STRIPED BASS ANGLERS NEED TO DO THE RIGHT THING

Although the final version of the 2018 striped bass benchmark stock assessment has not yet been released, we all know what it’s going to say:

“Female [spawning stock biomass] for Atlantic striped bass in 2017 was 68,476 [metric tons], below the SSB threshold, indicating the stock is overfished.  [Fishing mortality] in 2017 was 0.307, above the F threshold, indicating the stock is experiencing overfishing.  [internal references deleted]”

So we know that we’re facing a problem, and hopefully we’re going to fix it.

Of course, saying that you want to fix a problem is easy.  Actually doing something that will make a material difference always proves to be quite a bit harder.

That’s certainly going to be the case with striped bass, because the hard numbers say that the remaining female spawning stock biomass is about 25% below the spawning stock biomass threshold, and about 40% below the rebuilding target, so any rebuilding plan is going to require some fairly severe cuts in harvest.  And while people are always pretty eager to conserve someone else’s fish, and cut someone else’s landings, they can often be resistant to measures that end up cutting their own.

Hopefully, striped bass anglers won't follow that pattern.

On the whole, recreational bass fishermen are a relatively conservation-oriented bunch.  That’s particularly true for surfcasters and the light-tackle crowd, who have learned the hard way that any reduction in striped bass numbers will affect the quality of their angling first.    

Even so, as news of the striped bass’ trevails begin to appear in the angling press and on social media, we’re already beginning to see some anglers taking a “not my fault” stance, and pointing accusing fingers at the commercial sector.

After On the Water Magazine published an announcement of the benchmark assessment’s findings on its website, it received a number of responses, including

“Make the changes to commercial and charter limits.  My 1 or 2 every week or so can’t really be the issue… if it is…  it’s already too late.”

And that poster is right—IF he’s only talking about the bass that he, himself takes home.  But when you consider all of the anglers just like that poster, who each only take home a few fish each year, you get very large number.  “1 or 2 fish every week,” for many thousands of anglers, killed over the course of a year, can quickly turn into hundreds of thousands of dead striped bass, weighing many millions of pounds.

And when you start talking about that sort of numbers, they can very quickly become an issue.

A big issue.

Even so, there are some who have long sought to place the onus of striped bass conservation on others’ shoulders.  A recent article in the Cape Cod Times quotes Dean Clark, a board member of the recreational fishing group Stripers Forever, as saying

“The only way to increase [striped bass] biomass is to manage them as a recreational species,”

By “as a recreational species,” Clark means “by eliminating the commercial fishery.”  That’s long been a goal of Stripers Forever, which ended a recent report on the benchmark assessment with the words

“The only silver lining in all of this is that we may be presented with a return of the opportunity that we missed in 1988 to designate striped bass as a game fish in the coastal states.  Had that happened, we are confident that the decline we all have witnessed in the last 10 or 15 years would not have taken place.”

But it’s hard to figure out what that confidence Stripers Forever expresses is based on.  

It certainly isn’t based on the data contained in the benchmark stock assessment, which shows that the commercial fishery—harvest and dead bycatch combined—only accounted for about 10% of all fishing mortality in 2017, the terminal year of the assessment.  The single largest source of mortality—a full 48%--came from fish released by anglers that subsequently died.  Recreational harvest, which was responsible for 42% of the fishing mortality, accounted for the rest.

So when folks point their fingers at the commercial fishery, and say that it causes most of the harm, their claims seem to arise more out of wishful thinking than from anything out in the real world.

A lot of folks won’t want to believe that.  They’ll talk about pictures they’ve seen of trawlers clearing bycatch off their decks, with a long slick of dead, floating bass trailing out behind them.  But while such incidents certainly occur, and result in disturbing photos that quickly spread across Internet fishing forums, they’re not the primary source of fishing mortality—or even discard mortality—of the striped bass.

Think of them as the mass shootings of the fishing world.  

When mass shootings happen, they get a lot of press, a lot of Internet coverage, and result in a lot of discussion, but they don’t happen very often, and contribute only a very few points to the homicide rate.  Instead, the vast majority of our murders take place by the ones and twos, in drug deals gone wrong, botched liquor store holdups and domestic disputes.  

