If you’ve gone to enough fisheries management meetings, you
know the routine.
First, biologists will address the public, and describe the
state of the stock, providing numbers for biomass, recruitment and fishing
mortality. They’ll then recommend
regulations that, they believe, will prevent overfishing and allow the stock to
rebuild or, if the stock has already reached its biomass target, maintain it at
sustainable levels.
At that point, the debate begins.
Inevitably, someone—generally someone with no background in
either science or statistics—will rise to critique the stock assessment,
supporting his position with arguments like
“Your numbers are no good.
You don’t know what you’re talking about. You just sit behind a desk while we’re out on
the water every day. There’s plenty of
fish out there. Come out with us, and
we’ll show you how to catch ‘em. You
shouldn’t be trying to cut back our harvest; there’s so many fish out there,
you should be letting us catch more!”
It doesn’t matter too much where you are or what species
you’re talking about; Gulf of Maine cod, mid-Atlantic black sea bass or South
Atlantic red snapper, when you go to a meeting, they all sound just about the
same.
It might be useful, then, to take a look at some recent
stock assessments, and compare them to what is really going on out on the
water. I’m going to limit my comments to
species commonly found in my home waters off Long island, because I follow
those fish more closely, and can more easily provide reports of what’s going
on.
I’ll start with scup—our northern porgy—because that’s one
of the easiest fisheries to address. It
was considered a data-poor fishery as recently as 2008. For a while, it gave managers a hard time; fish
were sparse and small. Biomass bottomed
out around 4,000 metric tons during the mid-1990s.
Fortunately, a good stock assessment model was finally
devised, and the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council implemented a
rebuilding plan that was so wildly successful that a benchmark
stock assessment released in 2015 reported that
“Spawning stock biomass (SSB) was estimated to be 182,915 mt
in 2014, about 2 times the…biomass reference point SSBMSY Proxy =
SSB40% = 87,302 mt.”
If the stock is truly twice the size of the biomass target,
anglers should be catching plenty of scup, and that’s exactly what’s happening. A
report in a Riverhead, New York publication was typical:
“The bite was all day long.
As soon as things slowed, we would just move to find another pile of
fish. Toward the end of the day, the
wind turned south and picked up quite a bit.
This worked like a dinner bell for the porgies. The bite ramped up to lights out status…”
So it certainly seems like the biologists got their scup
numbers right.
But maybe scup are too easy, because there are plenty
around. The numbers for other popular
species, such as fluke and striped bass, aren’t quite so optimistic. Did the scientists get those right as well?
There was quite a bit of displeasure last year when managers
announced that the 2016 recreational summer flounder catch limit was going to
be substantially reduced. Brook Koeneke, who operates a New Jersey
party boat, reportedly had a predictable reaction to the news.
“I’m convinced that they don’t know what they’re talking
about. We see a lot of flounder. We raised the (size) limit and saved a lot of
fish. It looks like it recovered and
then the next year they say we have a problem.”
So the question is, just why do managers believe that a
problem exists?
It turns out that the
problem was a combination of overfishing and poor recruitment. For four consecutive years, 2010 through
2013, the number of young-of-the-year summer flounder entering the population
was well below average. Harvest had to
be reduced, because flounder removed from the stock today won’t be replaced by
new fish recruiting into the fishery next year.
Do anglers’ experience on the water reflect what the
scientists believe to be true?
It apparently does.
Early June is peak time for fluke in Connecticut waters, but a
report put out by the state’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection
on June 2 rates the fishing as only “fair to good.” A
New Jersey report from the same time period also talks about summer
flounder fishing being “spotty at best,” and “very hit or miss.” Another section of the same report says that
fluke fishing in southern New Jersey is “not what it has been in some other
early Junes.”
My own success with summer flounder has been far below
average this season, with few fish being caught on what are typically
productive drops. A charter boat captain
from Montauk whom I often speak with tells me that he is seeing a good number
of large fluke, but not many smaller ones, which would be typical of a fishery
with poor recent recruitment, that is forcing anglers to depend, at least in part,
on the bigger, older survivors of the larger year classes produced in 2008 and
2009.
Once again, what’s happening on the water seems to match the
biologists’ predictions.
And finally, we come to striped bass.
Chesapeake
Bay produced big year classes in 1993, 1996, 2001, 2003, 2011 and 2015. In the Hudson River, 2007
produced a very strong year class, and I have been told by folks at the New
York State Department of Environmental Conservation that 2014 was above-average,
as well.
