BLUEFISH MANAGEMENT: A TALE OF TWO FISHERIES

 Over the past few years, I’ve written quite a bit about bluefish management.

During that time, I’ve criticized proposals to shift recreational quota to the commercial sector.  I’ve argued for the recreational bluefish fishery to be managed for abundance rather than for landings.  And I’ve directed unkind words at both the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council and the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Bluefish Management Board for making decisions that always seem to favor high current landings rather than the long-term health of the stock.

But what I realized that I never have done is taken a real look at the fishery itself.  That’s a serious omission, because without understanding the nature of the fishery, it’s difficult to understand why some of the current management measures fall so wide of the mark.

Perhaps the first thing to understand is that the New England/mid-Atlantic bluefish fishery is unique because, of all the popular inshore recreational fisheries, it is one of the few that, in most states, is not governed by any sort of size limit.  

There are a few others.  

To the north, there are no recreational size limits for either Atlantic herring or Atlantic mackerel, but both of those species are essentially baitfish, that are subject to commercial harvest on an industrial scale, and support relatively small recreational fisheries.

Farther south, there are various panfish, such as puffers and northern kingfish, spot and Atlantic croaker, that can be landed without regard for size.  But the former two species are effectively unmanaged throughout their range, while the latter two are so small that imposing a size limit on the recreational fishery would border on the impractical.

Bluefish are different.  They are a relatively large fish, that can frequently exceed ten pounds in weight and, on not so rare occasions, might exceed 20.  The International Game Fish Association recognizes a 31-pound, 12-ounce bluefish, caught off North Carolina in 1972, as the all-tackle world record.  At the same time, young-of-the-year bluefish, known colloquially as snappers, typically flood inshore waters during late summer, where they are easily caught from shore, boat docks, and piers. 

The snappers support a fishery that is very different from the fishery for larger bluefish.  The snapper fishery is generally prosecuted from shore, although there is also a small-boat component.  The cost of entry is low; untold numbers of snappers have been caught with nothing more than a cane pole, hook, and length of line, along with some frozen bait. 

Because snappers are so readily accessible, the fishery attracts children, who often keep their fish, either marinating them in buckets of warm seawater or scraping their sun-stiffened bodies off the hot pavement of local docks at the end of the day.  

It also attracts older anglers who can no longer endure rough seas or extended outings, but can still sit in a folding chair and enjoy catching snappers from shore; such anglers may release all or part of their catch, but may also take some fish home for a tasty and low-cost meal.  The promise of inexpensive protein, and the fact that snappers can often be found along urban waterfronts, also make them a frequent target of lower-income folks and recent immigrants who typically fish for food.

But, although there are exceptions, snappers are not widely sought by serious anglers, unless they are on a family outing.

The fishery for big bluefish is very different. 

While quite a few larger bluefish are caught from shore, boat fishermen play a significant role in the fishery.  Although more than 50% of all bluefish caught from shore in 2019 were snappers—fish no more than 12 inches long—over 55% of bluefish caught from boats were larger than 14 inches in (fork) length.  While the large bluefish fishery does have a catch-and-keep component, many anglers tend to release larger fish, believing that the meat becomes strong tasting, to the point of being unpalatable.

The big bluefish fishery is, unlike the snapper fishery, largely a catch-and-release fishery; data used in the last benchmark stock assessment supports the notion that anglers tend to release their bigger bluefish, and keep the smaller ones.  The big bluefish fishery also tends to be more equipment intensive, requiring larger, more expensive rods and reels, and often involving relatively costly artificial lures.

Unfortunately, the differences between the snapper fishery and the large bluefish fishery don’t appear in management documents; there is a real risk that, because the snapper fishery is so popular along parts of the coast, snapper-related data distorts overall bluefish catch, effort, and landings data, which results in a significant misunderstanding of how the large bluefish fishery is prosecuted.  

The Mid-Atlantic Council and Bluefish Management Board have adopted management measures based on the assumption that the bluefish released by anglers participating in the big-fish fishery are the same size as those that are retained by anglers in the snapper fishery, despite the real-world bias toward catch-and-keep in the snapper fishery and the bias toward catch-and-release in the large bluefish fishery.

Thus, the estimate of recreational release mortality is almost certainly too low, which means, in turn, that regulations based, in part, on such estimate may not be restrictive enough to keep overall fishing mortality below the fishing mortality target.

And that’s before we even get to the question of stock structure.

Bluefish are managed as a single stock, that ranges from Maine to Florida.  Such approach is supported by both genetic and tagging data.  However, the Atlantic coastal stock seems to be divided into three components.  One component migrates along the coast, with some individuals migrating from New England as far as Florida.  One component remains in the mid-Atlantic area, and doesn’t migrate much farther south than North Carolina.  A third component remains off Florida, migrating inshore and offshore.

The regional bluefish fisheries that target such sub-stocks also differ.  

In New England, bluefish 12 inches or less in length accounted for less than 8% of all shore-based landings in 2019; 14-inch (fork length) bluefish accounted for well over half of the landings there, while nearly 55% of the boat-caught fish were 16 inches (fork length) long or larger.  

In the mid-Atlantic, where the snapper fishery is very important, nearly 80% of all bluefish landed in 2019 were no more than 12 inches (fork length) long.  On the other hand, 58% of boat-caught fish were at least 14 inches in length.  

In the South Atlantic—the Carolinas to Florida—large bluefish are not a big part of the fishery.  While 12-inch or smaller snapper blues only comprised a little more than 40% of shore-based anglers’ landings, virtually all of the shore-caught fish were no more than 18 inches (fork length) long.  The fish caught from boats also trended smaller than elsewhere on the coast, with less than 30% more than 14 inches (fork length) in length.

By combining the regional fisheries into a single set of management measures, the Mid-Atlantic Council and Bluefish Management Board ignore regional differences in the fishery.  That’s important, for regulations that might be appropriate in the mid-Atlantic, for a sub-stock that rarely ranges south of Cape Hatteras, may not make sense for sub-stocks of fish that range from New England into the south Atlantic, or for those that never stray from the Florida coast.

While I referred to bluefish as a tale of two fisheries—snappers and adults—the true picture is much more complicated than that.  Recreational bluefish management is a tale of many fisheries:  of young-of-the-years and adults; of wide-ranging migrants and fish that never leave Florida waters; of a primarily catch-and-keep fishery for small fish, and a primarily catch-and-release fishery for adults.

The current management plan for bluefish, which tosses all of those fisheries into a single pot, and tries to come up with management measures that will work for all, is overly simplistic.  Because it ignores the differences between the fisheries, it adopts generalized, one-size-fits-all management measures that, in the end, don’t fit any of the diverse bluefish fisheries particularly well.

We can hope that they’ll work despite that reality.

But we should not be surprised if they don’t.