THOUGHTS ON THE MASSACHUSETTS STRIPED BASS QUOTA

Call them “quotas” or “annual catch limits” or something else, they’ve become a fixture in saltwater fisheries management—some predetermined amount of fish that may be landed each year, an amount that, if not exceeded, should allow the fish stock to remain healthy and sustainable into the foreseeable future.

It seems like a simple concept, but people’s perception of just what a quota represents can vary widely, depending on their perspective.

To a conservationist, a category that includes a lot of fishery managers, a quota looks a lot like a hard cap, a level of harvest that may not be exceeded, lest overfishing occur and the health of the stock put in peril.  To folks with that sort of perspective, nothing’s gone wrong if landings fall short of the quota; the uncaught fish just become an unplanned addition to the spawning stock.

But to a fisherman, and to other fishery managers, a quota looks a lot like a target.  Any quota left uncaught at the end of the season represents profits lost, dollars left drifting in the open sea that could have been better used paying off debt or putting food on the table.  To folks with that sort of perspective, regulations should be designed to catch every fish allowed under the law; to them, if it looks like some quota might remain unlanded, the rules should change to correct that “problem.”

It’s not hard to craft arguments that, in theory, support either position.  But when theory becomes reality, as it now has in Massachusetts, other considerations may come into play.

Massachusetts receives the largest commercial striped bass quota on the coast, 869,813 pounds (there is a separate, and much higher, commercial quota harvested within Chesapeake Bay).  

The Massachusetts striped bass fishery is somewhat unique, as it is open to anyone who wishes to participate, provided that they purchase the appropriate license.  Harvest is limited to hook and line, all fish landed must be at least 34 inches long, and the daily trip limit is 15 fish for those fishing from their permitted boats, and 2 fish for everyone else.  Fishing is only allowed for a few days each week, with no fishing on the 3^rd and 4^th of July, and on Labor Day weekend.

The season begins on June 25, and continues until the quota is landed.  Historically, despite the restrictive regulations, the quota is filled by some time in late summer.

But that didn’t happen this year.  Instead, the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries announced that

“Current quota monitoring data indicates that just under 250,000 pounds—approximately 30%--of the commercial striped bass quota remains.  In recent weeks, daily harvest levels have averaged about 20,000 – 25,000 pounds.  If current conditions persist, we do not project closing the fishery until October.  Moreover, current weather projections and typical fall weather may constrain fishing activity reducing our ability to utilize the available quota.

“To ensure that the 2018 commercial quota is taken, the Director of the Division of Marine Fisheries is taking public comment on increasing the number of commercial fishing days…  [emphasis added]”

Massachusetts’ fishery managers certainly seem to fall into the “quota as target” category, and in the end,  decided to allow commercial striped bass fishing on Tuesdays, a day that had previously been closed.

Such action may well solve the problem of how to fill all of the state’s available quota, but that doesn’t mean that it was a wise thing to do.  Its wisdom depends on the reason why the quota is taking so long to fill.  Is the delay due to too much bad weather, too few people fishing or some similar cause?

Or is the failure to fill the quota more quickly due to something inherent to the resource such as, perhaps, a shortage of larger striped bass?

We can start with what the science tells us.

The last benchmark stock assessment for striped bass was released, with updates for 2012 landings, in 2013.  It found that

“In 2012, the Atlantic striped bass stock was not overfished or experiencing overfishing based on the points estimates of fully-recruited fishing mortality and female spawning stock biomass relative to the reference points defined in this assessment.  Female spawning stock biomass was estimated at 58.2 thousand metric tons (128 million pounds), [barely] above the SSB threshold of 57,626 metric tons, but below the SSB target of 72,023 metric tons.  Total fishing mortality was estimated at 0.200, below the F threshold of 0.219 but above the F target of 0.180.”

So five years ago, the news wasn’t great.  The female spawning stock biomass hovered just 600 metric tons above the threshold defining an overfished stock, while fishing mortality was a bit above target, although overfishing was not taking place.

