SHOOTING IN THE DARK: MARINE RECREATIONAL FISHING REGULATIONS FOR 2021

 

A few days ago, the National Marine Fisheries Service, following the advice of the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council, released proposed specifications for the 2021 Atlantic bluefish fishery.  If such specifications are ultimately approved, and there is little reason to believe that they won’t be, the recreational annual catch target will remain the same as it was this year—13.51 million pounds—although a roughly 25 percent increase in the estimate of dead discards will reduce the recreational harvest limit from 9.48 to 8.34 million pounds, about a 12 percent cut.

The Mid-Atlantic Council made those recommendations in August, but decided to postpone any decisions on recreational management measures until its December meeting, when more data from 2020 recreational bluefish landings would presumably be available.  Management measures for three other recreationally important species, summer flounder, scup, and black sea bass, will be set at the same time.

But even then, things are going to get tricky because, due to various legal and practical constraints related to COVID-19, whatever 2020 data might become available will be significantly less, and significantly less precise, than in more typical years.  TheCouncil’s Bluefish Monitoring Committee has acknowledged that it

“is concerned with the [Marine Recreational Information Program] landing and effort estimates for 2020 as a result of the COVID pandemic.”

The Monitoring Committee advised that it

“will review the 2020 projections in November, but may also consider other approaches to develop [expected recreational landings estimates] that have not yet been discussed.”

That makes sense.  There is going to be a lot of uncertainty in the management process this year.

What makes less sense is the Monitoring Committee’s—and ultimately NMFS’ and the Council’s—decision not to include such uncertainty in their calculations of the recreational harvest limit. 

Remember that bluefish are currently overfished, and that the Council, in collaboration with the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, is in the process of drafting a rebuilding plan, which must be implemented about one year from now—as a practical matter, in time for the 2022 season.  When managing an overfished stock, prior to implementation of a rebuilding plan, it would only make sense for fisheries managers to proceed with caution, and resolve any ambiguities in favor of the resource. 

If there is substantial management uncertainty, it would seem to make sense to set a recreational harvest target somewhat below the recreational harvest limit, to account for at least some of that uncertainty, and better ensure that anglers don’t overfish.

But in the case of bluefish, that’s just not happening.  The Monitoring Committee addressed the issue ahead of the August Mid-Atlantic Council meeting, saying

“in the Fishery Management Plan, management uncertainty is accounted for prior to the sector specific annual catch target (ACT), which means management uncertainty will affect both the resulting recreational harvest limit (RHL) and commercial quota (CQ), even if management uncertainty exists in only one of the two sectors.  The [Monitoring Committee] recognizes that this may be a concern moving forward since reductions for management uncertainty for only one sector is not feasible…

“Within both sectors of the bluefish fishery, the 2017-2020 fishing years contain significant fluctuations in fishery performance.  The 2018 fishing year had the lowest bluefish landings in recent history.  The 2019 fishing year warranted major reductions in the bluefish bag limits for the recreational sector and reductions in bluefish quota as bluefish was deemed overfished.  The 2020 fishing year has been heavily disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic and may result in unreliable catch and landings estimates…”

Those comments suggest that the Monitoring Committee believes that there is substantial management uncertainty going into 2021.  Thus, it’s difficult to understand why, after making that statement, it followed up by saying

“Thus, the [Monitoring Committee] recommends no reductions be taken for management uncertainty (status quo) until sector specific management uncertainty is reviewed, we develop a better grasp of commercial and recreational discards, and review the results of the next research track assessment.”

 It almost seems a non sequitur.  The Monitoring Committee previously admitted that the scope of the commercial, and particularly the recreational, discards are unknown.  It lacks precise data on recreational catch and effort in this COVID year.  Fishery performance is demonstrating significant annual fluctuations.  Those are the sort of considerations that call out for a management uncertainty buffer.

After all, once managers get “a better grasp of commercial and recreational discards,” for example, the level of management uncertainty will be less than it is now, and would reduce the need for such a buffer.

