PROBLEMS WITH PLANKTON

 

When people consider the things that can threaten our fisheries, they typically think of the obvious problems, like overfishing, predation, habitat loss, or a decline in forage.

Sometimes, they also consider the sort of things that don’t necessarily lead to population declines, but can make fishing harder or move fish elsewhere, like warming waters.

But more and more, as scientists look at the problems besetting various fisheries, they realize that the issues often lie at the very base of things, that is, with the tiny plants and animals, the plankton that lie at the very bottom of the food web, and hold the whole thing together.

And it seems that plankton has been becoming more and more problematic in the last decade or so.

A recent article in the New York Times noted that the distribution of phytoplankton, the single-celled plants that convert sunlight into the makings of life, has changed in recent years.  Satellite surveys of plankton abundance have found that there is less phytoplankton in the open ocean than there used to be, but more close to shore, particularly in more northerly regions, where a warming ocean seems to be creating conditions that favor plankton growth.

The increase in inshore phytoplankton has certainly been apparent in my local waters south of Long Island, New York, particularly to those of us who fish for tuna, shark, and other pelagic fishes.  Fishing for such big fish of the open sea is often called “blue water fishing,” because once one gets away from the shoreline—a distance that, depending on place and time, might be anywhere from a mile to 30 miles or so off the beach—the greenish, nutrient-laden inshore waters give way to blue water so clear that we could sometimes see the outlines of a hooked fish when it was still 50 or 60 feet beneath the boat.

I recall drifting near the Yankee wreck, in 20 fathoms of water, on an early September day, and watching a mako come in to a bait that was drifting at least 40 feet under the surface, and seeing it all as clearly as I might have watched someone swim beneath the surface of a backyard swimming pool.  Although green water sometimes extended farther from shore, it was unusual not to have blue water by the time a boat crossed the 30-fathom line.

Today, that’s no longer the case.  Often, these days, when I fish for sharks in 20 or 25 fathoms south of Long Island, I’ll have an angler fight a fish up to the boat, and we’re still not able to see it when my gloved hands get their first grip on the 15-foot wire leader that’s attached to the hook.  Last July, I was 40 miles from the inlet and still fishing in murk, finding bluefish instead of the bluefin tuna that I was seeking.

The green, plankton-filled water has certainly had a negative impact on fishing for billfish and the various tunas, fish which, as sight feeders, generally need clear blue water to locate and run down their prey.  Although there are still quite a few tuna around, we’re running ever farther, trying to find that blue water that holds them.

But in those cases, phytoplankton are merely an inconvenience that makes fish harder to find.  In other cases, they become a real risk to the health of both people and fish stocks.  Off the southwest Florida coast, so-called “red tides—blooms of harmful phytoplankton—are a regular enough occurrence that the state maintains a web page advising people of “Red Tide Current Status,” which advises viewers of where fish kills take place, and also notes that

“Respiratory irritation suspected to be related to red tide was reported over the past week in Southwest Florida (Pinellas, Manatee and Sarasota counties,”

which is probably not the news that tourists want to see as they plan their winter vacations.  Still, the Visit Florida website dutifully informs potential visitors that

“A red tide is a higher-than-normal concentration of a microscopic alga (plant-like organism).  In Florida, the organism that causes most red tides is Karenia brevis (K. brevis).  This organism produces a toxin that can affect the central nervous system of fish.  At high concentrations (called a bloom), the organisms may discolor the water a red or brown hue.  The water can even remain its normal color during a bloom…

“Some people may experience respiratory irritation (coughing, sneezing, and tearing) when the red tide organism is present along a coast and winds blow aerosolized toxins ashore…

“If you experience respiratory irritation, wear a mask, such as a painter’s mask, that covers the nose and mouth to filter out marine aerosol particles that carry the red tide toxins…Always seek medical care if your symptoms worsen.  For your home or motel room, keep your windows closed, the A/C on and check/change the unit’s filter.”

That might not sound like an enjoyable vacation, but things are even worse for the fish, which live in the region year-round without the benefits of windows or air conditioning that might combat at least a fraction of the red tide toxins.  And things aren’t likely to get better at any time soon.  A 2022 article in Inside Climate News noted that

“A task force organized by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to address the state’s algal bloom crisis concluded in a recent report that ‘without hard work and careful planning’ adverse human health impacts and widespread wildlife mortality would most likely ‘worsen’ because of climate change and the state’s growing population.”

While phytoplankton can have undesirable impacts when it becomes too abundant, zooplankton can have negative impacts on wildlife when it becomes too scarce, or when its abundance shifts to a time when it is no longer available to the creatures that need it.

I first learned of that problem a decade ago, when a paper titled “Slow adaptation in the face of rapid warming leads to collapse of the Gulf of Maine cod fishery” appeared in the journal Science.  The thrust of the paper was that as waters warmed in the Gulf of Maine, the number of cod reaching maturity declined.  The researchers raised the possibility that the increasing water temperatures have led to a decline in the abundance of zooplankton that larval cod depend on for food.

One important element of the missing Gulf of Maine zooplankton seems to be a copepod—a type of tiny crustacean—known as Calanus finmarchicus.  The New York Times reported that

“Calanus hibernate through winter, hiding from predators in the dim light of deeper waters…

“Dr. [David] Fields [a zooplankton ecologist] calls the layer of sleeping Calanus the ocean’s fat layer, a valuable resource for other life.  ‘That’s the whole reason the Gulf of Maine runs the way it does, because of that beautiful fat layer,’ he said.”

The Times also noted that

“specimens [of Calanus finmarchicus] had big oil sacs, full of the calorie-rich lipids that fish and right whales seek out.  In experimental studies, Dr. Fields and his colleagues have found that as the temperature rises, Calanus get smaller and have less fat relative to their body size.”

