SOME ASMFC COMMISSIONERS URGE ACTIONS WITHOUT UNDERSTANDING CONSEQUENCES

It’s said that “the road to Hell is paved with good intentions,” and we saw the truth of that saying play out in suggestions made at this month’s meeting of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission.

There’s no question that COVID-19 has impacted both recreational and commercial fisheries, and both the recreational and commercial fishing industries.  

On the recreational side, the most obvious impact has been many states’ decision to limit their for-hire fisheries’ ability to operate.  Such limitations have ranged from complete shutdowns in some states, including New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts, to restrictions on the numbers of passengers a for-hire vessel may carry in Maryland, to limiting such vessels’ clientele to state residents in Rhode Island and Maine.

As a result of that, some ASMFC commissioners apparently suggested that regulations should be changed to allow anglers and the angling industry to make up for lost time once COVID-19 restrictions are eased.  

The ASMFC’s 2020 Spring Meeting Webinar Summary notes that, at the Tautog Management Board meeting,

“Following the Board vote and other business, a number of Board members expressed concern about the overall impacts the current COVID-19 pandemic poses to recreational fisheries in general and the tautog fishery in particular, both for the for-hire industry as well as private anglers.  Moving forward, the Commission’s Executive Committee will initiate a discussion on how to provide guidance for considering changes to 2020 recreational measures to accommodate the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic.”

The meeting summary reports that a similar discussion occurred at the meeting of the Summer Flounder, Scup and Black Sea Bass Management Board.

It’s easy to understand why various management board members were concerned with the problems COVID-19 posed for the angling industry, and it is only natural that people were sympathetic to industry members’ plight, and wanted to do something to help ease their burdens.

However, effective fisheries regulations can’t be constructed out of sympathy and good intentions.  In order to adopt meaningful fisheries regulations, the first thing that folks need is good data, and that’s the very thing that COVID-`19 has taken away from fisheries managers.

Because of the risks posed by people associating to closely, most states are not conducting the angler intercepts and in-person interviews needed to estimate recreational landings.  The fisheries-independent state surveys used to determine the health of stocks such as tautog, summer flounder, scup and black sea bass have also been either cancelled or delayed by the states, while the Northeast Fisheries Science Center cancelled the spring trawl survey that is critical to understanding trends in the abundance of summer flounder, scup, black sea bass and other species, and to determine whether such stocks had adequate recruitment of young fish last year, and will be able to maintain their abundance under current regulations.

Faced with such unknowns, changing current 2020 regulations in order to “accommodate the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic” would be a very big shot in the dark, that could cause harm to the long-term health of fish populations.  If fish populations are already under stress, and recreational landings are higher than expected--and managers currently lack the data to determine whether either of those things might be true--good intentions could easily lead to a bad result.

The underlying assumption of those urging some sort of COVID-19 "acommodation" is, of course, that recreational  landings are down due to COVID-19.  That assumption could be very wrong. 

While COVID-19 might be keeping much of the for-hire fleet off the water, it could result in more fishing trips being made by those who are either working from home or have become unemployed.  And with talks of pending meat shortages, and increasing prices for groceries, making people nervous, it is also very possible that those who are going fishing are keeping more fish than they normally would.

New York charter boat captain John McMurray, who in more normal times operates vessels out of a port on western Long Island, commented in a recent blog published on fissues.org that

“Anyone who thinks there will be a huge reduction in [recreational striped bass fishing] effort due to the coronavirus hasn’t seen the crowds in Raritan Bay [which sits between New York and New Jersey].  More people working from home/out of work could actually result in an increase in effort.”

My own observations in New York’s Great South Bay would support Capt. McMurray’s concerns.  

Like a lot of other local fishermen, I was out on the water on Monday, May 4, to catch the beginning of New York’s recreational summer flounder season.  There were as many boats out on the water as I’d typically see on a May weekend; even after a lack of fish caused the fleet to thin out, there were more than twenty boats, carrying at least fifty anglers, in just a half-mile stretch of the State Boat Channel, with perhaps a dozen of those boats mobbed up within a few hundred yards of the State Channel’s intersection with the Babylon Cut.

That’s nowhere close to normal for a Monday morning in early May, when children are normally in school, people’s summer vacations are yet to begin, and far more fishermen are in their offices than in their boats.  

Perhaps the crowds on May 4^th could be ascribed to a desire to participate in the fluke season opener, but I was out again today, looking for weakfish, and the number of boats that were out and about before the sun even crawled over the horizon was about what I’d expect on a Saturday, not on a Thrusday.  As I headed home, I passed through a dozen or so boats fishing the same few hundred yards of State Channel that was filled with anglers on May 4^th, even though by now the season has been open for a week and a half, and everyone is very aware that summer flounder remain few and far between.

So there is reason to suspect that COVID-19 could very well be increasing angler effort, and effort is a major driver of recreational landings.

If effort is really increasing, and the ASMFC agrees to allow states to extend fishing seasons or otherwise liberalize regulations because of COVID-19, without having enough data on hand to assure that such liberalization won’t damage fish stocks, overfishing could easily occur.

Thus, it’s particularly troubling that this discussion occurred at the Tautog Management Board meeting, as tautog in the New YorkBight, where they are targeted by anglers from both New York and New Jersey,are already overfished, and extending the season there could cause harm to the stock and delay its recovery.

The ASMFC should also recall that, last fall, the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council opted to let 2019 regulations for black sea bass continue unchanged for this season, even though the best available information suggested that such regulations would cause the acceptable biological catch for black sea bass to be exceeded by a substantial amount.

If 2020 effort exceeds that of 2018 and 2019, and the ASMFC extended the black sea bass season in 2020 as a result of COVID-19, landings could exceed the overfishing limit as well.

Thus, this is another situation where managers, in the face of uncertain data, are well advised to take a cautious management approach that is calculated to do no harm to fish stocks.

Extending fishing seasons or otherwise liberalizing regulations in the face of COVID-19 might seem, to some, like a reasonable thing to do.

But it’s never reasonable to do anything when you lack enough data to fully understand what the consequences of such action might be.