CHUB MACKEREL; FORAGE, YET A FISHERY

Typically, if you manage to land a thresher shark that weighs more than  a quarter-ton, you’re going to win a weekend tournament.  However, that’s not how it went earlier this month at Star Island Marina in Montauk, where an angler put such a big fish on the scales, only to lose to an even larger, 598-pound beast.

A friend of mine runs a charter boat out of the same port, and he recently put one of his customers onto a thresher of nearly 300 pounds, close enough to shore that, according to him, you could still make out tourists walking around the top of the Montauk Lighthouse.

That’s pretty close to the beach…

And those fish weren’t exceptions.  There have been a lot of big threshers caught, and more seen, off Montauk this month, and the reason is perfectly clear.

Food.

Montauk is buried in baitfish.  There are big schools of menhaden, along with swarms of chub mackerel and even some Atlantic mackerel, which should have headed north a few months ago, pulling the sea’s apex predators surprisingly close to shore.

Montauk isn’t alone.  Although fishing is better there than elsewhere on Long Island, schools of chub mackerel are popping up all along the South Shore.  I caught them last Monday on the artificial reef about three miles south of Fire Island Lighthouse, when I stopped to make a quick drop for porgies on my way home from fishing an offshore wreck.

We also found chub mackerel when we were fishing in 20 fathoms of water, about 20 miles ESE of Fire Island Inlet, on Thursday, where they appear to have attracted the largest concentration of hammerhead sharks that I’ve seen off Long Island in decades.

So it’s pretty clear that in the ocean, chub mackerel matter, as an important link in the food chain.

Yet, historically, chub mackerel had no protection at all.  They were being targeted in what appears to be an expanding fishery that, in New England and the Mid-Atlantic, landed no chub mackerel at all in five of the last ten years for which information is available (2006-2015), but ramped up sharply in recent years, landing over 4 million pounds in 2013, 1.2 million pounds in 2014 and 1.4 million pounds in 2015.

Other important forage fish—the fish that other fish typically eat—were also without protection.  Thus, last year, the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council opted to create an omnibus amendment to its fishery management plans which would protect forage species important to fish stocks managed by the Council.

It was up to the National Marine Fisheries Service to adopt or reject the amendment that the Council had drafted.  There was concern in some circles that the incoming administration, which had long expressed hostility to regulations restricting business activity, might refuse to issue the regulations needed to implement the omnibus amendment.

Fortunately, those concerns proved baseless.  NMFS has just released a regulatory package that will protect not only chub mackerel, but sand launce (“sand eels”), anchovies, halfbeaks, sardines, some herrings, saury, silversides and a number of other important prey species.

The new regulations will require anyone who commercially lands, or otherwise sells, chub mackerel and other forage species to obtain federal permits and report landings and sales on the appropriate vessel trip reports or dealer reports.  Vessels will not be allowed to possess more than 1,700 pounds, in the aggregate, of forage fish species other than chub mackerel on any given trip, which should effectively prevent the creation of directed fisheries for such fish.

Because there is already a significant landings history for chub mackerel, that species will not receive the comprehensive protections extended to other forage stocks.  Instead, landings will be limited to a generous 2.86 million pounds per year—far, far higher than the landings in any recent year other than 2013—in the waters between Maine and North Carolina. 

Should annual landings equal or exceed that level, the directed chub mackerel fishery will be closed, and a 40,000 pound possession limit imposed.  It should be noted that the amendment contains no provision for accountability measures that would be imposed if annual chub mackerel landings exceed 2.86 million pounds, or any other threshold.  As the regulation currently stands, fishermen may land an unlimited amount of chub mackerel, provided that they only do it in 40,000-pound increments once 2.86 million pounds of fish are dumped on the dock.

It should also be noted that the 2.86-million pound catch limit and 40,000-pound possession limits are derived from commercial, not biological, data.  According to information provided to supplement the new regulation, the 2.86 million pound catch limit merely reflects average landings for the period 2013-2015, which happen to be the highest landings in the last decade. 

Using a 20-year time series, 1996-2015, would have better reflected historical landings, and would have resulted in a catch limit of just 900,000 pounds.  Using even the last five years, 2011-2015, would have returned a more modest 1.73 million pound cap.  Thus, the choice of 2.86 million pounds was one of the least conservative approaches available—although it should be noted that at least one individual wasn’t even happy with that high figure, and argued that the annual limit should have been 5.25 million pounds, equal to the highest landings ever recorded.

The 40,000-pound bycatch limit had an origin similarly divorced from biology.  It is simply equal to the capacity of a bait truck, the assumption being that the chub mackerel caught will be used only for bait, and not for human consumption (although the chub mackerel that I caught last Monday ended up in a citrusy ceviche, where they proved quite enjoyable).

The good news and the bad news is that the chub mackerel regulations will only remain in force until December 31, 2020. 

The intent is that, before that date, the directed chub mackerel fishery will be integrated into the Mid-Atlantic Council’s Atlantic Mackerel, Squid and Buterfish Fishery Management Plan, and subject to a full array of fishery management measures.  Thus, there is hope that biology, rather than the capacity of a semi-truck’s trailer, will eventually govern the size of the landings.

But there is also the chance that the Council will not meet the deadline, NMFS will choose not to extend the current regulations, and the fishery will again be unregulated.

That would be unfortunate since, despite industry protestations, the chub mackerel is an important forage fish deserving of adequate protections and management.

As the threshers in Montauk will mutely attest.