STRIPED BASS ADDENDUM VI--WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE

About two weeks ago, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Atlantic Striped Bass Mangement Board adopted Addendum VI to Amendment 6 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Striped Bass, a management measure intended to end overfishing and reduce fishing mortality to the target level, and incidentally to rebuild the striped bass spawning stock—although not within the 10-year deadline prescribed in the management plan.

Addendum VI includes four major provisions.  It requires both the recreational and commercial sectors to reduce fishing mortality by 18 percent.  To achieve such reduction, it requires all coastal states to adopt recreational regulations that include a 1-fish bag limit and a 28 to 35-inch slot limit, and requires all Chesapeake Bay jurisdictions to adopt recreational regulations that include the same 1-fish bag and an 18-inch minimum size.  And to reduce release mortality, it requires all states to adopt regulations that would mandate circle hooks for all anglers fishing with bait for striped bass.

That seems pretty cut-and-dried.  

But then the Management Board did one other thing:  It adopted a provision that allows every member state to ignore the size and bag limits included in Addendum VI in favor of regulations of such state’s choosing, provided that in doing so, the state managed to achieve an 18 percent reduction in its own striped bass fishing mortality, compared to what such mortality was in 2017.

By adopting that conservation equivalency provision, the Management Board didn’t exactly take everything back to Square One, as an 18 percent reduction is still required.  But it did compromise Addendum VI’s effectiveness, and it assured that today, less than six months from the effective date of the Addendum, anglers all along the striper coast still have no idea of what regulations will look like in the upcoming year.

Having said that, I know what I’d like to see. 

As I noted before the last Management Board meeting, I thought that striped bass would gain the greatest benefit from a 35-inch minimum size, that would allow the 2011 and the incoming 2014 and 2015 year classes the greatest opportunity to spawn a few times before being vulnerable to harvest.  While I conceded that a slot limit might be a rational way to manage a healthy stock, I believed—and still believe—that it is the wrong way to go about trying to rebuild a depleted female spawning stock biomass.

Since I’ve always made my opinion on slots very clear, it might surprise folks to learn that I now believe that the best thing that could happen would be for every coastal state to adopt the same 28 to 35-inch slot that the Management Board adopted in Addendum VI.

That belief doesn’t mean that I’ve experienced some sudden enlightenment, and have now become an acolyte worshipping at the slot limit’s altar.  In fact, it means nothing of the sort. I still believe that a 35-inch minimum was the right way to go.

But the Management Board felt otherwise, and there is now no chance at all that a 35-inch minimum will be adopted coastwide.  And it’s that truth that drives my current belief.

I still think that a slot limit will focus fishing pressure, and harvest, on the very year classes that we need to rebuild the spawning stock.  I still believe that it will result in fewer fish surviving to reach older ages, and that the stock will be in greater jeopardy, and recover more slowly, as a result.

But I also think that a situation in which some states adopt the Addendum VI slot, some states adopt a 35-inch minimum, and some states adopt some other set of supposedly “conservation equivalent” regulations represents the worst of all worlds.

Think about it.

The supposed virtue of a slot limit is that it protects the oldest, largest and most fecund females in the spawning stock, although perhaps at the cost of higher removals of recently matured females.  And the virtue of a high minimum size is that it allows bass recruited into the spawning stock to reproduce at least two or three times before they become subject to harvest.

But if we end up in a situation where some states adopt a 28 to 35-inch slot, while others adopt a 35-inch minimum size, both of those benefits disappear.  The states with the slot will be allowed to hammer the newly-mature females as they run the 28 to 35-inch gauntlet.  And just as those fish grow large enough to be immune to harvest in the slot-limit states, they grow large enough to be killed in wholesale numbers as they swim into the waters of those states that adopted a 35-inch minimum.

For the bass, it’s a lose-lose proposition, as fish over 28 inches long will always remain unprotected somewhere along the course of their coastwide migration.

Given that situation, the priority is no longer putting in a 35-inch minimum somewhere, to protect striped bass in a particular state, but to adopt uniform regulations everywhere so that some portion of the spawning stock bass actually is protected wherever they happen to swim, throughout the course of the year.

Unfortunately, conservation equivalency makes even that modest aim a goal that is unlikely to be achieved.

I discussed the reason for that a little over a week ago, too.  The 18 percent reduction is based on a coastwide standard.  However, the slot limit adopted in Addendum VI will have different impacts in different states.  Some states, which see a lot of smaller fish, but few large ones, might experience a very small real-world reduction.  On the other hand, there are estimates that New Jersey, which lands more recreationally-caught striped bass than any other state on the coast, would experience about a 40 percent reduction if the slot was adopted.

Thus, it seems likely that New Jersey will adopt some other regulatory scheme that will allow it to reduce fishting mortality by only 18 percent—less than half the reduction that New Jersey needs to make if Addendum VI is to successfully reduce fishing mortality to the target level. 

Addendum VI started out with only a 50 percent probability of success; that’s not as bad as it sounds, because what it means is that there is about an even chance that the actual fishing mortality will end up either above or below the target level. 

But if the largest striped bass harvester on the coast intentionally refuses to make the cuts needed to achieve Addendum VI’s goals, and instead adopts regulations that cut mortality by less than half of the amount needed, then Addendum VI will no longer have a 50% probability of success.  At that point, the probability curve will be skewed toward failure, with a much greater chance that the actual reduction will fall short of 18 percent.

