Phase 1: Traditional adaption of rural fishermen–farmers 1945–1986
The post Second World War period in many respects represents a new beginning for the areas that were burnt down during the German scorched earth strategy, which makes it a natural place to start the social–ecological timeline. This is in general a period characterized by increasing prosperity and a relatively healthy marine ecosystem. The traditional adaptation of the rural fisher-farmers of Porsanger (and northern Norway in general) of combining fishing with other sources of income in this period could perhaps be characterized as “autochthonous” (Howard 2013). Especially, the 1960s and 1970s were a period when the fjord fishery was one of the most important livelihoods for most households in Porsanger. It kept fish buyers busy, and cod stocks were still healthy and able to provide both dinner on the table and monetary income. Due to economic development and investments in fishing vessels and the fishing industry, conflicts between traditional fjord fisheries and commercial fisheries soon made themselves felt. In the 1950s and early 1960s, large quantities of herring, mostly juvenile, gathered in Porsanger (Pettersson 1994) where they were fished by a large fleet of effective, non-local purse seine vessels. Large saithe were abundant in the 1950s (summer–autumn) but diminished during the 1960s and 1970s, due to increased fishery by industrial fishing vessels (Andersen and Persen 2011: 71). The most dramatic events noted by fishermen are the sudden collapses of the herring fishery and the saithe fishery due to overfishing by seine vessels.
Cod was abundant during the 1970s: five local delivery stations operated in the Porsanger fjord and the considerable amounts fished in Porsanger were delivered to stations outside the fjord. In 1972, a fish-processing plant was established in Billefjord by Olav Bull from Repvåg, to which the fishermen in the inner part of the fjord took their fish:
We all fished – people bought boats and – those years people bought boats and skimmed the cream. Those were the 1970s when there was a lot of fish in here, and in the beginning of the 1980s, before the seal problems started. In the winter the larger vessels fished in Olderfjord – in the net season. But we were many of the smaller boats that fished just in here. But since the last five or six years [2003] it has been the way that in July and August, the fish disappears from here.
However, increasing conflicts on the cod spawning grounds between conventional gear (gillnets, mainly local vessels) and active gear types (Danish seine, mainly non-local vessels) followed. As catches started to diminish, fishermen changed their gear to adapt.
Afterwards I regret that we used small-meshed nets in the Porsanger fjord, the amount of kilos caught decreased the more we fished, and in the end there were rules for the mesh size. In the beginning we controlled the mesh size ourselves until the rules came later. Then the fishermen talked about the catch getting smaller, but we had ourselves to blame. And after a year of restrictions the catches were better. The size went up, but we caught less fish. I think they should have done more to preserve the fish in the fjord. I will way that we have been part of the destruction. When in addition boats from the nearby areas came with sink nets the ocean was emptied. This was in the middle of the 1970s.
Gillnets were modified for deeper water and with reduced aperture to catch smaller sizes, and the change from cotton and hemp to synthetic fibre also made gillnets more effective. Some local fishermen foresaw an impending catastrophe based on the intensity of fishing on their traditional fishing grounds.
There were so many nets there that (..) it was like a cloudberry field. It was orange with floats. And it was the spawning fish they took, or we took, I was a part of it too. But as 16-year-old (in the 1970s) I said to the fishermen that this has to end, you cannot take the spawning fish. Some day it will be empty. And it turned out, that when you take the spawning fish…. Then no new fish. Now you don’t see a fishing boat there anymore.
As local fishermen worried about the situation, the local fishermen’s association asked for protective measures. This had political repercussions as the regional fishermen’s association would not close off the rich fjord fisheries to their members. In essence, the coastal Sami uprising (Nilsen 2003) was a conflict between local Sámi fishermen and the Finnmark fishermen’s Association, who decided to exclude two members from Porsanger because they had raised protection of local spawning grounds as a Sámi rights issue (Eythórsson 2008). As a result, fisheries regulations that prohibited Danish seine fishing in the spawning season became effective for most spawning sites in Porsanger fjord during the 1980s. This did not, however, prevent some spawning grounds to be fished down. In a study by Maurstad and Sundet (1998), two of the previous productive spawning grounds in Porsanger were declared “dead” as a result of overfishing, in Olderfjord and Billefjord.