The decline of Calanus copepods in the Gulf of Maine may also be having a negative impact on the Gulf of Maine stock of American lobster.  While adult lobster remain abundant in the region, since 2012, biologists have noted a marked decline in the numbers of younger individuals.  In particular, they have been noting a dearth of lobster at the stage where they cease being free-floating larvae and settle on the ocean floor.

Some biologists suspect that a shortage of Calanus finmarchicus is again at the root of the problem. 

Historically, Gulf of Maine lobster began hatching in early June, with the peak of the hatch occurring a month or so later.  A new generation of Calanus finmarchicus appeared in April and were abundant into early fall.  The timing was perfect for the young-of-the-year lobster, which could feed on the copepods until the lobsters were ready to settle to the bottom of the sea.  

But warming waters have changed the timing of both events.  Now, the lobster are hatching earlier, while the copepods are spawning at the same time, but the copepod population’s annual decline begins much sooner, so that, but the time the young lobsters need them, there are about 70 percent fewer copepods available than there were three decades ago.  Lacking their once-reliable food source, fewer larval lobsters are surviving to settle on the bottom, a result that can only lead to fewer adult lobster in the not-too-distant future.

And such problems aren’t limited to the Gulf of Maine. 

In Maryland, striped bass have experienced their sixth consecutive year of poor reproduction.  While biologists have, for a while, associated poor striped bass spawns with unfavorable environmental conditions, the availability of food, in the form of zooplankton, is now believed to play an important role. 

The Maryland Department of Natural Resources has noted that

“One theory for low spawning success is known as the ‘mismatch hypothesis.’ This suggests that the food source—blooms of cold-water zooplankton—are not matching up with the first time larval striped bass need to eat, as winter temperatures in the Chesapeake increase.  If the zooplankton blooms don’t align with the first-feeding larvae, feeding success is too low for good survival.”

To make things a little more complicated, it’s not clear that any sort of zooplankton will do.  A biologist who has decades of experience working with Maryland striped bass recently stated that one of his former colleagues believed that, of all the zooplankton present in the Chesapeake Bay, the juvenile striped bass focused their feeding on only two or three species.  It’s not clear that the fish would shift their focus if the preferred species were not available.

So yes, to perpetuate a cliché, small things can sometimes make a big difference.  And the presence or absence of plankton—among the smallest forms of life in the sea—can have a very big impact on the health of marine resources all along the coast.

 

 

 

 

 

 

CONSIDERING THE FUTURE OF FEDERAL FISHERIES MANAGEMENT

 

On February 28, the National Marine Fisheries Service closed two bluefin tuna fisheries, the Angling Category Southern Area Trophy Fishery, which targets bluefin larger than 73 inches curved fork length in the waters between central New Jersey and the southeast coast of Florida, and the General Category commercial fishery which targets the same sized fish.  The latter fishery will reopen on June 1.

The reason for the closure is the high volume of large medium and giant bluefin tuna landings occurring this winter off the coast of North Carolina.

Normally, except for the unusually high volume of landings that led to such action, the closure would have been deemed unremarkable.  NMFS routinely closes bluefin tuna fisheries when regional and/or category closures are exceeded.  But this year’s bluefin closure was being watched very carefully, because it was an early test of how NMFS might react in a new presidential administration that is notably hostile to regulatory agencies, and makes no secret of its intent to limit regulatory actions.  

Over the past week, I was in contact with a number of people from both the recreational fishing industry and the conservation community, who were reaching out, asking for my views on the bluefin tuna situation that was unfolding in North Carolina, and whether I thought that NMFS would be able to close the relevant fisheries or whether, as a result of administration policy, would allow the overfishing to continue.

The good news is that NMFS did its job and acted to conserve the bluefin resource, which provides some hope that it will be able to continue to manage other fish stocks in the future.  But how well it will be able to manage U.S. fisheries remains unknown.  Some bad signs have already emerged.

Probably the most worrisome are the cuts already made to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration staff (NOAA is NMFS' parent agency) and the additional cuts that are likely to come.  NOAA has already laid off 880 people, about five percent of its staff, and while most of the news of the layoffs has focused on jobs related to weather forecasting and climate change, many fisheries scientists were also affected.  Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA) opined that such cuts

“jeopardize our ability to forecast and respond to extreme weather events like hurricanes, wildfires, and floods—putting communities in harm’s way.  They also threaten our maritime commerce and endanger 1.7 million jobs that depend on commercial, recreational, and tribal fisheries, including thousands in the State of Washington.  This action is a direct threat to our economy, because NOAA’s specialized workforce provides products and services that support more than a third of the nation’s GDP.”

According to a recent article in Newsweek, the nation’s commercial and recreational fisheries generate $300 billion each year in sales and value-added activity.  Janet Coit, who headed NMFS during the Biden administration, told Newsweek that she believed

“if the NOAA personnel were cut, you would see a cascading set of negative impacts.  While fishermen complain about regulation, as do many businesses, they also know that the regulation is what maintains the resource in the long term.”

Aside from personnel cuts, the House of Representatives’ Appropriations Committee has approved a 2025 funding bill that reduces NMFS Science and Management budget from $710 million to $637 million, while also reducing the agency’s Enforcement budget from $82 million to $68 million. 

While there’s little doubt that some fishermen would celebrate the opportunities for short-term profits that would accrue if NMFS regulators and enforcement agents were less able to do their jobs, there is also little doubt that, without the basic scientific work that NMFS does every day—the fisheries-independent and fisheries-dependent surveys, the updated stock assessments, the expanding knowledge of basic fish biology and how fish respond to oceanographic conditions, including a warming ocean—the long-term outlook for healthy and profitable fisheries would be poor.

For just one example of the problems cuts in NMFS’ funding and staffing could cause, consider Framework 17 to the Summer Flounder, Scup, and Black Sea Bass Fishery Management Plan, also known as the Recreational Harvest Control Rule Framework.  Framework 17 sets out the procedure used to determine the annual recreational landings target for the three named species, which employs a matrix that requires managers to know how the current spawning stock biomass of each species relates to that species spawning stock biomass target, and also requires managers to determine whether recreational landings for the upcoming year are likely to equal, exceed, or fall short of the recreational harvest limit, which limit also considers, among other things, the spawning stock biomass of the relevant stock.

