{"id":178712,"date":"2022-11-21T13:53:10","date_gmt":"2022-11-21T18:53:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/?p=178712"},"modified":"2022-11-21T14:04:04","modified_gmt":"2022-11-21T19:04:04","slug":"new-study-encourages-harvesting-consuming-wider-variety-of-fish","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/news\/new-study-encourages-harvesting-consuming-wider-variety-of-fish\/","title":{"rendered":"New study encourages harvesting, consuming wider variety of fish"},"content":{"rendered":"
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American Fisheries Society publishes URI team\u2019s research article<\/h2>\n

Nov. 7, 2022<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n

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It\u2019s better to harvest many fish species lightly than to harvest few species heavily. That\u2019s the result of a study published in Fisheries magazine and conducted by Jeremy Collie<\/a> from the Graduate School of Oceanography and a group of fisheries experts.<\/p>\n

Collie uses an ecosystem-based fisheries management approach that considers not only targeted species, but the interactions of those species and other factors such as unharvested species, climate conditions and habitat in conducting his research. This study tested several developments in fisheries management that had previously been theoretical.<\/p>\n

\u201cAlthough people have been advocating for balanced harvesting, there hasn\u2019t been adequate measuring to see the ecosystem-species balance,\u201d Collie said. \u201cThat\u2019s one of the things we set out to do with this project.\u201d<\/p>\n

The team wanted to measure the composition of species offered in the marketplace compared to what was available in the local ecosystem. The objective was to \u201c\u2026identify the constraints and opportunities for sustaining ecosystem balance while providing a diverse seafood market.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kate Masury of Eating with the Ecosystem<\/a> in Wakefield researched the availability of lesser-known species in the retail trade. \u201cIf fishermen were harvesting a little bit of everything, you need markets to follow suit,\u201d Masury said. \u201cIf you don\u2019t have a market, then it\u2019s not going to work because fishermen won\u2019t make any money. Part of the project was to look at these markets and find out whether there was a demand for such alternatives. We were looking at what the availability is of a given species in the marketplace. We found a great imbalance between species in the ecosystem and what was available in the marketplace.\u201d<\/p>\n

A popular misconception about the force behind the lack of selection in the marketplace is that fishermen often discard off-species varieties, thus preventing them from ever reaching stores. However, Collie says the data collected indicates that there is a loss rate of only 14% from discarding. For this reason, he questions the practicality of relying on regulations to restore the ecosystem-market availability balance.<\/p>\n

He points to a law in the European Union requiring fishermen to bring in all the fish they catch. However, that isn\u2019t necessarily less wasteful. \u201cFor one thing, maybe that wasn\u2019t the problem to start with, even though it was a kind of feel-good gesture. Maybe discarding wasn\u2019t as much of a problem as they thought. But the other thing is that it\u2019s created a lot of other, secondary problems because there may not be a market for it. You\u2019re bringing in all this fish, but nobody wants it, so then what do you do? If you want to fix the problem that\u2019s not the place to start.\u201d<\/p>\n

The URI group\u2019s approach to encouraging consumption of a wider range of fish emphasized education, said Masury.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe market is one place to put energy into trying to promote balance to make this better. If you have more markets for the full selection of species, it not only helps consumers to be able to eat a wider variety of foods and engage more with their local seafood, but you\u2019re also providing fishermen with the opportunity to catch a wider variety of fish species that allows them to take advantage of the species that are available. It should ultimately make it easier for them to catch fish. For that to happen, though, consumers have to be willing to eat those species. We have to have markets for them,\u201d Masury said.<\/p>\n

Part of the research into the question of marketing the fish was conducted by a group of volunteers. \u201cOne of the cool bonuses that came out of this process is that we had 86 citizen-scientists that were helping us collect this data in terms of the market availability part of the equation,\u201d Masury said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey had to visit all these fish markets and ask for these species. And because they were asking, in a lot of these cases, the market was like, \u2018oh yeah, we can get that\u2019. It showed that consumer requests for these species influences these markets in terms of their carrying these species,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Each week, for 26 weeks, each volunteer sought out four randomly chosen species in up to three local markets of his\/her choice throughout New England. The resulting database comprises 2,946 visits to 394 different markets in search of 52 different species.<\/p>\n

An unexpected result is that the citizen-scientists ended up becoming great ambassadors for eating a wider diversity of local seafood.<\/p>\n

\u201cBecause they were kind of forced through this project to eat a lot of species and try cooking with them at home, they became a lot more comfortable with them and made it less intimidating,\u201d Masury said. \u201cI think that\u2019s a big factor with a lot of people, that they just don\u2019t know what to do with the species. Trying to get people out of their comfort zone is difficult sometimes. \u201c<\/p>\n

Collie and Masury have no illusions about the challenges of educating the public.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s kind of an uphill battle, just because seafood markets are so global even for people who want to promote consumption of local seafood, they\u2019re always facing the headwinds of some import coming in and undercutting the price.\u201d Collie said. \u201cIt\u2019s almost inevitable. Still, the more people know that the squid they\u2019re buying could be frozen once, sent to China for processing, then frozen again, they might think, \u2018Hmm, I\u2019m not sure how comfortable I am with that.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With the goal of balancing sustainable fisheries with a diverse seafood market, new research measured the composition of species offered in the marketplace compared to what was available in the local ecosystem.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2165,"featured_media":178718,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[79],"tags":[894,1080,1612],"class_list":["post-178712","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-fisheries","tag-jeremy-collie","tag-sustainable-fisheries-management"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178712","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2165"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=178712"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178712\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":178719,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178712\/revisions\/178719"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/178718"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=178712"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=178712"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=178712"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}