The first question
set the tone of the meeting.
In October, 2019, the
Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Atlantic Striped Bass Management
Board (Management Board) adopted Addendum VI to Amendment
6 to the Atlantic Striped Bass Interstate Fishery Management Plan (Addendum
VI), which was intended to end overfishing and reduce fishing mortality by 18
percent, and so return it to a sustainable level. In order to achieve that
goal, Addendum VI set a one fish per day bag limit for recreational fishermen,
who would be permitted to keep only those bass that fell within a 28 to 35-inch
“slot limit” if caught on the coast, or were no less than 18 inches long if
caught in Chesapeake Bay.
Addendum VI also
permitted states to propose alternative regulations to those adopted in
Addendum VI, provided that those regulations achieved an 18 percent reduction
in that state’s striped bass fishing mortality, so on February 4, 2020, the
Management Board met again to review all such state proposals.
That’s
when Capt. John McMurray, a Management Board member from New
York, asked the Atlantic Striped Bass Technical Committee (Technical Committee)
what the coastwide fishing mortality would be if all of the state proposals
were approved.
And that’s when the
Technical Committee admitted that it could not give him an answer.
It wasn’t the
Technical Committee’s fault. The fourteen states that participate in the
striped bass fishery had presented forty-nine different sets of alternative
proposals, which could be mixed and matched in so many different ways that it
just wasn’t reasonable for the Technical Committee to analyze every possible
combination.
So, as the Management
Board began its deliberations, it found itself in a difficult situation.
Addendum VI, which it had passed less than four months before, called for an 18
percent reduction in striped bass fishing mortality. Now, it was asked to
approve proposed state regulations, but had no way to know whether those
regulations, if adopted, would achieve that needed reduction.
A few more comments
and questions made it clear that if the state proposals failed to achieve the
fishing mortality reduction contemplated in Addendum VI, there would be no
accountability for such failure on either a state or coastwide level.
One Management Board
member, New Jersey’s Adam Nowalsky, even admitted that “We’ve got a level of
confidence here that when we put all the [state] proposals [together], the number
will be less than 18 percent,” but he thought that falling short was OK,
because the Management Board “shouldn’t quibble” about whether the reduction
didn’t quite meet Addendum VI’s target. He guessed that any shortfall would be
minor.
And that sort of
attitude, shared by too many Management Board members, is why the Atlantic
States Marine Fisheries Commission’s (ASMFC) management process is in desperate
need of reform.
Fisheries
management is a very demanding and difficult discipline. As a Massachusetts fisheries official once quipped,
“Managing a fishery is like managing a forest, except it’s always night and the
trees move.” So asking the Management Board to make decisions on state
regulatory proposals, when they don’t even know what the effects of such
proposals would be, is very unwise. That is particularly true when, if a
state’s proposal failed to adequately reduce fishing mortality once put in
place, there was no way to impose remedial measures that might repair the harm
done to the striped bass stock.
Yet the ASMFC
frequently allows states to take such questionable actions, and rarely if ever
holds them accountable for the result.
After
the Management Board passed Addendum IV to Amendment 6 to the
Atlantic Striped Bass Interstate Fishery Management Plan (Addendum
IV) in 2014, recreational fishermen in Chesapeake Bay were required to reduce
fishing mortality by 20.5 percent, compared to what it was in 2012. Yet
after an ASMFC study revealed that those anglers not
only failed to achieve such reduction, but instead increased fishing mortality by more than 50
percent, the Management Board allowed them to maintain such increased levels of fishing mortality through the
2019 season.
They were not held
accountable in any way.
That’s not
surprising, because the ASMFC has historically reacted to recreational
accountability measures in about the same way that vampires react to holy
water. At the February Management Board meeting, Pat Kelliher, a Maine
fisheries manager, made a motion directed at states that adopted alternative
management measures. It would have required such states to adopt more
restrictive regulations if, and only if, their preferred alternative measures
failed to achieve the needed reduction in fishing mortality.
