Shifting Spearguns: Hunting Smaller Fish : Shifting Baselines

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The Shifting Baselines Blog

Jennifer Jacquet is a Ph.D. candidate with the Sea Around Us Project at the UBC Fisheries Centre. She works closely with Dr. Daniel Pauly, who coined the term Shifting Baselines, the syndrome on which this blog focuses.
Josh Donlan is a conservation scientist and a Visting Fellow at Cornell University. He often hides out in the backcountry of the Teton Mountains, pondering bygone giant beavers and ground sloths. He also is also the founder and Director of Advanced Conservation Strategies and has a habit of restoring remote islands.

Scientist turned filmmaker Randy Olson, founder of the Shifting Baselines Ocean Media Project is also a blog contributor.

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November 2008 Jennifer Jacquet is lead author of the study In hot soup: sharks captured in Ecuador's waters published in Environmental Sciences.

November 27, 2008: Jennifer Jacquet gives the talk "Why Consumers Alone Can't Save Our Fish" at 1pm at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, B.C.

August 2008: Josh Donlan is co-author on a new paper titled Integrating invasive mammal eradications and biodiversity offsets for fisheries bycatch: conservation opportunities and challenges for seabirds and sea turtles published in Biological Invasions.

August 2008: Jennifer Jacquet is co-author on a new paper titled Funding Priorities: Big Barriers to Small-Scale Fisheries published in Conservation Biology.

August 2008: Josh Donlan is an author on a new paper in Journal of Applied Ecology titled Diversity, invasive species, and extinctions in insular ecosystems.

July 26, 2008: Randy Olson's film Sizzle premieres on the East Coast at the Woods Hole Film Festival in MA.

July 24, 2008: Josh Donlan gives a talk on biodiversity offsets to The Alcoa Foundation and the Alcao Intalco Aluminum Plant in Bellingham, Washington.

July 22, 2008: Jennifer Jacquet gives the talk "A Way Forward in a Sea of Market Based Initiatives to Save Wild Fish" at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, CA.

July 19, 2008: Randy Olson's film Sizzle premieres on the West Coast at Outfest in Hollywood, CA.

July 17, 2008: Jennifer Jacquet gives the talk "In Hot Soup: Shark's Captured in Ecuador's Waters" at the Society for Conservation Biology Annual Meeting in Chattanooga, TN.

July 9, 2008: Jennifer Jacquet gives the talk "Flawed Data, Reef Fisheries, And Food Security: A Close Inspection Of Marine Fisheries Catches in Mozambique, Tanzania, Fiji, And The Solomon Islands" at the 11th International Coral Reef Symposium in Ft. Lauderdale, FL.

June/July 2008: Josh Donlan attends training for his Kinship Conservation Fellowship in Bellingham, WA.

May 2008: Josh Donlan is an author on a new paper in Ambio titled High impact Conservation: Invasive Mammal Eradications from the Islands of Western Mexico.

May 15, 2008: Jennifer Jacquet reviews Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood at the Tyee.

April 2008: Trade Secrets: Renaming and Mislabeling of Seafood by Jennifer Jacquet and Daniel Pauly is published in Marine Policy.

April 2008: Randy Olson and the Puget Sound Partnership release the flash video Shifting Baselines in the Sound:.

Mar. 2008: Dr. Josh Donlan joins the Shifting Baselines blog.

Jan. 2008 Jennifer Jacquet launches the Eat Like a Pig Seafood Wallet Card

« Politics Tuesday: Bad Tidings for Red Tide = Good Tidings for the Oceans | Main | Whisking Down the Food Web »

Shifting Spearguns: Hunting Smaller Fish

Category: Losing Track
Posted on: August 1, 2007 3:05 PM, by Jennifer L. Jacquet

Daniel Pauly just pointed me toward a story that will compete with Deer Meat Sushi as the Shifting Baselines story of the year. The Sunday Times ran A Trimmer Gun to Spear Smaller Fry about how there is finally a speargun sold in the U.S. to hunt smaller fish. Americans are known for hunting big fish (because we had some) with bulky spearguns. But lately there seems to be a growing vogue among American speardivers for smaller fish like croakers and snappers (decide for yourself whether it's because the fish are getting smaller).

The new line of spearguns--called the Euro Series-- is fashioned after those used in the Mediterranean (that sea of abundance). The spearguns are being sold in Miami and Hawaii. Daniel said he thought smaller flippers might have been a better idea than a sleeker speargun, that way some of the deeper fish would have a better chance of recovering. And then he pointed out that there is no recognition of the shifting baseline in the article, which only solidifies the sleeker speargun in what he describes as our "collective amnesia".

Comments

I was an avid spear fisherman in Australia and it was a shock to me to find legal spearfishing on SCUBA, here in the US. Making SCUBA spearfishing illegal is to me more important, than the size of the speargun. ps. I'm out of touch these days, maybe it is already illegal.

Posted by: Hans | August 2, 2007 7:01 AM

Spearfishing on SCUBA is still legal in the U.S. (finally confirmed this with friends who do it). Can you give us details on when and maybe even based on what science (if any) why Australia banned it? Thanks for this information, Hans!

Posted by: Jennifer Jacquet | August 8, 2007 11:10 AM

Unfortunately, the New York Times article is a little misleading in the title and may not represent a �smoking gun� for shifting baselines in the US. Euro style and other small spearguns have been used in the US for quite a while now. However, Riffe, the company mentioned in the article did not make them. As a spearfisher in Florida, a lot of us had a euro or smaller style gun in our quiver for different occasions. As mentioned, the some of the larger Riffe guns can be bulky in the water and are not ideal for catching smaller maneuverable reef fish for dinner (not everyone is out to hunt large trophy fish). Riffe, which has been made popular by their amazing blue water guns (large powerful guns used to shoot pelagic fish), is basically diversifying their product to capture another part of the spearfishing market. In fact it mentions that over half of their new style guns are going to Europe. In the US, where Riffe already has a big name for itself among spearfishers, people in the market for a more slender gun may choose their model over one of there competitors such as Omer. However, it doesn�t necessarily show that the fish are getting smaller as previously smaller spearguns were bought through from other companies making spearguns.

As an aside, the speargun in the picture is a large gun and although not used to shoot tuna, is by no means for small fry.

The ability to use scuba to spearfish can be a controversial issue among spearfishermen (note that for spearfishing world records, mentioned in another post, only freediving (no scuba) is accepted). I would be very interested to learn more about when and how no scuba for spearfishing came into place in Australia. In the US, which already has a large base of scuba spearfishers, I would imagine a change in policy to be very difficult.

Posted by: David | January 12, 2008 9:28 AM

Great comment guidelines. I think you�re on the right track here. Some of those comments should go somewhere else.

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