While overfishing was high on the political agenda at the time, fishermen also had hypothesises about the role of environmental change. A fisherman born in the 1930s started noticing changes from around 1975: that the sea urchins living on the bottom began multiplying and the sea bottom changed. He also noted the increasing ocean temperature from the middle of the 1980s:
It is climate change. Everything used to freeze, you had to go as far as Bevkop or even further to see open water, when you came to March. But now, when you go out here you can see the sea, open sea
This coincided with spring coming earlier. In the late 1980s, fishermen noticed that kelp was disappearing in the fjord, the apparent reason being an explosive increase in the number of kelp-eating sea-urchins (supported by Sivertsen 2006). Sivertsen and Bjørge (2015), who studied the process in the Porsanger fjord, found that sublittoral macroalgae had been subject to downgrazing by sea urchins to such an extent that it had left barren grounds in some localities in the outer and middle fjord. One local hypothesis was that the natural enemies of sea-urchins were depleted. Some had a theory that the population of Atlantic wolffish (Anarhichas lupus), known to feed on sea-urchins, had diminished. Wolffish are not targeted by fishermen, but the otter (Lutra lutra) is known to be an able wolffish-hunter. Whereas traditionally otters were hunted and sought after for their fur, it is now a protected species and growing in numbers. Disregarding the causal relationship, locals do not have the opportunity to hunt otters to facilitate regrowth of kelp beds.
According to Sutton and Hodson (2005), ocean temperature declined from the very warm years in late 1930s and 1940s through the 1950s and 1960s to a minimum in the late 1970s (see Fig. 2). This is also related to the decline in the herring stock during the same period. Herring are assumed to respond directly to lack of food, and temperature is assumed to be a good proxy for primary and secondary production in the oceans. The supply of zooplankton (secondary production)—both in the open sea and in the fjords—directly influences the abundance of herring (Sunnanå, personal communication). What fishermen saw as a direct consequence of overfishing on herring and saithe in the 1960s and 1970s might then also be related to the declining production of zooplankton, which is difficult to observe by the human eye. In the 1970s and 1980s, the ocean temperature was low (although fluctuating), which probably also resulted in a low production of food in the ocean as well as in the fjords. In the 1980s, recruitment improved for both herring and cod. This probably led to heavy predation on zooplankton in the open sea, as well as heavy predation on small capelin, causing a reduction of the capelin stock and thus lack of food for cod. This again led to a shortage of food for seals, which sent them on a hunt for food to the Norwegian coastline.
The tipping point: Invasion of seals, local cod collapse and introduction of IVQ system (1986–1989)
According to Nilsen et al. (1992), a consequence of the low ocean temperature and the collapse of the capelin stock in the 1980s was a severe food shortage for marine mammals in the Arctic Ocean, particularly seals that feed on capelin and small crustaceans. As the food sources diminished in the open seas, numbers of seals moved closer to the coast and into the fjords of Finnmark and Troms counties. Large numbers of seals are known to chase away fish in areas where they appear, and they also get entangled in gill nets when they try to feed on fish caught in them (Nilssen and Haug 1995). Seals are also hosts for parasites (Anisakiasis simplex) on cod that reduces the quality of the fish. In 1979, harp seals in large numbers appeared in eastern Finnmark. In the following years, the seals spread westwards and reached Porsanger in late 1986, where the cod fishery crashed.
The LEK narratives are rich in information about the period leading up to the dramatic seal invasion, and the following impacts on cod, saithe, and flounder fisheries.
The fish disappeared before Christmas in 1986, from the whole fjord, until early summer 1989. The seals were all over the place. Gillnets filled with seals and destroyed. The bigger fishing boats went outside the fjord to fish, the fjord fishermen with small boats were forced to quit fishing.
