Counting the fish eaten rather than the fish caught

Abstract

Counting fish underwater is more difficult than counting sheep on a pasture but is needed to support fishery management and to enumerate the contribution fish catches currently make to human society in the form of food, income, and revenue. Inland fisheries are particularly challenging to monitor and assess. They take place in variable and structurally complex environments, such as river floodplains and swamps, and are mainly found in resource-poor countries of the global South, and the larger ones (e.g., the Amazon, the Mekong, and the African Great Lakes) straddle national boundaries, requiring interstate collaboration for their governance. Moreover, the fish caught from the myriad smaller lakes, reservoirs, floodplain forests, and river tributaries escape being recorded because they are consumed directly by those who catch them or sold in informal markets in remote areas, far from the gaze of any reporting or management authority. In response to these challenges, Fluet-Chouinard et al. recently reported on a study that assesses fish catches by counting how many fish are eaten (1). Rather than trying to improve how we count fish through ecological surveys or to correct for the weaknesses in catch statistics, as others have previously done (2, 3), they have back-calculated national and global inland fishery harvests using estimates of consumption of freshwater fish from household consumption and expenditure surveys administered to 548,000 households across 42 countries. The consensus among fisheries scientists working on freshwater fisheries is that difficulties in assessing freshwater fish catches result in them being underreported and consequently undervalued (4). Fluet-Chouinard et al.’s (1) studies reveal that freshwater catches are, on average, likely to be ∼65% higher than those officially reported by national governments to the United Nations (UN) Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). The FAO is charged with compiling and disseminating fishery statistics. Global summaries are published … [↵][1]1To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: eha1{at}uw.edu. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1