MID-ATLANTIC RECREATIONAL FISHERIES--IS STATUS QUO THE WAY TO GO?

 The Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council is meeting next week; as part of that meeting, on the afternoon of Tuesday, December 15, it will hold joint meetings with the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Summer Flounder, Scup, and Black Sea Bass and Bluefish management boards, to finalize recreational management measures for 2021 season.

I wish them good luck, because they’re going to need it.  As a result of COVID-19, both the Council and the ASMFC management boards are largely flying blind, lacking the data they need to make informed decisions.  The pandemic disrupted the usual pattern of waterside intercepts—the in-person surveys of anglers used to determine what kind of and how many fish they encountered and might have brought home; what little data exists on that topic won’t be released until early next year.  It also disrupted the fishery-independent surveys, conducted at the state and federal level, used to determine the health of fish stocks.

So fishery managers are going to have to make their decisions without having any current information on the health of the fish stocks they’re managing, or how many fish anglers removed from those stocks during the 2020 season.

About the only thing that they’ll know with a reasonable amount of certainty is that angler effort in 2020 was roughly the same as it was in 2019 (because the effort survey is conducted by mail, and not in person, COVID-19 didn’t materially impact its operation), meaning that they can assume that if fish availability was generally the same as it was in 2019, if the size distribution of those fish were the same in both years, if anglers maintained the same harvest to release ratio in both 2020 and 2019, if anglers targeted the same species to the same extent in both years, and if regional and seasonal effort patterns were the same this year as they were in the year before, landings levels in 2020 should approximate those in the previous season.

Unfortunately, managers don’t know any of those things for sure, so if you’ve ever run a bad inlet at night, in the fog, with all of your electronics down and only a wavering compass needle to guide you, you were roughly in the same place as Mid-Atlantic managers will be at next Tuesday’s meetings.

Because of such uncertainty, both Mid-Atlantic Council staff and the various species monitoring committees have recommended that recreational management measures for summer flounder, scup, black sea bass and bluefish remain unchanged in 2021.

The question is, does that recommendation make sense, or does greater uncertainty call for a higher level of precaution?

The answer to that question may take different forms, depending on how one values regulatory consistency, fears adopting restrictions that ultimately prove unneeded, or prioritizes the wants of the recreational industry versus the needs of fish stocks.

It also depends on which particular fishery one is talking about, for all are at different levels of abundance, and experience different levels of fishing pressure.  Scup and black sea bass, for example, are at very high levels of abundance, bluefish are overfished, and summer flounder is currently hovering somewhere between its target abundance level and the threshold that defines an overfished stock. 

In addition, none of the four species have enjoyed strong recruitment over the past few years, meaning that maintaining a constant level of harvest could be setting the stage for problems a few years down the road, if more young fish don’t enter the fishery to replace the older fish that are removed.  

It’s possible that recruitment has recently gotten better—but in the absence of fishery-independent surveys that would have detected such new recruits, managers just don’t know.

Add to that the legal requirement that fishery management measures must have at least a 50 percent probability of preventing overfishing, and the managers’ task just gets that much harder.

Thus, it’s probably not surprising that status quo became the default alternative.

Whether it was the right alternative is a difficult thing to gauge.

Summer flounder might present the best-case scenario.  As a staff memo, dated November 3, 2020 notes,

“The lack of 2020 harvest information makes it difficult to assess what management changes may be needed for 2021.  While the [recreational harvest limit] for 2021 is proposed to increase by 8% from 2020 to 8.32 million pounds, it is not known how this fishery has performed thus far in 2020 relative to the current limit of 7.69 million pounds.  Summer flounder is not overfished and overfishing is not occurring, and harvest in 2019 was very close to the 2019 [recreational harvest limit]…”

Under those conditions—an 8% increase in the recreational harvest limit, which can act as a buffer to set off against any possible overages, and a stock that is believed to be increasing (which is why the recreational landings limit was increased in the first place)—maintaining status quo in the face of uncertainty seems to be a very rational decision.

The case for maintaining the recreational status quo for scup is a little more problematic. 

Last year, the Mid-Atlantic Council and Summer Flounder, Scup and Black Sea Bass Management Board allowed 2019 recreational regulations to carry over into 2020, even though that meant that anglers would probably exceed the recreational catch limit.  While that would ordinarily be a bad thing, it could be justified in this case because commercial catches have been consistently below the commercial catch limit, and that underage was expected to set off any recreational overage and keep overall catch below the acceptable biological catch established by the Council’s Scientific and Statistical Committee.  In addition, because the scup biomass stood at approximately 200 percent of target abundance, a small overage would not pose any meaningful risk to the stock.

