A HABIT OF WAITING TOO LONG

I started shark fishing about forty years ago—closer to fifty, if you include some ill-advised sessions trying to catch something large and toothy with a rope tied to the bow of a friend’s 10 ½-foot skiff—so I’ve had lots of time to watch the fishery change.

Decades ago, the fish were all over.  Big female sandbars—sharks measuring 7 feet long or more—were frequent visitors to my childhood waters in western Long Island Sound.  

Offshore, sharks of many species, including some truly large blue sharks and duskies, patrolled the waters and frequently stole cod when we fished off Rhode Island.

But of all the sharks that swam in those days, none were as prized as the mako.

I should be proper and say “shortfin mako,” to distinguish it from its close relative, the longfin mako.  But the latter is a fish of deep waters that rarely interacts with anglers, at least in the northeast. Up here, the shortfins are all that we see, and we just call them “makos.”

Back when I began, big makos weren’t rare.  

People would start looking for them before Memorial Day, and even though those early anglers usually only caught bluefish and blue sharks, a few of them got makos, too.  

June was peak season, when many 200, 300 and even 400 pound fish were brought back to ports on Long Island, but even during the heights of summer, folks who put in their time found some of those bigger fish, too; the New York state record, 1,080 pounds, was caught on August 26, 1979.   

When waters began to cool in the fall, mako numbers would increase again, and they’d stay ‘til the bluefish were gone.

Over the years, that started to change.  Makos started showing up later in the spring, and most disappeared sooner in the fall.  Although some large fish were still caught, the sharks started getting smaller, too.  By the late 1990s, it was clear that something was wrong.

In 1999, the National Marine Fisheries Service adopted the Final Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Tuna, Swordfish and Sharks, but it didn’t do much for the mako.  Recreational anglers were limited to one shark per trip, and a meaningless 54-inch minimum size.  Since about 50% of female makos are reproductively mature by the time they reach a fork length of about nine feet, when they are typically around 18 years old; setting a minimum size at only half a mako’s length at maturity did little or nothing to protect the spawning stock.  

Still, it was better than the regulations for the commercial fishery, where there was no minimum size at all.

Yet even those minimal restrictions were too much for some recreational fishermen, who sued to overturn them.  The Jersey Coast Anglers’ Association, part of a coalition or organizations, which included, among others, the Recreational Fishing Alliance, United Boatmen of New Jersey and New York and the Confederation of the Association of Atlantic Charter Boats and Captains [sic], announced that

“The arrogance of the National Marine Fisheries Service and their refusal to correct the inequities in the plan left this coalition no choice to go ahead with the lawsuit.”

They were entitled to their opinion, but the court deciding the case, Recreational Fishing Alliance v. Evans, disagreed with the plaintiffs on every point, and kept the plan intact.

Still, when even minimal levels of regulations can incite the sort of organizations that seek to preserve “the days of freedom in our fisheries” to file lawsuits, it’s easy to understand why fishery managers sometimes avoid taking unpopular actions.  

In the case of shortfin makos, such regulatory inaction led to real harm

Down in Florida, researchers at Nova Southeastern University have been placing satellite tags in shortfin mako sharks.  Based on the number of tagged fish that were caught, they calculated that fishing mortality on makos in the western North Atlantic was ten times higher than previously believed; a typical shark has only a 78% chance of remaining uncaught over the course of one year.

That finding was soon followed by the International Commission on the Conservation of Atlantic Tuna’s new shortfin mako stock assessment, which found that makos in the North Atlantic were both overfished and subject to overfishing.  Overfishing is so severe that fishing mortality would have to be cut by 75% just to prevent shortfin mako abundance from declining further.

ICCAT responded by adopting restrictions on harvest, which were recently adopted by the United States in an emergency regulation.  Commercial fishermen will have to release all live makos they bring to their boat (and only pelagic longliners may retain the dead ones); the recreational size limit has finally been raised to a more meaningful 83 inches—although that’s still too small to protect the females until they mature.

Yet it’s far from certain that such measures will be enough to achieve the needed 75% mortality reduction.  Even if they do that, there is only a 25% chance that they will rebuild the shortfin mako population by 2040—22 years from now.

What is certain is that if regulators had acted sooner, and reduced mako harvest before things got this bad, there would be more shortfin makos swimming around the North Atlantic today.

And, unfortunately, it’s not only ICCAT and the other folks who manage highly migratory species such as sharks who are prone to delay.

About a decade ago, anglers started reporting a decline in the number of striped bass that they were seeing, and asking that harvest be reduced.  However, managers remained fixated on the current state of the stock, which was good, and refused to look at what was likely to happen in the future.  One member of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Striped Bass Management Board even tried to justify an increase in commercial quota by saying

“We’re at tremendous levels of biomass.  We think that there may be a decline in the stock but that is three or four years down the line.  If that does manifest itself, then we can take action then.”

The benefits of making a small, precautionary reduction in harvest immediately, to avoid the need to make much more significant cuts in three or four years, apparently never occurred to him.

