of the Maine Lobster Advisory Council and one of many who have seen Allen’s demonstration. “The way it’s always been, if we want to try new [management measures] we’d have to wait to see the results. [LobSense] is so easy it’s amazing; it punches right into their formulas and takes only three minutes. What it comes down to is ‘Do you agree with the formulas?’ I like the tool, but not necessarily the formulas.”
“The formulas” refers to the standard used for determining the conservation level in the lobster fishery – Idoine’s egg-per-recruit model. In coarse terms, the model estimates how many eggs a female lobster would produce in the absence of a fishery, with every lobster living to the natural end of its life. Using that as a baseline and comparing it to the current fishing rate, scientists say they want females to produce at least ten percent of the eggs that they would if there were no fishing.
That ten percent sounds arbitrary, and there’s a lot of argument about that number. There is no perfect way to determine the ideal percentage, so fisheries scientists look at their experience in other fisheries and try to get as good a figure as they can.
Asked how LobSense will improve a lobsterman’s life, Allen sounds mild mannered and studied, as if he’s been around fisheries management long enough to let wisdom supercede emotion. (In fact he has been involved in lobster management since 1972, as a fish rep and fisherman.)
“The scientists’ model wasn’t accessible for people to use in real time,” says Allen. “Every time a lobsterman made a suggestion at a meeting it was taken back to the lab and put through their model, and then a reply would come back – sometimes months later – saying ‘it didn’t make it, any other ideas?’ And the next suggestion would take another two months to assess.”
Train and others who have seen Allen’s program are generally impressed. For one thing, even if you’re a technical geek it’s a lot more appealing to look at graphical interface than columns of numbers.
“It’s a huge step forward. It works. You don’t need to know code to run it,” says Patrice Farrey, executive director of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association.
But Farrey is not without reservations. The problem is that modeling is a complicated topic. You are applying something theoretical to the marine ecosystem.
“You have to understand what you’re putting in,” says Farrey. “Certainly it’s a tool that can be used, and I’m sure it’ll be used as we move forward. But it’s inherently complicated. We could have someone with the model at a lobster management committee meeting, but we’d also have to have someone there who has an understanding of what the model is doing. You can’t take that barrier away. It’s not as simple as it appears. You can buzz through the inputs and outputs, but you have to understand the results; you put junk in, you get junk out.”
Farrey points out that LobSense is slightly different from the model scientists use: some of the input parameters are set up differently from the actual model, so the results will be different.
Idoine’s egg-per-recruit model has been peer reviewed a number of times, and the general consensus is that it is the best available science. It has been around for years and nobody has come up with a better model.
Still, MLA’s Farrey says her association’s hopes lie in the development of new models that use additional reference points beyond egg production in an un-fished resource. Work is currently underway at the University of Maine to get more reference points, such as larval recruitment, into new modeling efforts.
Allen is happy to mail a CD with LobSense to anyone who is interested. He hopes to eventually have a downloadable version available for use on his website,
Meanwhile, the people who have seen LobSense already will continue to exercise its capabilities. Jack Merrill, a Cranberry Isles lobsterman, plans to work with it this winter. Merrill has kept records of the number of jumbo lobsters landed at the Cranberry Isle and other co-ops. “The egg-per-recruitment model assumes fishermen catch 90 percent and leave 10 percent,” Merrill says, “but what are we really catching? I’m going to try to come up with the percentage of the catch that’s oversized to see if we actually were catching 90 percent. There are a lot of variables, and the program lets you play with those.”
Train of the Lobster Advisory Council says he hopes more people will see and use the program, and would like Allen to give more demonstrations. “The most effective use of LobSense now is helping fishermen understand the possible impact of regulatory actions,” says Train. “It shows a lot of simple things we could do that would be good for the resource and that wouldn’t be a big deal to a lot of people. And we’d make more money if we all did it: if we cut our trap hauls in half we’d make more money and use less fuel and bait. Trouble is, everyone’s got to do it.”
Sometimes models can make truth appear stranger than fiction. Richard Allen ‘s motivation is to make the primary tool used in lobster management more user-friendly. If you add up all the licenses, there are well over 10,000 lobster fishermen from Maine to North Carolina, but only about three people who understand the model. As MLA’s Farrey points out, “anything you can do to bring those theories down to people is great.”