FISHERIES MANAGEMENT: FIRST, PREVENT HARM

We spend a lot of time talking about rebuilding overfished stocks, improving the management of forage species, moving to ecosystem-based management models and otherwise trying to improve the health of marine fish stocks, and probably spend too little time doing what, in the end, is the easiest thing of all:  preventing stocks from being harmed in the first place.

Granted, that’s not always easy to do.  No one predicted that, in 2013, the so-called “blob” of warm, nutrient-poor water would move into the North Pacific, stick around for three years, and cause substantial harm to the region’s fish stocks.

  

The original blob caused Pacific cod numbers to drop by about 70 percent, most likely because its warmer waters deprived them of the food they need to survive.  Tens of thousands of sea birds starved to death.  Most of the whales, which normally spend their summers in northern waters to feed on their rich troves of plankton, krill, and small fish, sojourned elsewhere; of those that did return to the seas off Alaska, many died.  Now, scientists warn that more such blobs may form in the future, but there is nothing they can do to prevent that from occurring, and little they can do to offset the damage that will cause.

Other things are much more easily controlled.

Consider striped bass.  I write about them quite a bit, both because they are an iconic sportfish of the East Coast and because they serve as an example of what occurs when fishery managers repeatedly make bad decisions.

The fact that striped bass are currently overfished didn’t come as a surprise to most striped bass anglers, at least if they had any long-term experience in the fishery.  

We could see that crash coming for a decade or more, in part because fishermen, as a whole, were killing too many bass, and in part because the Maryland juvenile striped bass index, which has proven to be the best single indicator of striped bass abundance, was consistently below or barely above the long-term average from 2004 through 2010, often returning young-of-the-year numbers as low as those that occurred during the crash of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Managers on the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Striped Bass Management Board certainly knew about the sub-par striped bass recruitment, and they were probably very aware of the declining abundance too, as many of those who sit on the Striped Bass Management Board are active fishermen themselves, and the few who aren’t would have been hearing about it from their state’s anglers.  

But management board members are supposed to base their actions on the best available science, and a 2009 stock assessment indicated that overfishing was not occurring, the female spawning stock biomass was 50 percent above the target level, and that the biomass should remain stable in the immediate future.  So they could be excused for thinking that, despite some bad news, there was no reason to y action to maintain the health of the stock.

That all changed in 2011, when a stock assessment update sounded a very different note, saying that while the stock was then neither overfished nor subject to overfishing,

“Projections of ages 3-8 abundance, ages 3-8 exploitable biomass, ages 8+ abundance, ages 8+ exploitable biomass, female spawning stock biomass, and landings from 2011 to 2017 were made for various levels of fishing mortality under low (average 2005-2010 age-1 abundance) and average recruitment (average 1989-2008 age-1 abundance) and 2010 selectivity at age…Abundance and exploitable biomass of ages 8+ are expected to decline regardless of the recruitment scenario.  Female [spawning stock biomass] will fall slightly below the threshold by 2017 under both recruitment scenarios…  [emphasis added]”

And there it was.  The best available science now informed the Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board that the stock was not only declining, but would be overfished by 2017.  By any reasonable management standard, that warning was a call for action to halt the decline, and so improve the health of the stock before it became overfished.

Because it was clear that if management continued on its current course, it would do harm to the striped bass stock.

For a brief while, it appeared that the Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board was going to do its job, and intervene before harm occurred.  At its February 2011 meeting, the Management Board instructed the Striped Bass Plan Development Team

“to begin drafting an addendum to Amendment 6 aimed at reducing striped bass fishing mortality up to 40 percent; and further, protect the spawning stock when it is concentrated and vulnerable…”

It the management board had carried through on that action, it’s very possible that we wouldn’t be worrying about how to rebuild the striped bass today.  Unfortunately, at its November 2011 meeting, the management board decided that acting proactively to prevent harm to the stock, rather than reacting after the stock been hurt, constituted “overmanaging.”

Management board members maintained that, despite biologists’ warnings that the striped bass stock was on the road to becoming overfished, striped bass still should be considered a “green light fishery” and prosecuted at the same levels that were contributing to its demise.

Tom Fote, the Governor’s Appointee from New Jersey, made perhaps the most vehement arguments against proactive conservation measures, saying

“You know, I think a solution to this problem is to release the restraints on summer flounder, scup and black sea bass and stop treating them as overfished stocks when they’re not overfished, except I guess now according to a now revised stock assessment…but that is more of what will happen because as soon as you allow people to go fish for the stocks they really want to take home to eat and get off striped bass, you’re going to release a lot of that pressure on the bigger fish because they’re available there, so you reduce the mortality in the first place.  [sic]

“Also if I’m asking for a relax on regulations like that, and striped bass is in a better situation than those species, how can I be a hypocrite and go out to my public in New Jersey and basically say, oh, by the way, we’ve been doing so great with striped bass and there really is no—we haven’t hit any of the triggers and now I’m going to reduce your catch by 40 percent…  [emphasis added]”

So we had Management Board member arguing that he thinks regulations should be relaxed on summer flounder, scup and black sea bass, because the only people who think that those stocks are overfished are the scientists who conduct the stock assessments, and since he’s willing to relax regulations on those more troubled species, he’d be a hypocrite if he supported increased regulations on striped bass, because even though the scientists warned that they’d be overfished within six years, they weren’t overfished yet.  (The fact that he could have supported effective conservation measures for both summer flounder, scup, and black sea bass and striped bass, and so set any hypocracy concerns aside, apparently never even came up on his radar.)

