Thursday, December 26, 2019

FISHERMEN DENY THE REALITY OF OVERFISHED STOCKS


It doesn’t really matter where you happen to be.  As soon as a stock assessment is released, that finds a particular stock to be overfished, fishermen will flock to the follow-on hearings, and offer varied and often creative theories to explain why the science is wrong, and fish stocks are as abundant as they ever were.

This week, some southern flounder news caught my eye.

Southern flounder support important commercial and recreational fisheries along the south Atlantic coast, but in recent years, the regulation of those fisheries hasn’t been able to constrain landings to sustainable levels.  As a result, the southern flounder stock suffered a precipitous decline.


“The fishing mortality reference points and the values of F that are compared to them represent numbers-weighted values for ages 2 to 4.  The ASAP model estimated a value of 0.35 for F35% (fishing mortality target) and a value of 0.53 for F25% (fishing mortality threshold).  The estimate of F in 2017 is 0.91, which is above the threshold (F25%=0.53) and suggests overfishing is currently occurring.  The probability the 2017 fishing mortality is above the threshold value of 0.53 is 96%.
“The stock size threshold and target (SSB25% and SSB35%, respectively) were estimated using a projection-based approach implemented in the AgePro software.  The estimate of SSB35% (target) was 5,452 [metric tons] and the estimate of SSB25% (threshold) was 3,900 mt.  The ASAP model of SSB in 2017 was 1,031 mt, which is below the threshold and suggests the stock is currently overfished.  The probability that the 2017 estimate of SSB is below the threshold value of 3,900 mt is 100%.”
Thus, the stock assessment demonstrated that the summer flounder stock was badly overfished and experiencing severe overfishing.


Predictably, people who profit from the summer flounder fishery aren’t happy with the current and pending southern flounder regulations.  They’re challenging the conclusions of the stock assessment, and questioning the validity of the data that led to those conclusions.  And predictably, they have no valid, countervailing data on which to base such challenges.  Instead, they’re falling back on the same sort of claims and arguments that one always hears, every time a stock is declared overfished or more restrictive regulations are proposed.



“I’ve been fishing for 50 years, so I should know a little bit about it.  The [flounder fishing this year] was the best I’ve seen,”

“Cod are everywhere, we can’t avoid them.”
Because if fishermen actually admitted that fish were having a problem, that would justify managers’ efforts to fix things.  

And that would mean new regulations.

Another fishermen made the argument that the North Carolina stock assessment was probably wrong, for the simple reason that fishermen weren’t willing to believe that the southern flounder stock was facing a problem.  He said

“It really feels like there is a fact gap here…how could everyone [here] be so wrong?  It’s difficult to measure a shifting [flounder population] with environmental factors, hurricanes, [etc.]  Don’t disregard hundreds of years of fishing experience that says the data doesn’t sound right.
“Have you been persuaded after listening [to the people here] to keep an open mind to the question of ‘Could the conclusion that we’ve been overfished be overestimated or incorrect?’”
To him, peer-reviewed data was far less reliable than fishermen’s opinions. 

That’s not a rare sentiment. 

Other fishermen are willing to admit that fish have become a little scarce, but aren’t willing to admit that fishing is a part of the problem.  In the North Carolina southern flounder debate, that took the form of blaming weather events, such as hurricanes, impacting environmental conditions along the coast, and leading to problems caused by storm-related debris or pollution runoff from pig farms.  Others argued that North Carolina’s problems were caused, in part, by fishing in other states’ waters, and couldn’t be fixed by North Carolina alone.  

Once again, the suggestion was that North Carolina shouldn’t further restrict fishermen’s landings

Again, such views are echoed in other fisheries management debates. 


“I don’t think they’re really overfished.  Up until [Hurricane] Sandy they used to stay in the area of the Mud Buoy.  After Sandy, they’ve been coming in and leaving.”
The captain was convinced that the population was still healthy and that the fish were just moving around, “coming in and leaving;” the possibility that the fish were no longer reliably available on traditional fishing grounds, because fish numbers were down, apparently never entered his mind.

