Sunday, March 21, 2021

FISHERIES MANAGEMENT: TIME TO PUT THE PROS IN CONTROL

Fisheries management is a demanding discipline. 

The people who do it right have gone through years of higher education, have earned graduate degrees, and have spent years in the trenches performing the surveys, crafting the regulations, and dealing with the people necessary to effectively manage marine fish stocks.

But saltwater fisheries management is still a little strange, because despite the presence of people who have dedicated their lives and their labor to the discipline, many of the most critical decisions are made by people who have no scientific background or education, never took the time to gain even an informed layman’s understanding of the stock assessment and management process, and often have a financial or other interest in the fisheries that they oversee.

The Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act has imposed tight enough bounds on the regional fishery management councils’ exercise of their discretion that federal fish stocks are largely healthy and fairly well managed.  But when the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission meets, and there are no legal boundaries to limit what the various management boards may do, amateur hour reigns, and the fish, and the fishing public, suffer as a result.

Now, don’t get me wrong.

There are a lot of real professionals working at the ASMFC, and I always fear that, when I criticize the Commission, they are getting undeservedly tarred by the same brush used to color the management boards.  The staff and scientists at the ASMFC are as talented and dedicated a group of people that you’re likely to find in any management body; the biologists on the ASMFC’s technical committees are producing plenty of good science to inform fishery management decisions.

The problem is that when that science gets handed down to the management boards—to the people who are actually charged with making the decisions—it is too often ignored and/or dismissed by the people who are supposed to use it.

Consider an Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board discussion that occurred back in May 2014. 

To set the stage, there had been a benchmark stock assessment completed in 2013, which found that the female spawning stock biomass for the striped bass, while not overfished, had declined well below the target level, while the fishing mortality rate had risen well above its target, although overfishing had not yet occurred. 

Amendment 6 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Striped Bass, which was in effect in 2014 and remains in effect today, states that when such conditions are found to exist, the Management Board “must”—and I repeat that injunction, “must”—return fishing mortality to target within one year, and initiate a rebuilding plan to return the spawning stock biomass to its target in no more than ten years.

The stock assessment in question was a massive effort, put together by the biologists on the ASMFC’s Atlantic Striped Bass Technical Committee working in conjunction with their counterparts at the National Marine Fisheries Service’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center.  Once it was completed, it was peer-reviewed by a panel of internationally-recognized fisheries scientists, all with PhDs and all with years of experience in the fisheries arena.

Such a peer-reviewed stock assessment, of a data-rich species such as striped bass, represents the gold standard in fisheries management science.  And the data it contained suggested that, in order to reduce fishing mortality to its target level, a substantial reduction in fishing mortality was required.

If such an assessment was presented to one of the regional fishery management councils that are responsible for managing federal fisheries, it would have been accepted as “the best scientific information available,” and the needed reductions put in place.

There might have been some heated debate about how to make the reductions, and perhaps about which sector of the fishery ought to bear the burden of the management measures, but the expertise of the scientists doing the work would have been respected—in part because, if NMFS allowed a council to set a management measure that wasn’t based on such science, it would very probably find itself on the losing end of a lawsuit.

But when the stock assessment was received by the Striped Bass Management Board, the reception wasn’t quite so cordial.  At least a few members—members who, it should be pointed out, have no academic credentials in fisheries science, much less the advanced degrees of those who prepared and reviewed the benchmark assessment—claimed that the science was wrong.  Perhaps foremost of those was the Governor’s Appointee from New Jersey, Tom Fote, who argued

“I remember years ago people panicking—and this was way before.  It was like 2004 when basically we weren’t seeing eight-year-old fish; and all of a sudden New Jersey was forced to put in a slot limit, and basically we went through all the permutations, and we did the regression analysis and three years later we basically said, oh, by the way, since we took away your producing area status so you can’t use the conservation there and we’re no long [sic] at that—you have to go with two at 28 [inches minimum size].  I mean, there are people who have been yelling for us to do something on striped bass for 15 years, even when the numbers were really high…

“…this stock isn’t overfished and overfishing is not taking place.  If came here on summer flounder [sic] and said the projections at three years from now that we basically might be over and we might have to do a reduction, so we should go to two fish on summer flounder right now with 20 inches [as a minimum size]; I would be laughed and hung at the table; but to take a 33 percent reduction—so I’m saying if we’re going to base this on science, we’ve really got to base it on the whole science problem on how to deal with it.  I’m looking at this and if we want to do something, let’s do it incrementally because two years from now when the regression analysis says we’re not even close to mortality, I don’t have to sit here and say I told you so.”

Granted, that’s not the most coherent comment that has ever been made—although not particularly incoherent, either, considering other things that have been heard at management board meetings—but the notion that the speaker was apparently trying to convey was that, despite the peer-reviewed stock assessment warning that overfishing and/or the stock becoming overfished could occur within three years, and despite the fact that the management plan itself required that fishing mortality be returned to the target level within one year, the management board should ignore the science and the dictates of the management plan and phase in mortality reductions over two years, if at all, because the stock wasn’t overfished or subject to overfishing yet, and anyway, New Jersey might have been required to make an unnecessary harvest reduction once, a decade or so ago, so it naturally follows that the science is probably wrong again (although nothing indicates that was the case), and taking action isn’t necessary this time, either.