Framework 17 is based on the assumption that the stock assessment for each managed species will be updated every two years.  Such stock assessment provides managers with an estimate of the maximum sustainable yield that can be produced by each managed stock, the spawning stock biomass needed to achieve maximum sustainable yield (the “biomass target”), and how current spawning stock biomass compares to the biomass target.  In order to perform the calculations required by Framework 17, managers also need to know what recreational fishermen’s landings were in previous years, in order to predict what they are likely to be in the future if management measures remain unchanged; the relationship between past and projected future landings determines whether any regulatory changes are needed to either further conserve the stock or to provide more harvest opportunities to recreational fishermen.

Performing the stock assessments, and collecting and collating the recreational landings data, is a labor-intensive effort, yet it is necessary for Framework 17 to work.  If any of the necessary data are unavailable, recreational landings targets for future years cannot be set.  We already saw this happen in 2023, when demands on NMFS’ scientific staff led to a delay in the completion of a research-track black sea bass stock assessment, and resulted in the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council being unable to calculate recreational black sea bass management measures for the 2024 season.

Reductions in NMFS’ scientific staff will virtually assure that managers will lack needed data in the future, and that whatever data is provided will often arrive well behind schedule.

Of course, there will be those, particularly in the recreational fishing community, who are probably looking forward to the federal fisheries management program being crippled.  A group of recreational fishing industry organizations, gathered under the umbrella of the Center for Sportfishing Policy, has long been trying to move the management of certain species, most particularly red snapper, away from federal managers obliged to adhere to the requirements of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, and into the control of state fishery managers, who are not governed by Magnuson-Stevens, and are often more vulnerable to political pressure exerted by special interest groups than is NMFS.

The current efforts to depopulate and defund NMFS plays into the hands of such organizations.  It is easy to imagine them proposing—because they’ve already tried—that that NMFS surrender its role in gathering recreational catch, landings, and effort data, in favor of state data programs that may not be as statistically rigorous as NMFS’ Marine Recreational Information Program, chronically undercount anglers’ landings, and so allow larger harvests to occur.  It’s equally easy to imagine—because they’ve already tried this, too—that such organizations will attempt to convince NMFS to hand management authority of recreationally important species over to state agencies unburdened by Magnuson-Stevens, which may allow overfishing to occur, and need not rebuild overfished stocks if there is political incentive to refrain from acting.

And given that angling industry groups such as the Center for Sportfishing Policy, American Sportfishing Association, and Coastal Conservation Association are already fawning over the newly appointed Secretary of Commerce, Howard Lutnick, it is easy to imagine that such conversations may have already begun,.

Still, if the current administration cripples NMFS ability to properly manage fish stocks, it’s not unreasonable to look to the states, and to the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, to provide a backstop, at least with respect to those species that support state-waters fisheries.

But even there, reductions in funding and agency actions can do real harm. 

The ASMFC, for example, receives funding from multiple sources, including payments made directly by the member states.  However, a substantial majority of its funding comes from either NMFS grants or from Congress, and can be badly hurt, and unable to fill in for lost federal management assets, if its federal funds are cut back.

Coastal states also run Sea Grant programs through various state universities, which conduct fisheries research and act as resources for the recreational and commercial fishing industries.  Those programs are heavily reliant on federal grants.  And just last Friday, one of those state programs, Maine Sea Grant, received a letter from NOAA that

“It has been determined that the program activities proposed to be carried out in Year 2 of the Maine Sea Grant Omnibus Award are no longer relevant to the focus of the Administration’s priorities and program objectives.”

As a result, Maine Sea Grant will lose about $1.5 million in financing this year, and about $4.5 million that it had expected to receive through January 2028.

Including Maine, 34 states maintain Sea Grant programs, and so far, as far as we know, none of the others have received similar notices.  So, it isn’t yet clear whether the letter received by Maine was merely the first shot in a campaign to defund Sea Grant—in which case an important source of research and fishing industry support will be lost—or whether Maine's defunding was merely done in a fit of pique after Maine’s governor, Janet Mills, refused to kiss the president’s ring at a meeting of governors that took place at the White House a week before.

But right now, the Sea Grant programs have to be considered at risk.

And things aren’t much better at the international level.

There are rumors going around that the administration is considering pulling the U.S. out of ICCAT, the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas.  While that rumor has not been confirmed, should it prove to be true, it would remove the United States, historically one of the most prominent supporters of highly migratory species conservation, from the international arena, and probably encourage some of the remaining ICCAT members to oppose needed management measures.

Regardless of whether the United States remains an ICCAT member, right now, there is a gag order in effect that prohibits NMFS staff from communicating with their counterparts in other nations, a situation which is hampering international management and law enforcement efforts.

The National Fisherman, a publication serving the commercial fishing community, noted that

“NOAA plays a key role in enforcing global treaties, tackling illegal fishing, and managing migratory species like tuna and swordfish.  Limiting international cooperation could weaken enforcement efforts and disrupt global suppy chains.”

Thus, the future of federal fisheries management is not at all clear.  The current administration seems to be more than willing to undercut fisheries science and law enforcement, while Congress—or, at least, the House of Representatives—appears unwilling to appropriate the funds needed for NMFS to perform its myriad enforcement, conservation, and management functions.  The efforts to hamper NMFS’ operations aren’t limited to the agency itself, but threaten its state, regional, and international partners’ efforts as well.

It is not at all certain that either NOAA or NMFS will survive the next four years and, even if they survive, whether they will bear any resemblance to what those agencies have been in the past, or whether they will merely be gutted shells unable to carry out their intended missions.  And should the latter be the case, there is no knowing when, or if, they will ever be restored to their former capabilities.

