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Ted Ames and the Recovery of Maine Fisheries

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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.