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Ted Ames and the Recovery of Maine Fisheries
One Maine fisherman earns a MacArthur "genius grant"
by Edie Clark
On an afternoon last fall, 66-year-old Ted Ames was working away on the computer in his office, a chockablock affair in one of the front rooms of his house, which sits up on a ledge of granite overlooking the Maine fishing village of Stonington. For long stretches over the past 45 years, he'd navigated his boats out into the big ocean from working harbors like this one, looking for fish. Since the mid-1990s, he had been spending most of his time looking for where the fish had gone. A crisis had befallen the fisheries of the eastern Gulf of Maine, an appalling situation that had rocked his life as well as the lives of countless other Maine fishermen. Quietly, over the past two decades, the cod and haddock had vanished, and the fishermen had, too. From Monhegan all the way to Grand Manan, "No one's home," was Ted's succinct conclusion.
The idea that this ancient livelihood might be on the verge of extinction disturbed him greatly. Since Ted first went to sea at the age of 6 with his grandfather, a retired lighthouse keeper, he had spent the better part of his life poking up and down the Maine coast, shrimp fishing, scalloping, lobstering, groundfishing -- you name it, he went for it. But in 1990, with the eastern Maine groundfisheries virtually bankrupt, Ted reluctantly sold his dragger, the Dorothy M., a 45-foot, 20-ton affair that he referred to as his "pocket battleship." To make do, he taught school and ran a water lab. He continued to fish for lobsters, which remained plentiful, but a bad fall had left him with chronic back pain and a diminished capacity to operate a boat. Even with these personal struggles, the condition of the fisheries was what troubled him most.
Environmentalists and state and federal agencies alike agreed that the cod and haddock were gone. But arguments raged over how to bring them back. A handy solution seemed to be limiting the number of days a boat could be at sea and the number of federal permits issued (at the moment, most commerical groundfishermen are restricted to 50 days in a year) -- in other words, shutting down the waters.
Ted was not only a fisherman but a scholar, having earned a master's degree in biochemistry from the University of Maine. He had studied spawning, habitat, and fishing patterns in the Gulf of Maine. In addition, he had chaired many regional and statewide fishing organizations. He hatched a plan: He'd interview as many retired fishermen as he could -- the ones who had fished in the 1930s and '40s. They knew where the fish had once been -- information that might lead today's fishermen to where the fish might return. "If we could find out where the old spawning areas were, we could restock them," he says.
Ted picked out 28 of the best inshore cod and haddock fishermen he knew of and, throughout the mid-1990s, he interviewed "some of the most wonderful bunch of old codgers you could ever imagine." He obtained grants to cover his expenses. Then he set out to map the information he gathered, which showed the spawning grounds identified by the old-timers and overlaid it on a map of the spawning grounds from the 1970s and '80s. "It fit like a glove," he says. The old inshore spawning grounds were no longer active, but the spawning grounds along the coastal shelf were the same.
Now that he had identified the historic spawning grounds, he felt that the fisheries could be recovered if only the laws could change. "The system has been broken, and the only way to get it back is to have a different type of management from what we have," Ted says. "Boy, I'd love to see it happen. But every time I've made my proposals, I've been told where to go and how to get there in the most vivid descriptions imaginable."
And so, as he sat there in front of his computer last fall, his hopes for changing the fate of Maine's fishermen hanging in the balance, the phone rang. A man from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation said he was calling about a fellowship. Often referred to as "genius grants," these fellowships are most often bestowed upon artists, writers, and scientists, and they come without warning or application. The foundation invites selected nominators to make confidential recommendations of worthy candidates, and from this pool, fellowships are awarded. At first, Ted thought this call was about someone else, for he knew many he thought deserving. But the man was not calling Ted about someone else; he was calling to tell him that the fellowship, worth $500,000, was to be awarded to him. Ted, in their view, successfully "fused the roles of fisherman and applied scientist in response to increasing threats to the fishery ecosystem."
It was the first time the MacArthur Foundation, which has been awarding fellowships since 1981, had given a fisherman such an honor.
Six months later, over a haddock sandwich in the café in Stonington, Ted recalled, "It was right out of the blue and willy-nilly. Here I was, already at a kind of turning point in my life. Well, gosh, it blew me away." There has been some time now for reality to settle in. For Ted, it's back to the business of saving the fisheries.