It is very possible that, when 2029 dawns, fisheries will find themselves where they were thirty years and more ago, before the Sustainable Fisheries Act was passed, when New Englandtrawlers stayed tied to their docks because there were too few groundfish to make fishing worthwhile, and summer flounder had become so scarce that not onlyanglers, but even NMFS’ survey vessels, had difficulty finding adults more thanthree years old.

Should that be the case, and three decades of progress is lost, we will learn in four years whether Congress might still care enough to begin the long process of rebuilding our fisheries all over again, or whether it will move on, leaving the nation’s marine resources just another casualty of an ill-conceived policy and an administration more interested in tearing down what others have built than in creating anything new that might achieve lasting worth.

 

 

 

WINTER FLOUNDER: HOW SOON WE FORGET

 

I was sitting around the other morning, drinking the day’s first cup of tea nd scrolling through my news alerts from the previous day when I pulled up an article from Outdoor Life magazine’s website:  “The Lost Art of Winter Flounder Fishing.”

The blurb under the title read

“These delicious underdog flatfish are making a comeback, and now is the time to get in on the action,”

and the only reaction I could have to that was

“Really?  This is going to be good,”

because I’ve lived long enough to remember when there really was a winter flounder fishery, long enough to watch that fishery die, and if anybody really believes that winter flounder are “making a comeback” today, they believe in the walking dead.

I did most of my flounder fishing off the southwestern corner of Connecticut in Long Island Sound, between the late 1950s and 1983, when I moved to Long Island, although I’ve also caught a few in Massachusetts and, for a couple of decades, removed my share from Long Island’s Great South Bay.  There were flounder around in those years, enough fish that, when I was a boy, most people chased them throughout the season.

It didn’t really matter when you fished back then; there were always flounders.  Particularly during the spring and the fall, there were enough fish in the creeks, harbors, and coves that you could usually catch a fair number while fishing from shore.  Even during the summer, the folks lining the ripraps at the town parks usually managed to put a half-dozen or so in their pails.  As boys in third or fourth grade, beginning around the middle of March, we’d go down to the marinas lining the Mianus River and fish off the docks, usually managing to catch enough flounder for a family meal.  The docks were technically off-limits to fishing, but at that time of year, with boats still resting in their canvas cocoons, the folks who worked at the marinas usually looked the other way.

By the time I moved to Long Island, Great South Bay’s flounder were already experiencing overfishing, although we didn’t even suspect it at the time.  Fish were still being caught by the pailful, at least in the spring and fall; 1984 saw New York anglers take home just under 14.5 million winter flounder, the highest annual landings ever recorded for the state.  And it wasn’t only New York that was enjoying the bounty.  In that same year, Massachusetts landed slightly over 4.8 million fish, Connecticut nearly 2.7 million, and New Jersey slightly under 8.5 million; even in little Rhode Island that year, recreational fishermen took a little more than 1.5 million flounder home.

But as pioneer ecologist Aldo Leopold once noted,

“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.  Much of the damage inflicted on land is invisible to laymen.  An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.”

What is true for the land and for ecologists is too often true for fish stocks and fisheries biologists as well.  By the mid-1980s, fisheries managers could see that the winter flounder was experiencing problems; the number of young fish recruiting into the population had dropped, and the population itself was beginning to slide.  But with catch levels still high, and with the flounder driving a lot of business for the tackle shops and the party boat fleet, resistance to any sort of recreational regulations was high. 

When the first regulations came out here in New York, they were, as a result, laughably lax.  As I recall, that first set of rules imposed an 8-inch minimum size and a bag limit of either 20 or 25 flounder, the smallest bag that was even remotely acceptable to the party boat fleet, which argued that their customers had to have the “perception” that a so-called “big day”—that is, a pail filled with fish—was still possible, or they wouldn’t want to pay the cost of the trip.

But outside of the public hearings and the fisheries meetings, everyone quietly admitted that those “big days” were notably few and far between.

From then on, the fishing decayed at first slowly, and then at a faster pace, and fisheries managers were never willing to impose the restrictions needed to stem the tide.  By the year 2000, one didn’t need to be a biologist to see that the flounder were in real trouble; by then, New York’s annual landings had fallen to just 575,000 winter flounder—a long way from the 14,500,000 of just 16 years before—and other states were following suit, with Massachusetts’ landings falling to less than 165,000, Rhode Island’s to 68,000, and Connecticut’s to 18,000.  Outside of northern New England, only New Jersey was maintaining a fairly strong fishery, although at just under 3 million flounder landed, even its recreational harvest was less than half of what it had been in 1984.

The winter flounder population went into freefall after that, and while wishful thinkers might say that the species “is making a comeback,” the facts belie that claim.

In 2024, New York’s anglers landed an estimated 2,737 winter flounder, although the surveyors working on behalf of the National Marine Fisheries Service intercepted so few successful flounder anglers that their estimate is almost meaningless; once its inherent uncertainty is taken into account, the actual landings might have been anywhere between zero (which is extremely unlikely, since if the surveyors hadn’t counted a single fish, New York shouldn’t have been included in the catch data) to 8,334.  Other states are in a similar situation with respect to the number of flounder caught and the quality of the data.  Massachusetts had the highest landings estimate, 32,123 (which might really have been anywhere between zero and 72,292), followed by New Jersey at 1,500, Connecticut at 333, and Rhode Island at 165.  The northern New England states, which exhibited lesser landings twenty or forty years ago, now had some of the largest recreational landings, with Maine and New Hampshire landing an estimated 4,491 and 1,618 winter flounder, respectively.

But compared to the years when the stock was relatively healthy, and over 20 million fish were landed coastwide, such numbers would be lost to rounding error; even the New England states’ landings are still, at best, trivial.  So, when I read about anglers “pounding winter flounder in Cape Cod Bay,” as described in the Outdoor Life piece, the best that I could muster was a bitter smile.

