We’re at that point in the year where fishing has dwindled
down to some wreck fishing trips for blackfish, black sea bass and cod, whenever
anglers are lucky enough to get chance to sneak out between winter storms and
speeding cold fronts. Most of the time,
though, fishermen will start looking forward to next year, or back to what happened
last season.
I started thinking about both a few days ago, after reading a
press release from the
Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council, which announced the agenda for its
December meeting.
The December meeting is when the Mid-Atlantic Council and
the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Summer Flounder, Scup and
Black Sea Bass Management Board get together to set recreational specifications
for three of the most important recreational species in southern New England
and the upper Mid-Atlantic. What
particularly caught my eye in the meeting agenda was an hour and a half set
aside for a “Discussion of Potential 2019 Mid-Year Revisions for Summer
Flounder, Scup and Black Sea Bass.”
Folks who don’t pay much attention to the management process
might have glossed over it, but “mid-year revisions” are a big deal.
Typically, the Mid-Atlantic Council and the Management Board
meet in August to set the annual catch limits for the three species in the
following year, and meet again in December, when more information is available,
to set the recreational specifications, which will then form the basis for
state summer flounder, black sea bass and scup regulations. Then, around the middle of February, after
receiving recreational catch data for the last two months of they year, states
begin the process of adopting the regulations that will apply for the next
twelve months.
It’s important to know what the regulations will be as early
as possible in the year, because anglers plan their days off and vacations, for-hire
boats book trips, and tackle shops make business decisions based on what the coming
year’s rules will be.
Changing regulations in the middle of the year can severely
disrupt both anglers’ plans and business’ income, so it’s something that
fishery managers try to avoid if they can.
But this year, a lot of different factors are converging
that make mid-year changes in at least one or two fisheries a real possibility.
One of the most significant factors is a
change in the methodology that the National Marine Fisheries Service uses to
calculate recreational fishing effort, and thus recreational catch. NMFS has determined that the old household
telephone survey, which depended on random calls to homes in coastal counties,
was not creating an accurate picture of the fishing activity taking place, and so
replaced it with a more accurate mail survey, and based on a relationship
between the two, recalculated catch and effort estimates back to 1981.
It
turned out that anglers are catching a lot more fish than managers previously
believed, and managers are still trying to figure out what that means for the
health of fish stocks. Intuitively,
anglers might think that such higher catch figures will inevitably lead to
claims of overfishing, but that isn’t necessarily true. While more fish were being removed from fish
populations, most of those population still managed to remain at today’s
levels, which means, in many cases, that the fish populations are probably
larger than previously believed. They
may also be able to tolerate higher levels of fishing. Either way, there is a good chance that, in
the case of most stocks, overfishing will not be a problem.
The only way to find out for sure is to conduct
a stock assessment, and that’s what’s happening right now with summer flounder. The assessment itself has been completed, and
as I write this, is undergoing peer review. Assuming the assessment makes it through the review process, it should
be released four to six weeks from now.
By that time, recreational specifications for the species will already
have been adopted, but they may not be compatible with the new information that
the assessment provides.
If the assessment confirms fishery managers’ current
assumptions about the health of the summer flounder stock, no mid-season
adjustments will be necessary, and the specification and rulemaking process can
go on in the same way as it has in other years.
If the assessment shows that there are more summer flounder
around than previously believed, and that the fishing mortality rate was lower
than had been thought, it is likely that both the recreational and commercial
fishing industries will seek an increased annual catch limit; NMFS and the
ASMFC could then opt to revisit the regulations and increase the 2019, harvest,
but they would not be compelled to do so.
The only time that a mid-season revision might be required
is if the assessment determines that the summer flounder stock is in worse
shape than previously believed. In that
case, recreational and commercial landings might have to be released to prevent
overfishing, and it isn’t impossible that the stock could have become
overfished, in which case managers would have to begin preparing a rebuilding
plan.
That possibility isn’t completely out of the question. In
2016, the Mid-Atlantic Council’s Scientific and Statistical Committee found
that
“the stock biomass is dangerously close to being overfished,
which could happen as early as next year if increased efforts to curb fishing
mortality are not undertaken.”
Efforts to reduce fishing mortality were implemented for the
2017 season, but the stock assessment has not been updated since 2016. If fishing mortality have been
higher than predicted over the past two seasons, and/or if the biomass was lower
than previously believed, it is possible that the stock might
has become overfished.
We don’t yet know what the assessment will say, but there
are some signs that abundance is fairly low.
For
the months March through August 2018, which accounts for most of the summer
flounder season, recreational landings all along the coast were about 1.96 million
fish, 32% lower than the 2.9 million fish caught in 2017, despite the fact
that the 2018 recreational catch limit was higher, and the 2018 regulations,
less restrictive, than they were the year before.
In New York, which hosts one of the largest recreational
summer flounder fisheries on the coast, the difference was even greater, with
2018 landings 56% less than they were in 2017.
Reduced effort accounts for some of the difference. Coastwide, fishing effort for the months of
March through August fell about 18% between 2017 and 2018; in New York, the
decline was 43%, more than twice as high.
But the decline in fluke landings was even higher.
The hard question to answer is whether summer flounder landings
were lower, in part, because effort declined, or whether effort declined
because summer flounder were scarce.
Either way, given how closely effort and landings are tied, when
landings fall off more quickly than effort does, a decline in the number of
fish available to anglers is the most likely reason why.
Again, that doesn’t mean that the summer flounder stock is
overfished, but it’s certainly not a sign that the stock is robust. If the assessment determines that the stock
has fallen below the biomass threshold, a mid-season revision of the
regulations will probably be in the cards.
Bluefish, black sea bass and scup have recently been subject
to benchmark assessments, so they won’t be fully assessed this year. However, all three species will be subject to
stock assessment updates early in 2019.
Hopefully, that won’t create any issues for either black sea
bass or scup. Both species seem to be
very abundant, so the chance of a mid-season adjustment affecting either of
them is probably extremely low.
But that doesn’t seem to be the case for bluefish. Anglers
along most of the coast, from New England down to North Carolina, have been
commenting on how few bluefish they’ve caught this year. Recreational bluefish landings in the first
eight months of 2018 were 44% lower than they were in 2017, a drop that can’t
be explained by the 18% reduction in effort during that period this year.
Thus, there’s a chance that we’ll be seeing changes in
bluefish management, too.
Of course, there’s always a chance that we won’t see any changes at all.
Everything depends on what the assessments,
and assessment updates, eventually say.
But it’s pretty sure that, should cutbacks be required,
there will be a lot of folks in the angling press, on the Internet, and elsewhere who will be
acting very surprised, and trying to stir up outrage in the angling community.
If that happens, it’s best to stay calm, ignore the hyperbole,
and listen to what the numbers say.
Because numbers—those in the stock assessments and elsewhere—tell the stories
that we need to know.
Now, we just have to wait and see what those stories will
be.
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