This year, the Summer Flounder, Scup, and Black Sea Bass Monitoring Committee stated that

“The [Monitoring Committee] agreed with the staff recommendations for status quo recreational management measures for scup in 2021.  Due to the lack of recreational harvest estimates in 2020, there are no harvest projections to compare with the 2020 [recreational harvest limit].  They also agreed that the rationale for status quo recreational management measures described at the [Monitoring Committee] meeting in 2019 for 2020 measures still holds true for 2021.  This rationale included the ongoing management response to the new understanding of the magnitude of the recreational harvest based on the new MRIP estimates as well as the healthy stock status for scup.”

Maintaining the same regulations over the course of three years, during which stock abundance steadily declined, carries with it more risk than does maintaining status quo rules for a stock that, like summer flounder, is believed to be increasing. 

From a purely biological standpoint, doing so is probably justifiable, given the health of the scup stock.  But from a legal standpoint, one should probably ask whether, and how, the Monitoring Committee and/or Council staff determined that maintaining status quo rules still provided a 50 percent chance that overfishing will not occur.

That becomes a much more relevant issue in the case of black sea bass given the fact that in 2019, the Council agreed that it would not tighten recreational management measures, even though such inaction would probably result in anglers exceeding the recreational harvest limit by 26 percent and the recreational catch limit by 23 percent, and cause the overall catch to exceed the acceptable biological catch, which supposedly sets the absolute upper bound for the combined recreational and commercial catch, by 12 percent.

Because the Council merely chose not to amend existing management measures, as opposed to recommending new rules that would have led to the acceptable biological catch being exceeded, the National Marine Fisheries Service probably didn’t open itself up to legal risk when it adopted the Council’s recommendation.

However, the 2019 Operational Stock Assessment for black sea bass predicted that the stock would decline in abundance at least through 2021, with the spawning stock biomass falling from 27,659 metric tons in 2019 to 20,379 metric tons in 2021—a 26 percent decrease in just two years—with 2,320 metric tons of the overall decrease projected to occur between 2020 and 2021.

Combine status quo regulations, that were already projected to cause the acceptable biological catch to be exceeded this year, with a shrinking spawning stock biomass, and the risks of overfishing increase.  It’s notable that nowhere in the staff or Monitoring Committee recommendations is there an explicit statement that the status quo rules have at least a 50 percent chance of preventing overfishing.

Maybe they do meet that legal standard, but before moving forward with status quo rules, it would be nice to know for sure.

But the greatest cause to question the wisdom of status quo rules arises in the case of bluefish, a stock that is already overfished.  The Bluefish Monitoring Committee stated that it

“revisited the methodology used last year to project 2020 landings to provide the Council and [ASMFC’s Bluefish Management] Board with analysis on potential 2021 recreational landings.  In October 2019, the Council and Board determined that 2018 recreational landings (13.27 [million] lbs.) served as an appropriate projection of 2020 landings despite the [Monitoring Committee] recommendation to use a 3-year average of harvest.  The 2020 recreational measures (3 and 5-fish bag limit) were implemented to restrict harvest by 28.56% to achieve the 2020 [recreational harvest limit] of 9.48 [million] lbs.   For 2021, the [recreational harvest limit] has been further reduced to 8.34 [million] lbs, indicating that a 12.03% reduction in landings may be necessary to constrain harvest to the lower [recreational harvest limit].

“To project recreational landings, the [Monitoring Committee] typically uses the most recent 3-year average of landings.  The 2017-2019 average landings (20.30 [million] lbs.) with the same 28.56% reduction that was projected to be achieved under the 2020 management measures yields a 2021 landings projection of 14.50 [million] lbs.  This landings methodology indicates a potential 73.86% overage of the 2021 [recreational harvest limit] of 8.34 [million] lbs…  [emphasis added]”

The Bluefish Monitoring Committee failed to state whether it was comfortable that, even with such an overage, maintaining status quo recreational management measures would provide at least a 50% probability that overfishing would not occur, but given that the commercial fishery is expected to land just about all of its quota, the odds of overfishing occurring would intuitively seem to be fairly high.

Hopefully most folks would agree that overfishing an already overfished stock is both a bad idea and bad fisheries management.  Even with all of the uncertainties surrounding the 2020 data, in the case of bluefish, the recommendation to stick with status quo measures appears to be questionable, at best.

Yet, however questionable it might be, it is unlikely that anyone on the Council or Bluefish Management Board will choose to question it, as the both bodies have been drifting away from conservative management over the past few years, and electing options that maximize landings in the short term.

That trend will probably continue on Tuesday, although in the case of bluefish, and maybe black sea bass as well, there are good reasons why it should not.