Ted is wiry, with the green eyes and peppery, steel wool beard of a pirate. Quite often, a mischievous grin sneaks through as he tries to explain the complexities of area management, which are second nature to him.
"The combination of modern electronics with large fishing vessels has created a technology too powerful for fish stocks to withstand," he explains.
The battle is hard fought as economics squeezes more and more young men out of what is already a tough and diminishing enterprise. Out of the remaining 1,200 to 1,300 fishing boats in New England, a mere 50 land 80 percent of the fish. These are the 250-foot, multimillion-dollar boats that haul out of New Bedford, Gloucester, Bos-ton, Portsmouth, or Portland. Under the restrictive permit codes, small boats in little harbors like Stonington don't have a chance -- the giant boats race to the gulf and drag the bottom for all the fish they can get. "Is it more appropriate to have fishermen as stewards of the resource, or should we just give it all to the biggest hog who can sweep up the most the fastest and never mind about tomorrow? We are suffering the consequences of that method right now," Ted says.
Ted advocates an approach that will not only help the fish to recover but will also help fishermen take charge and husband the fishery on their own. "To say 'you're catching too many' simply doesn't give them a constructive course of action. Protecting local spawning habitats and nursery areas is the key."
To formulate his method, Ted looked to the past. "What people are usually not aware of is that the lobster fishing in the 1930s was basically dead. Fishermen would go out and come back with 12, 15 lobsters. They figured out that they were basically raiding the nursery and the fish could never really reproduce. The lobstermen themselves initiated a series of management measures that were effective: protecting habitat, juveniles, brood stock. From that time on, because of these measures, the population of lobsters in Maine has gone continuously up." Today, lobstering is the only thriving fishing industry left in the eastern Gulf of Maine.
Ted would like to see a similar system put into place for groundfishing. "We need to fish smarter. We need to create a system where stewardship becomes important to the fishermen. The way to change it is to take those critical habitats in each section and make a special management zone where you put stringent rules on how, when, and where you catch fish; by doing that, you create an opportunity for the stewardship that allows for people to profit. Then it becomes meaningful."
In his research, talking to so many old-timers about their experiences at sea, Ted spoke with Roger Beal Sr. of Jonesport, who recalled the great Machias Bay codfish run of 1942. The old fisherman told Ted about the day when he and his father hauled in endless nets filled with thousands of cod 5 feet in length. No such haul has been recorded since. The tale is poignant to any fisherman who remembers fishing in the days of plenty, but tragic to fishermen who are aware that for years, trawlers have been ruining spawning and feeding grounds by dragging heavy equipment along the bottom of the sea, breaking up all the habitat.
Ted knows from firsthand experience how seductive trawling is: "God bless it, it's the dominant fishing technology today -- dominant because it catches everything. Haul it in, dump it on your deck, and, from the pile of stuff, pick out what you want and discard the rest. It's an incredibly comfortable, easy way to catch fish.
"But what you're doing is cleaning out the chicken coop before the eggs hatch. And at this point, the ground rules are such that if a fisherman has access to a spawning area and he knows when the fish are there, and he knows that other people know the same thing, he has to get there first. And the race is on. The government has created a self-defeating situation. The government is responsible for this. The fishermen are not."
Because he understands the natural world, Ted remains hopeful. "You have the potential for 30, 40, 50 million pounds of fish a year being taken from eastern Maine, and today you have squat coming in. I really believe that if you can get the system functioning again, we'll have fish coming out the wazoo."
He considers the recovery of Maine fisheries to be within reach. An additional and sizeable contribution to the reduction in the fisheries has been the existence of the many dams on rivers fish have historically used to spawn. "Right now, the fisheries are very depressing but, jeez, they removed a dam at the mouth of the Penobscot and a couple of years after that we started seeing fingerling cod in the upper part of the bay -- in areas where we had not seen cod since the 1930s. Which means there is a mechanism that will bring back these coastal stocks!"
This is what Ted Ames calls his "grand adventure" -- the fishing, the research, the winning of the MacArthur grant, and now the possibility of recovering the fisheries that have fed his family's line since the mid-1700s.
