On Tuesday, June 8, the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council (Council) and the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Bluefish Management Board (Management Board) finalized their joint Atlantic Bluefish Allocation and Rebuilding Amendment (amendment).
When the amendment
process began in 2017, it
only addressed allocation, but after a 2019 operational stock
assessment found that bluefish had become overfished, the
Council and Management Board had to modify the amendment to
address stock rebuilding as well.
The Council received
formal notice that bluefish were overfished in November 2019. Such notice
triggered a provision of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery
Conservation and Management Act (Magnuson-Stevens), which
requires that, “Within 2 years after…notification [that a stock has become
overfished], the appropriate Council…shall prepare and implement a fishery
management plan, plan amendment, or proposed regulations for the fishery to
which the…notice applies to end overfishing immediately in the fishery and to
rebuild affected stocks of fish… [internal formatting omitted]”.
To comply with the
law, the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) must have a bluefish
rebuilding plan in place by November 2021. By approving the amendment in June
2021, the Council is providing NMFS plenty of time to meet that deadline.
The amendment could
have taken any one of three possible approaches to bluefish rebuilding.
The first was a
“constant harvest” strategy, which maintained the same annual catch limits throughout
the rebuilding process. Such a strategy could rebuild the stock within just
four years, but would keep landings unnecessarily low in its later years, when
the stock had grown large enough to safely support a bigger harvest, and could
cause lasting damage to the commercial bluefish fishery.
The second was the
so-called “P*” approach, which tied annual landings to the risk of overfishing.
Such approach kept landings low during the initial years of rebuilding, when
the risk of overfishing was greatest, but allowed them to increase steadily as
the stock grew and the risk of overfishing decreased. That approach could
rebuild the stock within five years.
The third was a
“constant fishing mortality” strategy, which would remove the same percentage
of fish from the stock throughout the rebuilding period. Under such an
approach, the size of the annual harvest would increase in direct proportion to
the size of the stock. Maintaining a constant fishing mortality rate would lead
to significantly higher landings in the early years of the rebuilding process
than permitted under the P* approach. Such early landings would be high enough
to violate the Council’s recently revised
risk policy, and could only be permitted if such policy was amended.
Despite such higher landings at the beginning of the rebuilding process, the
constant fishing mortality approach was expected to rebuild the stock within
seven years, well within the ten-year rebuilding deadline established by
Magnuson-Stevens.
Council staff
recommended that the P* approach be adopted, viewing it as “a fair middle point
that considers both the biological and social requirements” cited in
Magnuson-Stevens. In doing so, it noted that such approach would provide
greater economic benefits to the commercial fishery than the constant harvest
approach, while still complying with the Council’s risk policy.
The Council and
Management Board disagreed with the staff recommendation, and soon took up a
motion to adopt the 7-year rebuilding plan. Proponents of the constant fishing
mortality approach argued that uncertainties surrounding the cause of the
decline in bluefish abundance, the ecosystem impacts of an increasing bluefish
stock, the economic effects of changing state commercial allocations (which
were also addressed in the amendment), and the chance to maintain a somewhat
higher catch limit in 2022 all militated in favor of the longer rebuilding
plan.
A number of Council
and Management Board members complained that there was no 10-year rebuilding
option included in the amendment (such option had been deleted in response to
the NMFS’ concerns that it would violate Magnuson-Stevens’ requirement that
rebuilding times be “as short as possible”). Many expressed skepticism about
the science underlying the amendment, arguing that bluefish abundance
fluctuates in response to yet-unidentified environmental conditions, often
cryptically referred to as “the cycle,” and is relatively unaffected by changes
in fishing mortality. With no longer rebuilding timeline available, such
persons supported the 7-year option.
Not everyone agreed
that the 7-year rebuilding plan presented the most viable option.
Michael Pentony, the
regional administrator for NMFS’ Greater Atlantic Regional Fisheries Office,
stated that “I have some concerns with this,” noting that, if the 7-year option
was adopted, the Council would have to amend its risk policy. Such policy was
already amended once before, when the Council adopted its Atlantic mackerel rebuilding plan
in 2019. The regional administrator expressed his belief that making such
amendments constituted bad policy, saying “Either we have a risk policy or we
don’t.”
His words found little
support on either the Council or Management Board, although Megan Ware, a Maine
fishery manager who sits on the Management Board, did offer a substitute motion
to adopt the P* approach. In making her motion, Ms. Ware asked whether, if the
Council is so willing to deviate from its established risk policy, it really
has a risk policy at all. To further support her motion, she cited public comments
supporting rapid rebuilding, and argued that the P* approach struck a
reasonable balance between anglers who wanted to see bluefish managed for
abundance, and those in the commercial and recreational fishing industries who
believed that landings ought to be maximized.
The substitute motion
failed, and the 7-year, constant fishing mortality approach was approved by
substantial majorities of both the Council and Management Board. Later in the
meeting, the amendment, as a whole, was approved, and forwarded to NMFS for
review.
Now, one of three
things might happen.
·
NMFS may approve the entire amendment, in which case it will
issue proposed regulations that implement the amendment’s recommendations, put
the proposed rules out for public comment, and then issue final regulations
well ahead of the November deadline.
·
NMFS may also disapprove the entire amendment, although looking
at the matter realistically, there is no possibility of that happening.
·
Finally, NMFS may disapprove certain provisions of the
amendment, and approve the rest. Michael Pentony’s expressed opposition to the
7-year rebuilding plan, and the associated need to amend the Council’s risk
policy, suggests that such a result can’t be completely discounted.
When pressed at the
June Council meeting on why NMFS went along with amending the policy in the
case of Atlantic mackerel, but doesn’t favor such amendment in the case of
bluefish, the regional administrator explained that the decision to approve or
disapprove a management plan’s provisions requires NMFS to consider the entire
administrative record. In the case of mackerel, the Council made a strong
argument that the amendment would only constitute a “minimal,” short-duration
deviation from the risk policy, but it was “not clear whether the same
considerations would apply” to the 7-year bluefish rebuilding plan.
Despite Michael
Pentony’s reservations, it is very likely that the entire amendment will be
approved, and that the Council’s risk policy will be amended once again.
While that shouldn’t
do the bluefish stock any harm, as it’s still likely to be rebuilt by the end
of this decade, it could sound a warning for the future of mid-Atlantic
fisheries. To echo Megan Ware, if the Council is willing to repeatedly amend
its risk policy, and do so without compelling reason, does it truly have such a
policy, or merely words on a page that, while they might sound impressive,
serve little real function at all?
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