Dr. Kathryn Fiorella, Assistant Professor in the Department of Public and Ecosystem Health, researches how changes in the environment affect the well-being, economic stability, and food security of communities. One area where all those concerns intersect are global fisheries. “Sometimes it’s the overharvest of resources,” she explains. “Other times it’s climate impacts, and harmful algal blooms.” Fishing makes up a large part of many populations’ dietary needs and Fiorella studies how the “ecological system and the social system are interwoven.” At this intersection, she sees how community-level decisions influence and are influenced by the environment.

WATER QUALITY AND HARMFUL ALGAL BLOOMS

One of her areas of focus is the fishing population surrounding Lake Victoria in Kenya. The resources and ecology of the lake have changed over generations and, traditionally, Lake Victoria has been financially productive for the fishing industry. “Dependence on fishing for food and income is very high,” she says. “Shifting water quality and harmful algal blooms are changing lake ecology and shaping how accessible fish are to people.” While fish are an important food source and generally highly nutritious, consuming fish exposed to the algal blooms can then expose people to toxins. Fiorella and her fellow researchers work with local scientists and the fishing community to track people’s exposure to these toxins. “There’s also potentially a lot of long-term health implications of being exposed to the blooms,” she explains, “either through drinking the water or ingesting the fish.” The community’s investment in the water quality of Lake Victoria makes them eager collaborators on this work. Local fishers and community members use their lived experience to chronicle the changes in resources, and Fiorella and her graduate students are developing avenues to further engage their understandings of blooms in the project.

Fiorella and her team work closely with the Kenya Marine and Fisheries Research Institute, a government research organization and a key partner in integrating the cultural needs of the community with the larger ecological concerns. “I think they do a really good job of thinking broadly about factors affecting the fisheries and they have strong relationships with fishing communities,” she says. Working with local organizations allows researchers to maintain a balance between all of the stakeholders affected by the project. Outside of the profitability of the Lake Victoria wild fisheries, developing aquaculture has the potential to expand fish access. “Fish are highly nutritious and a great food source…but there is a question about who is going to be able to access aquaculture fish,” Fiorella says. Which fish feed the community and which fish become fish meal, thereby making inexpensive fish less accessible to the poor, is also an essential part of the conversation.

FISH DIVERSITY AND NUTRITION

One of the challenges of studying fisheries and aquaculture is the variety of nutrition that fish have to offer. “Fish are a huge array of diverse species,” Fiorella says, “and so the consequence is that fish have variable amounts of different nutrients and particularly omega-3 fatty acids and micronutrients.” We tend to think of ‘fish’ as having a homogeneous nutritional profile, but this variation can affect the nutrients available from different species. “People also eat different kinds of fish differently,” she says, explaining that the small fish people tend to each whole, like sardines and anchovies, carry more nutritional value than those that are consumed as fillets. Studying who has access to which species and the variety of ways that fishing communities actually consume fish gives researchers insight into how fisheries and aquaculture contribute to public health.

In Cambodia, in partnership with the Center for Khmer Studies, Fiorella and her partner researchers examined highly biodiverse Mekong fisheries. “We used PhotoVoice,” Fiorella explains, “which is a methodology where we give people cameras to take pictures around a theme.” In Cambodia, Fiorella worked with communities to take pictures of the role of fish biodiversity in their lives. “Folks [living] a little further from the lake tended to have much more diversified livelihoods. So they were farming rice and participating in other jobs.” When people were more dependent on fisheries they were more vulnerable to fish declines and fishery regulations; those communities often talked about their issues with regulations and restrictions surrounding their vocation.

Researchers also noticed that fishers were catching a larger variety of fish and that diversity was “really critical to their well-being and their diets. Lots of people took pictures of their food, and in the images, you can really see an astounding array of biodiversity,” Fiorella says. Americans, for example, typically have only a handful of fish varieties as part of their regular diet, but the fishing communities in Cambodia were “on a regular basis, eating a huge diversity” of aquatic foods. Her research group worked with WorldFish, a global organization dedicated to encouraging healthful nutrition via sustainable aquaculture, to understand how much of the diversity of fish available in the ecosystem actually reached the community’s diet. On average, fishers catch and consume over 40% of the available fish species, “but they sell only about 9% of species in the ecosystem.” Fiorella points out that global fish consumption data is compiled through sales and commercial fishing. “Where there are a lot of small-scale fishers, that might dramatically underestimate the biodiversity that people are actually making use of from their food system.” Making social connections with affected communities, through empowered methods like PhotoVoice, allows researchers to scale down to the local level and study the actual intersection between the ecosystem and community. “The folks that live and work in these systems, I think, are the experts in them.” That expertise is critical for researchers like Fiorella in studying past and future effects of ecosystem change, and to develop sustainable nutrition for a growing population. “I think what we can do with the social sciences is try to understand those experiences and aggregate them in a way that looks at the bigger structural environmental factors that may be driving them.”

Written by Heather Flyte