"The waters of eastern Maine could be a sport fisherman's paradise -- a tourist's dream come true," he says. "The economic bang for improving this system just takes my breath away. It's so obvious, I can almost taste it. This is sitting there like a ripe plum for all of us to take advantage of, if we could just get our act together."
The MacArthur grant is given with no strings attached. If he wanted to, Ted Ames could spend the entire sum on a mansion or take his family on a cruise around the world. When he was awarded the fellowship, he was asked what he would do with the money. "I told them, 'I'm going to do just what the old fisherman did when he won the jackpot. I'm going to keep doing exactly what I've always done, and when I run out of money, I'll figure out some other way to go fishing!'"
He laughs, an explosive burst of energy and emotion. "This MacArthur fellowship has given me a bully pulpit. I've rattled the cage at every corner on the same issue, which is to create a mechanism for fishermen to get smaller without paying a terrible price." He knows he has his work cut out for him. "At the turn of the century, it was fish, fish everywhere, and today, not a fish in sight. If things go well, it ought to look once again like it did back then, but we'll have to do a little fishing for something other than fish to get there."
This he has done, fearlessly navigating the shoals of government red tape.
A year ago, he wondered where he was headed now that his fishing days were mostly behind him. Now he has many more possibilities.
He takes a visitor down to the Stonington docks and shows her, with a flourish, a big old derelict building, once a lobster-buying station. Teetering on the edge of the dock, it looks ready to fall into the harbor. This, he explains, may become a place where fishermen can meet with researchers and state and federal regulators, sharing information and resources; it will have archives and a museum, to ensure that the information gathered can be used in the future. And it will be a place where the young people in town can learn about the marine trades and the environment, learn how they fit together in an intricate mix and how the fisheries can be taken care of so they will still be there for future generations.
It's not hard to share Ted's enthusiasm; no doubt, he's the captain of this ship. "If we take care of it, we'll have a fishery that can be fished hard or easy and we can fish forever, and our kids and grandchildren will have it, too. That's what I would like to see. Oh, boy, how I'd love to see that!"
How Ted Ames Solved the Mysteries of the Sea
So, Ted Ames interviews a bunch of old-time fishermen and maps the historic cod and haddock spawning grounds in New England's coastal and offshore waters -- for this, he gets a MacArthur "genius award"?
It may be hard to imagine that it takes a genius to figure out such basic biological information about where the most venerable of all of New England's fish lay their eggs. But among the many mysteries of the sea, the biggest mystery is how little we know or remember.
Ever since New England fishermen led a successful effort to impose a 200-mile limit off our coasts and expel foreign fishing fleets 30 years ago, American fisheries biology has suffered from math envy. To manage our fisheries, regulators feed numbers such as how many fish are harvested and their growth rates into complicated mathematical models. These models then estimate the spawning stock biomass of cod, haddock, and other groundfish throughout their vast range, followed by an estimate of maximum sustainable yield. If it sounds complex and full of uncertainty, it is.
Ted Ames, in contrast, caught fish by paying attention to local details. What was the cycle of the moon or the tide or the type of bottom when he hauled back his nets full of cod and haddock? Were their bellies pale white or dark (clues as to whether they were migrating schools or localized stocks of fish)? Ted thought such ecological details, which are ignored by fisheries science and management, were vitally important to understanding a fishery.
So Ted set out to map the local spawning grounds of cod and haddock by relying on anecdotal information from retired fishermen willing to give up their secrets. His efforts were initially rejected as "unscientific." But, slowly, it seems that what Ted discovered has the potential to turn fisheries management on its head throughout New England.
Ted found that more than half of the historic Gulf of Maine spawning grounds were not out on the offshore banks, as most had assumed, but in bays and around the Maine islands; furthermore, he found that they were located at particular depths and on particular bottom habitats.
Ted's mapping project led directly to an act of the Maine legislature to end all commercial groundfishing in 2,900 square miles of state waters during the months of April, May, and June of each year when these species spawn -- the largest single state fishing closure in history at the time. Ted led a quiet revolution that turned some, if not all, fishermen into conservationists.
Mathematical models will continue to be important fisheries management tools, but Ted has shown that we must also incorporate vital local ecological details into the system if we are to restore the legendary runs of cod and haddock off the New England coast.
Philip Conkling is director of the Island Institute in Rockland, Maine.
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