It’s no secret that striped bass are harder to find than
they used to be.
Most anglers along the striper coast are complaining that
fish are harder to come by this year, and a
benchmark stock assessment (updated in December of last year) presented to the
Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission notes that
“Female [spawning stock biomass] grew steadily from 1982
through 2003 when it peaked at about 78 thousand metric tons. Female SSB has declined since then and was
estimated at 58.2 thousand metric tons [at the end of 2012]. The SSB point estimate in 2012 remained just
above the threshold level of 57.6 thousand metric tons and indicates that the
striped bass are not overfished. However,
given the error associated with the 1995 and 2012 values, there is a
probability of 0.46 that the female spawning stock biomass in 2012 is below the
threshold...”
In other words, what anglers are seeing on the water is
reflected in the scientists’ numbers. Striped
bass abundance is sliding downhill, and there is a 46% chance that bass were
already overfished in 2012.
We don’t know for certain where things stand this year, but
given that the spawning stock biomass sure didn’t increase in 2013, it’s pretty
safe to say that the stock is in worse shape right now than it was in 2012.
So if you wanted to bet that the female spawning stock
biomass of striped bass is already overfished—to be technical, that it had
dropped below the spawning stock biomass threshold—don’t expect me to bet
against you.
Even so, if you happened to be on the South Shore of Long
Island over the past few weekends, it might have seemed as if the bass weren’t in
any trouble. Ridiculous numbers of truly
large bass—some in excess of 50 pounds—are being caught by anglers fishing
around the pods of bunker (a/k/a menhaden) that are passing a few hundred yards
south of the beach.
Some days, the fish are picky, and not too many are
caught. On others, a single boat may
land upwards of two dozen fish, with few weighing less than 30 pounds.
This isn’t a “sharpie’s” bite. It’s what some of us call “stupid fishing,”
that doesn’t require any more skill than it takes to lob a weighted treble hook
into the middle of a school of bunker, snag a fish and then let it swim
around—often for a very short while—until a striper ingests it.
Experienced striped bass fishermen are catching their
share. But a lot of very average anglers
are catching fish, too, and a many of those anglers, who haven’t put in much
time chasing striped bass, are interpreting their sudden success as a sign that
the striped bass stock is healthy.
We saw the same thing last year, when a big body of sand
eels took up residence off Fire Island and, for a month or so, private boats
and for-hire vessels from as far away as Brooklyn—some say they saw at least
one party boat from New Jersey—found fast action with striped bass that homed
in on the bait.
Folks argued that, with party boats limiting out on an
every-day basis, the bass stock must be doing pretty well.
But—wait just a minute—did you notice me mentioning boats
from Brooklyn and maybe even New Jersey?
They were running all the way to Fire Island, burning a lot
of fuel and spending a couple of hours in transit, because there was nothing
closer to their own local ports. During
late October and early November of last year, if you wanted a striped bass
anywhere along the South Shore of Long Island, you ran east of Fire Island
Inlet.
And so far year, you run to the bunker schools. The surf
has been pretty dead, the bays have been quiet and the inlets have given up
very few fish. Most days, the only game
in town has been the bunker schools.
And that is a very bad sign.
Even so, people who happen to be fishing where the fish
happen to be are catching a lot of bass, and it can be hard to convince them
that something is wrong.
Up in New England, we’re seeing the same sort of thing with
cod.
A
2013 stock assessment found that
“The Gulf of Maine Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua) stock is
overfished and overfishing is occurring.
Spawning stock biomass (SSB) in 2011 is estimated to be 9,903 [metric
tons] or 10,221 mt which is 18% or 13% of the SSBMSY proxy (54,743
mt or 80,200 mt) [depending on which of two population models is used]. The 2011 fully selected fishing mortality is
estimated to be 0.86 or 0.90 which is about 4 or 5 times the FMSY proxy (0.18
for both models).”
In other words, Gulf of Maine cod are in pretty rough shape,
but you wouldn’t know it to hear some fishermen talk.
They’re catching a lot of fish, don’t think
that there is any problem, and have been saying things such as
and
As in the case of striped bass, it was all about an
abundance of forage fish that concentrated the predators in one place, although
in the case of cod, it was also about a lack of forage everywhere else.
NOAA Fisheries found that, beginning about ten years ago,
herring—which once were the predominant forage for Gulf of Maine cod, began to
disappear (as an aside, folks such as the Herring Alliance have been trying to
correct that problem, and have had some hard-earned success).
At that point the cod—like last fall’s striped bass off Fire
Island—switched over to sand eels. Most
of those sand eels were concentrated on a small section of Stellwagen Bank, and
the cod—again like the striped bass off Fire Island—bunched up on a 100-square-mile
piece of the bank, where they were easy to catch and gave the illusion of
abundance, although cod were scarce in the other 20,000-plus square miles of
the stock’s historic range.
As NOAA Fisheries pointed out,
“The trends in cod abundance in this small region were not
truly reflective of the overall resource at the time.”
Yet it’s hard to convince a fisherman of that when he’s
filling his boxes with cod, just as it’s tough to convince a lot of folks new
to the fishery that the striper is headed for trouble when they just put a pair
of 40-pound bass in the cooler.
Those folks weren’t around in the late 1970s and early
1980s, when the striped bass stock last collapsed.
They don’t remember that even as the fish
were disappearing just about everywhere, anglers on Block Island and up on Cape
Cod were having some of the fastest action they had ever known with some truly
large striped bass.
Back then, too, they couldn’t see past the big fish they
were catching to recognize that bad times had already come.
But if we are to fix our fishery problems—for striped bass,
cod, and everything else—we need to recognize that so long as fish swim in the
ocean, there will be those times when by some accident of bait, timing and
environmental conditions, fish will concentrate in one place and provide the
illusion of abundance, even in times of scarcity.
We must reject that illusion, and remember that the true
test of the health of a stock isn’t found in the scattered places where fish are
abundant, but in the empty places where the fish used to be.
And then we have figure out how to fill those big empty places
with fish once again.
Thanks for this - I was just reading about the cod and the ideas of Senecas Cliff - very interesting to see your viewpointviewpoint also.
ReplyDelete