Yes, the Gulf of Maine winter flounder stock, which ranges roughly from the “elbow” of Cape Cod to the Canadian border, seems more abundant than the Southern New England/Mid-Atlantic stock that is caught everywhere south of Cape Cod.  But that doesn’t mean that the fishing is anything approaching good.

Anglers may keep eight Gulf of Maine flounder, compared to just two farther south, and from what I’ve been told, it’s not unusual for an angler fishing at the right time, on the right tide, and probably from one of the charter boats that knows the area well, to put a limit of fish in the boat.  And maybe today, when flounder are scarce, landing those eight flounder seems impressive.

But, once again, some of us remember an earlier time.  We remember the days described by Capt. Jason Colby, who still operates a successful charter operation in Massachusetts and is one of the better-known flounder captains in the region, in an article that he wrote for The Fisherman magazine a few years ago:

“Growing up on Long Island, NY, I often heard tales of fellow fishermen taking buses up to Quincy, Massachusetts to go flounder fishing.  ‘Why,’ I asked, “would anyone travel four-plus hours on a bus when they had a viable local fishery?’  Well, as it turned out, the answer was quite simple:  the fishing was EPIC!

“Upon arrival at Hough’s Neck in Quincy, MA, anglers would be greeted by a sign that proclaimed the area to be, ‘The Flounder Capitol of the World.’  The two major destinations were Harvey’s Fishing Station and Hurley’s Fishing Station, both just off Sea Street.

“During the season, local kids would get up at 4 a.m. to put the float cushions, anchors, oars and motors on the boats so that they would be ready when the buses arrived around 8 o’clock.  The men fished while the kids went to school, and when they got out, the skiff fleet was beginning to trickle back to the dock.  Then the real work began!  Hauling the gear back to the boat sheds, and the fishermen’s gear back to the bus, was followed by filleting the hundreds of fish that had to be cut, bagged and tucked into coolers for the ride back to New York.  There were also buses from New Jersey and even some from Philadelphia, which shuttled happy anglers from all across the Northeast.”

Needless to say, all of those busloads of anglers didn’t head up to Quincy to catch just eight flounder apiece. 

Instead, they brought back coolers packed with fillets.  And they didn’t need a charter boat captain’s intimate knowledge of season, bottom, and tides to bring back a peach basket brimming with flounder; the anglers’ boats scattered across Quincy Bay and Boston Harbor, stopping wherever the anglers’ guts told them to stop, and if they might have to move from time to time over the course of the day, and some boats caught more fish than others, no one went home skunked, and very few departed unhappy.

What we see now is the merest remnant of those days.  The surviving fish do not represent a “comeback” of the winter flounder stock, but rather the mere dregs that remain once the rest of the cup has been drained.  But to understand the fishery that we have lost, one must have started their angling career at least twenty or twenty-five years ago.  If you started any later than that winter flounder, for most practical purposes, were already gone.

Thus, I had a few, somewhat contradictory reactions when I read an article that stated, as the Outdoor Life piece did, that

“The funny thing about these fish is that historically they were a real crowd pleaser.  Throughout the Northeast, anglers swarmed the coast in late winter and early spring to target them, creating an entire culture around the fleeting window in which these fish were available.

“That culture has largely dissolved, but the fish are still there for the taking…There’s no boat necessary.  All you need to understand are these basics.”

My first, and perhaps my strongest, reaction upon reading that invoked images of cattle and manure.  Back when there was a viable flounder fishery throughout the northeast, there was not an “entire culture” built around it; we welcomed the flounder when they showed up in the spring, when you would find just about everyone, from the rental skiffs to the big sportfishermen, anchored up in the channels hauling them over the side.  Then, as the waters warmed, most of us moved on to fluke and weakfish, bass and blues, tuna, sharks, and whatever else the sea offered, then returned to the flounder toward the end of the year, to put some fillets in the freezer before the bay froze.

You might make a trip to Quincy, but that was something you did once or twice each year; it wasn’t a “cultural” thing, any more than a trip out to Montauk to charter for stripers or tuna might be.

And there was no “fleeting window” in which to fish, for while fishing was better during the spring and fall, you could scratch up a few flounders—often, enough to fill an eight-fish bag limit, had such a thing even existed back then—even during the dog days of summer, although you might have to fish different spots at that time of year.

But the suggestion that anyone can readily catch a bunch of flounder these days—that “the fish are there for the taking…All you need to understand are these basics” is downright offensive.

I’ve been a member of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Winter Flounder Advisory Panel since the late 1990s.  I know, and am regularly in touch with, PhD-level scientists who have made winter flounder a part of their life’s work.  And if one thing is clear, it’s that the flounder are not “there for the taking” at all.

From the recreational fisherman’s perspective, there are two flounder stocks (the other, on Georges Bank, is almost exclusively a commercial fishery).

One, the Gulf of Maine stock presents an enigma.  The 2022 Management Track Stock Assessment, relying on the number of fish at least 30 millimeters (12 inches) or more in length being detected in trawl surveys, found that the stock was not experiencing overfishing.  However, biologists have, to date, been unable to calculate the size of the stock needed to produce maximum sustainable yield, or what that maximum sustainable yield might even be, and they have no idea whether the stock is overfished or not, although they do know that abundance was higher in 2021 than it was over the previous decade.  Combined recreational and commercial catch in 2021 was 168 metric tons, well below the approximately 8,000 metric tons caught in 1982; although that change probably reflects both a decline in abundance and a halt to overfishing, the fact that recent landings are only about 2% of what they were forty-three years ago certainly suggests that, at most times and in most places, even the more abundant Gulf of Maine flounder are not nearly as abundant as the Outdoor Life article suggests.