In the same way, most striped bass mortality is generated a fish at a time, as anglers each take home a fish or two, and release many more, some of which, inevitably, die.  While the big bycatch events might be photogenic, they are the exception, and not the rule.

And we can’t really blame the charter boats, either.  

Again, there are times when we see the party and charter boats hitting the bass pretty hard, but they make up only a small part of the picture.  In 2018, preliminary numbers show that anglers killed about 2.25 million striped bass in the New England/Mid-Atlantic region.  Less than 240,000 of those fish—barely more than 10%--can be attributed to the for-hire sector.

So when we look at the striped bass’ problems, the first thing that we need to do is admit that we—the surf and private-boat recreational fishermen—are the primary source of fishing mortality, and thus will have to shoulder the primary burden of bringing back the striped bass stock.  

That doesn’t mean that such burden shouldn't be shared; if, just for the sake of example, another 25% reduction in landings is needed to rebuild the stock, then the measures adopted should seek to reduce each of the private boat/surf, for-hire and commercial landings by at least that amount.  

But because we account for so much of the landings, when it comes to absolute numbers, rather than percentages, most of the savings will, of necessity, come from us.

How those cuts will have to be made will always be an issue.

Striped bass mortality has not been symmetrical, and neither were the reductions that resulted from the last management action, Addendum IV to Amendment 6 to the Atlantic Striped Bass Interstate Fishery Management Plan.  

Pursuant to such Addendum, coastal states were supposed to land 25% less in 2015, compared to 2013, while Chesapeake Bay jurisdictions were supposed to land 20.5% less than they had in 2012.  The decision to establish different reductions for the Bay and the coast was well-intentioned, but like many good intentions, it paved the wrong road.  While the commercial bass fisheries achieved their required cuts, and coastal anglers did, too, recreational fishermen in the Chesapeake substantially increased their kill.

As a result, while coastal anglers harvested, or lost to release mortality, fewer than 390,000 striped bass last year, anglers in inland waters—which, with some tiny exceptions, means Chesapeake Bay—killed nearly 1.9 million, about 85% of all recreational landings.  And while many of those fish were undoubtedly males, many were also females that were still too young to spawn. 

In addition, biologists assume that about 9% of all bass released don’t survive the experience, but Maryland fishery managers believe that, under adverse conditions, the actual release mortality in Chesapeake Bay could exceed 25% at times, saying

“27% is the more appropriate figure given current fishing techniques and environmental conditions in Chesapeake Bay during the warmest months of the summer [up through and including 2017]”

The estimate of dead discards in the benchmark assessment could well have underestimated the actual fishing mortality attributable to Chesapeake Bay anglers.

Thus, reducing the fishing mortality attributable to Bay anglers—and making sure that they meet their mandated reductions this time, and don’t shirk them as they did in the wake of Addendum IV—is going to be a big part of any recovery plan.  Most of the kill in the Bay consists of young fish that have just recruited into the population.  Many fall below the Chesapeake jurisdictions’ low 19- and 20-inch size limits.

Killing too many of those little fish is arguably equivalent to killing the striper’s future.

But coastal anglers will have to do their part too, using circle hooks in bait (already required in the Maryland portion of Chesapeake Bay) and being more aware of good release practices.  Prominent among those will be keeping bass in the water as much as possible, and not waving them around for photos while they’re desperately trying to breathe.

Think about someone holding your head underwater after you’ve finished a mile-long run, or completed a really tough workout, and you get an idea what bass experience in front of your camera’s lens.

And everywhere, we can expect size limits to increase, bag limits—in the few places where they allow more than one—to come down, and maybe even see a season, particularly in areas where warm summer waters are likely to reduce chances for released fish’s survival.

The bottom line is that, if we want to see the abundance of bass in the water increase, then the number of bass that go into coolers, and are otherwise killed, needs to come down.

As the primary cause of striped bass mortality, we, the surf and private-boat anglers, must take the lead in making that happen.