THE CONSERVATION-MINDED SALTWATER ANGLER IS ON HIS OWN

Sportsmen have traditionally been at the forefront of natural resources conservation.

In 1887, a group of big game hunters, including Theodore Roosevelt, were concerned with the decline in wild game numbers, and wished to keep the Yellowstone region undeveloped.  They founded the Boone and Crockett Club, an organization which has been a prominent conservation advocate and proponent of ethical hunting practices for well over 100 years.

“It is the mission of the Boone and Crockett Club to promote the conservation and management of wildlife, especially big game, and its habitat, to preserve and encourage hunting and to maintain the highest ethical standards of fair chase and sportsmanship in North America.”

Today, in support of that mission, 

“The Club promotes outdoor ethics for all people, emphasizing shared use of natural resources to protect options for future generations.”

In 1937, a group of waterfowl hunters, concerned that waterfowl populations had crashed, created Ducks Unlimited, an organization dedicated to acquiring and improving habitat critical to nesting, migrating and wintering waterfowl.  It has declared that

“The vision of Ducks Unlimited is wetlands sufficient to fill the skies with waterfowl today, tomorrow and forever.”

And the hunters weren’t alone.  In 1959, a handful of Michigan trout fishermen, concerned that their state was forsaking effective trout management in favor of filling the rivers with “cookie cutter” hatchery fish, formed Trout Unlimited.

As the organization explains on its website,

“From the beginning, TU was guided by the principle that if we ‘take care of the fish, then the fishing will take care of itself.’  And that principle was grounded in science.  ‘One of our most important objectives is to develop programs and recommendations based on the very best information and thinking available,’ said TU’s first president, Dr. Casey E. Westell Jr.  ‘In all matters  of trout management, we want to know that we are substantially correct, both morally and biologically.’”

Plenty of other, similar groups, from Pheasants Forever to the Wild Sheep Foundation, have also been formed.  So it’s pretty clear that if you’re an inland sportsman, whether your quarry has fins, fur or feathers, there is a conservation group that you can call your own.

But what if you fish in salt water?

Unlike hunters and freshwater fishermen, saltwater anglers have failed to create even one broad-based, nation-wide organization that promotes the conservation of fishery resources and the preservation of natural marine ecosystems, while emphasizing the future health of fish stocks rather than current harvest.

Instead, the organizations that purport to represent salt water anglers are obsessed with increasing anglers’ landings, and weakening federal fisheries law.

Nothing illustrates that conundrum better than the testimony of Chris Macaluso, Director of The Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership’s Center for Marine Fisheries, at a recent hearing held by the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Water, Power and Oceans.

On the whole, The Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership is a very solid organization, with a long history of doing good work on conservation issues important to sportsmen.  Its philosophy is to bring like-minded organizations together,

“work together on certain issues, identify areas of consensus, work towards conservation priorities and establish plans for action.”

It has worked with all of the five groups mentioned above, fighting for the preservation of America’s public lands, for clean waters and for a host of other important conservation priorities.  A few weeks ago, when I attended the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s New York meeting on the proposed Amendment 3 to ASMFC’s menhaden management plan, a TRCP representative was there, urging the Commission to adopt an ecosystem approach to menhaden management.

But when it comes to salt water fishery issues, that strong conservation ethic falls away; instead of trying to restore and conserve marine fish stocks, and assure their healthy future, TRCP has aligned itself with organizations seeking to weaken existing protections and put the nation’s living marine resources at greater hazard.

Perhaps that’s because there are no true saltwater conservation groups out there, for TRCP to partner with.  But whatever the cause, Macaluso endorsed the report released by his employer earlier this year, Approaches for Improved Federal Saltwater Recreational Fisheries Management which, in the last analysis, is just another flawed effort to let anglers escape the discipline of annual catch limits, imposed to avoid overfishing.

Urging federal regulators and legislators to adopt management measures that would make it more likely that overfishing occurs is a strange position for a conservation organization to take, making Macaluso’s—and TRCP’s—efforts to do so difficult to explain or understand.

One of the most troubling aspects of TRCP’s argument is that it’s based on a logical fallacy that is clear to anyone who has even a basic understanding of fishery management.

The "Approaches" report argues that hard-poundage annual catch limits should be replaced with annual removal rates because

“Stock assessments, even on the most popular recreational stocks are done sporadically, usually every three to five years.  This delay may, for example, lead to [annual catch limits] being placed on a stock which are generated from a three year old assessment, based of four year old data, which likely no longer reflect the current state of the stock and the resultant allowable catch…

“An alternative approach exists that has been successfully implemented in many inland and some coastal recreational fisheries throughout the country.  Harvest rate management sets management targets based on the rate of removals caused by fishing, rather than on a poundage based [annual catch limit] rooted in past harvest.  For primarily recreational fisheries, a harvest rate approach is more appropriate because regulations are based on the proportion of fish that are harvested from a stock, which must inherently account for the changing abundance, age structure and size structure of the stock.  Harvest rate management would require annual updates on the relative fishing rates, including updating the population abundance estimate as well as annual updates on the relative fishing rates and recruitment indices…”

Now just consider that for a moment.