Although it’s never explicitly stated, the Monitoring Committee’s reluctance to include a buffer for management uncertainty probably results from the fact that the far greater share of the uncertainty is on the recreational side, but that any uncertainty-related reduction would be shared by the commercial and recreational sectors.  With the commercial sector already taking a big hit from both the quota reduction and the end of transfers of fish from the recreational to the commercial allocation, the Monitoring Committee may well have felt that commercial fishermen shouldn’t be made to suffer for the ambiguities in the recreational data.

The problem is that the overfished bluefish stock shouldn’t be forced to suffer for such ambiguities, either.

And the truth is that the Mid-Atlantic Council, like most regional fishery management councils, has been very reluctant to adopt management uncertainty buffers, even in fisheries such as black sea bass, where managers have a very difficult time constraining recreational harvest to the annual harvest limit.  In the Gulf of Mexico, where anglers have chronically overfished their red snapper quota, the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council only imposed such a buffer after being ordered to do so by a federal court.

Now, given the uncertainties—of both the scientific and management sort—associated with the 2020 season, there is a real need for fisheries managers to embrace the management uncertainty buffer.

With the Northeast Fisheries Science Center’s usual trawl surveys halted in response to COVID-19, and many state surveys also scaled down, halted, or delayed, managers don’t have a good idea of the current health of fish stocks, the trajectory of such stocks, or what 2019 recruitment looked like.  Thus, while managers might have some feel for what stock condition’s should be, they don’t know what fish abundance actually is, and they don’t have good data on the number of new fish being recruited into the population.

At the same time, managers lack some important data on how many fish anglers took out of the system this year.  While MRIP sampling in Rhode Island was never interrupted, on the rest of the East Coast, there was little sampling done in March or April; sampling in Wave 3 (May/June) and Wave 4 (July/August) was limited, and not expected to get too much better during the remainder of the year.  Dr. Richard Cody, the Chief of the Fisheries Statistics Division at NMFS’ Office of Science and Technology, characterized MRIP’s spatial and temporal coverage throughout 2020 as “spotty.”

NMFS has stated that

“Given the extent of these data gaps and the expectation that COVID-19 will continue to impact sampling over the course of the year, the agency will not publish preliminary catch estimates for March-December 2020.  Instead, we will review the catch data our partners are able to collect in 2020 as a whole before selecting an estimation approach and publishing final catch estimates in April 2021, in accordance with our standard publication schedule.

“This unforeseen challenge to recreational fishing data collection and the production of catch estimates is being evaluated by fisheries managers to determine the best way to address in-season Accountability Measures and/or determine appropriate management measures for 2021.”

The lack of reasonably precise catch data is particularly troubling given anecdotal reports that, because they either weren’t working or were working from home, more people went fishing this year than fished in the recent past.  That was certainly true where I fish, on the South Shore of New York’s Long Island; opening day of New York’s fluke (summer flounder) season saw Great South Bay’s channels clogged with boats, although fish were few and far between, and there were certainly far more boats than usual fishing offshore wrecks on the first day of the black sea bass season.  The beaches were even more crowded, as people who didn’t own boats flocked to the shore, day and night, to pursue striped bass and other species.

It’s reasonable to believe that such increased angling effort led to higher recreational landings, but without good MRIP data, we just don’t know.  There is a lot of management uncertainty.  So much so, that in a very real sense, managers are really just shooting in the dark when they try to estimate what the recreational catch might be.

Thus, it would only be wise for the regional fishery management councils, NMFS, and the ASMFC to take such uncertainty into account when they set recreational management measures for 2021.

Yes, there’s a chance that, if they do so, management measures might be a bit more restrictive than they need to be, and so leave a few extra fish in the water.

But leaving too many fish in the water is still better than taking too many out, particularly when dealing with bluefish, and other overfished stocks.

For the first rule of shooting in the dark is making sure that you’re not killing off the very thing that you’re trying to preserve.