WHAT CAN THE ASMFC DO ABOUT STRIPED BASS RELEASE MORTALITY?

When the Work Group created by the Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board finished its work nearly one year ago, it reported that

“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.”

While the Work Group didn’t make it clear why recreational release mortality, which made up 48% of all striped bass fishing mortality in 2018, was a more important issue than reducing the 52% of fishing mortality attributed to other sources, the Management Board still took that message to heart, and voted to include recreational release mortality in the list of issues to be considered in the draft Amendment 7 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Striped Bass.

Reducing such release mortality presents a dilemma for fishery managers.

They can impose effort controls, in an attempt to reduce the number of bass encountered by recreational fishermen.  By doing so, managers could, in theory, reduce the number of striped bass released, and thus reduce the level of release mortality.

Yet such an approach presents a number of practical problems.  As I’ve noted in many previous posts, the striped bass fishery is overwhelmingly recreational, with anglers responsible for 90% of all fishing mortality.  And anglers release roughly 90% of the bass that they catch.

Thus, the recreational focus is on the angling experience, and not on taking fish home, although plenty of anglers also keep a bass or two—a few keep far more—over the course of a season.  In such a fishery, reducing angling effort enough to have a material impact on release mortality will also have a material impact on both angler satisfaction and on the economic benefits accruing from the recreational striped bass fishery, because both of those benefits are closely tied to effort.

Reducing effort could also prove to be very hard to do.  Striped bass don’t exist in a vacuum, and are incidentally caught by anglers targeting other species.  A Montauk charter boat trolling umbrella rigs for bluefish is very probably going to have a substantial bycatch of bass; an angler bucktailing or drifting sandworms for weakfish along some back-bay sod bank will pick up striped bass as a matter of course.  And there are ethical anglers who will say they are targeting something else while actually looking for bass, knowing that it is practically impossible to prove otherwise.

So reducing anglers encouncers with striped bass is more easily said than done.

Still, managers have only two choices if they want to reduce the number of bass that die after release:  Either try to reduce such encounters, or try to change the way bass are caught and handled, in order to increase the odds of survival.

At the June 17 meeting of the ASMFC’s Striped Bass Plan Development Team, scientists a look at number of options that touched on both approaches.

The initial discussions addressed effort controls, or what in common parlance would be called closed seasons.  

One possible approach is a winter closure on the coast, with December 15-April 15 specifically mentioned.  The problem is that the bass are present along different regions of coast at different times.  New York already has exactly that season in place, so no reduction in mortality would be achieved there.  In New England, fishing is very limited prior to April 15, so even if the season was closed, it wouldn’t have much impact up north, either.  South of the Hudson River, though, the impact would be very real.

The New Jersey season, for example, runs from March 1 through the end of the year, and it isn’t unusual for anglers to catch bass as soon as that season begins.  Further south, the winter closure would have even greater impacts.  The Virginia coastal season is closed from April 1-May 15, but open for the rest of the year, with some of the best fishing, for the largest fish, occurring in December and January.  A December 15-April 15 closure would hit striped bass anglers in Virginia hard, while having almost no impact on their counterparts in Maine, New Hampshire, or Massachusetts.

The same issue arises for one of the other proposed options, prohibiting fishing during half of the days in Wave 4—July and August—when water temperatures would be high and dissolved oxygen levels low, conditions that reduce survival chances for released bass.  

While that would make sense in the Maryland portion of Chesapeake Bay (Virginia’s season is already closed between mid-June and October), where “slicks” of dead, released bass have been recorded down-tide of anchored fishing fleets, it doesn’t make an awful lot of sense in the striper’s core summer range, between eastern Long Island and southern Cape Cod, where the water is relatively cool and well-aerated.  It would also make little sense, and cause a real hardship, in northern New England, where the water is even cooler and July and August account for a good part of the fishing season.

A third option would prohibit fishing in the spawning areas between December 15 and April 1.  Such an option would extend existing closures in the Chesapeake Bay, Hudson River, and Delaware Bay, and would probably do some good.

To some extent, the benefits of such closure would depend on how “spawning area” is defined.  For example, no striped bass spawn in Raritan Bay, on the New York/New Jersey border, but quite a few big female bass are caught, and some percentage killed, in those waters before they ascend the Hudson to spawn.  For those fish, a closure of the Hudson’s spawning reaches would be too little, too late.