When we look at the Southern New England/Mid-Atlantic winter flounder, we uncover a more tragic truth, which is concealed beneath the mere fact that, according to its 2022 Management Track Stock Assessment, the Southern New England fish are neither overfished nor experiencing overfishing.  That stock assessment advises that

“There was a change to the stanza of recruitment that was used in the projections for this species…The new recruitment stanza was the last 20 years of estimates (2002-2021) for both short term projections, and to estimate the biomass target (SSBMSY) from a long term (100 yr) projection.  Previous years have used the entire time-series recruitment (1981-present).  Many of the historical recruitment estimates are overly optimistic, if not impossible, for the current stock size and productivity to achieve.  Very early recruitment estimates are 20 times the levels seen in recent years…

“The stock status of Southern New England Mid-Atlantic winter flounder has changes since the previous operational update and from the status determined at the last benchmark assessment in 2011.  The overfished status of the stock has changed to not overfished, and the stock is now considered rebuilt by the 2023 deadline.  The reason for this change in status determination is directly due to changing the recruitment stanza going into the projections…The truncated recruitment stanza eliminates the highest estimates of historical recruitment and greatly reduces the median recruitment used by the projections.  The lower median recruitment estimates in the long-term BRP projection results in a much lower [spawning stock biomass] value for the SSBMSY reference point.  While the stock status has changed, the perception of the stock has not, and recent model estimates and fishery independent survey indices all reveal a poor stock condition for southern New England winter flounder.  [emphasis added]”

Thus, the fact that the southern New England stock is no longer considered overfished does not mean that the stock is healthy or that abundance is increasing; rather, spawning stock biomass declined substantially, from 6,186.4 metric tons in 2012 to 3,353.2 metric tons in 2021, even as the stock’s status was upgraded to “not overfished.”

Certainly, there’s no comeback taking place there.

And yet, upon reconsideration, I think that my initial reaction to the Outdoor Life piece was too harsh.  I shouldn’t expect an author to know what a truly healthy winter flounder fishery looks like, or the sort of abundance one experiences when the flounder are truly “there for the taking,” when that author neer experienced such fishing or such abundance for themselves. 

After all, the Gulf of Maine stock probably did grow more abundant between 2010 and 2021, and if you weren’t fishing in the early 1980s, and those recent years form your only frame of reference, today’s meager fishery probably does look like a “comeback” to you.  It’s a classic example of the Shifting Baseline Syndrome, in which we gauge the health of a stock based on our own limited experience with an already-depleted resource, and thus never understand just how good fishing on a truly healthy stock could be.

On my last trip down to Washington, D.C., as I wandered around the offices on Capitol Hill, speaking to various legislators’ staffs about fisheries issues, I met one staffer from a western Long Island congressional district.  Like most of his kind, he was young, just a few years out of college or law school.  But this particular staffer was also an avid saltwater angler, and as we spoke casually after our meeting, I learned one thing:

He had never caught, and had never even seen, a living winter flounder.

I was taken aback, but then I realized that, if you hadn’t been fishing twenty or even twenty-five years ago, your chances of catching a winter flounder on Long Island have since become increasingly small.

Over the course of just a few decades, we have forgotten what the winter flounder fishery was.  And over the course of a single generation, many have forgotten—in truth, have never known—that ever existed.

In such a context, catching a handful of flounder could, indeed, seem a big deal.

STRIPED BASS: EARLY THOUGHTS ON ADDENDUM III

 

Last week, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission Plan Development Team responsible for drafting the proposed Addendum III to Amendment 7 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Striped bass held its first meeting.  As might be expected this early in the process, the meeting was largely organizational, serving only to chart a path that leads to future actions.

The meeting didn’t directly address 2024 recreational catch and landings, which were also released last week.  That data will be considered at a Striped Bass Technical Committee meeting that will be held during March, at which point the Technical Committee will make its projections as to whether the current fishing mortality level is low enough to have at least a 50 percent probability of rebuilding the stock by 2029 and, even if it is, whether it is also low enough to have a 60 percent probability of rebuilding.

If the answer to either of those questions is “no,” the Technical Committee will also determine what level of fishing mortality reductions will be needed to rebuild by the 2029 deadline, considering both the 50 percent and 60 percent probability levels.

It’s going to be interesting to see just what the Technical Committee’s calculations show.

There is no question that recreational striped bass landings and recreational striped bass catch were lower in 2024 than they were in 2023; estimates were down by 39 percent and 31 percent, respectively.  Recreational fishing effort was also down, by a more modest 15 percent.

If the current level of recreational fishing mortality continues through 2029—which it almost certainly won’t, as recreational catch, landings, and effort typically make wide and somewhat unpredictable year-to-year swings—rebuilding by 2029 should, in theory, occur without any need to change the existing regulations.  The Technical Committee, the Plan Development Team, and ultimately the Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board will all face the unenviable task of figuring out what the likely trajectory of striped bass fishing mortality will be.

We know that the first swing in fishing mortality will almost certainly be upward.  In a presentation made at the December 16 Management Board meeting, the Technical Committee advised that, because the above-average 2018 year class would enter the 28- to 31-inch coastal slot limit this year, recreational landings could increase by 17 percent.  That estimate is based on what happened when the notably larger 2015 year class entered the slot in 2022, so might overestimate the imact of the 2018s.  The estimate is also effort-dependent; if fewer people than expected target striped bass in 2025, the increase would probably be less than 17 percent, while if effort is higher than projected, fishing mortality could instead be higher than that.

The Technical Committee expects that, as the 2018s grow out of the slot, and legal-sized bass become less available (legal bass are already hard to find in the Chesapeake Bay, where the recreational slot is a smaller 19 to 24 inches, which currently includes bass spawned between 2020 and 2022, years that produced year classes which were well below the average year class size), recreational fishing mortality would drop back to low 2024 levels, which would make rebuilding by 2029 likely.  Since striped bass abundance is arguably the best predictor of striped bass angling effort, it is even possible that recreational fishing mortality will drop below 2024 levels as the below-average sized year classes enter the slot, and not only legal-sized bass, but striped bass of any size, become harder and harder for anglers to find.

