Striped bass and the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries
Commission go back a long way.
ASMFC's very first management plan, designated “Fisheries Management Report
No. 1,” was the Interstate Fisheries Management
Plan for the Striped Bass, released in October, 1981.
Not long after that, in 1985, the
Commission adopted Amendment 3 to that management plan, a document that set
the stage for what is arguably the greatest fishery management success ever
seen on the U.S. East Coast, and perhaps anywhere in the nation: Rebuilding the collapsed striped bass stock
into a vital and abundant population capable of supporting active commercial
and recreational fisheries.
But that success didn’t come without sacrifice. Amendment 3 worked because it placed
extremely strict restrictions on the striped bass harvest. It required
“That the states 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 those year classes have an
opportunity to reproduce at least once.
This objective is intended to apply to the fishery until the three-year
running average of Maryland young-of-year index attains 8.0. Management measures which will accomplish
this objective include combinations of the following which insure that no
fishing mortality occurs on the target year classes:
a. Total closures of striped bass fisheries. Where a state whose waters border on or are
tributary to those which are closed should take complimentary actions to ensure
the enforceability of those closures.
b. Establishment
of minimum size limits below which 95% of females have spawned at least once.
c. Establishment
of minimum size limits in combination with seasonal closures which insure that
sub-adult females are not taken in open fisheries.
d. Elimination
of any allowable bycatch below minimum lengths.”
It also required
“That the Striped Bass Board 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 upon the onset
of restoration efforts.”
Amendment 3 was a perfect example of the old adage that “Desperate
times call for desperate measures,” because when it was put in place, the
striped bass population was running on empty, and there was a real chance that
if the 1982 year class—which wasn’t even up to the standards of what we’d call
an “average” year class today—wasn’t protected and allowed to spawn, the
striped bass fishery could completely disappear for the foreseeable future.
Amendment 3 was also proof that ASMFC could, if it chose to,
take decisive action to conserve and rebuild not just an overfished, but a completely
collapsed fish stock, and bring it back to abundance.
Because Amendment 3 worked.
By 1995, ASMFC had completely restored the striped bass
stock to health; Amendment 3 had worked so well that, just
four years after its adoption, managers were already able to begin to relax
some of its strictest provisions.
By
focusing on the needs of the striped bass, rather than on the desires of those
who would continue to squeeze the last drops of blood from a dry and quickly
crumbling stone, the Commission presided over the species’ spectacular recovery.
But once the bass had come all the way back, they soon grew
complacent. Or negligent. Or both.
It almost appeared that, once the stock had been rebuilt,
the members of ASMFC’s Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board felt that they
could just put the striped bass on autopilot and leave it alone, and it would manage itself
without any mid-course corrections.
The
Management Board did adopt Amendment 6 to ASMFC’s striped bass management plan
in 2003, after a few years of contentious debate, to correct some of the problems
that had arisen with the previous Amendment 5,
which was adopted as soon as the stock had recovered.
One of the problems, raised by experienced striped bass
anglers from all over the coast, was the apparent lack of large females in the
population.
“It is clear that having a significant number of large fish
in the striped bass population is not only desirable from an angling
perspective, it has important biological ramifications as well…A concerned
group of anglers have formed a coalition called Friends of the Striper to raise
awareness about what’s at stake with Amendment Six. The group recognizes that recent successful
spawns can one day yield more large fish, but the only way to ensure a
successful recovery is to have a management plan with appropriate biological
targets that lead to a more natural mix of age classes.”
I was a part of that coalition. We asked managers to establish a fishing
mortality rate of 0.25 (at the time, a fishing mortality rate of 0.41 was set
as the threshold, and 0.31 as the target), in order to reduce landings and so
allow more larger, older females to become part of the spawning stock.
We were opposed by the commercial fishing
sector, and a large part of the recreational striped bass fishing industry, who
were focused on the higher profits they believed would accrue if fishing mortality
was closer to maximum sustainable yield.
Amendment 6 was, in the end, a sort of compromise.