The number of seals in the Porsanger fjord was at its highest in 1987–1988 and the local cod fishery collapsed in 1987, with a reduction of the fishing fleet by 50% (Brattland 2014). The owner of a local delivery station noted the impact on catches to the fish receiving stations in the fjord:
Before the collapse, the deliveries were between 1,5 and 2 million kilograms of cod, from the west side of the fjord (Olderfjord, Smørfjord and Repvåg). The catches from Smørfjord alone were between 500.000 and 700.000 kilograms. After the collapse, it went down to about 90.000 kilograms.
The cod did not return to the spawning sites in the inner part of the Porsanger fjord after the seal invasion, but continued to some degree in the outer part of the Porsanger fjord. Local fishermen had a theory that the cod were scared off to deeper waters outside the area of local gear restrictions that were in effect for the spawning areas in the fjord. As the fish gathered outside the restricted areas, they could easily be caught by larger vessels using Danish seines and long lines. As a result of the declining fishery, the fishermen with the smallest vessels which were not equipped to follow fish over longer distances, dropped out of the registries (Brattland 2014). Many of these vessels never re-entered the fishery after the introduction of the IVQ system in 1990, even though some may have had the intention to enter the fishery again after the storm was over.
Under these conditions, combined with overfishing of the cod stock, the fisheries managers struggled to avoid what they saw as a cod collapse in the late 1980s. The total allowable catch for cod was strongly reduced in 1990, and IVQs, already in effect for the offshore fisheries, were also introduced in the coastal fishing fleet (Christensen 2017). For the Porsanger fishermen, the collapse in the fisheries had, however, already occurred in 1986, thus making it hard to accept the link between local overfishing and vessel quotas at the time. The introduction of vessel quotas for the small-scale fishing-fleet in 1990 represented a limitation of catches and exclusion of fishermen who did not meet the requirements for quota allocation in terms of their vessels’ catch record for the last 3 years. Since many of the Porsanger fishermen had been unable to maintain their fishery during the seal years, they did not meet the requirements for allocation. Many small-scale fishermen quit fishing and never returned to fisheries as they had found other occupations (Broderstad and Eythórsson 2014).
Phase 2: Adapting to the new system and arrival of the Red king crab (1990–2010)
The quota system revealed a tension between traditional ways of limiting catches and the new way of thinking:
Even though I have a quota that is 10 or 15, or 20 or 100 tons for that matter, I fish as much that I decide that «I don’t need to fish anymore, it is enough”. (..)I mean, before this quota system was introduced in 1990, when we didn’t have a quota. Then we fished until the season was over, and we quit when it was bad. And didn’t care to fish more. After the quotas you don’t hear anything else than that you need to fish up your quota. And that is even if it is 10 or 100 or 150 tons. That is, you need to fish up that quota.
The new system had consequences for the adaptation strategy of combining livelihoods to support household economies. In order to catch their allotted quota with their vessels and keep up the fisheries activity, and thereby the right to stay in the fisheries, the fishermen who remained and obtained a quota adapted to the new system by investing in more effective and mobile fishing vessels that could fish farther away from home. This meant, for instance, narrowing the range of livelihood combinations to invest more time and resources in fisheries, and stationing vessels in communities closer to the richer coastal fishing fields in the main cod fishery season (Brattland 2014). Decommissioning of vessels was also an action used by the government to get rid of overcapacity and facilitate participation in the closed quota-regulated fisheries. Instead of local norms and values guiding when one had fished enough, the quota decided when it was time to stop fishing. The quota system thus spurred responses on the personal and household levels; it represented a break with previous norms and societal mechanisms; it changed with which vessels and where active fishermen fished; and not least it led to political change. Most importantly, the newly established Sami Parliament used the opportunity to argue that coastal Sami had been hit hardest by the new regulations, since so few fishermen in coastal Sami fjords had acquired a quota due to the seal years prior to the introduction of the system (Broderstad and Eythórsson 2014). Some compensatory measures were introduced a few years after the quota system was in place, such as economic support from the Sami Parliament to cover loans on fishing vessels (the price of which includes the value of the quota). In general, the new system radically changed the traditional livelihood adaptation all along the Norwegian coast.