Should the Technical Committee find that the striped bass stock is likely to rebuild by 2029 without any additional management measures being imposed, it is not impossible that the Management Board will decide to discontinue work on Addendum III altogether.  We have seen the Management Board discontinue work on addendums before, even when the striped bass stock was headed in the other direction—not toward rebuilding, but toward becoming overfished—as was the case in 2011, when an addendum was discontinued even though a stock assessment update advised that the stock would inevitably become overfished if nothing was done.

But the question of whether the Management Board ought to discontinue Addendum III under the circumstances described can’t be disposed of so easily.

First, although it appears that there is probably a very good chance that the Technical Committee will find at least a 50 percent probability of rebuilding by 2029 even if the Management Board takes no further action, there is no guarantee that that current level of fishing mortality will provide a 60 percent probability that the stock will be rebuilt on time.  The Management Board might—or might not—decide to keep Addendum III alive to provide public input on the 60 percent issue.

Adopting the 60 percent probability target would make good sense because, as North Carolina fishery manager Chris Batsavage noted at the Management Board meeting earlier this month, there is significant uncertainty in the recreational data.  Factors unique to 2024 might have rendered fishing mortality atypically low; should that be the case, the assumption that 2024 fishing mortality levels will continue is immediately called into question.

A particular concern might be whether the 2024 data for Wave 6—November and December—is typical of what we’ll see in the future.  In 2023, anglers landed over 921,000 striped bass, and caught 10,610,000 over the course of 4,275,000 trips taken during that two-month period.  In 2024, for the same two months, all of those values were down by about 45 percent, with 499,000 bass landed and 5,760,000 caught, over the course of 2,321,000 trips. 

If Wave 6 effort returns to something close to 2023 levels in 2025 and subsequent years, it may well be enough to prevent the stock from rebuilding if no additional management actions are taken. 

The Management Board might also want to consider the recent poor recruitment experienced in all four of the major striped bass spawning areas.  While Addendum III was intended to increase the likelihood that the stock will rebuild by 2029, the Management Board also asked, as part of the Addendum III process, that the Technical Committee provide projections of the spawning stock biomass going out to the mid-2030s, to show the impacts of what are now six consecutive years of very below-average spawns.  If those projections indicate that the stock will again decline, and is likely to be overfished during the 2030s, the Management Board might decide to adopt proactive management measures intended to stem at least some of the projected decline in abundance.

There are thus good reasons to keep Addendum III alive, and to impose new management measures, even if the Technical Committee determines that there is at least a 50 percent probability of timely rebuilding if no additional management measures are adopted. 

But if the Management Board decides not to seek further reductions in fishing mortality, Addendum III ought to be set aside, for if the proposed addendum is not used as a means to rebuild and conserve the striped bass stock, it should not be used to favor particular sectors of the striped bass fishery. 

Addendum III should not be the vehicle used to adopt mode splits favoring the for-hire sector, and Maryland should not be able to use the addendum as some sort of lifering, that keeps the state from drowning in the sea of confused regulations that it has adopted over the years in its efforts to elevate its commercial and for-hire fisheries over its private boat and shore-based anglers.

It will be at least another month until we know whether the Technical Committee will complete its projections and determine what, if anything, must be done to rebuild the striped bass stock by 2029.  And we won’t know until May whether the Management Board will decide to move forward with the proposed addendum.

But there is one thing we do know right now.

If Addendum III will provide a clear benefit to the striped bass stock, then the addendum should be put in place.  But an addendum that does not provide clear benefits to the striped bass stock is an addendum that we don’t need at all.

 

AT THE ASMFC: THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE

 

I just learned that Pat Keliher, the long-serving head of Maine’s Department of Marine Resources, will be retiring from that position, and so will also be leaving his post as Maine’s Administrative Appointee at the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission.  He will be missed, even though he is leaving behind Megan Ware, another very capable Maine fisheries manager who has long served as his proxy and, in doing so, has created her own legacy in fisheries conservation and management.

I have known Pat for nearly 30 years, dating back to the late ‘90s when we were both involved with the Coastal Conservation Association.  At the time, he was the Executive Director for CCA’s Maine chapter, who ran a fundraising, membership, and advocacy program that made Maine a standout among CCA’s four New England chapters.  I was the Chair of CCA New York, a member of CCA’s national executive board, and also the chair of CCA’s Atlantic States Committee, which primarily dealt with issues arising at the ASMFC.

In that role, I worked with Pat quite a bit, and was always impressed by his calm and rational demeanor and his commonsense approach to fisheries issues.  It was an approach and demeanor that he carried into his work at the ASMFC (and, I’m certain, in Maine, although I had no occasion to work with him there), where he was often forced to deal with difficult issues affecting two of the most controversial species managed by the Commission, striped bass and American lobster (although two other species, American eel and Atlantic menhaden, also provided more than their share of headaches).

Perhaps the best example of his leadership, his rational approach to fisheries management, and his conservation philosophy can be found in comments he made while serving as the Chair of the ASMFC in 2021, when he addressed the May meeting of the Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board as they were drafting the document that eventually became Amendment 7 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Striped Bass:

“Thank you for allowing me just a moment to address the Board as the Commission’s Chair.  As you all know, striped bass is known as the Commission’s flagship species.  You also likely know that Congress acted back in 1984, and passed the Atlantic Striped Bass Act.

“This was the beginning of the moratorium years, a time we all sacrificed, and a time that the recovery of this flagship species began.  Since then, we as a management body have strived to address and maintain the recovery in a way that benefitted the fish, and the fisheries that support it.  Throughout this time, we’ve continued to exercise our state’s rights, and put forward our opinions on management that is best for both the species and our state’s interest.

“I would say we’ve likely had mixed results over the years.  That brings us to today, I feel there is a lot at stake, not only for striped bass, but for ASMFC as well.  Some are stating that the Commission has a credibility problem, that we’ve taken our greatest fisheries management success story and reversed it.

“Whether you agree or disagree with these comments, you must agree that we are at a crossroads with management, and today we are deciding which way we’ll turn.  Things are changing.  Many species the Commission manages are seeing shifts in their abundance, and distribution.  Striped bass are not immune to this change, as our stock assessment shows that the stock is overfished, and overfishing is occurring.

