Good news, bad news: global fisheries discards are declining, but so are total catches
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ghoti papers Ghoti aims to serve as a forum for stimulating and pertinent ideas. Ghoti publishes succinct commentary and opinion that addresses important areas in fish and fisheries science. Ghoti contributions will be innovative and have a perspective that may lead to fresh and productive insight of concepts, issues and research agendas. All Ghoti contributions will be selected by the editors and peer reviewed. Etymology of Ghoti George Bernard Shaw (1856‐1950), polymath, playwright, Nobel prize winner, and the most prolific letter writer in history, was an advocate of English spelling reform. He was reportedly fond of pointing out its absurdities by proving that ‘fish’ could be spelt ‘ghoti’. That is: ‘gh’ as in ‘rough’, ‘o’ as in ‘women’ and ‘ti’ as in palatial. Abstract During fishing operations, fish are often caught that were not targeted. When the species in question are of low value, or protected, this ‘by‐catch’ is often thrown overboard as ‘discards’, the retained part of the catch constituting the landings. The amounts of fish discarded are generally highly area‐ and gear‐specific, but can be high; for example, discards in tropical shrimp trawl fisheries may be one order of magnitude higher than the retained catch. The latest analysis undertaken by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations suggests that global discards have declined in recent years, indicating that wastage is being reduced in global fisheries operations. By all accounts, reducing waste is a good thing, and hence good news. Nevertheless, if one considers this decline in discards in conjunction with the reported decline in global fisheries landings over the last decade, it becomes evident that total global fisheries catches (consisting of landings plus discards) might have declined at a substantially steeper rate than previously thought. This could be bad news, if it is indicative of declining total availability of fish. While acknowledging the high uncertainty in both discard and landings data at the global scale through time, the present observation may serve as an urgent reminder that global fisheries may be in more trouble than we thought previously.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.024 | 0.011 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".