WORDS MATTER: CALL THEM "RELEASES"

Language has power.

Although words seem ephemeral, they have the ability to transform anything, even the most seemingly solid and immutable objects, through the power of perception.

Consider “used car.”  

When you first hear those words, it’s not unlikely that you think of some clunker, sitting on a lot amid dozens of its kind, with a price and some sort of come-on phrase luridly painted across its whole windshield.  And maybe you think about semi-bald tires, sawdust in the transmission, and maybe a fast-talking, ethically-challenged salesman or two.

You don’t see many folks selling “used cars” any more, at least not many people connected with major dealerships.  If you see any at all, it usually involves a small, ill-lighted lot in a disreputable section of town, or an obnoxious ad that blasts through the speakers of your truck's radio.

On the other hand, you see plenty of folks selling “pre-owned vehicles” these days. 

I think that Mercedes might have started that trend, but these days you’ll see pre-owned Fords, Nissans and Hyundais, too.  Even though you know, in your head, that they’re all just used cars, essentially no different than what you would have found on the same dealer’s lot a decade ago, down in your gut they seem somehow far better than the “creampuff” you bought, in your youth, from that guy in the plaid suit, who was always chewing on a cheap cigar.

Words can, is such ways, upgrade the mundane.

They can downgrade the virtuous, too.  

Unfortunately, for an example of that, we only need to turn to federal fisheries managers, and how they deal with catch and release.

And maybe the first thing we ought to consider is how, and then perhaps, why, they don’t really acknowledge "releases" at all.

Instead, they call them “discards,” tossing them into the same big pot as “regulatory discards,” the undersized, over-limit and out-of-season catch that fishermen might want to keep, but aren’t allowed to by law, and “economic discards,” fish that may be legally kept but, to a commercial fisherman, aren’t worth the time and the trouble—and the hold space—to bring back to the dock.

The shared characteristic of regulatory and economic discards is that folks don’t want to catch them.  For commercial fishermen, discards of any sort just take up valuable time on the water that could be better spent catching something with real market value.  For anglers, days spent catching shorts and out-of-season, non-target fish are usually not too much fun.

Fish caught by a catch-and-release angler, who heads out on the intending to let everything go, are something essentially different.  They are not “discarded.”  They are not returned to the water because of legal restrictions or because they are perceived to have little value. 

Very much to the contrary, such fish are usually caught during the open fishing season, and are frequently big enough to keep.  They are released not because they are worthless, but because they are held in such esteem by the angler that, in the words of the late angler and author Lee Wulff, they are thought

“too valuable to be caught only once.”

Unfortunately, the National Marine Fisheries Service doesn’t see things the same way that anglers do.

I was reminded of that yesterday, as I was reading through the just-released Fisheries of the United States 2017, NMFS’ annual report to Congress which, in its preliminary comments on the recreational fishery, notes that

“The 2017 U.S. marine recreational fishfish catch, including fish kept and fish released (discarded) on the Atlantic, Gulf, and Pacific coasts (including Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico), was an estimated 1 billion fish taken on an estimated 202 million fishing trips…”

While a significant proportion of the fish released probably did represent legitimate regulatory discards, having been undersized, over-limit or out-of-season when caught, a significant portion were also undoubtedly legitimate “releases”—fish that could have been retained by an angler who just preferred to set the fish free.

NMFS’ failure to distinguish between regulatory discards and intentional releases needs to be remedied, because it has real and unfortunate policy consequences.  The most recent, and one of the most unfortunate, is currently unfolding at the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council, which has begun work on what it calls the “Bluefish Allocation Amendment,” a pending amendment to its bluefish management plan that could permanently shift some of the annual allocation from the recreational to the commercial sector.

Ad hoc reallocations of bluefish are already permitted under the current management plan, which was last amended in 1998.  It provides that

“If the commercial quota was less than 10.6 million lbs, the quota could be increased up to 10.6 million lbs if the recreational fishery was not anticipated to land their allocation for the upcoming year.”

The key word in that provision is “land”; as the management plan is written, the goals of the recreational fishery are deemed to be the same as those of the commercial fishery—harvesting bluefish.  No consideration was given to the catch-and-release fishery at all.

That’s important in the case of bluefish which, because they can be strong-tasting, particularly if not bled and iced down as soon as they are caught, are not particularly valued as food.  However, they are valued for their fight, and many anglers are completely content to catch and release bluefish all day, without keeping a single fish.

