Saltwater
fisheries management is a relatively new science.
Freshwater fisheries managers have been developing population
models and experimenting with various management measures for years, but on the
Mid-Atlantic coast, we never saw any such models until 1997, when a virtual population analysis was
used to assess the striped bass stock.
Fisheries management has advanced a long way in the last twenty
years. Mathematical population models have become the norm; an innovative stock assessment for black sea
bass, which passed peer review in late 2016, resolved the last
“data-poor species” issue in the Mid-Atlantic region.
However, having a good stock assessment
only answers part of the management puzzle. It’s also necessary to limit
commercial and recreational landings, so that harvest doesn’t exceed
sustainable levels.
That’s not too hard to do in
commercial fisheries, where a relatively small number of fishermen must sell
their catch to an even smaller number of buyers. In recreational fisheries,
where millions of anglers land their fish at countless places that might
include remote beaches, busy commercial marinas and even docks in their own
backyards, it is far more difficult to get a handle on landings.
In most recreational fisheries, anglers, unlike their commercial
counterparts, are not required to report their catch, and it is physically
impossible to do an accurate census of all the fish caught. Thus, recreational
landings must be estimated by surveying selected anglers, through a process
known as the Marine Recreational Information
Program (MRIP). Because MRIP is a survey and not a
census, its harvest estimates always contain some degree of
uncertainty; it also takes some time to calculate harvest estimates from the
survey data.
Such delays also mean that it
takes some time to determine whether the regulations used to prevent
overfishing, which are usually some combination of size limits, bag limits and
seasons, are restrictive enough to achieve their goals while still allowing
anglers to catch all, or at least nearly all, of their annual quotas.
Recently, some anglers’ rights organizations, along with some
members of the fishing tackle and boating industries, have argued that such
delays, and the uncertainties inherent in MRIP, justify exempting recreational
fishermen from annual catch limits, the most effective tool that
managers use to prevent harmful overfishing.
The Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (Magnuson-Stevens),
which governs all fishing in federal waters, did not always require managers to
prevent overfishing; that requirement was only added in 1996, when the Sustainable Fisheries Act was
passed in an effort to reverse a decline in fish abundance that was being felt
on every coast of the United States.
The Sustainable Fisheries Act’s changes to Magnuson-Stevens, and a subsequent appellate court
decision that required all fishery management plans to have at
least a 50% chance of achieving their goals, led to the recovery of many fish
stocks. Even so, as the Washington Post reported, fishery managers “regularly flouted
scientific advice and authorized more fishing than could be sustained.” In
response, when Magnuson-Stevens was reauthorized in early 2007, it included
provisions for mandatory, hard-poundage annual catch limits for almost all
federally-managed fisheries, and made fishermen accountable for any overfishing
that might occur.
The imposition of such annual catch limits sharply reduced the
incidence of overfishing; in 2016, overfishing only occurred in about 8% of all
federally-managed fisheries. But in some recreational fisheries,
such as Gulf of Mexico red snapper, where anglers chronically exceeded
their quotas, annual catch limits forced fishery managers to impose
very restrictive, and very unpopular, regulations.
Thus, the various angling groups are now trying to force federal
fishery managers to take a step backward, to a time when various “alternative”
fishery management measures, which often failed to prevent overfishing, were
still used. To that end, they are urging Congress to pass the so-called Modernizing Recreational
Fisheries Management Act (Modern Fish Act).
The Modern Fish Act provides,
among other things, that federal fishery managers would “have the authority to
use alternative fishery management measures in a recreational fishery (or the
recreational component of a mixed-use fishery) in developing a fishery
management plan, plan amendment, or proposed regulations, including extraction
rates, fishing mortality targets, harvest control rules, or traditional or
cultural practices of native communities.”
While that doesn’t sound too malign, given that guidelines issued by NOAA
Fisheries already allow managers to employ such measures,
current law does not relieve managers of their obligation to establish and
enforce an effective annual catch limit, even when alternative management
measures are used. There are other provisions of the Modern Fish Act that would
create substantial exceptions to the annual catch limit requirement.
The ultimate goal of Modern
Fish Act supporters is to clearly to eliminate annual catch limits in many, if
not all, recreational fisheries.
The American Sportfishing Association (ASA), which represents
the recreational fishing tackle industry, states that the Modern Fish Act will
allow “exemptions where annual catch
limits don’t fit.” ASA doesn’t explain what it means by “don’t fit,”
but given that the sole purpose of annual catch limits is to prevent
overfishing, the only time they wouldn’t “fit” is when ASA would let
overfishing occur.
The Center for Sportfishing Policy, an organization dedicated to finding political solutions to
fisheries issues, is less cryptic. It is encouraging people to
support the Modern Fish Act because it “Modifies the annual
catch limit requirement to allow for more adaptive approaches.”
Modern Fish Act supporters frequently point to Atlantic striped bass
as a fishery management success, achieved through “alternative”
measures. A closer looks shows that such alleged success is illusory. The most recent update to the
striped bass stock assessment, released late in 2016, indicated that
the female spawning stock biomass (SSB) hovered just 1,200 metric tons above
the overfishing threshold, and was 13,000 metric tons below the SSB target.
When the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC)
adopted measures to increase the SSB,
it required recreational fishermen within the Chesapeake Bay to reduce their
landings by 20.5%, compared to what such landings had been in 2012. However,
ASMFC failed to impose an annual catch limit on the Chesapeake anglers. As a
result, in the first year of the new management plan, Chesapeake Bay anglers
didn’t just fail to meet the mandated 20.5% reduction; they increased their landings by more
than 58% instead.
And because ASMFC failed to adopt any sort of recreational
accountability measures, Chesapeake Bay striped bass
landings have climbed even higher since then.
Such a result shouldn’t
surprise anyone familiar with how “alternative” management measures function in
the real world; if anything, striped bass represent a best-case outcome.
ASMFC’s management of the tautog fishery provides a much starker example.
By 1996, biologists knew that
tautog were overfished, and experiencing severe overfishing. ASMFC
adopted a management plan intended to end overfishing and begin rebuilding the
stock, but imposed no annual catch limit and no accountability measures on the
recreational fishery. As a result, the states never imposed sufficiently
restrictive regulations on anglers. In 2007, more than a decade later, ASMFC admitted that “The
trend in total stock biomass and spawning stock biomass has been generally flat
and at low levels since 1994.”
In other words, the
“alternative” management measures, which did not include annual catch limits,
had failed.
So ASMFC tried again. But a stock assessment update
released in 2016 found that fishing mortality was still twice the
level recommended in 1996. Twenty years of “alternative” management, without
annual catch limits, failed to come close to rebuilding the stock.
As such examples make clear,
the “Modern” Fish Act is not really modern at all. By seeking to infuse
recreational fishery management with the sort of management measures that so
often failed in the past, it is not merely reinventing the wheel, it is reinventing
a square wheel design that is ill-suited to moving the management process
forward and restoring fish stocks to the sort of abundance that benefits
everyone.
Without the discipline
imposed by annual catch limits, managers will always be tempted to dither, and
avoid imposing the sort of controversial and politically unpopular restrictions
that are so often needed to rebuild fish stocks.
So yes, there are people
telling anglers to support the Modern Fish Act, and “alternative” management
measures.
But what they’re not telling
anglers is that such measures are, in truth, an alternative to effective
fishery management, and to rebuilt and healthy fish stocks.
-----
This essay 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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