2020 BLUEFISH REGULATIONS: A RECIPE FOR FAILURE?

By now, most East Coast anglers have heard that an operational stock assessment has found the Atlantic bluefish stock to be overfished, and that more restrictive regulations are on the way for the 2020 bluefish season. 

But the question that no one can answer right now is whether the regulations adopted by the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council and Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Bluefish Management Board at their joint meeting last December will be restrictive enough to keep anglers from exceeding the recreational harvest limit this year.

Two other questions that folks ought to be asking is whether managers can legally avoid imposing even more restrictive regulations for the 2021 season, and whether the current recreational harvest limit of 9.48 million pounds is adequate to prevent real-world overfishing in both this year and 2021.

There is good reason to believe that the answers to all three of those questions are no, no and no.

As I listened to the Council and Management Board discuss bluefish issues at their October and December 2019 meetings, I couldn’t help thinking that they were putting together 2020 regulations that, while legally sufficient, would neither constrain recreational landings to the harvest limit nor offer real assurance that the overfished bluefish stock would not be subject to overfishing in this season and next.

And as I listened, I couldn’t help coming to the conclusion that many Council members, and many members of the Management Board, knew that they were adopting regulations that probably wouldn’t get the job done, but were more interested in minimizing shock to the fishery in the upcoming year than in conserving the bluefish stock.

Let’s start with a little bluefish history, and the 2020 regulations.

The data time series used to assess the bluefish stock only dates back to 1985, when the spawning stock biomass was slightly above 400 million pounds, which was very good, but still slightly below the 438 million pound target.  The stock was already suffering from overfishing in 1985, and by 1987 the fishing mortality rate approached 0.6, three times the threshold fishing mortality rate of 0.183 that defines when overfishing begins.

In response to such high levels of overfishing, the bluefish stock rapidly declined, becoming overfished for the first time around 1988 and remaining overfished for more than ten years.  In response to reduced landings and a fishing mortality rate that, while still too high, had fallen to about half of its 1987 level, the spawning stock biomass climbed slightly above the biomass threshold in the late 1990s.  Fishing mortality began to ramp up somewhat around 2010, and that increase, coupled with sub-par recruitment, caused the stock to become overfished again in 2013, and it has remained so ever since.

In 2018, bluefish landings dropped to the lowest level ever recorded, but for the first time in the entire 33-year time series, overfishing did not occur.  The fishing mortality rate for 2018 was 0.136.

The 2020 regulations are based on an acceptable biological catch of 16.28 million pounds, which was set by the Council’s Scientific Statistical Committee, and on the Council's and Management Board's estimate of what the final 2019 landings would be.  While the SSC’s figure for acceptable biological catch is based on sound science, things began to go off the rails with the estimate of 2019 landings.

The Bluefish Monitoring Committee, which is composed of scientists from the Council, ASMFC, the National Marine Fisheries Service and a number of states, recommended a 2020 commercial quota of 2.77 million pounds, and a recreational harvest limit of 3.62 million pounds, both substantial reductions from 2019.

In 2019, the commercial quota was 7.71 million pounds, but it included 4 million pounds of supposedly “unused” recreational allocation.  Once updated recreational effort and landings data revealed that anglers were not only catching, but substantially exceeding, their recreational harvest limits on a regular basis, such transfer would no longer be made.  The reduction in the total allowable commercial catch, without any transfer being considered, was slightly less than a million pounds—from 3.71 to 2.77 million.

While that’s a big cut, it’s pretty simple to explain. 

It takes a little more time to describe why the Monitoring Committee recommended cutting the recreational harvest limit from 11.62 million pounds in 2019 to just 3.62 million pounds in 2020.  While the answer, in one word, is “discards,” understanding how discards matter takes a little longer.

Managers have always relied on the premise that the size of the bluefish that anglers released are no different than the size of the fish that the anglers kept.  If that is true—and the NMFS’ Greater Atlantic Fisheries Regional Office assumes that it is—then about 4.03 million pounds of bluefish were predicted to die after being released in 2020.

Those dead discards would have to be deducted from the recreational annual catch limit in order to calculate the recreational harvest limit that would be used to set regulations.

But the Monitoring Committee, along with the scientists who performed the stock assessment, didn’t agree with that approach, nor did they agree with the assumption that released bluefish were the same size as those that anglers kept.  Instead, the Monitoring Committee

“generally agreed that this [4.03 million pound] estimate does not fully capture what is happening in the recreational fishery because length frequency data suggests that most anglers keep smaller bluefish and release larger bluefish...”

