Thursday, August 5, 2021

MANAGEMENT BOARD STILL WRESTLING WITH STRIPED BASS RELEASE MORTALITY

Last Tuesday, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board held it’s August meeting.  The agenda was crowded, but one of the more important items was a request for guidance for the Plan Development Team that is preparing the Draft Amendment 7 to the striped bass rebuilding plan.

The Plan Development Team has spent the last couple of months trying to develop options to address the items that will be addressed in the Draft Amendment 7:  Management triggers, recreational release mortality, conservation equivalency, and protecting the 2015 year class as it recruits into the spawning stock.

While the PDT had no problem developing options that addressed many of the open issues, in some cases, it wasn’t clear what direction the Management Board wanted to take, or exactly what the Management Board was hoping to accomplish in Amendment 7.  That was particularly true in case of recreational release mortality; the Management Board expressed a desire to reduce it, but wasn’t very clear about the extent of such reduction, how it should be accomplished, or even about why recreational release mortality was being singled out as a particular problem.

It’s not unreasonable for the Management Board to be concerned about recreational release mortality, as it is the largest single source of striped bass fishing mortality, accounting for 48% of all such fishing mortality in 2017.  Thus, reasonable efforts to reduce such mortality, such as the circle hook requirement that went into effect last year, make a good deal of sense.

On the other hand, efforts to address release mortality can go a little too far, particularly when they begin to single out recreational release mortality from other forms of fishing mortality.  After all, from a biological perspective, a dead fish is a dead fish; whether a bass dies after being released, suffocates on ice in some angler’s cooler, is killed in a gill net, or is dumped overboard dead after running afoul of a squid trawl, the effect on the spawning stock is the same.

In the end, what matters is keeping overall fishing mortality constrained to or below the target level, not how such mortality was produced.

And that’s what make’s the PDT’s job, and the job of the Management Board, especially difficult.  They’re trying to find the right answer to a question based on a false premise, for to rebuild the overfished striped bass stock, managers don’t need to reduce recreational release mortality, they need to reduce fishing mortality, and release mortality is only one part of that.  By placing  particular focus on recreational release mortality, the Management Board is unnecessarily creating confusion, without doing much to help the striped bass.

That came through loud and clear at last Tuesday’s meeting.

Consider the PDT’s most basic question:  How much of a reduction in release mortality does the Management Board want to make?

Yet no one on the Management Board could come up with an answer.

There were suggestions that, instead of shooting for a specific percent reduction, perhaps measures could be designed that would achieve a cut in release mortality that fell within some specified range.  But that’s as far as anything got.  No one even suggested—and so the Management Board could never agree on—what that range ought to be.

Thus, the PDT was condemned to throw darts in the dark, tasked with trying to develop options that would reduce recreational release mortality, but given no direction as to what those options ought to achieve.

The PDT told the Management Board that there were a lot of things that it could do.  It could develop options that would prohibit certain gear and/or practices, such as outlawing the use of treble hooks, or gaffs, or trolling with wire line, although there was no way to know what level of reduction that would achieve.  It could also develop options to implement closed seasons although, once again, it needed some guidance on how closed seasons would work.

Everyone was pretty much agreed that seasons would have to be imposed at the regional level, because a winter closure would do nothing up in New England, while hitting hard down in Virginia and North Carolina, while a summer closure might close down the fishery during the only months when fish can be caught up in Maine, while having no impact at all in Virginia.

But once again, no one was quite sure what the closure was supposed to accomplish.  Massachusetts fishery manager Michael Armstrong noted that the issue was more complicated that it might appear on its face, asking whether the intent of seasonal closures was to

“get people off of catching fish or get people off of catching fish when [water] temperatures are too high [for successful release]?”

A consensus quickly emerged favoring closures imposed on the state or regional level, although Connecticut’s Dr. Justin Davis questioned the wisdom of state-level closures due to the inherent uncertainty of recreational catch and landings estimates when applied on both the state and wave level, while New Jersey’s Governor’s Appointee, Tom Fote, seemed to express opposition to any closure that might impact New Jersey’s kill, specifically mentioning Raritan Bay (apparently afraid that New Jersey fishermen would no longer be able to target egg-laden females that stage there before ascending the Hudson River to spawn) and complaining that closures favor catch and release fishermen who can continue to fish while catch and kill anglers have no reason to head onto the water.

That comment led into the question of whether any closure ought to ban harvest, or ban targeted catch and release angling, too.

Considering the issue in a vacuum, a no-targeting ban seems to make sense.  After all, just prohibiting harvest during a certain season won’t do a thing to reduce release mortality, which is supposedly the whole point of the exercise.  But when everything is considered, things don’t look quite so clear.