In the northeast Atlantic, herring and cod stocks grew rapidly as the ocean temperature rose in the 1990s. The capelin stock suffered from this increase, and only in periods when the abundance of young herring was low in the open sea would the capelin stock recovered temporarily. Combined with the increasing but fluctuating ocean temperature in the 1980s, these conditions may have resulted in a fluctuating cod stock, in the open sea as well as in the fjords (Sunnanå, personal communication). Around 2010, ocean temperatures reached the same high level as in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Simultaneously, the herring stock reached biomass levels comparable to the levels in the 1950s, and the size of the mature stock of oceanic cod the same levels as in the 1950s. However, the coastal cod stocks have not recovered to the same degree as the oceanic cod. Adding to the meagre recovery of cod fisheries in the fjord,Footnote 1 and fishermen’s concern for other species like flounder that continue to be absent, the present social–ecological system is in a very different state. This might indicate that high ocean temperatures have different impacts on local and oceanic cod stocks.
Around the turn of the century, the red king crab reached Porsanger. The arrival of king crab was the result of transport of living crab from the Pacific by Russian biologists to the Barents Sea in the 1960s (Pinchukov and Sundet 2011). The red king crab has gradually expanded its territory and has shown up in increasing numbers in Porsanger since 2000. At first, it was only a nuisance, especially for gillnet fishermen, but after 2002, local fishermen have been allowed to participate in a commercial and increasingly lucrative crab fishery. It grew to become the main fishery in the fjord in terms of catches and income. Due to the amount of crabs caught up in gillnets in the inner part of the fjord, fishermen were, however, forced to relocate their vessels to fishing grounds further away from their homes.
After a couple of years, I moved to another fishing area. After 2002, I left the fjord almost for good, I have been here only sporadically. I have been fishing on the western side, from Kokelv and further off the shore, and from Havøysund and towards Repparfjord. But it was because of the arrival of the crab that I moved, it was not possible to fish with gillnets.
From 2008, the fisheries authorities opened up a so-called “extinction fishery” in the inner part of the fjord, aimed at decimating and halt the spread of the rapidly expanding stock of king crabs. Although the decision was controversial among fishermen, the fishery boomed to such an extent that the remaining receiving station in Smørfjord had trouble receiving all of the catch.
When the stock was down to a sustainable level, the fishery was closed again in 2015 and was limited to those with vessels below 6 m and who already participated in other fisheries. The crab is currently a valuable commercial species, and the catch regulations are favorable for most participants in the fishery. For the remaining active fishermen, they can stay in waters closer to home, not having to move between fishing grounds towards the coast to catch the cod and crab quotas throughout the yearly cycle. Paradoxically, the new fishery thus allowed some fishermen to station their vessels close to home as resources have become abundant again. For others, such as fishermen with vessels below 6 m, this meant that the option of including the new species in their livelihood system was cut off, and investing to enter the closed fishery or finding alternative occupations to combine with non-quota regulated fisheries were the remaining options. For this group of fishermen, king crab will provide more disadvantages in terms of destruction of fishing gear than economic advantages or opportunities to continue local livelihood combinations.
According to Pedersen et al. (2018), the king crab does not seem to have a significant effect on the cod stocks. The long-term ecological impact of the crab is, however, not known (Sundet 2008), and fishermen worry that it is yet another contribution to the degradation of the fjord ecosystem. Scientists at the EPIGRAPH project collected samples using different types of gear over a 4-year period at several stations in the fjord, aimed at analyzing the fjord’s ecological processes as a top–down system driven by predators (Pedersen et al. 2018). The fjord was modeled using Ecopath with Ecosim (EwE), analyzing the impact of the red king crab on invertebrates, mainly concluding that the ecosystem in Porsanger is relatively resilient in face of the king crab invasion, and that cod fisheries remain relatively undisturbed.
Based on ecosystem model simulations run by the EPIGRAPH project, however, a likely scenario is that king crab will deplete sea-urchins, thus contributing to increased regrowth of the kelp forests that are important nursery areas for cod (Pedersen et al. 2018).