OK. So I'm planning my vacation and one morning I'd like to go horseshoe crabbing. Then, I hear that the daggone NJ Department of Environmental Protection has banned horseshoe crabbing for two years. Catch and release is fun too, but I like to bait my eel trap with those critters.
My vacation is ruined, or nearly so, due to a scrawny bird (and it's not even endangered):
The red knot, a robin-size bird that the state has listed as threatened, migrates annually from Tierra del Fuego, at the southern tip of South America, to the Canadian Arctic. When flying north from Brazil, the birds make only one stop, along the Delaware Bay, where they eat enough protein- and fat-rich horseshoe crab eggs to double their weight. Then the birds take off for the last leg of their 10,000 mile journey, a nonstop flight north to Southampton Island in Canada, just below the Arctic Circle.
In 1998, about 50,360 birds made the journey. But by 2004, after a large increase in the horseshoe crab harvest during the 1990's, only 13,315 birds were counted. Last year about 17,000 landed on the shores of Delaware Bay. Some scientists estimate that the birds could become extinct in five years.
The red knot is the largest of the "peeps." Check it out here. That's a big effin' peep.
Don't freak, I'm not really a horseshoe crabber and I'd probably enjoy a red knot encounter if I ever got the chance.
Here is the policy:
A bill in the New Jersey Assembly's Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee calls for a moratorium on horseshoe crabbing that would last until the red knot population reached 240,000 and the supply of crab eggs returned to a level that could sustain them. The bill also seeks to appropriate $168,300 to compensate licensed harvesters of horseshoe crabs and eggs, based on their harvests three years ago.
So what has been going on in this fishery? Here are the landings data from NMFS:
Delaware and New Jersey landings are down. New York, the rogue horseshoe crabbing state, landings are up.
The revenue from horseshoe crabbing in NJ was about $200k (2005 dollars) in 2003 and $50k in 2004. $168k should be enough compensation, especially if the crabbers can try to make money fishing something else, right? Wrong:
Scot C. Mackey, a lobbyist for the Garden State Seafood Association, said 32 or 33 fishermen still have commercial licenses to catch horseshoe crabs. He said he was disappointed with the state's moratorium, and would have liked to have seen the state allow the harvesting of male crabs. Compensating the fishermen for their lost harvests would not help conch fishermen, who use the horseshoe crabs for bait, he said.
And if you are thinking in terms of a benefit-cost analysis, what is the value of that little bird:
Eric Stiles, vice president for conservation at the New Jersey Audubon Society, said that the shorebird migration generated at least $15.9 million in tourism for New Jersey in 1998, and from 1996 to 2001, wildlife-related recreation grew 43 percent. "We're looking at an industry that's exploding in New Jersey," he said. Meanwhile, he added, the conch and eel fisheries, which use horseshoe crabs for bait, are in decline.
Wrong, wrong and wrong. None of these numbers has much to do with the big peep bird. The benefit of the red knot is the additional willingness to pay for its survival. Tourism revenue generated from gazing of all shorebirds in NJ is a gross overestimate of what one species is worth to society. Impacts aren't benefits (in the benefit-cost analysis sense of the word). And wildlife-related recreation won't take much of a hit without the biggest peep around.
That said, my guess is that the benefit of the red knot survival exceeds the cost to 30+ horseshoe crabbers who have to make a living catching something else (with a little change in their pockets to help them through the tough spots).
