Over the past few years, anglers in New England and the
upper mid-Atlantic have seen an abundance of black sea bass invade their local
waters. Unfortunately, because abenchmark stock assessment, completed in late 2011, was found to be inadequatefor management purposes, fishery managers have had to set regulations without
the aid of clear biological reference points.
Do to such lack of data, black sea bass catch limits have been very
restrictive, to avoid overfishing the stock.
At the same time, the abundance of fish has drawn a lot of
attention from anglers, who are always eager to bring some of the good-tasting
sea bass home. Recreational
black sea bass landings increased 46% between 2012, when 1.87 million fish were
landed, and 2016, which saw 2.73 million black sea bass brought home.
During that same time, the average-sized fish has been
growing larger. When measured by weight
rather than numbers of fish, landings increased by 77%, from 3.18 million to
5.82 million pounds.
A combination of low catch limits and increasing
recreational landings have forced fishery managers to impose very restrictive
regulations in an effort to avoid overfishing.
Such regulations often angered anglers, who couldn’t understand why the
rules needed to be so restrictive given the abundance of fish.
Thus, the angling community eagerly awaited the results of anew benchmark stock assessment, which was completed late last year. Last January, rumors began to spread that the
assessment had successfully passed through the peer-review process, and would
allow the annual catch limit to be substantially increased.
It wasn’t long until the rumors were confirmed; the 2017annual catch limit for black sea bass would be increased by 52%, compared tothe year before. For a brief time,
anglers were happy.
Then word got out that the estimate of 2016 recreationalblack sea bass landings was actually higherthan the 2017 recreational harvest limit, even though that limit had been
increased by about 50%. Recreational
regulations would not be relaxed after all; based on the available numbers,
regulations actually needed to be a bit more restrictive, to reduce landings by
8%. The National Marine Fisheries
Service actually gave anglers a break by waiving such additional restrictions,
and maintaining the 2016 status quo.
However, anglers didn’t feel like they were getting a break;
they expected some regulatory relief.
And things got worse when the original estimate of landings
in November/December of 2016 was replaced by actual figures from the Marine
Recreational Information Program, which showed that landings in the last two
months of the year were far higher than expected; now, anglers were very
possibly facing regulations tight enough to reduce landings by over 20%.
So the question is, given that the population of black sea
bass north of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina is currently more than twice the
number of fish needed to produce maximum sustainable yield, and given that the
recreational harvest limit has been increased by roughly 50%, why are anglers
looking at more restrictive regulations in 2017?
The answer lies in the uncertainty surrounding the harvest
estimates provided by the Marine Recreational Information Program . The problem doesn’t arise out of MRIP itself,
but in the way the MRIP numbers are used.
Managers try to apply the landings estimates on too small a scale, and
by doing so, introduce a high level of uncertainty into their predictions of
how effective management measures will be.
“The size of sampling error depends upon the sample size, the
sample design and the natural variability within the population. As a general rule, increasing the sample size
decreases sampling error.
“…the more samples you draw, the more precise your estimate
will be.”
The MRIP Handbook also notes that
“In MRIP, sampling error is reported as percent standard
error or PSE which expresses the standard error as a percentage of the
estimate. The lower the PSE the greater
the confidence that the estimate is close to the population value.”
That being the case, managing a fishery on a coastwide
basis, using annual landings estimates, would provide the largest sample size,
the most accurate estimate of black sea bass landings and regulations, based on
such landings estimate, that are most likely to constrain harvest to or below
the annual harvest limit.
Unfortunately, that’s not how black sea bass are managed.
While NMFS does establish size limits, bag limits and
seasons for federal waters, it is the states, acting through the Atlantic
States Marine Fisheries Commission, which establishes regulations for each
state. And it is those state regulations
that create the real problems.
Most black sea bass are landed in the states that lie
between Massachusetts and New Jersey.
None of those states shared the same regulations in 2016.
In New Jersey,
anglers could keep 10 black sea bass, at least 12 ½ inches long, from May
23 through June 19. Then the season
closed for a few days, to reopen on July 1; from then until August 31, the bag
limit dropped to just 2 fish, although the size limit remained the same. After that, the season closed for nearly two
months, reopening on October 22 and remaining open for the rest of the year;
however, during that period, the bag limit increased to 15 fish, and the size
limit increased to 13 inches.
Confused yet? And
that was only one state…
New York
was a little better. It maintained a
15-inch minimum size throughout the year, but steadily increased its bag limit
from 3 between June 27 and August 31, to 8 in September and October and 10 in
November and December.
On the other side
of Long Island Sound, Connecticut
had the same 15-inch size limit, but its season ran from May 1 through
December 31. For most anglers, the bag
limit was 5 fish per day, but if they fished from a party or charter boat, the
bag limit increased to 8.
In
Rhode Island, the sectors were all treated the same, and a 15-inch minimum
size prevailed throughout the season.
However, the bag limit changed with the seasons, from 3 fish from June
24 through August 31 to 7 fish from September 1 through the end of the year.