So, once again, the need is for uniformity.  Unless every state accepts its responsibility to reduce fishing mortality to the level needed to cut coastwide fishing mortality by 18%, Addendum VI is likely to fail.

At that point, the failure of the striped bass stock might not be far behind.

So what are the chances for such coastwide uniformity?  

Probably, pretty low.  There is a good chance that New York and the New England states will stick together, as they did in 2015, and adopt consistent regulations—almost certainly the 28 to 35-inch slot.  After that, the prospects begin looking worse.

Historically, New Jersey has played the conservation equivalency game like a master, always managing to find ways for its anglers to kill more and smaller fish than its neighbors, regardless of the impact on the stock. 

But there have been big changes in the New Jersey governor’s mansion since the state defied the ASMFC to adopt noncompliant recreational summer flounder regulations in 2017, and destroyed once and for all the regional management structure that was showing real promise to stabilize summer flounder regulations in the New Jersey/New York/Connecticut region.  

Those changes allow for at least a scintilla of hope that the new administration, and a new salt water fisheries chief, will lead New Jersey to a more enlightened and more cooperative approach to fisheries management.  However, that hope must be balanced against the reality that many of New Jersey’s recreational fishing organizations will fight tooth and claw to keep that from happening.

It's impossible to say which side will win.

Down in the Chesapeake, Virginia has proven itself to be a leader in striped bass conservation, while its neighbor Maryland is still seeking to reach new lows in its efforts to stave off harvest reductions.  The talk coming out of that state is that its Department of Natural Resources intends to make private recreational fishermen shoulder just about all of the conservation burden, and allow the state’s watermen to conduct business as usual. 

Those reports find some confirmation in a question that Michael Luisi, a Maryland fishery manager, made at the April 2019 Management Board meeting, when he asked,

“…if it were going to be the cast at some point that we were considering perhaps removing the commercial fishery from being part of this addendum, due to its, I guess size in comparison to the recreational fishery.  Would it be possible then to calculate reductions solely based on a recreational fishery; if that were going to be what was going to take the reductions?  [emphasis added]”

Regulations that would place the entire onus of conservation on the backs of private recreational fishermen would look quite a bit different from the 1 fish at 18 inches adopted by the Management Board for the Chesapeake Bay. 

Of course, there was little chance that Luisi was going to accept the 1 at 18 inch standard anyway.  He always makes a big fuss over reducing release mortality, saying at the April meeting that

“There is a problem that exists; which was discussed in depth back in February, and for us that problem is the dead discard issue in the recreational fishery…

“I’m a little disappointed and slightly discouraged that we’re sitting here talking about options to increase minimum size limits across the board; only knowing that it’s going to exacerbate the situation that we are currently in with dead discards being as high as they are.  I really hope that those examples are just examples of what things we could put forth in this addendum to try to be creative in an approach to solving a problem.”

But when the Management Board handed Maryland exactly what Luisi seemed to be looking for, an 18-inch minimum size and single-fish bag limit that should sharply reduce release mortality, that solution wasn’t welcomed with open arms.  

Instead, Maryland has been contemplating a combination of “conservation equivalency tools” that appears to have been crafted either in a fever dream or during a bad acid trip, that not would not only make anglers responsible for the entirety of the conservation effort, but do it in a matter almost certain to fail, with measures that can’t be easily or accurately quantified, such as prohibiting fishing for striped bass after 10:00 during August.

But, as bizarre as the proposed measures were, they would allow Maryland anglers to kill two striped bass--at an increased size limit, of course, throughout most of the season.

The entire list, presented at a Maryland Sport Fishing Advisory Commission meeting on October 22, is depicted here.

Hopefully, if such a hodgepodge was ever presented to the ASMFC’s Atlantic Striped Bass Technical Committee for approval, it would be shot down in flames.  It was heartening to hear Katie Drew, one of the ASMFC’s technical experts, say at the August Management Board meeting that

“I would say I think the [Technical Committee] is going to be hesitant to endorse things that are difficult to quantify.  Things like educational programs or using circle hooks, or things like that where its harder for us to say what is the actual effect of these measures this educational approach on actually reducing release mortality.

“Something like season limits or closed days, if you actually close the fishery during days when temperature is too high, as opposed to just saying, maybe don’t go fishing.  That I think the [Technical Committee] and [Plan Development Team] would be much more open to.  I think we’re focused on things that will have a concrete, demonstrable quantitative benefit to reducing how many fish you’re throwing back alive.”

Still, the fact that conservation equivalency makes such piecemeal proposals even possible, and the possibility that even Maryland’s mess might be accepted as conservationally equivalent, demonstrates why states must strive for uniform management measures.

If states succeed in unifying behind a set of reasonable rules, what comes next for striped bass will probably be a slow rebuilding that, assuming average recruitment, might eventually rebuild the population.

But if the states think only of their own short-term benefits, and not the overall health of the spawning stock, what comes next will be more of the same:  A stock that languishes at low abundance levels, always flirting with the point where depletion, coupled with consecutive years of below-average recruitment, could push it over the edge from merely overfished to something far worse, full collapse.