While that might seem
reasonable to anyone concerned with the health of the striped bass stock, the
motion immediately ran into strong opposition.
Not surprisingly, the
most strident criticism came from Maryland and New Jersey, states which had
adopted controversial and, at least in the case of Maryland, unsuccessful
alternative measures in response to Addendum IV, and were now planning to adopt
management measures that could undermine the goals of Addendum VI. Michael
Luisi, a Maryland fishery manager, managed to convince the Management Board to
postpone any action on the motion until the May Management Board meeting.
As
is often the case, the objections to holding states accountable for not meeting
Addendum VI’s target reduction were based on both the timing and the perceived
accuracy the recreational catch data provided by the Marine Recreational Information Program (MRIP).
From one perspective, the objections are justified. The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) advises that
“The more samples you draw, the more precise your estimate,” so the precision
of landings estimates provided for a single state will never be as good as the
precision of coastwide estimates.
Still,
the relative imprecision of state-level catch estimates doesn’t deter states
from using such MRIP data when they’re trying to convince the Technical
Committee and Management Board to approve alternative regulations that would
allow them to enjoy a more liberal bag limit, lower minimum size or longer
season. The percent standard error, something that NMFS says “is similar to the margin of error used
in polling,” for estimates of striped bass caught in Maryland during March and
April is 36.5. That’s far from precise. Yet that data was used to justify a
substantial component of Maryland’s 2020 striped bass regulations.
Using the same data
to hold states accountable when their alternative regulations fail to
adequately protect the striped bass stock, on the other hand, remains clearly
anathema to quite a few Management Board members.
That
seems wrong, but not as wrong as the attitudes of some Management Board
members, who seem to have little intention to rebuild the striped bass stock.
The last benchmark stock assessment found the striped bass
stock to be overfished, and because that was the case, Amendment 6 to the
Interstate Management Plan for Atlantic Striped Bass (Amendment
6) requires the Management Board to “adjust the
striped bass management program to rebuild the biomass to the target level
within [no more than 10 years].”
Despite
that clear language, the Management Board has taken no action to begin the
rebuilding process. Maryland’s Michael Luisi, at the February meeting, went so
far as to say that he would consider the Management Board’s efforts successful
if, by the time the next stock assessment comes out, the fishing mortality rate
has been reduced, and the decline in the spawning stock biomass has slowed.
He
didn’t say that the stock should be rebuilding, as Amendment 6 requires. He
didn’t even say that its decline should have stopped. To him, striped bass
management would be successful if it merely slowed the
decline of the already overfished striped bass stock by the time the next
assessment was done.
And the next benchmark
assessment won’t be released until early in 2024.
Unfortunately,
he’s not the only Management Board member who feels that way. Such attitudes
explain why the ASMFC, throughout all of its 77-year history, has never managed
to rebuild even one overfished stock, and then maintain that stock at
sustainable levels. It came close with striped bass, which the Management Board
successfully brought back to health after the stock collapsed in the late 1970s
and early 1980s, but the Management Board’s failure to follow the dictates of its own
management plan allowed the stock to become overfished once
again.
The
Management Board’s failure to adopt a clear, consistent and, most
importantly, certain approach to achieving
the needed reduction in striped bass fishing mortality at its February meeting
illustrates why the ASMFC management process is in need of real reform. While
some Management Board members are trying to bring that reform about from the
inside, they have been unable to overcome the resistance of others who feel
well-served by the status quo.
Thus, we should look
to Congress, who can compel the ASMFC to adopt management plans likely to end
overfishing, that set clear catch limits for recreational and commercial
fisheries, hold fishermen accountable when such limits are exceeded and, when
necessary, rebuild overfished stocks within a reasonable and clearly stated
time.
Unless such reforms
are put in place, expect ASMFC-managed stocks to languish, and some Management
Board members to continue to envision success as an overfished stock that is
still in decline, but not declining as quickly as it had before.
-----
This essay first
appeared in “From the Waterfront,” the blog of the Marine Fish Conservation
Network, which can be found at http://conservefish.org/blog/
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