STICKING TO THE FACTS WHILE FIXING STRIPED BASS

There’s no denying it.  Many of our saltwater fisheries are not in good shape.

Right now, here in New York, striped bass are overfished and experiencing overfishing.  Bluefish are overfished, too.  Weakfish are depleted, tautog (“blackfish”) need to be rebuilt, winter flounder have all but disappeared, cod are in bad shape, and even our cool-weather forage-fish fisheries, such as Atlantic mackerel and Atlantic herring, are not doing too well.

South of Long Island, our offshore stocks are, if anything, faring even worse.  National delegations to the recent meeting of the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas failed to help the badly overfished shortfin mako, but recognized that bigeye tuna are being fished at unsustainable levels.  ICCAT also tightened quotas on white and blue marlin, acknowledging that those species, too, are in dire straits.

Facing those facts can get a little daunting, and more than a little depressing.

But as we work through the seemingly Sisyphean task of restoring our fisheries to health, we must be careful not to fall into the trap of making things out to be even worse than they are.

Right now, I’m thinking about that mostly in terms of striped bass.  

Yes, bass are overfished, and not just by some small amount.  The latest benchmark stock assessment found that, at the end of 2017, female spawning stock biomass was just 68,476 metric tons, 25 percent below the 91,436 metric ton threshold, which itself is another 25 percent below the female spawning stock biomass target.  The Atlantic State Marine Fisheries Commission has both a duty, pursuant to its own striped bass management plan, and a moral obligation to end overfishing and rebuild the female spawning stock biomass to the target level.

Anglers are right to demand that the ASMFC step up, shoulder its responsibilities, and get that job done, without delay and without resorting to ploys such as lowering the biomass target, which might provide the sham appearance of success but won’t put any more bass back in the ocean.

At the same time, as bad as the current situation is, striped bass advocates are only hurting their own cause when they claim that the striped bass stock is about to collapse, if it hasn’t already, or suggest that it’s time to impose a moratorium on all striped bass harvest.  As bad as things are, they’re not that bad yet, and when people get in front of regulators and make claims that the facts don’t support, they’re not only hurting their own credibility, but the credibility of other conservation advocates who take less extreme positions.

As many readers know, I fished through the last striped bass collapse.  That experience allows me to say that if fishermen think that things are truly bad now, they just don’t understand how bad they can get.  While there were some memorable days even in the depths of the collapse, with some truly large bass coming ashore at places such as Block Island and the outer beaches of Cape Cod during the late 1970s and most of the 1980s, the nearshore ocean was usually a seeming desert, where even good anglers could fish for days without encountering a single striped bass.

This year, we all complained about the schools of immature bass that swarmed throughout the northeast throughout the season, hitting lures meant for the larger fish that, for the most part, didn’t show.  Back in the early 1980s, little fish were all but absent; at many times, in many places, it was easier to find a bass over 30 than it was to hook up with a rat.  And those fish over 30 were scarce.

The plain fact is that, today, the female spawning stock biomass is about four times as large as it was at the depths of the collapse, thirty-five or so years ago.  Fishery managers know that.  As Max Appelmann, the ASMFC’s Fishery Management Plan Coordinator for striped bass reportedly said,

“There’s a general feeling around the management board that the stock isn’t near the level of the 1980s.”

Managers recognize that they need to do something to end overfishing and rebuild the stock, but when they start hearing fishermen say that the stock has collapsed, those managers tend to stop listening.

Recently, a blog by David Samuel Shiffman appeared on the American Scientist website.  It was called “The Danger of Viral Falsehoods in Conservation,” and though it was inspired by recent, inaccurate reports of Australia’s koalas becoming “functionally extinct” as a result of recent wildfires, it is relevant to fisheries conservation, too.

As Mr. Shiffman notes,

“The problem is simple:  A person’s understanding of the severity of a conservation threat and their understanding of what policy solutions are available for addressing that threat affect what policy solutions they support.  Research shows that people who wrongly believe that a problem is much worse than it is are more likely to support different policy solutions than experts.

“The potential for bad policy can lead to needless conflict between stakeholders, scientists, and managers, as well as policy outcomes that aren’t those best supported by scientific evidence.  For example, people who believe that sustainable fisheries are impossible are more likely to support total bans on all fishing, even though experts tend to support policy that allows some fishing but prevents overfishing.”

Perhaps more to the point, he observes that

“Sharing easily debunked nonsense in support of a good cause results in that nonsense getting debunked, which can undermine support of your cause!  And when experts point out that a viral claim about science and the environment is wrong, it sometimes leads to people getting angry at the scientists and other experts correcting the record, which risks further undermining public trust in science and evidence-based conservation in general.”

That’s an important observation.  It’s also one that most of us can relate to.  How many times have you been at a fisheries meeting, or read some anti-science rant in the editorial section of a local fishing magazine, and winced at all of the inaccuracies that were being perpetuated? 

How often have you shaken your head in disbelief and disgust when you heard one of the anti-regulation crowd declare that there’s plenty of striped bass around, but the managers don’t know it because “alternative data” shows they’re all just farther from shore, swimming out in the EEZ?   Or that there are plenty of bluefish, but they’re offshore, too?  Or that the reason that black sea bass recruitment was down in 2018 was because there are so many sea bass out there now, they are eating everything they can find, including their own young?

When you hear things like that, which you know are just wrong, you tend to stop listening and discount the speaker as someone who is making things up just so they can keep killing fish.

You write them off because of their selfish motivations, but promoting a false narrative is never right, even if your motivations are good.

Years ago, when I was still involved with the Coastal Conservation Association, I often heard its then-chairman, the late Walter Fondren, advise that we always needed to be sure that we got the science right when we pushed a conservation agenda.  He always warned that if we try to advance an agenda based on a false premise, we would lose our credibility with the decisionmakers, and that such credibility, once lost, is very hard to restore.

That’s good advice, and something that we all ought to remember as the debate over new striped bass regulations reaches its crescendo over the next few months, and must remember in May, when debate is expected to begin on a new amendment that could affect the way bass are managed long into the future—perhaps for the rest of some of our lives.

Although the striped bass population has not yet at the brink of collapse, it remains in some peril.  While appropriate management measures can still rebuild the stock with relative ease—the 18 percent reduction proposed in the recently adopted addendum could rebuild the stock in about 13 years, if such reduction was actually achieved—an inadequate management response, coupled with a few years of below-average recruitment, could make collapse a very immanent possibility.

We increase the likelihood of an inadequate management response if we overstate the severity of the bass’ current condition, and so undermine our own credibility when demand that decisionmakers act.  Thus, we further our own interests, as well as that of the striped bass, by sticking close to the facts.

And that should be enough, for as Mr. Shiffman reminds us,

“One of the few silver linings of the massive conservation cloud we’re facing is that the actual real truth is quite scary and bad, which means we don’t need to lie in order to get people’s attention.”