All three of the options described above might or might not permit catch-and-release fishing during the closed season, perhaps under very strict rules that require such things as barbless hooks, in-water release, limits on the number of lines fished, etc..  Although the Plan Development Team agreed that prohibiting catch-and-release would be the most effective way to reduce release mortality, it also recognized that it is difficult to prove that an angler was actually targeting striped bass during the closed season; in addition, there was a concern that a complete ban on such targeting would shift effort to other species, although just what species those might be, given that bluefish and weakfish are also overfished, was not completely clear.

To maintain some sort of equity among the regions, the Plan Development Team is also proposing that the states be allowed to set seasonal closures that would achieve reductions equivalent to the option ultimately selected by the Management Board.  The PDT doesn't want such proposal to fall within the definition of "conservation equivalency," because the draft Amendment 7 will very likely contain proposals designed to limit, or perhaps completely eliminate, the use of conservation equivalency inr striped bass management.  But I can't stop thinking about the old adage:  If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it probably is a duck, so if it looks like conservation equivalency…  

Should states be allowed to propose their own seasons, we will see all of the old problems emerge, with states trying to game the system, using imprecise state- and wave-level data to game the system and minimize their actual harvest reductions, and so undercut the effectiveness of the management plan.  For an example of how that works, just take a look at Maryland’s conservation equivalency program, adopted in February of last year.

One other proposal—which I never thought that I’d hear seriously discussed at any ASMFC meeting—was the imposition of a harvest moratorium in the striped bass fishery.

The details of any such moratorium would still have to be fleshed out.  Would it serve as the best way to protect the 2015 year class, and be managed accordingly?  Would it remain in place until the stock was fully rebuilt, or just until it was no longer overfished?  Would it apply to the commercial as well as the recreational fishery (remember that reducing recreational release mortality was the goal)?  Would catch-and-release be allowed?  Right now, that’s not clear, and it’s highly unlikely that the Management Board would adopt such a closure.  

Still, the fact that the PDT would seriously consider a moratoriumh option for inclusion in the draft Amendment 7 shows that they understand that the bass are in deep enough trouble that such a proposal at least merits discussion.

With effort controls out of the way, the Plan Development Team turned to possible gear restrictions.  Bans on gaffing striped bass, on treble hooks, and on chumming were all discussed, as was a barbless hook requirement.

With respect to gaffs, I was honestly surprised at how many states already ban their use in the striped bass fishery.  They’re only allowed in six jurisdictions—Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and the District of Columbia—so while I’d personally be happy to see their use outlawed, to prevent the gaff and release of fish that fall under or over the slot, it’s not clear how often that even occurs, or what impact such prohibition would have on overall release mortality.  Even so, it is likely that the draft Amendment 7 will include a requirement for “non-lethal” landing aids (personally, like a lot of bass anglers, I just lean over the side of the boat and grab the lower jaw with one hand, which is about the most non-lethal aid that I can imagine).

I’m not sure what to make of a possible treble hook ban.  Currently, no state has any such regulation in place, although Maine limits lures to no more than two sets of hooks.

Outlawing trebles would certainly reduce release mortality.  If you’ve plugged for bass for any time at all, you’ve had bass that hit the head of the lure, and were firmly snagged in the jaw, but also seriously injured when the tail hook on a plug swung around to pierce an eye or a gill during the course of the fight.  Some anglers are already switching out their trebles for in-line single hooks in an effort to prevent such damage.  

At the same time, from a practical standpoint, I’m not sure whether the ASMFC can reasonably ask the universe of anglers to switch out all the hooks on existing lures, while requesting manufacturers to immediately switch over design and production—not to mention the issues posed by treble-hooked plugs already in the supply chain.  So while banning trebles would probably be an effective way to reduce release mortality, any such provision would probably require a long phase-in before it became a legally-enforceable measure.

Barbless hooks, on the other hand, are something that could be adopted more quickly, provided that “barbless” included hooks with their barbs merely crushed down with pliers.  Many bass fishermen, particularly surfcasters, do that already, not so much to protect the bass as to protect themselves, for no one wants to find themselves standing on a wave-swept rock, a long, deep wade from the shore, with a flopping, 30-pound striper permanently pinned to their thigh by a deeply-imbedded barbed hook.  

