Thursday, January 31, 2019

TIME FOR A PARADIGM SHIFT AT ASMFC


It’s now almost official:  The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission is batting an even .000 when it comes to rebuilding and maintaining healthy fish stocks.

A quick review of the ASMFC Stock Status Overview shows that, of the 23 stocks managed solely by the Commission (10 other stocks are managed by both the Commission and the National Marine Fisheries Service), only four are deemed to be “Rebuilt/sustainable” (a fifth, Massachusetts-Rhode Island tautog, is neither overfished nor experiencing overfishing, so probably belongs in that category, too) with three more “Recovering/rebuilding”.  

In contrast with that meager good news, seven ASMFC-managed stocks are considered “Depleted” and four more are of “Concern.”  The state of the remaining four stocks is “Unknown.”

And it’s probably important to note that the designation “Rebuilt/sustainable” is a little misleading, because none of the four stocks granted that status were actually rebuilt by ASMFC.  One, black drum, was never overfished, and ASMFC recently inherited a second, cobia, that had benefitted from years of federal fisheries management.  The Gulf of Maine/Georges Bank stock of American lobster seems to be benefitting—so far—from warming waters more than from ASMFC management measures, while the fourth stock, Atlantic menhaden, acquired “rebuilt/sustainable” status not through any management effort, but instead through a new stock assessment, which showed that the population, once thought depleted, had really been healthy all along.

So when you look at the numbers, there’s not much for ASMFC to take pride in, on the “rebuilt/sustainable” front.  In the seventy-seven years since ASMFC was founded in 1942, and in the twenty-six years since the Atlantic Coastal Fisheries Cooperative Management Act, which gave ASMFC the power to enforce its management decisions, was passed in 1993, ASMFC has failed to rebuild a single overfished stock, and then maintain such rebuilt stock at sustainable levels.

“Well, wait!” I might hear you saying.  “What about striped bass?”  Because for many years, ASMFC’s recovery of the once-collapsed striped bass stock, which was declared fully rebuilt in 1995, has been hailed as one of the great achievements of East Coast fishery managers.

But striped bass aren’t doing well any more.

Remember how I started this blog post, saying that ASMFC’s failure to rebuild and sustainably manage even one stock of fish was “almost official”?

The “almost” comes from the fact that the 2018 benchmark striped bass stock assessment hasn’t yet been released, nor has the peer review report that judges the assessment’s fitness for use as a fishery management tool.  However, ASMFC has released a “Preliminary ASMFC Summary of the 2018 Benchmark Stock Assessment for Atlantic Striped Bass.”  That preliminary summary makes it clear that ASMFC has not just failed, but failed dismally, to sustainably manage what is arguably the premier finfish species that comes under its sole management authority.

The preliminary summary tells the sad story.

“The combined full [fishing mortality] was 0.307 in 2017.  Fishing mortality for both the Chesapeake Bay fleet and the ocean fleet has been increasing since 1990
“Abundance of age-8+ striped bass (considered the mature component of the population) increased steadily through 2004 to 16.5 million fish.  After 2004 age-8+ abundance oscillated and has been in decline since 2011.  Age-8+ abundance in 2017 is estimated at 6.7 million fish, a value near the 30th percentile of the time series.
“Female [spawning stock biomass] started out at low levels and increased steadily through the late-1980s and 1990 peaking at 113,602 [metric tons] (250 million pounds) in 2003 before beginning to gradually decline; the decline became sharper in 2012.  Female SSB was at 68,476 mt (151 million pounds) in 2017…
“For this assessment the…SSB threshold was estimated at 91,436 mt (202 million pounds), with an SSB target of 114,295 mt (252 million pounds).  The [fishing mortality] threshold was estimated at 0.240, and the [fishing mortality] target at 0.197…
“Female SSB for Atlantic striped bass in 2017 was 68,476 mt, below the SSB threshold, indicating the stock is overfished.  [Fishing mortality] in 2017 was 0.307, above the [fishing mortality] threshold, indicating the stock is experiencing overfishing.  [emphasis added, internal references removed]”
Because the final benchmark assessment has not yet been released, those conclusions haven’t yet been reflected in the ASMFC stock status overview.  When they are, they will change the current scorecard to seven “wins” (stocks that are either rebuilt/sustainable or recovering/rebuilding) versus twelve “losses” (stocks that are either depleted or of concern); based on such numbers, ASMFC’s career winning percentage is a mere 37%--a number that drops to just 30% if the stocks of “unknown” status are included as well.