Commercial harvest was increased, to 100% of
what it had been before the collapse, in the base years between 1972 and 1979;
at the same time, the amendment made a significant concession to the concerned
anglers, setting as its goal
“To perpetuate, through cooperative interstate fisheries
management, migratory stocks of striped bass; to allow commercial and
recreational fisheries consistent with the long-term maintenance of a broad age
structure, a self-sustaining spawning stock; and also provide for
restoration and maintenance of their essential habitat. [emphasis added]”
To achieve that goal, Amendment 6 included seven objectives,
including
“Manage fishing mortality to maintain an age structure that
provides adequate spawning potential to sustain long-term abundance of striped
bass populations.”
and
“Establish a fishing mortality target that will result in a
net increase in the abundance (pounds) or age 15 and older striped bass in the
population, relative to the 2000 estimate.”
None of us were particularly happy with that, particularly
since the fishing mortality target was pegged at 0.30. During
the final debate, Pat Keliher, who was, at the time, the Chairman of ASMFC’s
Striped Bass Advisory Panel, expressed the feelings of most on such Advisory Panel when
he noted, with disapproval, that ASMFC’s approach to striped bass management
was
“moving back towards [maximum sustainable yield] and away
from the conservation approach that this board has taken over the last bunch of
years to get to the point where we are.”
Those who supported the 0.30 fishing mortality target told
the rest of us, who wanted to see more conservative measures, that we shouldn’t
worry because of safeguards built into the amendment.
“We’re being overly cautious.
I just might mention that when we do eventually adopt Amendment 6, don’t
forget there’s all those biomass and [fishing mortality] triggers in there… [emphasis added]”
In essence, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries
Commission made us all a promise, that if the striped bass stock again headed downhill,
they’d take action to stop it as soon as Amendment 6’s management triggers
kicked in.
There’s no question that two management triggers, one addressing
the overfished stock, one addressing the continued overfishing, have been
tripped. The only question that still
needs an answer is whether ASMFC will stand by its word to cut fishing mortality back
to the target and rebuild the overfished stock, or whether it will renege on
its promise.
Right now, based on the Management Board’s record, there is some reason for doubt.
Back in November
2011, the Management Board decided not to move forward with an addendum to
Amendment 6 that would have reduced striped bass landings, even though a
recent stock assessment update had predicted that, if nothing changed, the
stock would become overfished in a few more years.
One Management Board member declared that
“We have a healthy fishery, a healthy stock, and I’m in
agreement that we’re in a green light fishery right now. We have [a fishery management plan] where we’ve
built two triggers into it. We have a
threshold on abundance for spawning stock biomass… [emphasis added]”
By making such statement, that Management Board member renewed
the Management Board's promise that if the triggers were tripped, action would be taken.
But that didn’t exactly happen.
The
2013 benchmark striped bass stock assessment revealed that two management
triggers—one relating to biomass, one to fishing mortality—had, indeed, been
tripped. They related to targets,
not thresholds, and so were arguably of less urgency than they might have been if
thresholds had been violated, but they were management triggers nonetheless.
To its credit, ASMFC
acted reasonably promptly to reduce landings by 25% in an attempt to end
overfishing, but it didn’t respond to the violation of the biomass trigger
at all, even though Amendment 6 specifically required the creation and implementation
of a stock rebuilding plan.
If the Management Board had done what it had originally
promised to do, and began rebuilding five years ago, there’s a very good chance that the striped bass stock would be
in a much better place today.
So now we have very good reason to wonder whether ASMFC is
going to renege on its promise again, and what the consequences of that might be.
Even before the newest benchmark assessment was completed,
there were signs that the Management Board was gearing up to do the wrong thing. With
a number of its members obsessed with short-term economic impacts, rather than
the long-term health of the stock, it was already exploring the possibility of
changing the reference points in a way that would not only tolerate, but
normalize, a higher kill and a smaller female spawning stock.