Barbless hooks are an option that, at the least, deserves consideration.

As far as chumming bans go?  Some argue that the chum artificially concentrates fish, and so leads to more encounters and greater levels of fishing mortality.  Yet it's not a widespread practice, so it's hard to tell whether banning it would make a measurable difference in striped bass mortality--although I have to admit that if someone banned the practice of clam chumming here on Long island, something that seems to have, thankfully, fallen out of favor in recent years, I certainly would not object.

The last behavior modification that the Plan Development Team discussed, requiring that larger bass be released without removing them from the water, would probably pay the greatest dividends in terms of reducing recreational release mortality.  You may disagree, and it’s possible that I’m wrong, but I firmly believe that cameras and scales—particularly Boga-type scales—are responsible for far more release mortality of larger bass than are gaffs, treble hooks, and other barbed hooks combined. 

Think about it.  

A big bass is already stressed from the fight, far more so than a rat that pretty well gets cranked straight back to the boat or the shore.  Releasing such fish while they’re still in the water will cause far less additional stress, and so increase the bass’ chance for survival, compared to the too typical process of dragging it up on the sand, or dropping it onto the deck of a boat, where the fish gasps and flops while someone digs out a camera and/or scale, at which point the slowly-suffocating fish is waved around in the air for a while, perhaps with a hand shoved up in one gill, perhaps hanging vertically while its weight strains its spine and internal organs, before the bass is finally returned to the sea and allowed to make its escape. 

People like to say “I saw it swim away.  It was fine!” while trying not to consider the realities of delayed mortality.

The PDT had some concerns with the practicality of an in-water release requirement in a fishery that has a harvest component, as people will want to take some larger fish out of the water to measure before, perhaps, having to let them go.  That’s a real issue, but is easily answered by setting a lower limit for in-water release a few inches above the top of the slot—say, 40 inches given the current 35-inch maximum size.  That would allow fishermen to employ a rough measure—the length of a landing net handle, the distance between two points on a rod, etc.—to see if a fish is clearly too large to keep, or whether it is close enough to measure.

Whatever proposals ultimately end up in the draft Amendment 7, release mortality remains a complicated issue.

The problem is real.  Release mortality comprises a large pproortion of overall fishing mortality.  It's not unreasonable to consider it in the draft Amendment 7.  If the PDT and Management Board can come up with a practical and quantifiable way to reduce such mortality, the bass can only come out ahead.

But “practical” and “quantifiable” are key qualifications. 

Asking a state to propose its own closed seasons, in order to attain a specified level of reduction, is probably neither.  To understand why, just consider that the uncertainty—expressed in percent standard error—in coastwide striped bass releases for 2019 was 6.5, which is certainly precise enough for management use.  But limit that data to releases in only Wave 4, and uncertainty doubles, with a PSE of 13.3.  Apply that Wave 4 data on a state level, and uncertainty spikes again, resulting in PSEs that range from 17.8 in Massachusetts, which is still not too bad, to 24.8 in Maryland, the next lowest, to 34.4 in Rhode Island, 35 in New York, 38 in New Jersey, finally topping out at 48 in Virginia.

If you don’t think that New Jersey would be able to do real mischief gaming the system with a 36 PSE, and similarly high PSEs in the other waves, you mustn’t have been paying attention to that state’s past behavior.  Expecting it to suddenly reform, and do right by the resource, is not a practical approach.

The benefits of measures like banning gaffs or treble hooks, or even requiring in-water releases, just aren’t quantifiable.  There is just no data on how many fish are gaffed and released, how many die of treble hook-inflicted injuries, or how may are weighed and photographed to death, although we intuitively know that such mortality occurs. 

Thus we come back to the question of whether singling out recreational release mortality makes sense, or whether, in a fishery that is 90% recreational, that also sees 90% of recreationally-caught fish released, it makes more sense to accept recreational release mortality as an unavoidable byproduct of such fishery’s nature, and just another factor to be considered when calculating the necessary restrictions on landings.

I’ve made it clear over the years that I favor the latter course.  In October, we’ll learn whether the Management Board can come up with a viable alternative.