To its credit, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board eventually, if slowly and painfully, adopted a new Addendum IV to the management plan that was intended to reduce fishing mortality by 25% (20.5% in Chesapeake Bay).  

Addendum IV’s success was uneven; it successfully reduced commercial landings and recreational landings on the coast, but utterly failed to constrain the recreational kill in Chesapeake Bay, where managers were unwilling to impose measures that adequately protected the big 2011 year class from recreational effort.  The recreational kill in both Maryland and Virginia spiked, with landings up by 50% and dead discards up even higher, by nearly 70%.

Thus, a stock assessment update released in 2015 found that the spawning stock biomass had only increased by about 650 metric tons since 2012.  At 58,853 metric tons, it was still uncomfortably close to the 57,828 threshold for an overfished stock.  On a positive note the update found that fishing mortality had been reduced to 0.16, slightly below the fishing mortality target.

Still, based on those numbers, it would be hard to call the striped bass stock perfectly healthy; it just wasn’t dangerously ill.

Again, there were positives.  In 2011, the Maryland young-of-the-year index came in at 34.58, the fourth-highest on record (the long-term average is a bit over 11), and there was another good year class, of 24.20, in 2015.  Those promised to help replenish the spawning stock, if they could survive the recreational and commercial gauntlets in Chesapeake Bay and grow old enough to reproduce.

On the other hand, the 2012 index was 0.89, the lowest ever recorded, lower even than indexes from the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the stock had collapsed.  And for most of the years between 2006 and 2014, the index was well below average.

The resulting hole in the age structure explains a lot of the problem up in Massachusetts. 

A 34-inch striped bass, the smallest fish that may be commercially harvested in that state, is approximately nine years old (fish, like people, grow at different rates, so there is some overlap of age classes).  2009 was a below-average year class, and 2006 and 2008 saw even poorer spawning success.  2007, at 13.39, was marginally above average, but hardly made up for adjacent year class' indices of 4.25, 3.20 and 7.87.  Some later spawns were better—2003 was well above-average at 25.75, followed by an average spawn in 2004 and a smaller, but still above-average spawn in 2005—but at that point, we’re reaching back to older year classes that are getting whittled away by time and the natural and fishing mortality that time brings.

That’s consistent with what recreational fishermen are seeing.

On the Water Magazine reported that

“there have been great numbers of schoolies [2015 year class] and small recreational-size keepers (28 inches and larger) [2011 year class] around, but larger striped bass have been harder to come by.  Ther were fewer large striped bass around Race Point and the Outer Beaches this spring…The large bass that show up in Cape Cod Bay in the late summer were late arriving and fewer in number.  Besides a few big fish blitzes in the Cape Cod Canal, it’s been an alarmingly quiet summer for big striped bass in Massachusetts.”

It has been "alarmingly quiet" along much of the striper coast.  

Here on the South Shore of Long Island, we had a shot of very big fish—some over 60—in early July, but the run lasted for days in any one place, not for the weeks that we'd seen in earlier seasons.  Montauk and Block Island have held big fish all summer, but that’s a small piece of territory, and even at that, fishing hasn’t compared to some of the action that occurred a few years ago.  Reports that I’m getting from Long Island Sound and mainland Rhode Island paint a similar picture.

That’s not to say that things are falling apart. 

As far as we know—and we’ll know far better once a new benchmark assessment is completed this fall—the spawning stock remains above the biomass threshold, and might even be increasing slightly as the 2011s and a very few 2015s recruit into the spawning population.

Even so, we have to ask whether relaxing regulations, in order to kill more large, prime spawning females, represents good stewardship. 

We have to ask whether the failure to fill the Massachusetts quota by Labor Day weekend, a failure that has seldom if ever occurred before, is a signal that the number of large, fecund spawning females has fallen so low that managers should exercise caution when managing what remains.

We’ll know for certain by the end of the year, when the stock assessment comes out.

But while uncertainty remains, the greater wisdom demands that they plan for the worst, and assume that lower harvests reflect lower abundance.

For “ensuring that the 2018 quota is taken” is a far less important goal than ensuring that the spawning stock remains healthy in 2019—and beyond.