Out of all the five northern states, only
Massachusetts had one simple set of regulations—a 5-fish bag, 15-inch
minimum size and a season that ran from May 21 through August 31.
When you look at the widely varying regulations between
neighboring states that, in many cases, share the same waters, you can’t help
but wonder how such a hash of regulations can properly manage the fishery. And the truth is, they don’t manage it well
at all.
Remember the percentage standard error, or PSE, that gauges
the precision of the recreational harvest estimates generated by MRIP? It tells the whole story.
If we look at the
estimate for all black sea bass caught in the northeast and mid-Atlantic region
in 2016, without breaking the estimate down by state, sector or wave, we
find a PSE of 8.3. That’s reasonably
precise, and provides a pretty good basis for management measures.
But if we start breaking that down into states—say, the
estimate for Massachusetts, which maintained consistent regulations throughout
the year—the PSE jumps to 18.5, which is still adequate for management
purposes, but lacks the precision of the regional estimate. Regulations based on state-by-state catch
estimates, rather than the regional estimate, will embody greater uncertainty,
and are somewhat less likely to achieve their management goals.
Then, when you go beyond mere state estimates, but begin to
slice-and-dice the state landings by sector or by two-month “wave,” the
uncertainty is compounded.
If we look at New Jersey, the PSE is 27.1 for the short
May-June season and 22.8 for July and August.
It then jumps to an effectively unusable 55.8 for the few days that the
season is open in September and October, and an unreliable 45.2 for November
and December. Given those PSEs, anyone
who believes that the harvest estimates are reliable, or that the regulations
will do much to stop overfishing is just kidding themselves.
Elsewhere in the northeast, where bag limits change but the
size limit is constant and the seasons are not broken up by interim closures,
PSEs are not quite so large, but still indicate a relatively low level of
precision. In New York, the PSEs are
20.9 for July and August, 28.6 for September and October and 33.0 for November
and December. In Rhode Island, the PSEs
for the same periods are 21.3, 29.7 and 56.1, respectively, and 48.5 for the
few days that the season was open in June.
That’s not very good.
Connecticut demonstrated that maintaining different bag
limits for sectors, rather than for time of year, might only make things even
worse, as 2016 PSEs were and completely useless 101.9 for shorebound anglers,
27.2 for party boats, an undependable 78.5 for charter boats and 17.0 for
private vessels.
Yet no one should be surprised by such results. Prior to the December 2015 joint meeting of
the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council and ASMFC’s Summer Flounder, Scup
and Black Sea Bass Management Board, the
Mid-Atlantic Council’s Summer Flounder, Scup and Black Sea Bass Monitoring
Committee advised that it
“encourages the development of more consistent regulations
between states within the regions. The
Monitoring Committee notes that the difficulty of analyzing the effects of new
regulations increases with management complexity and hyper-customization of
measures. One of the intended benefits
of ad-hoc regional management was to have similar regulations by region. Complex sets of measures, including splits by
mode, season, and sector, continue to be implemented, contrary to previous
recommendations of the Monitoring and Technical Committees. Additionally, MRIP data for state, wave and
mode combinations is typically associated with very high PSEs that often are
higher than the percentage of the landings adjustments required…”
However, the states ignored that good advice, and again
adopted management “hyper-customized” management measures that, in the end, don’t
represent an intent to properly manage the fishery as much as they do an effort
to manipulate the data in a way that is likely to provide the longest season
and biggest kill for that states anglers.
By doing so, the states gain in the short term, as the
increased harvest opportunities tend to mitigate anglers’ and the angling
industry’s complaints about restrictive regulations; however, such actions end
up hurting the management process over the long haul, as overfishing ensues,
which results in the sort of tightening regulations expected in 2017, that
serve only to alienate anglers from fisheries managers.
Quite simply, the current approach to black sea bass
management doesn’t work.
It is time for the states to stop coddling the complainers
who will never be satisfied with any restrictions on landings, and start acting
responsibly, for the benefit of the fish, the fishermen and the fishery
management process.
It is time to abandon overly-complicated regulatory schemes
that stress the available data beyond the breaking point, and result in
management measures that are doomed to fail.
It is time to adopt simple management measures that are
consistent throughout the year, and throughout the region.
Such approach was first
tried with scup in 2004, when the states that accounted for more than 95% of
the recreational landings joined together in a region that shared the same size
limit, bag limit and season length. Since then, the recreational scup fishery,
which was once plagued by constantly fluctuating state harvests and resulting
regulatory changes, has been remarkably stable, with abundant fish and generous
bag limits.
Taking a similar approach to black sea bass management, with
all states between Massachusetts and New Jersey sharing a common set of
regulations, would probably be equally beneficial, and would almost certainly
result in a more stable and predictable fishery than exists today.
That’s the right way to manage the fishery. But to get there, states must abandon their
narrow, partisan views, and look to the good of the whole.
In today’s world, that’s
always easier said than done.
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