First of all, and this is a critical point, the striped bass fishery is primarily a recreational release fishery.  Yes, there’s a small commercial component, but that’s pretty well managed, and there is a catch and keep fishery, too, but the fact remains that anglers release about 90% of all striped bass that they catch, and they do it largely by choice.  The days when every “keeper” was kept are in the long-dead past, and not very likely to return.

The thing to remember is that striped bass has primarily been a recreational release fishery for a very long time.  The PDT presented a slide at Tuesday’s meeting showing that the high rate of releases goes back to the 1980s, a time when the stock was still collapsed and the first effective rebuilding effort was in its infancy.

There have been some small diversions, both up and down, from the norm, but anglers have been releasing a very high percentage of their striped bass since 1988 or so, and the percentage of released fish is, if anything, increasing in recent years.  But it’s clear from the PDT slide that claims that catch and release is something new, and that people always used to catch bass to take home, has no support in the modern history of the striped bass fishery.

It’s also inevitable with such a high level of releases, much of the fishing mortality is going to be attributable to release mortality; when keeping a bass is relatively low on the list of anglers’ priorities, release mortality will inevitably approach or exceed the mortality attributable to landings.

That’s why the Management Board’s focus on recreational release mortality, rather than overall fishing mortality, makes little sense.  For in attempting to reduce fishing mortality, what the Management Board is actually attempting to do, whether it realizes it or not, is to change the basic nature of the fishery from primarily catch and release to primarily catch and kill.  And that’s difficult if not impossible to do.

Anglers want to catch bass, and they want to release them, and as a number of Management Board members noted last Tuesday, regulations prohibiting anglers from targeting, and not just keeping, striped bass are just about impossible to enforce.  If I’m standing on a rock at Montauk, throwing a plug into the night-darkened surf, can anyone prove beyond a reasonable doubt that I’m not seeking one of the “gorilla” bluefish that will sometimes take a lure between dusk and dawn?

No, a responsible angler won’t knowingly break the law, but that angler will be sorely tested to bend it close to the snapping point if he knows that Maryland charter boats are legally killing two immature bass per man, two trips per day, while he is prohibited from even exercising a bass for a few minutes and then setting it free.

William Hyatt, the Governor’s Appointee from Connecticut, noted that he was opposed to prohibitions on targeting and releasing bass not only because they were unenforceable, but because they would cause fisheries laws to be seen as a joke, and reduce public confidence in the management process.

I don’t think that he’s wrong.

Martin Gary, who represents the Potomac River Fisheries Commission, probably placed no targeting rules in their proper context when he noted that they were unenforceable, but still might be useful in places like the Chesapeake Bay and the Potomac River, where high water temperatures and low salinity can combine to make successful release problematic, and anglers should be willing to

“give the fish a break during this metabolically challenging time.”

What he said made sense, particularly because he recognized that the same seasonal closures were probably not needed up in New England, where warm summer waters are typically not an issue.

Of course, there were others who adamantly supported no-targeting rules, seeing releases, and not overall fishing mortality, as the problem that needed to be solved.  Not surprisingly, they included Michael Luisi and Joseph Cimino, fishery managers from Maryland and New Jersey, respectively, who have always fought for bigger kills for their states, and stretched the boundaries of conservation equivalency, in order to maintain such kills, far beyond their original intent.

And they included Tom “the only good fish is a dead fish” Fote, who continued to complain that if catch and release anglers weren’t impacted by seasonal closures, than catch and kill anglers shouldn’t be impacted either.

In the end, it was the comments of Dr. Justin Davis that made the most sense.  He acknowledged that the striped bass fishery is primarily a catch and release fishery, and that as a result, it will always have a high level of release mortality.  He noted his opposition to no-target regulations, because they weren’t enforceable.  And then he observed

“If we’re not talking about a targeting closure, I’m not sure what we’re doing here…It is not entirely clear to me what we’re trying to accomplish…”

And that was really it in a nutshell.

From the comments made by the PDT, and from the comments made—and not made—by the Management Board, it was evident to anyone listening in on the meeting that, with respect to recreational release mortality, no one really knew what they were doing at the meeting, or what they were trying to accomplish.

Sure, everyone recognizes that reducing recreational release mortality would be a good thing, but everyone should also recognize that in a fishery where catch and release is frequently and voluntarily practiced, significantly reducing release mortality is far easier said than done.

Thus, it is probably time for the Management Board to abandon this exercise in futility, and instead focus on something that it can effectively accomplish:  Reducing recreational landings to the point where, when combined with release mortality, overall fishing mortality remains below target.

That is something that the Management Board and the PDT both know how to do.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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