Marine Stewardship Council Ross Sea Toothfish Fishery Certification
The Marine Stewardship Council is currently evaluating the Ross Sea Toothfish Fishery for sustainability certification. ASOC opposes this certification. First, the lifecycle of the toothfish renders it extremely vulnerable to overfishing. Another MSC-certified toothfish fishery is showing signs of overfishing, despite having met MSC's standards (Shust and Kozlov 2006). Toothfish live for several decades, mature slowly, and reproduce sporadically. This makes them extremely vulnerable to overfishing because fishing that targets either juveniles or adults will likely cause serious damage to the population. Typically, toothfish fisheries target the largest and therefore most valuable specimens, causing population declines as the numbers of reproducing adults dwindles. Yet the body certifying the fishery appears not to have considered that anything but very low levels of toothfish fishing may be unsustainable. CCAMLR, the body that officially manages the Ross Sea fishery, has designated the fishery as "exploratory" due to uncertainties about toothfish biology. It is therefore premature to discuss certification of the fishery.
On November 27th, ASOC and its member groups issued a press release condemning the MSC's decision to certify the Ross Sea toothgish fishery - click here to read it. ASOC believes that the fishery also fails on many of the performance indicators required by MSC methodology. Although the toothfish has been researched by scientists for years, there is still no data on larvae or eggs, which is critical for determining whether fishing is possibly having an unsustainable impact on the overall population. Moody Marine, the independent team assessing the toothfish fishery against MSC principles, believes that future research, as well as an industry-based tagging program, will fill these knowledge gaps. ASOC strongly disagrees with this assumption as the tagging program has thus far mostly tagged younger fish, which will not provide enough information to draw conclusions about the entire population. Furthermore, Cheung et al. identified toothfish as a species highly vulnerable to climate change, but there are no allowances made for climate change in the MSC methodology (read more about the MSC and climate change here). It is simply irresponsible to increase fishing pressure on a population that is also experiencing a shrinking of available habitat due to climate change. Finally, Moody Marine is overly optimistic about CCAMLR's ability to manage the toothfish fishery. You can read our full comments here, and track the fishery here. The comments of other NGOs and stakeholders are below:
Greenpeace
Friends of the Ross Sea
WWF
Center for Biological Diversity