TRUST, THEN VERIFY

A day or two ago, I was perusing an Internet discussion on the state of the striped bass fishery, when I came across a comment from someone who explained that the reason that anglers aren’t seeing many striped bass inshore is because the fish are all out in federal waters, where there is more bait to hold them.

I found that a bit curious, because once the weakfish are gone from the bay, I do most of my fishing out in the EEZ, either sitting on wrecks for black sea bass and such, chumming for sharks or trolling for tuna.  And I haven’t seen the big concentrations of bass that he seemed to suggest were out there. 

Yes, every now and then there will be one or two on a wreck, or a bass will pick up a fluke bait drifted over squid-rich deep structure.   And sometimes you’ll come across striped bass chasing bait well offshore, particularly during the spring and fall migrations.  But while such forays do occur, and there are some small areas where bass regularly feed more than three miles from shore, there's no real evidence that a substantial percentage of the bass population is spending time offshore these days.

So I asked the poster where he was seeing the offshore bass, and his answer was enlightening.  He said that he hadn’t seen them himself, but since he sometimes has some good nights in the surf, when he puts a couple of dozen stripers on the sand, he guessed that when people aren’t catching bass elsewhere on the coast, it means the fish must be out in deep water, where federal law keeps them off-limits to anglers.

Apparently, the possibility that he’s just getting into a local concentration of fish once in a while, and that bass aren’t being caught by a lot of other folks because they’re just not that abundant never entered his mind.

As far as I can tell, he made his comment in good faith, but if he hadn’t been questioned, folks reading them might have accepted his views without digging any deeper.

And failing to dig is always a mistake.

That’s particularly true in the Internet age, when “alternative facts” can be spread with just a few strokes on a keyboard.

For example, about two weeks ago, I learned, to my great surprise, that I wanted to cut the bluefish bag limit by two-thirds.

I had no idea that I was planning to do that.  

But someone sent me a Facebook post warning that “environmental lobbyists” involved in the fishery management process were planning to cut the bluefish bag limit from 15 fish to 5, and when I got to the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council’s New York bluefish hearing a day or so later, a representative of New York’s party boat industry made it abundantly clear that one of the “environmental lobbyists” that the post mentioned was me.

I’m still not sure where the notion that folks, including myself, were trying to slash the bluefish bag limit came from.  When state fishery managers noted that no such plans were in place, they were quickly told that it was “all over social media,” and thus, apparently, had to be true. 

The party boat folks also seemed to buy into the oft-heard notion that fishermen (including themselves) weren’t seeing as many bluefish as they once not because the population declined, but because the fish just went somewhere else.  

One captain from Huntington, New York even suggested where that “someplace else” might be, noting that bluefish were found off Africa as well, so that the fish absent from North American shores could be somewhere in the middle of the ocean that divides the two continents.

Of course, scientists tell us that the western and eastern Atlantic bluefish populations are isolated from one another, and that there is no interchange of fish between the two, but why let science get in the way of the story you want to tell?  

That would be like letting the truth get in the way of a provocative Facebook post…

So when you hear someone say anything that seems hard to believe or, perhaps more importantly, when they say anything that you want very hard to believe, some fact-checking is always in order. 

The cases related above described folks with no real authority talking about fishery issues.  That  might be excusable.  There is less excuse when people that other folks trust fail to do enough fact-checking before making equally baseless claims.  

Some members of the angling press are particularly bad about passing inaccurate information on to their readers. 

That has certainly been true in the case of black sea bass management, which has been a particularly contentious issue this year.  The population is in very good shape, and some members of the fishing community, who believe that bag limits should be higher, have aggressively attacked fishery managers. 

Unfortunately, some fishing writers have been throwing gasoline on what is already a very hot fire by perpetuating the myth that black sea bass abundance is at 240% of the biomass target.

It’s true that, back in 2015, the black sea bass biomass was estimated to be at 230% of the biomass target.  But that was in 2015.  Since then, because of the decline of the formerly large 2011 year class, black sea bass numbers have been in steady decline.  The stock is still very healthy, with spawning stock biomass probably somewhere between 123% and 160% of target, but the 240% number hasn’t been valid for at least three years.

By reprinting what they should know is a bad number, writers inflame anglers’ emotions and lead them, without real reason, to lose faith in the management system.  The fact that they write in trusted publications makes their failure to adequately fact-check the information that they pass along an even more egregious problem, and makes it more important that anglers retain a healthy skepticism about everything they read and hear, and fact-check information relating to all important issues for themselves.

Unfortunately, that need to fact-check extends not only to publications, but even to organizations that anglers supposedly join to protect their interests and give them the straight scoop about what’s going on.

Nothing demonstrates that more clearly than the current debate over the Modernizing Recreational Fisheries Management Act, better known as the “Modern Fish Act.” 

Anglers are being told that the Modern Fish Act will improve recreational fishing; what they’re not being clearly told—although sometimes it’s buried in some of the promotional materials that are released—is that the bill the House of Representatives will be voting on, H.R. 200, is not the Modern Fish Act.  

Instead, H.R. 200 is a bill that has long been sought by the most conservation-hostile members of the recreational and commercial fishing industries, who want to cripple the conservation and management provisions of current law in the name of a “flexibility” that will allow them to overfish and delay the rebuilding of overfished stocks.

If it does that, it certainly won’t promote marine resources conservation, as Modern Fish Act supporters constantly claim.

Yet there are likely plenty of anglers who take the organizations’ words at face value, and think that the Modern Fish Act is a good thing.

That’s unfortunate.  For whether anglers are discussing the health of a single fish stock or a law that could place the health of many fish stocks in danger, they shouldn’t take anything they’re told on faith.

Instead, they should take the advice of angler Joey Sikorski, who was quoted in an article that appeared on the Internet site Fish Rap.

“Take 5-10 minutes to actually read about it and the repercussions of it for the long haul.  It’s not all buttery sweet as it sounds.  I want to keep a sustainable resource.”

As President Ronald Reagan once noted, it's perfectly fine to trust.  

As long as you verify, too.