ASMFC WORK GROUP REPORT BODES ILL FOR STRIPED BASS

At the August 2019 meeting of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board, a motion was put on the table to initiate a new amendment to the ASMFC’s striped bass management plan.

The vote on that motion has been postponed several times, for various reasons, but is expected to occur when the Management Board meets on August 4.

In order to facilitate the amendment process—because it is a foregone conclusion that the motion will receive broad support—the Management Board assembled a Work Group of its members to decide on topics to be addressed in the new amendment.

Thus, I was eager to see what sort of recommendations the Work Group would come up with, because whatever the proposed new amendment looks like, it will probably govern how striped bass are managed for the rest of my angling life, and very possibly the rest of my actual life as well.

The Work Group report has now been released and, unfortunately, if some of its recommendations become part of the new amendment, what remains of a viable striped bass fishery probably won't last much longer than I do.

What became very clear as I reads the Work Group report is that fisheries managers still don’t comprehend the nature of the striped bass fishery.

A primarily recreational fishery, that sees most anglers fishing for pure recreation and not for meat, is a fishery that ought to be managed to maximize an abundance of fish in the water, and not a pile of dead fish on the dock.  Yet the Management Board remains focused on yield; abundance does not appear to be a major concern.

The Work Group’s biases, and its blindness to the realities of the recreational striped bass fishery, are evidenced throughout the report.

“In the post moratorium era (ending 1990), the management of Atlantic striped bass has largely been a story of success."

Success?

Really?

Has anyone noticed that the last benchmarks stock assessment found that the stock was both overfished and subject to overfishing?

If that’s anyone’s definition of success, I hope those folks aren’t in the military, or surgeons, or managing anyone’s money, because that sort of “success” could leave a lot of people either dead broke or just plain dead.

It didn’t do the bass very much good, either.

If you actually look at the last three decades of striped bass management, it’s hard to call anything that the Management Board did a “success,” largely because the Management Board hardly did anything at all.

The Management Board’s real success came during the late 1980s, after it adopted Amendment 3 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Striped Bass.

After that amendment lead to a rebuilt stock in 1995, the Management Board more or less got lucky, with favorable environmental conditions leading to very strong year classes in 1993, 1996, 2001 and 2003.  It could sit on its hands and bask in the glow of a healthy stock for more than a decade.

But when recruitment began to decline after 2004, the Management Board kept sitting on its hands, even as the female spawning stock biomass began to decline as well. 

It called a stock on its way to becoming overfished "a green light fishery."

When the 2012 stock assessment indicated that the stock wasn't in a good place, and that more restrictive measures were needed, the Management Board made a modest effort to reduce fishing mortality, but failed to adopt a 10-year rebuilding plan, even though Amendment 6 to the management plan required it to do

After the most recent benchmark stock assessment found the stock to be both overfished and subject to overfishing, that scenario replayed itself once again.

If that’s considered “a story of success” at the ASMFC, it’s easy to understand why they haven’t managed to rebuild, and then maintain, a single fish stock under their care in the past 75-plus years.

And things in the Work Group report went downhill from there.

It turns out that the Work Group is somewhat obsessed with what it called “management stability;” that is, putting regulations in place and then not changing them for an extended period of time.

“The [Work Group] noted that management stability should be thought of as a two-way street where management stays the same in good and bad years (i.e., avoid knee-jerk reactions if fishing mortality (F) goes above or below target for 1 year).”

Since Management Trigger 3 in Amendment 6 already requires at least two years of F above target, along with a below-target biomass, before action is taken, the point of that statement isn’t completely clear.

“There was strong support from [Work Group] members to revisit the management triggers.

I have to admit that when I read that one, I almost fell off the couch.

“The triggers require constant change?”

That’s a total break from reality.

And the Management Board ignored triggers 2 and 4 anyway...

Two management changes over the course of 17 years hardly constitutes “constant change.”

Perhaps just one management trigger that suggests “flexible” action once the stock has completely collapsed?

Yet that aversion to regulatory change—the same aversion that led us to an overfished stock today—colors the Work Group’s approach to matters as critical as rebuilding the striped bass stock.

“The [Work Group] began its discussion with a question regarding the evaluation of management success:

Uncertainty is no stranger to the fishery management process; every management body, state, regional, or federal, deals with uncertainty every day.

But if you’re dedicated to “management stability,” and basically want to sit on your hands for a decade or so, regardless of what’s happening to the stock, then go out for a few beers after the Management Board meeting and toast to your great “success,” that’s probably not an attractive option.

The basic problem is, at it so often is at the ASMFC, that the Work Group places more emphasis on how their actions impact people than they do on how they impact the fish that the ASMFC is entrusted to manage.

That comes through in comments like

“the new [Marine Recreational Information Program] numbers changed the Commission’s understanding of stock status, and given the shift in magnitude of removals, the degree of required action and its effects on stakeholders should be considered carefully.”

It would make more sense for a fisheries manager to be primarily concerned on the effects of

The Work Group also apparently believes that

“a potential goal of the Striped Bass [fishery management plan] should be to improve relationships between the various groups, whether that be between the commercial or recreational sectors or between the coastal states and the Chesapeake Bay region.”

How about just rebuilding the stock to true abundance?

But that’s the sort of insight that has apparently not yet taken hold among striped bass managers.

I’m trying to keep this essay from going to long, and strongly suggest that you read the entire Work Group report for yourself; you can find it at http://www.asmfc.org/files/Meetings/2020SummerMeeting/AtlanticStripedBassBoardSupplemental.pdf

But before I close, I have to note that no better proof of the Work Group being almost completely disconnected from the realities of the recreational, surf and private boat, catch and release fishery that is responsible for at least 80% of all striped bass fishing mortality than its approach to release mortality, something that the Work Group named the number one priority for any new amendment.

“Multiple members of the [Work Group] indicated that recreational dead discards may be the single most important issue at this time, and addressing (or reducing discards) is the most important action that can be taken going forward.

But why?

Could you imagine, with respect to another fishery, a manager saying “Recreational landings [and/or commercial landings] accounted for 80% of the fishing mortality, and there is a critical need to address this issue?”

I couldn’t.

What the members of the Work Group, and of the Management Board, can’t seem to get their mind around is that, in a primarily catch and release fishery, much if not most of the fishing mortality is going to come from release mortality, because people aren’t taking many fish home.

And it doesn’t matter, so long as overall fishing mortality remains within sustainable parameters.  

Yes, we should try to do all we can to assure that a released fish will survive.

But to the fish themselves, dead is dead.

Consider the recreational fishery for an essentially inedible (at least for most people) species such as tarpon or bonefish. managers see nothing wrong with that.is

But because the Management Board, and for that matter, most saltwater fisheries managers, are laser-focused on harvest, the idea of accepting the discard mortality that necessarily accompanies catch and release is very, very foreign.

That’s a mindset that isn’t going to change any time soon, and it is symptomatic of the biggest problem that conservation-minded anglers are going to have going into the Amendment 7 debate:

The Working Group report tells us that.

It also tells us that nothing is likely to change at the ASMFC, at least not from the inside.  If we want fish-focused management for striped bass and other species, we’re going to have to convince Congress to make that happen.

Otherwise, it will be business as usual, lots of sitting on hands, and calling an overfished stock a success.

The fight over Amendment 6 was tough and years-long, and we were happy to come out with a draw.

Judging from the Work Group report, the fight over any new amendment will be worse.

Because it looks like the bass is going to need all the help it can get to come out intact from this one.