Over
the past couple of seasons, no fish has frustrated Mid-Atlantic fishery
managers—and Mid-Atlantic recreational fishermen—as much as the black sea bass.
There are a lot of them out
there. A benchmark stock assessment completed late in 2016 estimated that the spawning stock
biomass (SSB) at the close of 2015 was 22,176 metric tons (mt), more than twice
the SSB target of 9,667 mt. In response to the new stock assessment, NOAA Fisheries (NOAA) increased the 2017 recreational harvest limit by
52%.
At first, such proposed
harvest increase excited anglers, who were certain that it would lead to
relaxed regulations. However, as more information became available, such
excitement turned to dismay, as NOAA revealed that anglers killed an estimated 4.67 million pounds of black sea bass in 2016,
exceeding the proposed 4.29 million pound recreational harvest limit for 2017
by about 8%. Although that overage could have triggered more restrictive 2017
regulations, NOAA decided to keep 2016 regulations in place for another year.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t
the end of the story. In February, estimated landings for Wave 6 (November/December)
of 2016 finally became available. Wave 6 usually sees relatively few black sea
bass caught north of Delaware Bay, but 2016 was an exception. In a number of
states, particularly New York, landings were so high that they raised the annual harvest estimate to 5.18 million pounds.
Status quo regulations were no longer an option; a 17.3% harvest reduction was
proposed.
At that point, some
anglers’ dismay turned to anger, and they unleashed their vitriol on the Marine Recreational Information Program(MRIP).
It was the wrong target. The problem wasn’t the MRIP data, but
how that data was used.
The National Academy of Sciences recently found that NOAA has made “impressive
progress” in implementing MRIP, which included “major improvements in the
statistical soundness of its survey designs.”
Thus, MRIP offers fishery managers a valuable tool that will
enable them to estimate recreational landings with a reasonable degree of
precision. However, like any tool, MRIP will only prove useful when it is used
in the proper manner.
In the case of black sea bass, it has not been used properly at
all.
The problem lies in the
fact that, for the states lying between Massachusetts and New Jersey,
regulations are not set by NOAA, but by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries
Commission (ASMFC), which incorporates the concept of “conservation equivalency.”
ASMFC’s Interstate Fishery Management Program Charter (ASMFC Charter) defines “conservation
equivalency” as “Actions taken by a state which differ from the requirements of
the [fishery management plan], but which achieve the same quantified level of
conservation for the resource under management. For example, various
combinations of size limits, gear restrictions, and season length can be
demonstrated to achieve the same targeted level of fishing mortality…”
The “quantified level of conservation” is, in recreational
fisheries, derived solely from MRIP data. That creates a serious flaw in the
“conservation equivalency” concept.
According to NOAA’s Marine Recreational Information Program Data User Handbook (Handbook), “Sampling error is
inherent in all sample statistics and is a result of random variation among
samples. 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
reduces the sampling error. [emphasis added]”
ASMFC, through the concept of conservation equivalency, allows
each state between Massachusetts and New Jersey to set its own unique
regulations for black sea bass. In practice, no two states have the same
regulations, and even within a state, different regulations are in force at
different times of the year, or for different sectors of the recreational
fishery.
Such fragmentation by place, time and/or sector assures that the
sample size depended upon to both set and to evaluate each state’s regulations
will be too small to assure a reasonable level of accuracy.
Thus, the Mid-Atlantic
Fishery Management Council’s Summer Flounder, Scup and Black Sea Bass
Monitoring Committee has repeatedly advised against such extreme variation in
regulations. Its most recent warning, issued on January 27, 2017, notes that
“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. A new approach that prioritizes
consistency, from both an analytical and regulatory perspective, is
recommended.”
To date, such advice has not been heeded. As a result,
substantial error plagues the MRIP estimates, which in turn affects the
regulation-setting process and makes it nearly impossible for fishery managers
to effectively limit recreational black sea bass landings.
The Handbook explains that “In MRIP, sampling error is reported
as percent standard error or PSE which expresses the standard error as a
percentage of an estimate. The lower the PSE the greater the confidence that
the estimate is close to the true population value.”
NOAA estimates that,
throughout all of 2016, anglers in New England and the Mid-Atlantic regions
harvested slightly more than 2.5 million black sea bass; the PSE for that
estimate was 8.2, which is good and certainly makes the estimate adequate for
management purposes.
When estimates are broken out for each of the five northern states,
which account for most of the recreational black sea bass landings, the PSE
doubles, ranging from 15.7 for New York to 19.4 for Massachusetts. Such data
remains useful, but each estimate includes a substantial margin of error.
When state landings are
broken down further into industry sectors or two-month waves, the PSE increases
again, and the estimates become far less useful. The 2016 regulations that did
such a poor job of controlling recreational landings were based on MRIP estimates of 2015
landings. PSEs as high as 79.9, 83.3 and 95.2 made such single-wave
estimates effectively worthless, yet ASMFC allowed those very imprecise
estimates to be used to calculate the conservation equivalency of even very
complex management measures.
For example, New Jersey’s 2016 black sea bass rules allowed anglers to retain 10 fish at
least 12 ½ inches long from May 23-June 19, then closed the season for ten
days, reopened it from July 1-August 31 with the same 12 1/2-inch minimum size
but just a 2-fish bag limit, closed it for another 51 days and finally reopened
it for the rest of the year with a 15-fish bag limit and larger, 13-inch
minimum size. Such an intricate set of regulations were based on 2015 estimates
with PSEs of 15.9 in Wave 3, 26.9 in Wave 4, 55.5 in Wave 5 and 79.9 in Wave 6,
levels of imprecision that virtually assured that real-world landings would
have little resemblance to the “quantified level of conservation” calculated on
paper.
High single-wave PSEs in
Massachusetts, Rhode Island and New York helped to assure that real-world
landings in those states were also far from the predictions made with pen and
paper. Connecticut chose to split its black sea bass regulations by sector rather than by two-month
wave, which resulted in PSEs that ranged between 21.2 and 31.9 in
2015, but soared as high as 70.2 and 101.9 in 2016, suggesting that sector-specific
regulations may notresult in any more precise estimates than regulations that
change from wave to wave.
Such imprecision underlies
the problem with conservation equivalency. While the ASMFC publication, Conservation Equivalency: Policy and Technical Guidance Document,
advises that “The [Plan Development Team] should consider stock status, stock
structure,data availability, range of the species,
socio-economic information, and the potential for more conservative management
when stocks are overfished or overfishing is occurring when making a decision
on conservation equivalency [emphasis added],” in practice states’ requests for
conservation equivalency are rarely denied if a state can demonstrate, by using
even very imprecise MRIP data, that its proposed regulations will achieve
ASMFC’s conservation goals.
As a result, states
commonly game the system, using data that they know, or at least should know, is highly suspect in order to
justify regulations that, on paper, seem to meet ASMFC’s objectives, even if
such regulations are unlikely to adequately restrict harvest in the real world.
The Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (Magnuson-Stevens) mandates that “To
the extent practicable, an individual stock of fish shall be managed as a unit
throughout its range.”
Although ASMFC is not bound by Magnuson-Stevens, it would do
well to take that provision to heart, applying a single set of regulations to a
stock of fish wherever they may be caught and employing conservation
equivalency only under extraordinary and compelling circumstances. Such a
broad-based approach would best assure the accuracy of harvest estimates and
the effectiveness of whatever rules are adopted.
While conservation equivalency sounds like a good idea,
experience has shown that it works far better in theory than in practice.
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This post first appeared in “From the Waterfront,” the blog
of the Marine Fish Conservation Network, which can be found at
http://conservefish.org/blog/
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