The first paragraph quoted above says that annual catch limits don’t work because they are based on data that may be three, four or five years old.

The second paragraph says that using removal rates to manage fisheries is a better approach “because regulations are based on the proportion of fish that are harvested.”  

Those two statements, read together, create an inherent contradiction, because how can managers know what proportion of the CURRENT stock is being harvested if the most recent abundance data is three, four or five years old?

The second paragraph tries to explain that away, but just ends up digging a deeper hole in its credibility.  It admits that harvest rate management would require “annual updates on the relative fishing rates, including updating the population abundance estimate…and recruitment indices.”  But if managers have an annual update of population abundance and recruitment, why can’t those updates be used to adjust annual catch limits, too, and not just estimate removal rates? 

In fact, the National Marine Fisheries Service already uses annual or biennial updates of abundance and recruitment to both estimate removal rates and set new annual catch limits.  That’s exactly how NMFS currently manages summer flounder, which is nevertheless one of the more controversial management programs on the East Coast.

The fact that TRCP doesn’t seem to know that—and suggests otherwise in both the “Approaches’ report and in its recent testimony—indicates that it probably ought to become more familiar with how salt water fisheries are actually managed before making any efforts to change current law.

As part of that process it also ought to learn that there is no real difference between an annual catch limit defined by a hard-poundage quota, and a target removal rate.  They are just two different ways to express the same level of fishing mortality.

This is how it works:  Assume that there is a stock of fish with a spawning stock biomass of 10 million pounds, and that managers decide that, based on current recruitment levels, fishermen can sustainably remove 20% of the spawning stock biomass each year.

That 20% can be defined as a target removal rate, expressed as what biologists call the “instantaneous fishing mortality rate” of 0.223 (normally written as “F_target=0.223”), or as an annual catch limit of 2 million pounds.  Both reflect exactly the same thing, the removal of 2 million pounds of fish from the spawning stock. 

So why are the advocates of “alternative” management measures, including TRCP, insisting that annual catch limits need to be replaced by removal rates and similar approaches?

The answer is accountability. 

Estimates of recreational landings are available 45 days after year-end, and sooner for species with seasons that end before November 1.  While such estimates aren’t perfect (but are as accurate as estimates of recreational removal rates based on anglers’ landings), they provide fishery managers with a good benchmark for setting the next year’s regulations.  If anglers exceeded their annual catch limit, it’s likely that regulations will be more restrictive in the following season, as anglers are held accountable for their overage.

The organizations trying to do away with recreational catch limits are essentially trying to do away with that accountability.  

Historically, removal rates have been used as “soft” harvest caps; exceeding the target rate in any given year does not necessarily result in a change in regulations or good conservation outcomes.  The best example of that is the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s management of tautog, a bottom fish popular with anglers in southern New England and the upper Mid-Atlantic.  

In 1996, ASMFC determined that the removal rate should be no higher than F=0.15.  Twenty-one years later, because the discipline and accountability that goes along with annual catch limits was never imposed, tautog remain both overfished and subject to overfishing, and the removal rate is still nearly double what was recommended before the close of the last century.

If you’re the American Sportfishing Association or the National Marine Manufacturers’ Association, and you want to sell more product to anglers, or if you’re the Recreational Fishing Alliance or Coastal Conservation Association, and you want to help your members bring home more dead fish (or, to use the current euphemism, give them more “access” to the stock), that might be a good thing in the short term.

But it doesn’t bode well for the future.

That’s why it’s so puzzling why a group such as TRCP, with a previously exemplary conservation record, would jump on the pro-overfishing bandwagon.

A recent op-ed that appeared in The Hill, written by angler Mark Eustis, says it best.  The piece was titled “Recreational fishermen, be like Roosevelt and put conservation first,” and observes

“So, what would Roosevelt do?  Would he invest in our coastal communities for the long term by making sure we leave abundant resources for everyone?  Would he strengthen the Magnuson-Stevens Act framework that has brought a measure of stability and the prospect of viability to fish populations that were on the brink of collapse only decades ago?  Would he invest in improving the science around recreational fishing?  The answers are yes.

“Now is the time to advocate for a strengthened Magnuson-Stevens Act, with more data, better science and balanced management.  Now is not the time to ‘increase access’ to take more fish, now is the time to build on what works and help increase the fisheries for all.  Now is the time for recreational anglers to give back and support conservation—again.  Abundance across entire ecosystems should be our goal, not taking ever-larger quotas from shrinking concentrations of smaller fish.

“As Roosevelt once said ‘The most practical kind of politics is the politics of decency.’  Now, just as Roosevelt did when president, the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership and the ‘recreational community’ have an opportunity to give—not take—and be on the right side of history.”

And if they did that, conservation-minded salt water anglers would finally have an organization to call their own.