“While I personally don’t think we’re at a point we were in 1984, the downward trend of the stock is evident in the assessment.  For many of the Commission species, we’re no longer in a position to ‘hold out hope’ that things will revert to what they’ve been previously, if we just hold static.  Change is happening too fast, and actions need to be taken.

“Today I would ask this Board to think about what is best for the species, but also what is best for the future of the Commission.  I suspect that this will be a painful discussion, and sacrifices needed to find a way forward.  The small amount of pain now pays us dividends down the road.  Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, for allowing me to address the Board, and good luck with this meeting.  Thank you.”

We need more voices like Pat’s at the Commission, and his will be hard to replace.

The past year also saw the retirement of Dr. Michael Armstrong, the former Deputy Director of the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries.  I didn’t know Dr. Armstrong.  I never met him face-to-face, and never even communicated with him over the phone or by email, but I was very aware of the leadership role that he played, and the respect that he was given.

Because of the importance of the East Coast striped bass fishery, and the prominence of that species at the ASMFC, I was most aware of his leadership on the Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board, where he was always a champion of conservative management and the long-term health of the fishery. 

Anyone who has spent very much time listening to that management board debate issues knows that there is a contingent of representatives who always try to delay management actions, and when delay seems unlikely, do their best to convince the Board to adopt half-measures that are inadequate to end overfishing or rebuild the stock, but instead would maintain landings at unsustainably high levels.

Dr. Armstrong was skilled at blunting such efforts, never afraid to stand up for the resource and paint a very explicit picture of what everyone stood to lose from delay.  He crafted a significant win in May 2023, when he convinced the Management Board to adopt emergency measures to reduce recreational landings after unexpectedly high landings in 2022 made it unlikely that the stock would rebuild by 2029, the deadline derived from the management plan, if fishing mortality was not cut.  He said to the Board,

“I guess the challenge here is convincing you that this is an emergency…The problem is, we have an entire year of fishing on a very, very strong year class.  Emergency measures haven’t been used much, maybe half a dozen times or so.  The definition is circumstances under which conservation or coastal fishery resource or attainment of fishery management objectives, that’s the key, has been placed substantially at risk by unanticipated changes in the ecosystem for stock, or the fishery.  Let me address the unanticipated first.  We doubled harvest almost.  I went back into the time series for MRIP, all the way back to ’81, and that has only happened a couple of times, the last time being over 30 years ago.

“Although I think we all sat around saying, this is a big year class, you know harvest will go up.  We could not have anticipated that it was going to go up by double.  It’s never had that.  Now, that being said, I have faith that MRIP is right.  We do 6,000 intercepts a year in Massachusetts, about 5,000 are for striped bass.

“That is a lot of data.  You can complain about MRIP for other species.  I think they got it right, especially on a coastal, without breaking it up into modes and waves and everything else.  What we saw was the ’22 harvest completely derailed the rebuilding down to 14 or 15 percent chance of getting there.  I told you a little about what we looked at our recreational fishery, and really great graphics of the 2015 was about 55 percent into the slot, and we doubled the harvest.

“There is no question in my mind that there is zero percent chance of the harvest going down.  I mean the PSEs on this estimate are fine, they are as good as they’ve always been.  I mean there is always biased things that can change, but I have faith that the harvest this year will be the same, or I would say greater, because the entire year class is in the slot.

“We’re going to have to deal with that, and it’s going to get more and more difficult if harvest is huge again this year…We had anglers say last year was the best fishing they’ve ever had, and a lot of it was environmental conditions and the presence of menhaden.

“But also, the presence of a really big year class.  I mean there is just no question that they are more available this year.  How could harvest go down?  There is also, I think we have all seen this, I would call it irrational exuberance by the fishing community.  When fishing gets good, fishing effort goes up, and probably not in a linear fashion.

“People coming off a great year, I’m guessing that effort will go up much more.  We’ll get the casual anglers will be going out more.  We have no output controls, and that makes it very difficult managing the striper fishery.  I proposed this because I don’t want to be further behind the eight ball.  I don’t want to see another projection again that includes 11 percent probability of restoration, and any, I’ll leave it at that.”

There was some resistance to Dr. Armstrong’s motion, but he laid the argument out so well that, in the end, only New Jersey—perhaps the state most implacably opposed to striped bass conservation effortds—voted against.  His absence from the Management Board is certainly being felt.  It’s hard not to wonder whether, if he had still been seated at the table, the vote at the December 16, 2024 Board meeting might have gone a different way, although such musings are probably a little unfair to Massachusetts' current representative on the Management Board, Nichola Meserve, who has proven herself to be a champion of bass conservation in her own right, and did everything that she could do to adopt needed measures for the 2025 season.  The vote just didn't go her way.

Both the Maine and Massachusetts delegations remain in good hands, and the traditions of stewardship set by both Pat Keliher and Dr. Armstrong will remain behind.  While we often hear anglers criticize the ASMFC—and that criticism is not without cause—what we don’t hear often enough is recognition and appreciation of what a number of dedicated fisheries managers are trying to accomplish when they are part of a management board.

For Pat Keliher and Dr. Armstrong were not alone in their efforts to responsibly manage the striped bass and other species.  There are a host of other state managers—and some governors’ appointees, legislative appointees, and legislative proxies, too—who speak out for conservative, sustainable fisheries management, intended to keep stocks healthy in the long term.  All of them deserve our thanks.

Because there are also the others, who seek short-term advantage for their state, their favored sectors, and perhaps, at times, for themselves, regardless of the scientific advice, or the impact their actions might have on the health of fish stocks.  They’re the ones who tarnish the ASMFC’s name.

But that’s why the Kelihers, the Armstrongs, and all of the other dedicated managers matter.  They stand between us and the irresponsible few.

They aren’t appreciated enough for what they have done, and continue to do.