CHESAPEAKE STRIPED BASS: FISHERY MANAGEMENT ISN'T ENOUGH

 The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission has released the preliminary agenda for its October Annual meeting.  It appears that the Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board may be preparing to release the Public Information Document for the pending Amendment 7 to ASMFC’s striped bass management plan, despite the concerns that many Management Board members expressed at the August meeting about beginning the public comment period during a time when COVID-19 remains a serious threat.

But if COVID-19 remains a threat to anglers wishing to comment on the Public Information Document, then the document itself, and the contemplated Amendment 7, also presents a threat to the striped bass resource, if it is rushed through the process by those who are more concerned with increasing short-term landings than in the long-term health of the stock.

Such improvident managers may or may not be successful; there are also a number of strong conservation advocates on the Management Board, and there is a fair chance that they might succeed in producing a more conservative Amendment 7.  

Yet the possibility of a bad amendment is not the most immediate, and probably not the most serious, threat to the future of the striped bass stock.

As most readers already know, the Chesapeake Bay is the most important spawning ground, and the most important nursery area, for the coastal migratory striped bass stock.

And the Chesapeake Bay is facing a serious threat.

I have a friend who lives down in Maryland, somewhere near Kent Narrows, who loves to fish for striped bass.  He’s a fly fisherman by choice, but isn’t averse to soiling his hands with a spinning rod if that’s what conditions call for.  He fishes all through the year, or at least through the legal season, which is not the same thing, particularly since Maryland banned catch-and-release for part of the year.

When he talks about fishing for striped bass these days, there is always a wistfulness in his voice. 

Part of that comes from the shortage of stripers.  The bass are overfished, and that shows even in the Chesapeake, where anglers get a shot at the immature fish while they’re still concentrated inside, and haven’t yet scattered themselves up and down the coast in the course of their coastal migration.

But a big part of his unease comes from the condition of the bay, where pollution carried down by the rivers has sparked hypoxic conditions, creating a big summer “dead zone” where fish cannot live, and which forces what bass remain to concentrate in places where oxygen levels and water temperatures allow them to survive—at least until the added stress of Maryland’s summer angling season becomes the coup de grace that causes too many released fish to die.

Yet while Maryland’s section of the bay is badly affected by nitrates, phosphates, and other pollutants, there’s not too much that the state can do about it.  Outside of the nitrogen runoff from Maryland poultry farms (and there’s a lot of that, estimated at 24 million pounds per year), much of the problem originates outside Maryland’s borders, from farms and municipalities in states as far away as New York.

It’s not a new problem.  

In 1983, the governors of Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, along with the mayor of Washington, D.C. and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, came together to create what is now the Chesapeake Bay Program, a cooperative, congressionally-funded effort to address pollution problems in the Chesapeake Bay.  Between 2000 and 2002, the governors of three other states in the Chesapeake watershed, New York, Delaware, and West Virginia, signed on to the program and agreed to meet its water quality goals.

In 2010, the Environmental Protection Agency established the “Chesapeake Bay Total Maximum Daily Load” for pollutants flowing in from the watershed, which has been described as

“a federal ‘pollution diet’ that sets limits on the amount of nutrients and sediment that can enter the Bay and its tidal rivers to meet water quality goals.

“Each of the seven Bay jurisdictions has completed Watershed Implementation Plan (WIP) that spells out detailed, specific steps the jurisdiction will take to meet these pollution reductions by 2025.  Federal, state and local governments coordinate through the Bay Program partnership to develop the WIPs.

“The WIPs will guide local and state Bay restoration efforts through the next decade and beyond.  The Bay jurisdictions will use their two-year milestones to track and assess progress toward completing the restoration actions in their WIPs.”

It was a big step forward.  An array of industrial interests, including representatives of the farming, real estate development, and other pollution-prone businesses, challenged the effort in 2011, but that challenge thankfully came to naught when lower courts ruled against them and the Supreme Court declined to accept their appeal.

Things looked good through early 2017, when the incoming Trump Administration sought to slash all funding for the Chesapeake Bay Program from the 2018 budget claiming, according to the Washington affiliate of NBC News, that

“the cuts will return the responsibility for funding ‘local environmental efforts’ to state and local entities, ‘allowing the EPA to focus on its highest national priorities,”

which “highest national priorities,” judging from the agency’s recent actions, presumably included weakening the Clean Water Act, increasing mercury releases from industrial smokestacks, and allowing an open-pit mine to threaten the salmon runs in Alaska’s Bristol Bay.