With baseball spring training about to begin, this might be the time to note that a manager with that sort of record won’t be managing for very long…

And perhaps more troubling than the mere fact that ASMFC seems unable to recover and then maintain once-depleted fish stocks—a fact that was made even worse after ASMFC frittered away its erstwhile success with striped bass—is how and why its failures occur.

Striped bass provide the perfect example.

As the preliminary summary of the bass assessment makes perfectly clear, the decline of the striped bass stock should not have come as a surprise to anyone.  While the extent of the decline, and the extent of the overfishing, was probably greater than anyone expected (except, perhaps, for anglers up and down the coast, who have long been telling managers that bass were having real problems), long-term increases in fishing mortality, and continuing decreases in overall abundance and female spawning stock biomass, have been obvious for a number of years.

Bit ASMFC’s Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board has repeatedly refused to fully address them.


Action to prevent the stock from becoming overfished was treated, by many, as anathema.

Even after the 2013 benchmark stock assessment effectively forced the Management Board to take action, it took as little action as it could get away with, and less than its own management plan called for.


“If the Management Board determines that the fishing mortality target is exceeded in two consecutive years and the female spawning stock biomass falls below the target within either of those years, the Management Board must adjust the striped bass management program to reduce the fishing mortality rate to a level that is at or below the target within one year.”
Amendment 6 also requires that

“If the Management Board determines that the female spawning stock biomass falls below the target for two consecutive years and the fishing mortality rate exceeds the target in either of those years, the Management Board must adjust the striped bass management program to rebuild the biomass to a level that is at or above the target within [ten years].”
The 2013 benchmark assessment indicated that both of those triggers for action had been tripped.  While the Management Board did initiate efforts to reduce harvest to the target level—although some of its members, mostly from the Chesapeake Bay region, tried very hard to stretch that reduction out over three years, instead of the one year the Amendment required—it completely ignored the requirement to rebuild the stock, despite the fact that the Amendment said that such rebuilding “must” be done.

Thus, the Management Board brazenly and broke a covenant that it had made with the public the moment that it adopted Amendment 6.

Almost as soon as the new addendum, intended to cut landings by 25%, was put in place, there were efforts to increase the kill.  



“perhaps just that very small change could be something that saves a few of the fishermen in my state.
“A half an inch in minimum size could mean a lot to our fleets, our charterboat and recreational fleet; more so the charterboat community.”

“there is nothing uncertain about the economic hit that netters in Delaware have taken and the Chesapeake charter fishermen that have been here for the last three or four meeting [sic] we’ve had here.  I don’t think they’re here just because they want a few extra bucks.   They’re here because they see a real threat to their business.  I think that this addendum at least gets us on the right track to correcting an over action that we took a few years ago.”
Again, the effort to increase harvest failed, but the theme of crafting regulations that would better serve the short-term interests of fishermen, rather than the long-term interests of the fish stock, continued on.  


“Does the Board want to manage the manage the stock to maximize yield, maximize catch rates, maximize the availability of trophy fish, and what is the acceptable level of risk when it comes to preventing stock collapse?”

At no time did the Management Board require that such reference points prevent harvest from exceeding the stock’s maximum sustainable yield.  At least one Management Board member wanted to do that, but he did not prevail in the vote.

Unfortunately, such efforts to elevate the fishermen’s interests over those of the fish aren’t limited to the striped bass.


“we almost put a moratorium on winter flounder, we would have been one of two states that would have done that, which would have put a further hit on both recreational, commercial and bait and tackle people and marinas and so for those supplies.”
Putting “a further hit” on the flounder by continuing a harvest they could not sustain did not appear to concern him at all.