At the same time, a
2015 update to the striped bass stock assessment said that there was a 49%
chance that the stock could have become overfished last year. So while we’ve seen some strong year classes,
the overall population is not at a high level of abundance.
So what do anglers see on the water?
Over all, experienced
anglers are seeing a real decline in the number of fish available. At the same time, a lot of big fish are being
caught, including a 62-pounder that hit a trolled bunker spoon east of New York’s
Fire Island Inlet. However, there aren’t
a lot of fish in one place. When action
was hot in New York Bight, it was slow farther east on Long Island. Later in June, the big-fish action moved into
my region of South Shore Long Island, but waned to the west while Montauk
remained dead.
Now, bass have disappeared almost completely on the central
South Shore, but have settled in at Montauk and Block Island, with one party boat operator reporting
“EPIC striped bass fishing aboard the Viking Starship
tonight. We had a sold out crowd and our
anglers enjoyed and our anglers enjoyed a full boat limit of mighty moo cow
Bass! Most fish were in the 25-35 pound
class, with a few smaller and a few bigger!
…the pool fish [was] a 43.9 pound Behemoth Striped Bass…the second place
winner…was 39.8 pounds.”
Again, that’s about what one would expect from the data
available. There are only enough bass in
the population to provide decent fishing in a few localities, and most of the
fish caught can be attributed to one of the big year classes. On the Viking Starship, the majority of the
catch, 25 to 35 pound fish, were probably produced by the 2001 and 2003 year
classes. The 62-pound fish caught off
Fire Island was likely a ’93.
But the smaller fish are showing up, too. Here on Long Island, the
2011 year class began to show up in numbers in 2015, and reports indicate
that they were also present up in New England.
They were back with a vengeance this spring, particularly in New York
Bight and in western Long Island Sound, where the small, 22 to 26-inch fish
were joined by a few in the 13 to 18 pound range, which were probably 2007s
from the Hudson River. We also saw a lot
of menhaden-sized stripers along the western Connecticut shore, which were
almost certainly spawned in the Hudson in 201A4.
Once again, the science predicted the sort of striped bass
fishing that we’d experience.
That being the case, claims that the biologists’ “numbers
are bad” don’t really ring true. The
stock assessments and similar data are usually very good predictors of what we
will see on the water.
Yes, there are areas of local abundance when populations are
down, and places that fish sometimes avoid even when they’re abundant.
But over the long haul, you won’t go very wrong if you predict your likely success based on the numbers that the scientists provide. Although some folks refuse to believe it, those
numbers are usually right.
I think a lot of know that since stock assessments are only done every 5 years, the observations on the water are more timely. Remember all the striped bass anglers yelling about the decline in fish and their geographic range shrinking and calling for a ONE fish limit? Well, when the stock assessment was finally done we had objective evidence.
ReplyDeleteIn contrast in the South Atlantic, the recovery of the Black Sea Bass outraced the stock assessment as well. They were everywhere BEFORE the stock assessment caught up. Anglers were upset and now they have a year round season and the fish number was just upped to 7 fish at 13 inches. Black sea bass are quick to sexually mature, so the recovery was rapid.
Contrast Black sea bass with Atlantic Red snapper who live decades. The on the water info is they are "everywhere". Yet these fish grow quickly, take several years to sexually mature and since they live so long the stock (age) structure has not filled in with the older fish. It is well known that the older females produce many more eggs than the younger females and they will be required for full recovery. The cries are to open up the fishery before the stock is recovered, and I understand this-it hurts to release a 10lb snapper!
Not sure that I agree that people see changes on the water before they show up in the data. Sometimes, yes. But using striped bass as an example, there are typically two or three assessment updates that come out between the benchmark assessments; it's only the benchmarks that come out every five years. In addition, we get the Maryland young of the year index, which comes out every fall and is probably the best single predictor of future abundance. Summer flounder, scup and black sea bass are updated every year, with reports on recruitment, etc. You could see the current problem with summer flounder coming in the numbers well before we saw it in the water. Reef fish have a lot less data available, so there, I think that you're right. But even then, being able to look at recruitment, and being able to distinguish between a couple of strong year classes and a broader recovery, is a big help.
DeleteAnyway, the bottom line is that the folks who like to attack regulations by attacking the data stream are, for the most part, barking up the wrong tree.