Fortunately, Congress—including the Republican-controlled Senate—likes polluters and their effluent far less than Trump does, and has continued to fund the Chesapeake Bay Program.  Just last Wednesday, the Senate passed a bill that included $92 million in annual funding for the Program in every year through 2025; House passage of the bill is very likely.

$92 million to clean up the Chesapeake will go a lot farther than the mere $7.3 million—less than 10 percent of its typical annual funding—that the Trump Administration planned to provide the Program in its 2021 budget.

But money, in itself, still isn’t enough.  States must take that money and spend it in ways that assure that they will meet their Watershed Implementation Plan goals, and keep the Chesapeake Bay on its “pollution diet.”

Right now, that just isn’t happening.   Some states aren’t doing their share, and the Environmental Protection Agency isn’t holding them to their agreement.

It appears that the Environmental Protection Agency approved Pennsylvania’s implementation plan last year, even though it is likely to achieve only 73 percent of the 31 million pound nitrogen reduction that the state had previously committed to (in the runup to this year’s election, it’s impossible not to note that Pennsylvania is a must-win state for Trump, that a lot of the state’s nitrogen runoff can be attributed to manure and other pollutants associated with the state’s dairy farms, and that manure country is usually Trump country, so the agency’s lax approval standards were probably understandable).

New York fell short of its nitrogen reduction commitments by over 1 million pounds per year, and apparently has no plans to find funding to correct that shortfall; excess nitrogen from New York’s farms and stormwater runoff is likely to keep finding its way to the headwaters of the Susquehanna River, and thus into the Chesapeake Bay.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s failure to properly discharge its responsibilities, and enforce state obligations with respect to the Chesapeake’s pollution load, has bought it at least one lawsuit, and at least one more is likely on the way.  On September 10, the Maryland Watermen’s Association, a commercial fishing group, and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation initiated legal action intended to compel the agency to enforce the pollution standards that it had established ten years ago.

Maryland’s Anne Arundel County, some elected officials, and two Virginia livestock farmers have signed on as additional plaintiffs to the suit.

The attorneys general for the states of Maryland, Virginia, and Delaware, and also for the District of Columbia, did not join the Watermen’s suit, but instead are filing their own, similar action against the EPA.

Those lawsuits—if not the situation which spawned them—are good news for striped bass, as they probably represent the best chance to clean up the Chesapeake Bay, at least while the Trump Administration, and the Trump EPA, remain in Washington.

It seems unnecessary to observe that as fish, striped bass live in water.  But it’s probably necessary to remember that any water is not good enough.  W water must contain enough oxygen, be of the right temperature, and support enough prey, if the striped bass is to thrive.

There are already indications that the nitrogen loading in Chesapeake Bay could be having an impact on the bass that goes beyond just hypoxia.  The last benchmark stock assessment suggests that it could be making the fish more vulnerable to disease, in particular Mycobacteriosis.  That assessment observes that

“A rise in Mycobacterium disease in the Chesapeake Bay could be causing increases in natural mortality.  Two primary hypotheses have emerged regarding the mechanism for increased natural mortality.  One is that elevated nutrient inputs to the Chesapeake Bay, with associated eutrophication, results in the loss of thermal refugia for striped bass, forcing them into suboptimal and stressful habitat during the summer…  [citations omitted]”

 Mycobacteriosis is particularly common in younger striped bass, with its prevalence increasing steadily until the fish reach five years of age; after that, the percentage of infected fish declines, likely because the older fish begin to die from the infection.

Add the impacts of the disease to the impacts of hypoxia on the younger year classes of bass, as well as on their prey, and the likely effects of the EPA’s failure to enforce total daily load requirements on the upstream states becomes all too apparent.

Thus, while we all need to worry about how the ASMFC will treat the striped bass in the upcoming Amendment 7, we need to worry about water quality in the Chesapeake Bay as well.

Because if Environmental Protection Agency inaction, and increasing nutrient load in the Chesapeake Bay renders that water body less and less suitable to produce and host strong year classes of immature fish, all of the amendments that the ASMFC might produce won’t be enough to restore the stock to good health.