Fish Conservation and Tech
Introduction
Fishing regulations are an important part of conservation. They are also important to ensure anglers will consistently have a good fishing experience. This article is meant to be an introduction to one aspect of fish conservation and how tech helps.
Maintaining healthy fisheries
Sustainable fisheries is more than just about feeling good. As with any ecosystem, there’s some really important things a healthy fishery provides. Such benefits include:
- Providing food to a large percentage of humans
- They help ensure the survival of the diversity of species, which in turn has innumerable benefits, across every aspect of life. For example, sea sponges have numerous medicinal benefits that we are still discovering. If we were to lose one of those species, we might lose a cure for cancer.
- They create and maintain valuable industry such as tourism, commercial fishing, education, conservation, medicine, etc. For example, it’s a $28 billion industry just in Florida (that’s larger than the Florida citrus, cattle, and space industry!). From a tourism perspective, 20 million people visit Florida per year just to fish.
If healthy fisheries aren’t maintained, we could lose information for cures for cancer, many many jobs, and a booming tourism industry.
Fishing regulations do actually help
Fishing regulations are a principal means by which man manages fisheries and ensures the vitality of fish stocks. Historically, fishing regulations existed to maximize the sustainable yield of valuable species. For example, commercial regulations are often set to allow harvest of the maximum amount of fish possible without reducing the base of fish population. More recently, fisheries managers may take an ecosystem management approach where the focus is on the ecosystem rather than a single species. In either approach, well maintained and regulated fisheries ensure species are able to spawn effectively, anglers and divers are able to enjoy the ocean, to harvest fish, to run their business, to feed others. Regulations also help revitalize species that were once endangered.
The problems with fishing regulations
As with any man made tool to control and regulate, there are some problems that come with fishing regulations.
Commercial anglers are required to report all species caught where as recreational anglers are not. Without reporting requirements, harvest estimates can be somewhat unpredictable. This lack of recreational harvest data means NOAA, Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission, and other fishery management agencies have to build their models on insufficient information. One attempted solution is to collect data through surveys but only a tiny percentage of anglers are surveyed.
The angler’s side has some roadblocks too: It’s hard to keep up to date with regulations. Some of this is because of the old school approach still used to distribute regulations (such as laminated cards found in bait and tackle shops that are oftentimes out of date soon after they are printed). It’s also hard to determine where regulation boundaries are especially when you’re on the open ocean.
Another big barrier: anglers oftentimes don’t understand why a new regulation is introduced. Most anglers care about the health of a fishery because they want to catch fish when they go fishing! But sometimes it’s not clear why a fish is regulated a certain way. From spawning seasons to interesting biological factors in a given species, there are so many factors that go in to a regulation it’s hard to educate everyone on why a decision is made. Biological factors that exist, for example, in Red Snapper: “One 24-inch female red snapper (about 8 years old) produces as many fish as 212 17-inch females”. These types of factors also apply to species such as Snook and Redfish (Redrum), which is why they have a max size limit.
What we’re doing to help anglers
We built Fish Rules to make fishing regulations accessible to more people while helping agencies ensure the right regulations are being delivered. We approached the mobile app with some core philosophies:
Answer questions as fast as possible
At a glance, immediate information is important in the digital era and even when you’re fishing on a boat. We went through lots of trials with the app out on the water. One thing that was immediately noticeable: If the app took too long to figure out where we were located, load the appropriate regulations, and display them, not only would the angler be frustrated as a fish was flopping around but it could needlessly increase release mortality. In one instance, Albrey was holding a beautiful greater amberjack while I was waiting for the app prototype to pull up the regulations. It took greater than 10 seconds to pull it up. By the time I verified the regulation Albrey had already thrown it back in the water and replied, “It has to be faster!”. The app pulls up regulations in sub-seconds now because of this.
Make everything easy to understand
Anglers aren’t lawyers and shouldn’t have to decipher legalese to determine what they can and can’t keep. We’ve gone through numerous state and federal agencies’ disparate regulations and tried to create a unified display language for viewing regulations. We believe an angler should be able to comprehend what’s going on at a glance.
Location matters
Fish Rules App takes a pedantic approach to which regulations should be shown initially: Use the GPS to load regulations for the current location of the angler. Not only is this because we believe speed is crucial but because it keeps the guesswork out of it. There are numerous regulatory zones that people just don’t realize exist. We think they shouldn’t have to! That’s why the app does the boundary heavy lifting for the angler.
Always up to date
One of the big problems we’ve seen in the field: anglers buy these laminated regulation cards from tackle shops and they’re usually out dated. It’s really hard to stay up to date with everything. So, again, we think anglers shouldn’t have to have FOMO (fear of missing out), the app does all that for them.
Be the voice of trust
We care deeply about anglers and their legal safety. We also care about healthy fisheries. In order to service both sides of this industry we know we have to be trusted, be accurate, and be responsive when there are issues. As part of this value, we’ve partnered with multiple state and federal agencies to ensure regulations stay up to date: NOAA, South Atlantic Fishery Management Council,Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council, Hawaii Division of Aquatic Resources, and most recently Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.
What we’re doing to help fisheries management
Ensuring healthy fisheries means helping anglers and management agencies. For the agencies, we’re delivering several valuable tools:
One place to manage regulations
Every agency has different systems of records for fishing regulations: PDF documents, CMS systems, apps, newsletters, etc. A change in regulations oftentimes means employees have to update regulations in multiple spots. Our fish management platform allows things to be done all in one spot.
Better data
The platform helps scientists better understand the status of a species in a body of water. They can augment MRIP surveys, which historically have a very long lead time, with near real time data, to help determine the health of a management area.
Reach and compliance
Our fish management platform ensures accurate regulations are pushed out to hundreds of thousands of anglers at a moment’s notice. Regulators and Fish Rules staff can easily schedule regulation revisions to be delivered at the right time in the future. This is important for management agencies as they need to demonstrate compliance and law accessibility to ensure healthy fisheries.
Citizen Science
Research students, scientists, and any angler can report on species, tag them and report the tag, and use the data in studies.
How to get involved
Besides what we’re doing, there’s a lot of other great programs you should think about getting involved in if you’re interested in bringing tech to fish conservation:
- Local school conservation programs
- OceanX Labs
- Global Fishing Watch
- Pew Trust Society
- Tell your state game and wildlife agency about Fish Rules, we’d love to partner with them!
