Anecdotes and the Shifting Baseline Syndrome of Fisheries
A one-page Postscript in which Pauly proposes the name shifting baseline syndrome. After calling fisheries a global disaster, he argues that fisheries science, though it has responded as well as it could, has by following fishers and fleets tended to factor ecology and evolution out of its models; its lack of an explicit model for the syndrome illustrates the point. Each generation of fisheries scientists accepts as a baseline the stock size and species composition at the start of their careers; the next starts from stocks that have declined further; the result is a gradual accommodation of the creeping disappearance of resource species, and inappropriate reference points for evaluating economic losses from overfishing or setting targets for rehabilitation.
He calls these strong claims. Unlike astronomy or oceanography, fisheries science has no formal approach to early accounts of large catches of resources now extirpated, which are viewed as anecdotes. A colleague's grandfather's report of bluefin tuna tangled in his mackerel nets in the Kattegat in the 1920s is, Pauly says, as factual as a temperature record. A small study by others used the anecdotes in Farley Mowat's Sea of Slaughter to infer that the biomass of fish and other exploitable organisms on Canada's North Atlantic coast is now under 10% of that two centuries ago. The large animals of low fecundity at the top of earlier food webs, he argues, must have been less resilient to fishing than today's survivors: the big changes happened way back, and only anecdotes now recall them. Frameworks for bringing such earlier knowledge, which is what the anecdotes are, into fisheries models would help overcome the syndrome, in part at least.
The piece reports no new data. The bridge to psychological safety is ours. We read it as a caution about baselines: a team that judges itself by the conditions its members found on joining, or a survey whose first round becomes the baseline, may not see how far things had already moved. The slide is akin to what Vaughan called the normalisation of deviance, though in Pauly it comes as one generation replaces another. And stories of how things used to be, collected and consolidated, can count as evidence.
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