REBUILDING BLUEFISH: ADVERSITY SPAWNS OPPORTUNITY

The bluefish stock is overfished, and has been for at least the past five years.  The Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council has now begun working on a rebuilding plan, which must be in place for the 2022 season.  Part of the process of drafting that plan involves a series of scoping hearings that will be held between February 13 and March 4 of this year, and provide stakeholders with opportunities to comment on possible management measures.


The scoping hearings will address the pending Bluefish Allocation and Rebuilding Amendment to the Bluefish Fishery Management Plan.  That document began life about two years ago as the Bluefish Allocation Amendment, which threatened to permanently shift partof the recreational allocation to the commercial sector, but went through a metamorphosis a few months ago after an operational stock assessment found that recreational fishermen were killing far more bluefish than previously thought.  That finding pretty well killed any thoughts of a recreational/commercial reallocation, and made rebuilding the stock the Council’s primary objective.


Because the bluefish stock is overfished, the Amendment must include measures that rebuild the stock to the target level within ten years. However, just what such measures should be is still up for debate.  In addition, the scoping hearings for the Amendment will allow stakeholders to comment on a wide array of other issues related to the bluefish fishery, including the goals and objectives of the management plan.


In those goals and objectives, opportunity lies.


As the scoping document for the Amendment notes,

“The original [fishery management plan] (1990) contains the first set of goals and objectives.  The five goals of the FMP are the following:

1.       Increase understanding of the stock and the fishery.

2.       Provide the highest availability of bluefish to U.S. fishermen while maintaining, within limits, traditional uses of bluefish (defined as the commercial fishery not exceeding 20% of the total catch).

3.       Provide for cooperation among the coastal states, the various regional marine fishery management councils, and federal agencies involved along the coast to enhance the management of bluefish throughout its range.

4.       Promote compatible management regulations between State and Federal jurisdictions.

5.       Prevent recruitment overfishing.

6.       Reduce the waste in both the commercial and recreational fisheries.”

That wasn’t an unreasonable set of goals in the context of 1990, when more than two-thirds of all bluefish caught by anglers were landed, and less than one-third released.  But today’s fishery is very different.  In 2018, the trend was completely reversed, with only about one-third of all bluefish caught being landed, and two-thirds being released.


Thirty years have passed since the goals listed above were written, and it’s well past time for the Council to consider new goals and objectives that reflect the reality of today’s fishery, which is dominated by catch-and-release.  The trend toward catch and release becomes even more marked when one realizes that a very substantial majority of the bluefish retained by anglers in 2018 were taken in the so-called “snapper” fishery, which targets young-of-the-year bluefish less than 12 inches long.  While snappers also accounted for most of the landings in 1990, larger bluefish made up a bigger portion of the landings than they do today.


Given the shape of today’s fishery, it would be entirely appropriate and, I would argue, very desirable to add a goal stating something like

“Maintain bluefish level at a high level of abundance, that allows anglers to encounter such fish on frequent occasions and supports a primarily catch-and-release fishery.”

You rarely, if ever, see such language in federal fishery management plans, but it is entirely consistent with the language of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, which esplicitly lists, as one of its purposes, 

“to promote domestic commercial and recreational fishing under sound conservation and management principles, including the promotion of catch and release programs in recreational fishing.  [emphasis added]”

Unfortunately, despite that clear statement of federal fisheries policy, saltwater fisheries managers, unlike their inland counterparts, have yet to embrace the concept of catch-and-release.  Instead, they focus on landings, and construct management plans around maximizing sustainable yield.  As mentioned above, the current Amendment began as a pure allocation amendment, that considered reducing the recreational share of bluefish landings because managers thought that anglers consistently failed to utilize—that is, land—their full harvest limit.  


The thought that anglers could utilize fish not by killing them and taking them home, but by catching them and letting them go so that they could be caught—and so utilized—again was a very foreign idea.  Even the current management plan contains a provision allowing for some or all of the “unused” portion of the recreational allocation to be transferred to the commercial sector on a year-by-year basis.


Yet such transfers undercut the very reason that anglers want to release most of the bluefish they catch.  They want to release fish so that they can maintain bluefish abundance and provide better, more consistent fishing in the future.  They don’t release them merely so that they can be killed by commercial fishermen and increase commercial landings.


The ironic thing is that if today’s anglers behaved in the same way as anglers did thirty, forty or fifty years ago, killing most or all of the bluefish that they caught, just to dump many of them back into the bay, toss them into a dumpster, or feed them to the tomatoes and roses, there would have been no talk of reallocation; instead, anglers only risked losing a portion of their allocation when they became more conservation-minded and began releasing their catch.


The operational assessment, which found bluefish to be overfished may have ended any chance of reallocation, but it hasn’t necessarily changed managers’ minds about what constitutes “use” of the bluefish resource, and made them more receptive to the idea of managing the fishery for abundance and catch-and-release.


But at least now, they’re thinking about it.  Two of the “management considerations” listed in the scoping document for the Amendment are

“Economic and intrinsic value of recreationally released fish”

and

“Value of unharvested quota.”

These are issues that the Council should examine very closely as they move forward with the Amendment.  Once again, Magnuson-Stevens shows the way.  National Standard 1 states that

“Conservation and management measures shall prevent overfishing while achieving, on a continuing basis, the optimum yield from each fishery for the United States fishing industry.”

Fisheries managers generally interpret that language to mean that they should manage for the highest yield that a stock can safely produce, but the definition of “optimum” yield suggests that such interpretation is not completely accurate.  The definition reads

“The term ‘optimum,’ with respect to the yield from a fishery, means the amount of fish which—

(A)     will provide the greatest overall benefit to the Nation, particularly with respect to food production and recreational opportunities, and taking into account the protection of marine ecosystems;

(B)    is prescribed as such on the basis of maximum sustainable yield from the fishery, as reduced by any relevant social, economic, or ecological factor; and

(C)    in the case of an overfished fishery, provides for rebuilding to a level consistent with producing the maximum sustainable yield from such fishery.  [emphasis added]”

Given that definition, it’s not difficult to argue that setting the optimum yield for bluefish well below maximum sustainable yield, in order to provide greater abundance, would increase recreational opportunities, and that the benefit provided by such recreational opportunities would offset the loss of food production, since bluefish command relatively low price on the market—generally well under $1 per pound—and are usually released by anglers. 

It is also easy to argue that social and economic factors argue for greater bluefish abundance.  Anglers like to catch fish, and being able to engage in an active catch-and-release fishery for bluefish, that sees anglers frequently encountering fish, leads to more enjoyment, and encourages anglers to fish more often.  That can be seen in the data from the past five years (2014-2018), which shows that the number of fishing trips primarily targeting bluefish fell by 45% over that period, as bluefish abundance steadily declined.

Ironically, the economic losses from a decline in abundance hit the for-hire sector, which tends to harvest a higher proportion of its catch and frequently opposes efforts to conserve and rebuild the stock, particularly hard.  During the same 5-year period, the number of charter boat trips on the Atlantic Coast primarily targeting bluefish fell by 63%, while the number of party boat trips targeting bluefish nosedived by 93%, even though the bluefish regulations were unchanged throughout those years.  

Yet it is a pretty good bet that some for-hire operators will be stridently contesting the need for rebuilding when the scoping hearings are held.

The data clearly demonstrates that an abundance of bluefish benefits everyone.

Thus, it is in everyone’s interest to get out to the scoping hearings when they are held, and encourage the Mid-Atlantic Council to embrace a new management paradigm that seeks to ensure that an abundance of bluefish remain in the ocean, and deemphasizes the number of bluefish that lie dead on the dock.