Because, once again, if the fish were really overfished, managers would be justified in doing something about it.

There is also the ages old notion that bluefish, more than any other fish, are subject to some wort of mysterious “cycle” in which they suddenly disappear, for no clear reason, before returning to abundance, with no need for management intervention, at some point years in the future.


“Just as a historical point of view, bluefish has gone in cycles.  I remember my father telling me, he started in the bluefish fishery in 1955 and it was robust, and then 1959 and all of a sudden there were none.  It went for a 3-4-year period with none.  You would have a small fishery in the fall and the same in the spring.  Suddenly, in the beginning of the 1960s it changed, the only time you caught any fish is when you were in deep-water and offshore, and when they were plentiful in shore [sic] they were never seen offshore.  The bluefish do not stay in a certain place any given time.  You can go by past performance to predict future performance, but it is very difficult to do.  Taking this into consideration, I think everything should remain status quo.  This is not an emergency, and historically it shows that this is not an emergency fishery.  You have ebbs and flows and that is how the fishery goes.”
S. Kip Farrington, in his classic book Atlantic Game Fishing, argued that the bluefish population waxed and waned in an eleven- to thirteen-year cycle;  at  a  recent meeting called by the New York Department of Environmental Conservation to discuss commercial quotas, a number of fishermen maintained that bluefish populations fluctuate on a shorter, 10-year cycle. 

However, such regularly-occurring patterns are recognized  in  neither the  latest  benchmark  stock assessment nor in the operational assessment released in 2019.

Instead, the operational assessment, which incorporates the most recent data, shows that the bluefish population has been suffering from overfishing since at least 1985, and that, probably in response to such unsustainable levels of fishing mortality, the population quickly declined from relatively high levels in the mid-1980s, and since then has fluctuated just above and below the threshold that defines an overfished stock.  

The stock first became overfished in 1989, then apparently benefitted from Amendment 1 to the rebuilding plan, which cut harvest, combined with improved recruitment in the early 2000s to rise just above the threshold, and became overfished again in 2014 after s a long-period of below-average recruitment began.

The biomass data shows no wide swings of abundance and scarcity that suggest that the much-referenced “cycle” is real, although bluefish abundance, like the abundance of most animals, demonstrated variations in year-to-year numbers. 

Yet many fishermen still insist that “the cycle,” rather than overfishing, is the cause of low bluefish abundance.

Fishermen are also very fond of arguing that bluefish, along with other species, are still perfectly abundant, but just went somewhere else.  That’s suggested in the party boat captain’s comments quoted earlier, which assume that the bluefish that used to be abundant in the Mud Buoy area are not “coming in and leaving,” although he seems at a loss to identify the places where the bluefish are coming from or leaving to.

It also emerges as a popular theme in the 2018 meeting comments.

Another representative of the New York party boat fleet first admits that

“We do not have bluefish in New York and New Jersey anymore the way we used to.  Warmer waters and changing habitat have altered prey availability and thus, bluefish abundance.  After traveling 35 miles of ocean at night, we at times, do not see any bluefish.  This is unheard of in relation to past years.”
Although his comments about prey availability fail to explain why the vast menhaden schools in New York Bight, which are large enough to support substantial numbers of humpback whales during the spring, summer and fall, are not adequate to support bluefish, he does at least admit that the bluefish are not there.  But then, he argues that

“The for-hire fishermen…should not have the quota taken away because there are no fish in the ocean.  It is not true; the bluefish are no longer here.  Migratory patterns have changed, and bluefish are now further offshore being caught in 700 feet of water.”
Another fisherman, who may have also been associated with the for-hire industry, made a similar argument, saying

“Assessments need to be reevaluated because we are now finding bluefish way offshore.  They are being caught on tilefish trips in 900 feet of water.”
At a subsequent meeting, a New Jersey gillnetter agreed that the bluefish were offshore, but disagreed about the abundance of prey in inshore waters, with a summary of his comments noting

“Something inshore is happening that shifts bluefish all offshore.  Beach replenishment is an issue that could be moving the fish offshore.  He also noted that prey are booming recently but there are no predators…”
Other people also made comments suggesting the bluefish were really offshore, and not overfished, and even the operational assessment suggested that “anecdotal evidence”—that is, fishermen’s reports—suggested that abundance had shifted at certain times.  