The Monitoring Committee’s approach to calculating discards

“uses the Northeast Fisheries science Center (NEFSC) discard estimates, which incorporates a length-weight relationship for released fish data from the [Marine Recreational Information Program], American littoral Society tag releases, and volunteer angler surveys from Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Jersey.”

The inclusion of such data seemed to support the Monitoring Committee approach, but also had problems, as

“this sampling approach does not characterize the entire coast, which adds to the uncertainty in these estimates.  Furthermore, NEFSC staff suggested that the uncertainty in these estimates has grown in recent years as the availability of bluefish has apparently decreased.  In previous years 1,000+ fish were collected, but only 522 were collected in 2018.  Moreover, outliers tend to shift the average discard weight.”

Under the Monitoring Committee’s approach, 2020 bluefish discards wouldn’t be just 4.03 million pounds, but 9.90 million pounds, more than twice the previous estimate.

Anglers who are at all familiar with the bluefish fishery would instinctively suspect that the Monitoring Committee was right.  Many recreational fishermen don’t like to eat bluefish at all, believing that the fish’s flesh is too oily and strong-tasting to be enjoyable.  But those who enjoy eating bluefish, and I include myself in their number, usually opt to keep the smaller ones that, because they’re not feeding on large, oily baitfish such as menhaden, generally taste better than the large, bunker-fed bluefish do.  

Yet when the issue of discards came up at the October Council/Management Board meeting, not a single recreational fishermen on either body mentioned that simple truth. 

Council and Management Board members aren’t appointed because of their knowledge of fisheries science; it’s the job of the SSC, committees, and Council and ASMFC staff to provide the scientific information that management decisions are based on.  The job of Council and Management Board members is to provide advice based on their experience in the local fisheries, so that the scientists’ information can be applied in more effective ways.

Yet even though “I only eat the small ones,” is something all of the recreational representatives on those bodies must have heard anglers say dozens, if not hundreds, of times, the only recreational representatives who spoke on the issue chose to focus on the uncertainties, question whether the data was biased, and remain silent on one fact that they knew was true:  Most anglers tend to keep the smaller bluefish, if they keep any at all, and release the large ones.

Most chose not to speak at all.

The reason for their silence was perfectly clear.  If the Monitoring Committee’s approach was approved, and the 9.90 million pound discard figure accepted, the recreational harvest limit would have been a mere 3.62 million pounds.  

But if the Council and Management Board rejected the Monitoring Committee’s approach, and stuck with the traditional method of calculating discards, which was also the approach recommended by Council staff, the recreational harvest limit could be set at 9.48 million pounds, a level much more acceptable to some recreational fishermen and most of the fishing industry.

And, in the end, that’s just what the Council and Management Board ended up doing, even though they had to know that, if the Monitoring Committee's premise was right, their vote would probably cause the overall recreational catch--landings and discards combined--to exceed the annual catch limit for the recreational sector.

But that was only their first misstep, which set the stage for a much worse decision, which would sharply increase the odds that overfishing would occur in 2020, and that anglers would be facing necessarily harsh accountability measures in 2021.

For in December, the Council and Management Board recommended the regulations intended to constrain anglers' harvest to the 9.48 million pound recreational harvest limit.  To do that, they first had to figure out how many bluefish would be landed by anglers in 2019, so that they could modify 2019 regulations in a way that would hopefully keep 2020 recreational landings within the new limit.

The process of estimating 2019 landings was, in many ways, as much art as science.  When the December meeting was held, the Council and Management Board only had recreational landings data through August 31, so they had to predict the future, and decide what the next four months' landings were likely to be.  

There were three approaches that they could use to figure out what the full year’s landings would be.

They could just assume that landings in 2019 wouldn’t be much different than they were in 2018.  In some ways, that approach made sense, as regulations had not changed, and consistent regulation might well lead to a consistent level of landings.  However, would only happen if weather, the availability of other species, or some other factor didn't change angler behavior, and if bluefish were equally available, and equally catchable, over the course of both years.

As mentioned before, 2018 saw the lowest level of bluefish landings in the past 33 years, and there was also a distinct possibility that landings might rebound in 2019.  That possibility was probably transformed into a probability with the release of recreational landings estimates through August 31, 2019.  