The saddest part about the whole thing is that, although most management board members didn’t sink to that level of absurdity, they did agree with the basic message that it was premature to take action to prevent overfishing of a stock that wasn’t in trouble yet, and the effort to draft an addendum was shelved.

Eight years later, with a benchmark stock assessment confirming that the striped bass stock has indeed become overfished and is also experiencing overfishing, the Management Board again took no concrete action to rebuild the stock, even though the management plan that such board adopted in 2003 says it “must” do so.

It appears that the “triggers” that Fote referred to in 2011 were finally hit, but resulted in only a misfire.  

Now, because of its chronic inaction, the management board finds itself in a hole, with the stock overfished, but hasn’t yet even tried to find the shovel it needs to dig itself out.

And we are facing other issues that impact our fisheries, where the wrong decision could cause harm to fish stocks, not the least of which relate to COVID-19.

Restrictions put in place to slow the spread of the virus have closed restaurants where most seafood is sold, imposed new work rules on commercial fisheries, and left many party and charter boats tied up on the dock.  There is no question that the economic impacts of such actions have been severe.

Some, including the Jersey Coast Anglers Association, have suggested that easing restrictions on fishing might help alleviate some of the economic pain.  It’s probably no coincidence that Fote advocates that fisheries managers should take that course in the Association’s May 2020 newsletter.

He admits that

“The [Atlantic States Marine Fisheries] Commission and the [regional fishery management] Councils are going to have a hard time with stock assessments because of the cancellation of observer coverage and the cancellation of many independent fisheries surveys.  There will also be a cancellation of [Marine Recreational Information Program angler] intercepts for the recreational sector.  We don’t know when any of these will be resumed but this will be a poor data year.”

So what does JCAA/Fote propose to do in the face of such dearth of data critical to the management process?

“Since we are planning for 2021, we should just go for status quo in 2021 and begin planning for 2022…The regulations currently in place will be more than enough to protect the stocks until we can resolve the data collection process.  We should actually consider relaxing some regulations as a part of a stimulus package for the recreational and commercial industry when the status won’t hurt the stocks.  The current regulations are so restrictive that there is room for some flexibility.  As an ASMFC Commissioner and a [Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council] member, I am looking forward to working with the Councils to make this happen.  [emphasis added]” 

So we now have the same person who urged the Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board to ignore biologists’ warning that the striped bass stock would become overfished—which it subsequently did—now wants the ASMFC and the federal fishery management councils to relax science-based regulations, and assures us that it will be fine.

To a rational person, that would seem akin to running a boat down a narrow, twisting channel at full speed in pea-soup fog, with all the electronics shut off, with full confidence that everything will turn out OK, and you won’t end up running aground and taking on water after your rudders and struts are ripped off by a sandbar.

And just as we know that there are a surfeit of sandbars in our coastal bays, we already know that, contrary to Fote’s assertions, there are a number of reasons why current regulations could cause harm to fish stocks if carried over into 2021.

Bluefish provide a case in point.  The stock has been declared overfished, and a rebuilding plan is being drafted.  In the meantime, 2020 regulations were based on the assumption that this year’s landings would be the same as landings in 2018.  Yet 2018 landings were the lowest on record in a time series going back to 1985, and 2019 landings were substantially higher; by October 31, 2019, with two months of the season yet to go, anglers already landed about 2.5 million more pounds of bluefish than they did in all of 2018.  Thus, regulations based on 2018 landings are very likely to lead to overfishing in 2020, which would require both revised regulations, and payback of the overage, in 2021. 

In that scenario, status quo bluefish regulations in 2021 could only do more harm to an already overfished stock, and make rebuilding more difficult.  It would be, in short, a very bad idea—much like maintaining status quo regulations for striped bass was a very bad idea in 2011, and led to a very bad result.

Black sea bass are in a different, but also fraught, situation.  

While black sea bass abundance is still very high due to an unprecedentedly large 2011 year class, it has been steadily declining, and is expected to fall from about 240 percent of target biomass in 2018 to about 160 percent of target in 2021.  The 2017 year class, which when assessed as Year 1 fish in 2018 represented the lowest recruitment level in the entire time series, will enter the fishery this year and become a more important contributor in 2021, when most such fish reach the 15-inch minimum size in place between New York and Massachusetts.  Data released in the second half of 2019 revealed that recreational landings were well above the recreational harvest limit; nonetheless, the Mid-Atlantic Council decided to carry 2019 management measures over into this year, even though such measures will result in the recreational harvest limit to be exceeded by 26 percent, the recreational catch limit to be exceeded by 23 percent, and the acceptable biological catch to be exceeded by 12 percent in 2020.

Maintaining status quo regulations again in 2021, as biomass continues to decline, could well result not just in exceeding the acceptable biological catch, which is bad enough, but in exceeding the overfishing limit as well.

While people could argue that the black sea bass biomass is still well over target, and a year or two of overfishing won’t do real harm, we should always remember that the striped bass biomass was in supposedly good shape in 2011, when status quo rules were maintained, and we all know how that has turned out.

Actions have consequences, and the first obligation of fishery managers ought to be to cause no harm to the stocks under their care.

But we should recognize that inaction has consequences too, and that maintaining the status quo can be far from benign, for doing nothing when action is called for can also hurt fish stocks.

Fishery managers have a moral and, on the federal level, a legal obligation to conserve and manage fish stocks for sustainability in the long term.

Not doing anything to harm those fish stocks is the first step toward meeting that goal