Sunday, August 18, 2019

STRIPED BASS; A TALE OF TWO STATES

Over the past day or two, a couple of press releases crossed my desk.  Both were issued by state fishery management departments, and both dealt with striped bass.  But the story they told, and the way that they addressed management of the overfished striped bass stock, couldn’t have been more different.

Their differences largely define today’s striped bass debate.
The first release came from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Massachusetts has the largest commercial striped bass quota of any coastal state, and usually, that quota is caught fairly quickly.  But in 2018, commercial fishermen began having trouble finding enough bass, and Massachusetts opened additional commercial fishing days (the state’s commercial fishermen are only allowed to target striped bass on certain days of the week) in an effort to fill the state’s entire quota.  Because of the state of the striped bass stock, even with those extra days, part of the quota remained uncaught.




In other words, Massachusetts is voluntarily cutting its landings a year before it has to, in order to have a positive impact on the striped bass stock, which is overfished and experiencing overfishing.  That's not a common occurrence in the fisheries management arena, where the Tragedy of the Commons seems to recur again and again.

It would be nice if all states responded to fisheries problems that way.

But there’s always a New Jersey, which recently announced that its striped bass “bonus tag” program for 2019 will be getting underway on September 1.


New Jersey is one of only two coastal states that allow anglers to keep more than one striped bass on any trip, although New Jersey is the only state on the entire east coast that has created a way to let recreational fishermen kill three at a time.

To add just a bit more frosting to the cake, that so-called “bonus” fish must measure somewhere between 24 and less than 28 inches in length.  Since fewer than half of all female striped bass have matured by the time they’re six years old, and since recent data compiled in New York indicate that most bass in the 24-28 inch range are six years old or less, the New Jersey bonus tag program seems designed to target immature females, and remove them from the stock before they have a chance to spawn even once.


“Length-at-age also becomes an important contributor to adjusting regulations, particularly when the sexual maturity of a species is based on age, and therefore size.  For example, if length-at-age data showed that anglers are catching legal-sized fish that are below ages when they mature, regulations would have to be changed so the fish could have the opportunity to spawn before being removed from the population.”
At least, regulations would have to be changed in states other than New Jersey…

In nearly all of the other coastal states, regulators try to prevent anglers from killing immature fish, even when the stock is healthy.  Allowing those immature females to recruit into the spawning stock is even more important now, when the stock has suffered from a steep decline, and has become overfished.

Yet to some, putting more dead fish on the dock today is more important than the future health of the bass population.  New Jersey’s recreational regulations are one example, but the same sort of pernicious thinking has plagued discussions at the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board for a very long time.  

In recent years, the State of Maryland has probably been the biggest opponent of conservative management, and the loudest advocate for a bigger kill, although New Jersey, Delaware and individual management board members from other jurisdictions have provided support.

On the other hand, the New England states (and I’ll append neighboring New York to them, as the New York Department of Environmental Conservation has been an important and influential striped bass advocate over the past four or five years), along with Pennsylvania, often North Carolina, and most recently Virginia, have been consistent voices for striped bass conservation.

Virginia, like Massachusetts, took unilateral action to reduce its striped bass kill this year, while representatives from the other states have spoken out for appropriate and needed management measures.

As the debate over ending overfishing comes to a head in October, we can expect to see those two sides engage in a clash of values, with the northeastern states, along with their allies in the Mid-Atlantic, working hard to give the striped bass the protection it needs, while representatives from Maryland, New Jersey and Delaware, and perhaps some others, do their best to undercut such protections. 

Such efforts to minimize harvest reductions almost certainly won’t take the form of direct opposition to the proposed addendum, which is almost certain to pass, but rather by wheedling around with the consept of “conservation equivalency,” which allows states to adopt alternative measures that have supposedly the same conservation impact as the measures adopted by the management board.



“I think we just need to be very clear on the record for the audience that the options we select today may not be the options that individual states implement and that phrase ‘all jurisdictions would implement’ really only means in the absence of them bringing forward a conservation equivalent proposal, and I just want confirmation of that,”
because there was no way that New Jersey was willing to settle for one 28-inch bass when it might find a way to increase its kill.


Although that motion ultimately failed by a wide margin it, like the Massachusetts decision to limit its commercial fishery in 2019, showcased the difference between the states that support conservation and those with other agendas.

Such states will clash again before the final vote on the proposed Addendum VI.

But that fight will only be a precursor for the bigger battle for the striped bass’ future, which will probably begin next May, when the management board decides whether to begin a new, wide-ranging amendment of the management plan.

Should they move forward, everything will be on the table, and the fight will really begin.



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