The Bluefish Allocation Amendment could end up punishing anglers for releasing fish that they don’t intend to eat.  It is somewhat ironic that if recreational fishermen killed more of their catch, and used the unwanted fish for fertilizer or just dumped them at the local landfill, as happened far too often in the past, no one would be talking about reallocation.  But because the anglers are returning live fish to the water, to help maintain abundance, provide good fishing in the future, and perhaps bolster the spawning stock, they could be subject to a punitive reallocation.

Reading the Scoping and Public Information Document, Bluefish Allocation Amendment to the Bluefish Management Plan, which kicked off the public comment process on the amendment, makes the bias against, and nonrecognition of, catch and release fishing clear.  The scoping document notes that

“A coastwide time series of recreational harvest and catch (harvest and discards) in numbers of fish is provided…  [emphasis added]”

Four more times in the text, the term “discards” is used, including one sentence noting that

“Discards in the recreational fishery remain relatively high throughout the time series.  [emphasis added]”

Discards.  

The word “releases” is not used one single time in any section of the document describing the fishery or the possible goals of the amendment.  It is as if, to managers, the catch-and-release fishery did not exist at all, and was unworthy of consideration if it did.

Since anglers don’t seem to value bluefish—after all, they “discard” most of their catch rather than, at the least, taking them home and feeding them to the tomatoes—some fishery managers would just shift recreational quota to the commercial sector, which apparently values the species enough to want to kill more of them.  (It should be noted here that few commercial fishermen support reallocation, so this is not criticism of them, but of the management mentality that makes such reallocation a worrying possibility.)

That sort of thinking is possible because federal fishery management is strangely schizophrenic when it comes to catch-and-release angling.  One of the clearly stated purposes of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, which governs all fishing in federal waters, is

“to promote domestic commercial and recreational fishing under sound conservation and management principles, including the promotion of catch and release programs in recreational fishing.  [emphasis added]”

The law also defines “bycatch” to include

“fish which are harvested in a fishery, but which are not sold or kept for personal use, [including] economic discards and regulatory discards.  Such term does not include fish released alive under a recreational catch and release fishery management program.  [emphasis added]”

Both “economic discards” and “regulatory discards” are also defined, but Magnuson-Stevens does not define any other sort of “discards” that would seem to include those fish voluntarily returned to the water by anglers.  And since released fish are, by definition, not “harvested,” it doesn’t seem that they’d be bycatch, either.

Looking at the letter of the law, it would seem that a released fish should be treated by managers as, well, a released fish, and not as a discard.

But that’s not the way things have played out.  Instead, regulations adopted by NMFS in 2008 state that

“A catch-and-release fishery management program is one in which the retention of a particular species is prohibited.  In such a program, those fish released alive would not be considered bycatch.”

Thus, if I’m fishing south of Long Island, and I catch and release a sandbar or a dusky shark, neither of which I am legally allowed to keep, that released fish is not considered to be “bycatch.”  On the other hand, if I release a bluefish that happened to show up in my chum slick, that bluefish constitutes…

It’s not really clear what.  

While a strict wording of the law would lead to the conclusion that such bluefish was not “bycatch,” because the fish wasn’t “harvested.” Because I would have been legally able to retain the bluefish had I elected to do so, it wouldn't be a regulatory discard, and it’s difficult to call it an economic discard, either, as the release wasn't because “of an undesirable size, sex, or quality,” nor for any “other economic reasons.”  

But under current NMFS regulations, that bluefish probably would be considered bycatch, and/or some sort of undefined “discard,” with all of the negative connotations those words imply.  That's a problem, because managers are required to “minimize bycatch” pursuant to National Standard 9 of Magnuson-Stevens, and so minimize “discards,” too.

And that puts catch-and-release anglers, and catch-and-release fisheries, in a very strange and very undeserved place.

The simple act of releasing a fish, something that conservation-minded anglers have always deemed laudable, has been twisted by the language of fishery management into an act that, at best, has no legal standing and, at worst, managers should strive to prevent.

That’s a situation in very dire need of change.

In a troubled ocean where an increasing human population, warming waters, resource extraction, pollution and a host of other factors place increasing stress on fish populations, catch-and-release angling should be recognized as an effective way to do what Magnuson-Stevens requires—maximizing recreational opportunities, while protecting marine ecosystems—and not as an activity that produces nothing but bycatch and discarded fish.

So when Congress again considers reauthorizing Magnuson-Stevens, let's try to convince our legislators to call voluntary releases what they are—RELEASES—not “discards” or “bycatch” or terms of that sort, and recognize that such releases plan an important role in the health of salt water fish stocks.