Doing just that might be very attractive for an Atlantic
Striped Bass Management Board that has hemmed and hawed and hedged in every one of
its actions since it adopted Amendment 3 in 1985, the last and only time in its
history that it had the moral courage to stand up and do all the right things to
assure a healthy future for the striped bass stock—and, not coincidentally, for
the long-term health of the striped bass fishery, as well.
Instead of facing the storm of controversy and criticism
that will inevitably occur if the Management Board reduces landings enough to
end overfishing and rebuild the stock, it may decide to take the easy way out and not honor the obligations it made
when Amendment 6 was adopted.
Instead of standing by the clear language of
the amendment, it may resort to weasel words, and “adjust the striped bass
management program”—the thing that Amendment 6 says it must do once triggers are tripped—not by
rebuilding the stock, but by lowering its standards, and so render the
current higher fishing mortality and lower biomass a kind of “new normal” for
the striped bass.
There’s no law that could prevent that, right now.
“The reference points currently used for management are based
in the 1995 estimate for female [spawning stock biomass]. The 1995 female SSB is used as the SSB
threshold because many stock characteristics (such as an expanded age
structure) were reached by this year and the stock was declared recovered.”
But the summary later notes that
“The [Stock Assessment Subcommittee] explored empirical and
model-based reference points [as they were tasked to do by the Management Board];
an alternate threshold of SSB1993 is shown in Table 6. However, the model-based approach (e.g.,
SPR20%) produced [spawning stock biomass] reference points that were unrealistically
high. As a result, the [Stock Assessment
Subcommittee] recommended using empirically-based reference points rather than
model-based reference points.”
Those statements, read together, are interesting for a few
reasons.
First, the current threshold equals the female spawning
stock biomass when the rebuilding striped bass
population first demonstrated the characteristics of a fully-recovered stock. That would make it a reasonable minimum standard for a healthy striped bass stock. If the Management Board decides to abandon that standard in favor of the 1993 spawning stock biomass level as their standard, they would be seeking to maintain the population at still-depleted levels,
in order to achieve some assumed socioeconomic gain. It would be a clear admission that maintaining a truly healthy striped bass
stock was no longer an ASMFC priority.
If that happened—and we can all still hope that it will not—striped
bass anglers’ current growing suspicion of, and dissatisfaction with, ASMFC will climb to new heights, as will the belief that ASMFC'S management boards will always subordinate
good science and heathy fish stocks to short-term socioeconomic considerations.
But it’s also interesting that the summary said that model-based reference points would set “unrealistically high” spawning stock biomass levels.
There is no explanation of why such reference points would be “unrealistic.” It’s possible that there are some biological
or statistical factors that led to that conclusion, and if that’s so, it would
be wise to accept the experts’ opinion.
On the other hand, the striped bass model has been developed,
reviewed and improved over many years, and is generally considered reliable. It’s curious that such a model would produce “unrealistic”
results. Thus, it's hard not to wonder whether the model-based reference points would be politically, rather than biologically, unrealistic.
If they are, in fact, biologically attainable, but achieving them would risk the ire of a significant share of the fishing community, the next question raised would be why a set of science-based standards that works so
well in federal fisheries should not also be used for striped bass.
Of course, the problem of socioeconomic factors trumping the
heath of fish stocks, if that is, in fact the issue, would not be unique to
ASMFC. The regional fishery management
councils were largely ineffective for the first twenty years after the passage
of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, just for that reason. Only after the
Sustainable Fisheries Act of 1996 legally compelled such councils to follow the
science, end overfishing and rebuild overfished stocks, did they became effective stewards
of the nation’s marine resources.
So should ASMFC fail the striper, some anglers will undoubtedly
begin to consider legislative solutions.
Hopefully, things will never get that far.
Hopefully, when the dust clears, tempers cool, and the final
votes are taken, we will find that ASMFC’s Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board has honorably discharged its duties, lived up to the promises made, and
so helped to assure that the next generation of fishermen will know the same
abundance of bass that we have enjoyed, both before the collapse and after the stock
had recovered.
For they obligated themselves in Amendment 6, and that bill
is now coming due.
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