If I were an ASMFC staffer, particularly a staff scientist, I suspect that I’d be heading straight to the bar at the close of the meeting, after hearing my work dismissed with a comment like that.

Despite such comments, that time the management board did cut the fishing mortality, and did so in a single year, but the quote gives you an idea of the sort of comments that are regularly made around the management table, once the amateur hour begins.

At least one-third of every ASMFC management board is comprised of state fisheries professionals, who have a very positive effect on the conversation, but one-third doesn’t make a majority, so the amateurs can--and often do--still get their way.

While the above example is nearly seven years old, the same sort of thing is still going on.

For example, at the August 2019 meeting, another fishing mortality reduction was being considered, just a few months after a new benchmark stock assessment found that striped bass had become overfished.  Despite the assessment’s ominous findings, Russell Dize, the Governor’s Appointee from Maryland, commented on what he alleged was an abundance of young striped bass in the Chesapeake Bay, saying

“amongst this gloom and doom, I’m going to say I’m a commercial waterman, 60 years on the Chesapeake Bay.  I’ve never seen in all of my life as many small striped bass…”

According to Mr. Dize, the bass he was seeing were 8 to 14 inches long, which means fish that were spawned no earlier than 2017, with the 8-inchers probably young-or-the-year fish.  If we look at the Maryland striped bass juvenile abundance index for those years, we find indices of 13.19 and 14.78—both slightly above the long-term average of 11.7—for 2017 and 2018, respectively, and a well below-average 3.37 for 2019.

Compare those with indices of 38.76 in 1993, 59.39 in 1996, 50.75 in 2001, 25.75 in 2003 and, more recently, 34.58 in 2011 and 24.20 in 2015—all years well within Mr. Dize’s 60-year career on the Chesapeake Bay—and you quickly realize that Mr. Dize either happened upon an unusually dense aggregation of young bass, that didn’t reflect overall abundance or, perhaps didn’t remember just how abundant bass used to be ten or fifteen years ago.

Either way, his observation illustrates why letting amateurs manage fish stocks creates a big problem; they tend to give too much credence to their own perceived experiences, and not enough to the hard data that drives the professionals’ actions.

In the end, fish are just another form of wildlife, making amateurs’ role in their management even more inappropriate.

Compare the way the ASMFC manages fish, for example, with how the United States Fish and Wildlife Service establishes bag limits and seasons for ducks and other waterfowl.  In that case,

“The U.S. and Canada are divided into four administrative flyways; the Atlantic, Mississippi, Central, and Pacific.  Each flyway has a Flyway Council consisting of representatives from state and provincial wildlife management agencies…

“The [Flyway] Councils are advised by flyway technical committees consisting of state and federal biologists.  These technical committees evaluate species and population status, harvest, and hunter-participation data during the development of the Council recommendations.  Supported by those biological evaluations, the Councils recommend hunting regulations to the [Fish & Wildlife] Service…

“The Service’s Migratory Bird Program, with input from biologists in the Service’s Regional Offices, evaluate the Council recommendations, considering species status and biology, cumulative effects of regulations, and existing regulatory policy.  The Division of Migratory Bird Management then develops their recommendations, which may support Council recommendations or may differ from them, based on their assessment of likely impacts of the proposed regulations.

“The Division and the Councils present their recommendations to the Service’s Regulations Committee, which…considers both the Council and Migratory Bird Program recommendations, then forwards its decisions on annual migratory bird hunting regulations to the Service Director and the Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Fish, Wildlife, and Parks for approval.”

In the case of waterfowl, decisions are based on biology and made by professionals.  Nowhere in the process do duck hunters, or hunting guides, or sporting goods retailers sit on a panel that can overrule professional decisions because they think that it should be easier for hunters to take a few ducks home, worry that restrictions on harvest might reduce hunting guides’ incomes, or keep bag limits too high in order to increase the sale of shotgun shells. 

In the case of ducks, biological decisions are made by biologists based on current data; you don’t have people arguing that they remember what hunting was like in their favorite marsh back in 1962, and trying to base management decisions on that, the way you hear ASMFC management members talking about managing striped bass for the people who fished off the Canarsie Pier around the middle of the previous century.

Most big game, small game, upland birds, and even freshwater fish are managed more like ducks—by biologists, based on the facts—than like saltwater fish, where amateurs, relying on little more than instinct and opinion, can dictate the health of a stock,.

It would be refreshing to see that change.

Imagine giving the ASMFC’s Technical Committees the lead in setting regulations, based on landings data and the science contained in stock assessments, the way that data and science drives federal fisheries management decisions.

Imagine ASMFC management boards that weren’t allowed to tolerate overfishing, and were forced to rebuild overfished stocks, just like federal managers are, with their actions dictated by the science that professionals provided.

Imagine an ASMFC that put such science first, and limited management boards’ discretion to adopt regulations based on other, competing factors.

Imagine holding the ASMFC legally responsible if it adopted management measures that were likely to fail.

Imagine an ASMFC that worked.

It’s not an impossible dream.  The talent and know-how are already there.

Only the amateurs on the management boards, and a broken process, stand in the way.

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