RESTORING FISHERIES: CLEAN BREAKS VS. CREEPING CALAMITIES

One of the striking things about salt water fisheries management is how well some fishery management plans work, and how others don't work at all.

Consider the striped bass.  

The successful recovery of the striped bass stock, from its collapse in the late 1970s/early 1980s to its declared recovery in 1995 has often been ballyhooed as one of the great fishery management success stories.  While that success is perhaps overstated, as itseems that striped bass abundance is, once again, on the decline, there is no question that, a generation ago, managers did a good job rebuilding the stock. 

Then, take a look at winter flounder—at least at the Southern New England/Mid-Atlantic stock—along with some other New England groundfish such as cod.  

Those stocks collapsed, too, but no one is telling any success stories about them, as abundance still grinds along at historically low levels and, at least in the case of flounder, there is a real chance of complete extirpation from some waters where it was once abundant.

The question of why one stock benefits from conservation measures, and why another remains badly overfished, has been a puzzle for a very long time.  Recently, a paper with the unwieldy name of “Path-dependent institutions drive alternative stable states in conservation,” which appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, sought to shine some light on that question.

It turns out, according to that paper, that fish are victims of choices that people made in the past, as

“historical contingencies trap similar institutions in dramatically different, but predictable, states.”

To say it another way, it all depends on the management path originally chosen; if a fishery is managed conservatively from the start, conservation is likely to continue.  On the other hand, once a fishery becomes overexploited, it is very difficult to change its course, and manage it in a sustainable manner.  

As Edward W. Tekwa, the paper’s lead author, explains,

“we found that people often get trapped by their past decisions.  If they start out overharvesting, they tend to continue overharvesting.  But once people start conserving, this this behavior is also self-perpetuating and gets amplified.  Policies change slowly.”

However, the paper notes that laws such as the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, which require that depleted stocks be rebuilt within a relatively short time, are a valuable tool that can overcome the tendency of overfished stocks to remain overfished, and move them onto a path toward sustainability.  

An article in Science Daily, which summarizes the paper, explained that

“This research suggests that short, intensive harvest-reduction efforts (such as recovery mandates) can spur conservation that is self-perpetuating.”

That makes sense, because such laws, and their mandates, can force institutions to change patterns of behavior that they would be unlikely to change on their own.  And so long as such laws and mandates remain in place, they serve as a bulwark against institutional backsliding toward overharvest.

Particular attention needs to be paid to the finding that “short, intensive harvest-reduction efforts” can spur self-perpetuating conservation efforts, because that finding brings the common practice of imposing relatively weak, incremental management measures, that fall short of what is needed to recover the stock, into serious question. 

And that, in turn, seems to discredit those who demand more “flexibility” in the fishery management process, either in the form of legislation such as the so-called “Strengthening Fishing Communities and Increasing Flexibility in Fisheries Management Act” that the House or Representatives (but thankfully not the Senate) passed earlier this year, or in the form of the stock rebuilding programs described in the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership’s report, A Vision for Managing America’s Saltwater Recreational Fisheries, where

“Instead of having a fixed deadline for stocks to be rebuilt…the regional councils and fisheries managers [would] set lower harvest rates that would allow fish stocks to recover gradually while diminishing socioeconomic impacts.”

It’s certainly a contentious view, but it’s one that seems to find validation in real-world events.  

Even setting aside the 217 managed fisheries, taking place all over the world, that were examined by the authors of the paper, a hasty analysis of what has worked and what failed on the upper East Coast of the United States seems to provide support for the paper’s findings.

The paper's findings help to explain why, since the turn of this century, federal fishery managers have been so much more successful at rebuilding fish stocks than have the states, whether working on their own or through the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission.  They also explains ASMFC’s only real success, the recovery of the striped bass population in 1995.

Federal fishery managers have no choice but to rebuild overfished stocks; they are mandated to do so by law.  And they are required to do it in a relatively short period of time, which is also dictated by law.

Those requirements largely take political considerations out of the picture, as federal fisheries managers lack both the discretion to allow overfishing to continue and the discretion to allow stock abundance to languish at depleted levels.  Should they try to do so, their decisions could, and almost certainly would, be subject to judicial review.  Thus, federally-managed stocks are, for the most part, healthy and not overfished.

That is not the case at ASMFC, which is not bound by law to take any management action at all.  Everything there is, in the end, discretionary.  

Thus, although ASMFC knew that the tautog stock was both badly overfished and subject to severe overfishing as early as 1996, it was free to adopt only ineffective, incremental management measures for more than twenty years, rather than imposing the sort of “short, intensive harvest-reduction efforts” that were most likely to prove effective.  And even when it finally took somewhat decisive action in 2017, it still clung to its incrementalist approach in Long Island Sound, where it will allow overfishing to continue until 2029, and has set no deadline at all, not even in the far-distant future, for actually rebuilding the stock.

Such incremental measures were adopted with the best intentions; with the hope of, as expressed in the “Vision” report, “diminishing socioeconomic impacts” of the management program.  But, as the recent paper suggests, all that such measures have done to date is perpetuate overfishing and frustrate conservation efforts.  There is no reason to believe that the tautog's future, at least in Long Island Sound, won’t simply mirror the past.

The interesting thing is that the management of some other fish stocks help to prove that it really is the management approach, rather than the management institution, that determines whether a rebuilding plan will succeed.  For in the three fisheries mentioned at the beginning of this essay, striped bass, Southern New England winter flounder, and cod, the usual roles were reversed.  It was ASMFC that imposed “short, intensive harvest-reduction efforts” on the striped bass fishery, and federal fishery managers, led by the New England Fishery Management Council, who took an incremental, and ultimately catastrophically ineffective, approach to managing flounder and cod.

After the striped bass stock collapsed, and Congress passed the Atlantic Striped Bass Conservation Act, which gave ASMFC the authority to enforce its plan to recover the stock, the Commission released Amendment 3 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Striped Bass.  Amendment 3 was short, consisting of only three pages, and to the point, having only two objectives.

Objective 1 was to

“prevent directed fishing mortality on at least 95% of the 1982 year class females, and females of all subsequent year classes of Chesapeake Bay stocks until 95% of the females of these year classes have an opportunity to reproduce at least once…”

Objective 2 was to support

“restoration efforts in the Delaware River system including the Delaware Bay and that a moratorium on striped bass fishing in the Delaware Bay system be implemented…”

Those were certainly “short, intensive harvest-reduction efforts.”

And they worked.

Up in New England, on the other hand, the New England Council steadfastly refused to adopt annual catch limits for cod, winter flounder and other groundfish until forced to do so by changes made to Magnuson-Stevens in 2006.  Instead of imposing real limits on fishermen’s catch, they tried to minimize the impact of regulations on fishing businesses, and attempted to control catch with various input controls such as limiting days that a vessel could be at sea.

They didn’t work at all.  Both stocks of cod, as well as the Southern New England winter flounder, remain badly overfished--so badly overfished that a decade of new and restrictive management measures haven’t yet been able to turn things around.

Thus, the conclusions of the paper seem to accord with what fishermen see on the water.  Rigorous conservation measures, applied in time, can restore fish populations, and if good conservation practices are maintained, populations—and fisheries—will remain healthy.

But once a fishery falls victim to a culture of overharvest, the consequences of such culture can be very hard to undo.

Thus, moving forward, both policy and law, at all government levels, should support the kind of effective fishery management currently mandated by Magnuson-Stevens, because experience has shown that incremental cuts in harvest, that fail to get overfishing under control, solve nothing.

No matter how well-intentioned, such incremental cuts are, to both fish and fishermen, ultimately the unkindest cuts of all.