Even after a stock assessment update, released in 2011, predicted that

“Female [spawning stock biomass] will fall slightly below the threshold by 2017,”

meaning that the stock would become overfished, managers were reluctant to take any action.  At its November 2011 meeting, ASMFC’s Striped Bass Management Board decided not to move forward with a contemplated harvest reduction, largely because the stock was not yet overfished and overfishing was not yet occurring.  The comments of Tom Fote, the Governor’s Appointee from New Jersey, were typical.

“…there was never a striped bass tournament during that period of time in June when we had the fluke tournament.  Last year we ran into five of our member clubs that belong to Jersey Coast [Anglers Association] that were running striped bass tournaments because that was the only thing people were out there catching to eat in New Jersey.

“…I also look at the fact that we’re dealing with a species that is not being overfished and overfishing is not taking place…

“Also, if I’m asking for a relax on regulations like that [on summer flounder, scup and black sea bass] and striped bass is in a better situation than those species, how can I be a hypocrite and go out to my public in New Jersey and basically say, oh, by the way, we’ve been doing so great with striped bass and there really is no—we haven’t hit any of the triggers and now I’m going to reduce your catch by 40 percent.

“No, I don’t see that with my fishermen basically approving it…”

So managers decided to live in the moment and allow the stock to decline, until a new benchmark assessment that came out in 2013 required them to cut landings by 25%, lest the stock become overfished in 2015.  And even then, it took a year of debate, and a tense, all-day meeting, before those reductions occurred.

Even at that, things could have been worse, because striped bass never did become overfished.

That wasn’t the case with tautog.

ASMFC knew that tautog were overfished, and suffering from severe overfishing, by 1996.  But the states never adopted regulations that came close to ending overfishing or rebuilding the overfished stock, and ASMFC’s Tautog Management Board never summoned the will to require measures tough enough to get the job done.  A benchmark stock assessment released in 2015 found that tautog remained overfished throughout its range.

In an effort to fix the problem, the Management Board initiated a new Draft Amendment 1 to ASMFC’s tautog management plan, which broke the tautog’s coastal range into four different regions, and proposed measures that had a good chance of rebuilding the stock in each one. 

In Long Island Sound, the population had become very badly overfished, and severe measures were proposed to restore it to health.  A 47% reduction in fishing mortality was required.  However, such a cut didn’t go over well with the recreational fishing industry, particularly the for-hire fleet.  

Here in New York, they packed into the ASMFC hearing on the Amendment, to become an undisciplined mob that showed no respect for either the process, the forum of the people involved, and made it clear that they were not willing to accept the biologists’ advice.  Attendees at a Connecticut hearing were reportedly better-behaved, but no more willing to accept the Amendment.

As a result, the Tautog Management Board blinked, and reduced the required harvest cut from 47% to just 20.3%; such a reduction has only a 50% chance—coin-flip odds—of ending overfishing by 2029, more than a decade from now.  No one has any idea when, or if, the stock will rebuild.

And that’s why critics of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, with its hard-poundage catch limits, accountability measures and rebuilding deadlines, are so far off base.  

In their support for bills such as H.R. 200, the so-called Strengthening Fishing Communities and Increasing Flexibility in Fishery Management Act, and H.R. 2023, the Modernizing Recreational Fisheries Management Act (better known as the “Modern Fish Act”), which would substantially weaken those management tools, they forget one critical thing.

When managing fisheries, you’re not only dealing with fish.  You’re dealing with people, too.

You’re dealing with people who catch the fish, whether they’re recreational or commercial fishermen.  And with the folks who run the boats, sell the gear, and otherwise profit from fishing.  

You’re dealing with people who sit on fishery management panels, many of whom are fishermen themselves, who want to do the right thing, and don’t want to hurt their neighbors, but particularly don’t want to have their neighbors spit in the street and turn their heads the other way instead of saying hello because of a panel decision.  

And you’re dealing with people in government, who don’t enjoy being pilloried in the press and abused at public meetings any more than you or I would.

All those people, being completely human, would rather wait, and put off an unpopular decision for as long as they can, rather than take even a badly needed action and being condemned as a result.  Their lives turn out better that way.

Because fishermen are a little funny.  If their landings are reduced by regulation, even a regulation that will allow them to catch more fish in five years or so, they’ll hoot and they’ll yell and they’ll call people names.  But if their landings fall because they’ve overfished, and they’re now casting their lines into near-empty waters and pulling their nets through a near-empty sea, they won’t blame anyone at all.  “It’s just how it goes.”  “The fish went away.”

So for managers, doing nothing is the easy way out.  It becomes a bad habit, and bad habits aren’t easy to break.

That’s why we need a strong Magnuson-Stevens, that prohibits overfishing, puts hard, science-based limits on landings, and requires that stocks be promptly rebuilt.  When managers are faced with the choice of breaking a habit or breaking the law, Magnuson-Stevens makes taking action easier than doing nothing at all.

And so things get done.