And there is no doubt that bluefish are really out there.  I remember fishermen trolling for tuna in Hudson Canyon—more than 70 miles offshore—and catching bluefish that far offshoree as long ago as the mid-1980s, and I’ve caught plenty of bluefish trolling for tuna and chumming for sharks more than 40 miles off the beach.

The last benchmark stock assessment clearly states that

“Bluefish, Pomatomus saltatrix, is a coastal, pelagic species found in temperate and tropical marine waters throughout the world an inhabits both inshore and offshore waters along the east coast of the United States.  [emphasis added]”
So the comments that bluefish are offshore are hardly new or surprising.  But they run into trouble when they suggest that finding bluefish offshore is something driven by recently changing conditions, or suggest that the stock is healthy because the stock has recently shifted offshore.

A few--but not all--of the bluefish have always been there.


“New York area fishermen faced a major blow this season due to ASMFC’s decision to cut the Atlantic Striped Bass fishery by up to 17% next year and recommend maintaining the current ban on striped bass fishing in the Block Island Sound Transit Zone.  Rather than rooting these decisions in local stock assessments, ASMFC uses flawed data that measures the Atlantic Striped Bass stock based on the entire eastern seaboard.  However, it fails to account for Atlantic Striped Bass outside of the 3-mile fishing area, assuming fish abide by arbitrary bureaucratic boundaries.  Alternative data that shows the Striped Bass stock is in a better place outside the 3-mile limit was not only thrown out by the Commission, but the Commission also moved to no longer perform data collection in those waters, virtually ensuring that any future decision regarding the Striped Bass Fishery will be based on flawed data in perpetuity.  [emphasis added]”
Again, the findings of the benchmark stock assessment, that the striped bass was both overfished and experiencing overfishing, was challenged on the basis of “flawed data” and the bass being somewhere in the vast waters offshore, with only “alternative data”—a term that pretty well translates into made up, imaginary or statistically-invalid data—telling the supposed truth that the stock was, in fact, OK.

It's all just part of a venerable pattern.

As is the final leg of the “they’re not overfished” platform.  

Along with “the data is bad,” “it’s the cycle,” and “they’re just somewhere else,” you can depend on someone arguing that “it’s not the fishermen that caused the stock to decline; something else is eating them.”

In the case of bluefish, that “something else” is apparently mako sharks.  In the course of the 2018 bluefish meetings, a Massachusetts charter boat captain tried to convince fishery managers that

“Abundances of (mako) sharks have a significant impact on bluefish populations.  This is very important to take into account when looking at ecosystem-based management.”
while a New York party boat operator gave a more colorful account, including a photo, of an alleged

“650 lb mako shark, this shark at the time had 9 bluefish between 10-15 lbs in its stomach, and not a tooth mark in the bluefish.  And this would happen every night.  The blues would come in first, and then the sharks would come in after that and then everything would clear out.  Now since we’ve pretty much ended recreational mako shark fishing by making the limit larger than most sharks that are in near shore waters we have unleashed this species of shark that goes across the ocean, same as the bluefish.  They follow bluefish across the ocean and harvest them, daily.”

So blaming the mako for the bluefish’s decline just isn’t credible.

But it’s not about credibility; it’s about finding a way to deny that a species is overfished.  Thus, a Cape Cod fisherman is more than willing to blame seals for the decline of winter flounder, American eels and striped bass, and say that

“If we didn’t have any seals these fish would return,”
even though, looking at the problems besetting those species, it’s clear that isn’t true. 


Because it’s always easier to blame a shark, or a bird, or a seal, or to claim that the data is bad, the fish are offshore, or there’s some sort of immutable cycle, than it is to accept the truth that a stock’s overfished.

Because once you admit that a stock is overfished, you then need to do something about it.

And that’s when the hard work begins.


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