Are the Ugly Truths Not Ugly Enough?

Abstract

In recent years there has been an increase in the number of papers, many of which have been published in high profile journals, that address real environmental or ecological problems, but with flawed, subjective, and frequently hy- perbolic arguments. I identify two such examples from the US Gulf of Mexico, linked by their focus on fisheries re- sources as the cause de jour, to illustrate the problem and express my concerns. If this trend continues, we should not be surprised when managers and policy makers who need objective, defensible, scientific answers no longer solicit our in- puts. THE UGLY TRUTHS Science, if nothing else, should be objective, and scien- tists who receive funding from public sources are ethically and morally obligated to speak truth to managers and policy makers that work on the public's behalf (1, 2). In recent years, however, there has been an increase in the number of papers, many of which have been published in high profile journals, that address real environmental or ecological prob- lems, but with flawed and subjective arguments. Two such examples are being played out in the Gulf of Mexico, and I use both to illustrate the problem and express my concerns. De Mutsert and coauthors (3) showed that previous analyses using commercial landings data to conclude that marine fish- eries ecosystems in the Gulf of Mexico (GOM) are severely degraded and overexploited (4, 5) were flawed, and overly pessimistic. In their re-analyses, De Mutsert and coauthors (3) used both commercial landings and fishery-independent survey data to show that commercial targeting and high land- ings of target species, and an overly simple definition of a collapse that failed to account for the effects of targeting, variability in fishing effort, and market forces, led to errone- ous conclusions. The aforementioned authors (5) further concluded that all of the worlds capture fisheries would be depleted by the year 2048; this outcome is highly unlikely, and would seem to imply that the fishery management com- munity has learned nothing from past mistakes. There now exist more than 10 published rebuttals of this paper (5) alone. That said, 20% of GOM fisheries have collapsed, but several of these have recovered and others are recovering. Clearly, the most controversial fishery in the GOM is the northern red snapper, which collapsed the late 1980's, when it was commercially extinct in ~50% of its former range. Management of red snapper began in earnest in 1989, and the stock is slowly recovering. More detail is available (3), but user conflict has made management of red snapper espe- cially difficult because recreational and commercial fishers almost equally split the directed harvest, and until recently,