Fisheries
management breeds controversy.
No matter how badly a
management measure is needed, some people will argue against it. Sometimes they
challenge the science, and say that a stock is healthier than biologists claim.
Sometimes, they allege that the economic harm that a measure may cause
outweighs any benefit it might bring to the stock.
And sometimes, after all of
their arguments have been made and lost, they drop their fervent opposition,
and merely ask that the status quo be maintained for just a little while
longer, to give people a chance to collect some more data and figure out
whether additional management measures are, in fact, needed.
People tend to equate taking
no action with doing no harm, so such requests often find a sympathetic
audience. Yet by taking no action when action is called for, managers can do
real harm to fish stocks.
A failure to end overfishing
will lead to decreased abundance, which in turn could lead to a stock becoming
overfished. A subsequent failure to rebuild the overfished stock increases the
risk that such stock could collapse.
Even if stock collapse
doesn’t occur, failing to promptly implement needed management measures only
assures that, when such measures are finally adopted, they will be much more
restrictive than they would have been if they were put in place before the
stock experienced further decline.
North Carolina’s southern flounder fishery provides a case in
point. I could summarize what’s going on, but it probably makes more sense to
just quote Dr. Louis Daniels, who used to be the state’s top fishery manager
and spelled it all out in a recent letter to the Carteret
County [NC] News-Times.
I
spent 20+ years working for the North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries
(DMF) in hopes of rebuilding depleted fish stocks and providing a healthy
resource for all to enjoy and support our coastal economies. The failure of our
county leadership, past and present, to support meaningful fisheries reform and
programs may be at its zenith.
…As a
brief background, the commercial fishery as we know it has declined for decades
and is going out of business. Fish stocks have declined to historically low
levels and many claim this is the result of regulations and the ‘boogey man de
jour.” The fisheries that anchored the Carteret County fishing economy such as
blue crab, spot, croaker and southern flounder have no limits on the quantity
that can be harvested and most have no size limits. Efforts to rebuild these
stocks and return Carteret County to its historical glory as a fishing
community and destination have met resistance at every turn.
Proposed
fisheries regulations are consistently met with disdain and objection by the
County Board of Commissioners, believing they are protecting the few commercial
jobs left. For example, the state had the opportunity to reduce harvest of
summer flounder by 30% in 2006 and rebuild this most valuable finfish fishery
by 2016. By doing essentially nothing since 2006, due in part to political
pressures, the stock has continued to decline and remains severely depleted.
The reduction in harvest now needed to rebuild the stock is 72%. Talk about
going out of business…
Unfortunately, such thinking
isn’t limited to North Carolina. Up in New England, the cod decline has been
going on for a very long time, but fishermen have continually avoided efforts
to rebuild the stock.
As Discover magazine
reported in 1995, “Between 1977 [soon after Congress passed the
original Fishery Conservation and
Management Act] and 1983, the number of boats fishing out of New
England increased from 825 to 1,423. The new boats were bigger and equipped
with the latest electronic fish-finding equipment…The cod catch on Georges Bank
alone peaked in 1980 at more than 53,000 tons. Then it started to decline. As
the stock declined, the mortality inflicted by fishing rose…in New England,
fisheries biologists knew it was happening, and said so.”
Yet the response to the stock
decline was not harvest reductions, which were opposed by most in the industry.
Instead, “During the 1980s the New England [Fishery Management] council proved
itself unwilling to control fishing. Indeed, one of its early actions, in 1982,
was to eliminate catch quotas…as [National Marine Fisheries Service] scientists
warned of declining stocks of cod, haddock, and yellowtail flounder, the
council dithered…”
The result was not surprising. New England cod stocks crashed.
Three decades later, the 2017 operational stock
assessment for Georges Bank cod concluded that “stock condition
is poor.”
The Gulf of Maine stock is doing no better. The 2017 operational assessment found
that such stock was both overfished and subject to continued overfishing, with
abundance somewhere between 5% and 8% of the target level. Yet even though the
results of such assessment were confirmed by an independent study performed by
the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, a prominent New England
fishermen still argued that the science was wrong, and that
“Where these fish exist in the western Gulf of Maine is greater than it has
ever been in my lifetime.”
Such unreasoned opposition to
management measures makes it easy to understand why cod stocks are not yet
rebuilt, even though scientists first recognized that they were in trouble
close to forty years ago.
I saw the same thing happen with winter flounder in my local
Long Island waters. In 1984, New York anglers took home
nearly 14,500,000 of the small flatfish. But when the
population went into a noticeable decline in the late 1980s, the recreational fishing industry
opposed meaningful regulations that might have halted the
decline. Instead, they argued for status quo and, when that was not an option,
for size limits, bag limits and seasons that were less restrictive than the
science called for. Not surprisingly, with such inadequate regulations in place
the stock continued to decline, to the point that even after very restrictive
regulations were adopted more than a decade ago, the 2019 season yielded so few
fish that surveyors interviewing anglers last spring couldn’t find a single
fisherman who caught one.
Yet fishermen still argue that
New York’s recreational flounder season should be extended, so that if an
angler happens to catch a flounder while fishing for another species out in the
ocean, they wouldn’t have to release it.
Right now, we’re seeing
another species, the striped bass, threatened by unreasonable delay.
A benchmark stock assessment,
completed late in 2018, has found that the striped bass stock is both
overfished and experiencing overfishing. The striped bass management plan clearly states
that when overfishing occurs, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s
Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board (Management Board) must adopt management
changes that reduce fishing mortality to or below the target level within one
year, and that when the stock becomes overfished, the Management Board “must adjust
the striped bass management program to rebuild the biomass to the target level
within [no more than ten years]. [emphasis added]”
Yet despite the mandatory language of the management plan—”must”
doesn’t seem to contemplate any Management Board discretion—the Management
Board has not yet taken action to initiate a ten-year rebuilding plan. At its
May meeting, it did vote to initiate an
addendum process that, if completed, will hopefully see fishing
mortality reduced to the target level in 2020. But the management plan’s
requirement to initiate a 10-year rebuilding plan was completely ignored.
That wouldn’t be permitted if striped bass were a
federally-managed fishery, as the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery
Conservation and Management Act requires overfished stocks to
be rebuilt within ten years, if biologically possible. But the Atlantic States
Marine Fisheries Commission’s (ASMFC) management actions do not have to comply
with any legal standard; there is no legal requirement that ASMFC rebuild
overfished stocks. Even if the ASMFC takes an action that is clearly arbitrary
and capricious, and contrary to the best available science (or, in this case,
to its own management plan), such action is not subject to
judicial reviewpursuant to the federal Administrative Procedures
Act.
There is even a faction on the Management Board who seek to amend the management
plan, in a way that would permanently lower the biomass
target, allow a higher level of fishing mortality, and so increase the risk to
the spawning stock. Given the ASMFC’s lack of legally-binding management
standards, it could take those actions even if they have no scientific support.
That’s a problem, because it
seems that people never learn.
Despite the lessons taught by
southern flounder, winter flounder and cod, it seems that some fishermen, and
some fishery managers, continue to delay needed striped bass management measures,
rather than face the political pushback that always occurs when new
restrictions on harvest are proposed.
Given the importance of the
striped bass fishery, the price of doing nothing to rebuild the overfished
stock could be particularly high.
-----
This
essay first appeared in “From the Waterfront,” the blog of the Marine Fish
Conservation Network, which can be found at http://conservefish.org/blog/
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