For all of 2018, anglers landed less than 13.3 million pounds of bluefish, with 8.2 million pounds of that landed by August 31.  By the time last December’s meeting was held, Council and Management Board members knew that anglers had already landed 12.4 million pounds of bluefish by August 31, 2019, which was about 50 percent more fish than they had landed by the same point in 2018, and nearly equaled their landings for all of the previous year, with four months of fishing yet to go.

Thus, it was pretty clear to Council staff that landings in 2019 would almost certainly be much higher than they were the year before.  A staff memo noted that

“Bluefish advisors and [Monitoring Committee] members suspect that 2018 may have been an anomalous fishing year and may not fully represent trends in landings.  To help account for this variability, the [Monitoring Committee] initially recommended that the Council approve using the three-year average for expected recreational landings (23.15 million pounds).  However, the Council used 2018 landings as a proxy for expected recreational landings in 2020 and 2021 because 2018 represents the most recently competed fishing year and is consistent with how expected recreational landings have been proposed in recent years.”

And, of course, the fact that it resulted in the smallest permissible reduction in landings didn’t hurt either…

But to be fair, using three-year averaging, and including landings from years when bluefish were more abundant, probably wasn’t the right approach either, and would have resulted in a 2019 landings estimate that was much higher than what 2019 landings were likely to be.

That left what we might call the Goldilocks option, a third choice that was likely to produce an estimate close to the actual 2019 landings:  Projecting landings through August 31 out for the rest of the year.  As the staff memo also reported,

“Similar to the approaches used to project landings for other Council managed species, the [Monitoring Committee] can project 2019 bluefish landings using data from waves 1-4 to estimate overall 2019 landings.  This estimate results in 17,122,744 pounds harvested compared to the Council approved 13,270,862, which represents a difference of 3,851,882 pounds.  Understanding the difference between the 2018 landings and 2019 projected landings as the assumed expected recreational landings will assist in avoiding a [recreational harvest limit] overage in 2020.  Using the Council approved estimate, constraining harvest to the RHL would result in a necessary 28.56% reduction while constraining harvest using the 2019 projected landings would result in a necessary 44.63% reduction.  [emphasis added; internal reference omitted]”

That last sentence explains what happened next. 

Given a choice between two alternatives, both of which could arguably constitute “the best science available,” the Council and Management Board opted for the alternative that would result in the smaller harvest reduction and provoke the least hostile comment, even though it probably didn’t reflect reality, instead of the alternative that was likely to yield a far more accurate estimate, but would have led to more restrictive regulations and greater outcry from some of the stakeholders. 

Today, we already know that the Council made the wrong choice.  

We now have recreational landings estimates which show that, through October 31, 2019, anglers had landed about 15.8 million pounds of bluefish, which is about 2.5 million pounds more than they landed in all of 2018.  If they land the same 1.5 million pounds in November/December of 2019 that they landed in the same months of 2018, the 17.1 million pound projection would have been almost precisely on target.

But it’s probably too late to worry about that now.  The decision has already been made.  We’ll be looking at a 3-fish bag limit (5 on for-hire boats) and a 28.56% reduction in bluefish landings this year.

And if 2020 landings do end up coming close to those of 2019, we’ll also be looking at landings that will exceed the 2020 recreational harvest limit by millions of pounds.

That would lead to real consequences, and real pain, in the 2021 season.

First, regulations will have to be tightened again, to achieve the rest of the 44 percent reduction that we should have achieved this year.  But that’s not all.

Because the bluefish stock is overfished, any overage in 2020 will trigger accountability measures that will require pound-for-pound paybacks in 2021, meaning that regulations will have to be tightened even more to account for the previous year’s excesses.

A 1-bluefish bag could be a very real possibility.

Over the course of two meetings, the Council and Management Board adopted a recreational harvest limit that probably underestimated the impact of discard mortality and will, in reality if not on paper, cause anglers to exceed their annual catch limit in 2020.

Then, they based 2020 regulations on what they had to know was an underestimate of 2019 landings, which will almost certainly cause anglers to exceed their 2020 recreational harvest limit, and compound the likelihood that they’ll also blow though their ACL.

And by setting anglers up to exceed their recreational harvest limit in 2020, the Council and Management Board have made it very likely that anglers will be hit with punitive accountability measures in 2021, even though they followed all the rules that those bodies had set.

In short, the Council and Management Board have set themselves up to fail.  But it will be bluefish anglers, and perhaps the bluefish themselves, that will be forced to pay the price.