“It’s bad enough that you can’t go home with a sea bass, and it looks like next year in New Jersey they can’t go home with a summer flounder.  At least they’ll have, you know, one fish to take home, maybe one winter flounder and one weakfish…How do you keep an industry going?”
The irony of the fact that he was basing angling industry survival on weakfish and winter flounder, probably the two most at-risk inshore species in the region, was apparently lost on Fote.  

The fact that he was willing to put both species further at risk in order to protect the fishing industry shouldn’t be lost on anyone else.


Far too many people who sit on ASMFC’s management boards haven’t yet learned that the only absolute in the management system is the biological needs of fish stocks.

They don’t understand that scaling the size of the harvest to the needs—or at least the desires—of the fishing industry is the surest road to perdition.

They have not yet accepted the truth that sustainability depends on scaling the size of the industry to the needs of the affected fish stocks.

And yes, that might mean that some folks go out of business.  But a stock collapse will turn everyone out into the streets.

Yet there are hopes that things could turn around.  ASMFC just released the results of its annual survey of state commissioners, and some of the survey results are encouraging.  For example, the answers to the questions

“How comfortable are you that the Commission has a clear and achievable plan to reach the Vision (Sustainably managing Atlantic Coast Fisheries)?”
and

“How confident are you that the Commission’s actions reflect progress toward its Vision?”
hit all-time lows, scoring 7.23 and 6.94 (out of 10), respectively.  The first step toward solving a problem is admitting that it exists.

Other responses were not as clear.  The rating assigned to

“One of the metrics the Commission uses to measure progress is tracking the number of stocks where overfishing is no longer occurring.  Is this a clear metric to measure progress?”
was 7.42.  Since that question was first asked in 2014, ratings ranged from 7.80 in 2014 to 7.09 in 2017, suggesting that today’s commissioners are somewhat ambivalent about the answer.  

The response to the question

“Are you satisfied with the Commission’s ability to manage rebuilt stocks?”
was 6.45; again, that rating fell between the 2014 high of 7.17 and a 2016 low of 6.19, but the fact that all of the ratings were relatively low suggested that managing for continued sustainability was seen as a problem.

Free-form comments to other answers cast more light on the question of how commissioners feel about the progress that ASMFC is making.  When asked

“What is the single biggest obstacle to the Commission’s success in rebuilding stocks?”
answers varied widely.  But the fact that they included comments such as

“Public resistance to making the sometimes hard choices needed to manage stocks in need of re-building,”
“Balancing the needs of the fishing community with the need to constrain fishing effort,”
and

“Lack of will to make difficult decisions”
provide reason to hope that at least some commissioners recognize that the old way of doing things at ASMFC needs to be changed, and that managing in a way that pleases fishermen, rather than managing in a way that rebuilds and maintains healthy fish stocks, is not the right way to go.

Perhaps the most revealing comment, and also the most troubling, noted that

“Increasing stakeholder engagement with outside entities has caused undo [sic] influences that tend to hamstring our actions.  Engaged commissioners feel that, in order to maintain their seats, politics and not science must drive the final outcomes to the advantage of individual stakeholders and ignore the greater good.  This is counterproductive but perhaps a fact of (commission) life.  Other than setting terms for appointment length, this will be a hurdle that will be hard to overcome.  Commissioners should not fear being removed should one outcome be ill received ‘at home’.”
That paints a dismal picture, but all is not doom and gloom.  

There are some new commissioners taking seats on the management boards who provide a breath of fresh air.  I was reminded of that just yesterday, when I saw an article in our local newpaper, Newsday, that read

“State Sen. Todd Kaminsky has been appointed to the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission…
“Kaminsky emphasized the need for smart conservation, mentioning striped bass in particular.’
“’I think there’s a need for more conservation-minded people on the board,’ he said.  ‘As somebody raising a young family on Long Island, I don’t want to talk to my family about a fish that used to be on Long Island and isn’t anymore.’”
Amen.

If all of the ASMFC commissioners could understand that, the needed change would already be here.






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