ASMFC COULD CONSIDER STRIPED BASS MORATORIUM

There’s an old saying that we probably ought to hear more often these days:  Be careful what you wish for, because you might get it.

That’s something that striped bass anglers ought to contemplate as they look forward to the Draft Amendment 7 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Striped Bass, which is likely to be released for public comment in less than a month, and as they think back on certain comments that they made withy respect to the Public Information Document for Amendment 7 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Striped Bass, which they made last spring.

When it released the Public Information Document for stakeholder comment, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board wasn’t specificallyy looking for comments on a harvest moratorium; instead, it was looking for input on broader guidelines that it would use to manage the stock, and then invited the public to also provide comment on any other issues that they might want to be considered.

A lot of striped bass anglers, who tend to be more conservation-oriented than salt water fishermen as a whole.  They're not happy that the ASMFC allowed the stock to become overfished and experience overfishing.  They told the ASMFC that it wanted to see striped bass harvest reduced and abundance increased.  

And many of those anglers said that imposing a harvest moratorium was the best way to make those things happen.

Such comments must have been shocking to fishery managers.  Anglers tend to shy away from management issues, and rarely comment on proposed management measures.  Usually, when managers hold a hearing on fishery issues, such hearings tend to be dominated by the commercial and recreational fishing industries, which differ on many things, but are usually united in opposition to landings reductions and more restrictive regulation.

But when striped bass issues are on the table, anglers turn out to speak for the fish.

Striped bass have always been a legendary sport fish, particularly in the northeast.  They were always the coast’s apex predator, the biggest of the inshore sport fish, that could be found everywhere—in the ocean and in the bays, around rocks, sod banks, and sandy beaches, on shallow flats and over deep-water reefs—but are not easily caugh, except by those anglers who had “paid their dues” and taken the time to learn the striper’s ways.

When fishermen gathered around the dock in the evening, to tell their tales and drink a few beers, the talk wasn’t of flounders, blackfish, or tomcod, but of striped bass.  They spoke of fish caught, and of fish lost, and they spoke of the fish that they hoped to catch in the future.

And then, sometime around 1980, the conversation changed.  Striped bass anglers began to talk about whether they, and the bass, had any future at all.

Today, we all know the story—how the stock collapsed and, thanks to hard and dedicated work by Congress, the Management Board, and the states, was nursed back to health by the mid-1990s—because that tale of loss and recovery is now legend, too, with anglers who weren’t even born when the population first crashed learning about it from older fishermen who had lived through the bad times and seen the return of the good.  

And thanks to that story, handed down between generations, many anglers feel a duty to conserve and stand up for the stock.

But the legend has morphed, as legends do.  While its conservation message still rings true, the details of what happened forty years ago have gotten a little fuzzy.  And one of the fuzziest details of all is the moratorium that “saved” the striped bass.

Ask a striped bass angler today, particularly one who wasn’t alive back then, and most will be quick to tell you that the striped bass recovery can largely be attributed to a coastwide moratorium imposed on the fishery, which prevented anyone, anywhere, from killing a striped bass.

Today, many people still believe that a moratorium represents the best way to assure the overfished striper’s recovery.  One organization, Stripers Forever, called for a 10-year ban on all harvest when it commented on the Public Information Document last spring.  As one Stripers Forever board member explained,

“Bold, decisive action is needed to prevent the collapse of the fishery like we saw in the late 1970s.  An emergency moratorium was adopted in 1984 and is the only approach proven to work.  We are calling on recreational anglers, conservationists, and anyone who depends on a healthy coastal ecosystem for their economic well-being to stand with us and demand that a moratorium be adopted now.”

A lot of anglers took up Stripers Forever’s call.  During last spring’s round of comments on the Public Information Document, the ASMFC received 170 comments supporting some sort of striped bass moratorium.  141 of such comments were written (130 from individuals, 1 from Stripers Forever, and 10 form letters), while 29 were made by stakeholders speaking at the various hearings held up and down the coast.  The ASMFC’s Fishery Management Plan Coordinator characterized such comments by noting,

“Most comments related to harvest control supported a moratorium on all commercial and recreational harvest for some period of time.  Suggested times ranged from 3 years to 10 years or until the stock is rebuilt.  Some comments support designating the striped bass a gamefish (recreational only with some recreational harvest allowed).  [emphasis added]”

And the ASMFC listened.  Sort of.

At the September 28 meeting of the ASMFC Plan Development Team that is putting together the draft Amendment 7 for discussion at the October Management Board meeting, the PDT examined a proposal, intended to protect the big 2015 year class, to impose a moratorium on all recreational harvest for some length of time that would allow the 2015s to become an important component of the spawning stock.

And yes, you read that correctly.  The moratorium would be imposed solely on the recreational fishery, while the commercial fishery would be allowed to continue doing business as usual, removing whatever 2015s that it encounters along the way.

That isn’t exactly what Stripers Forever and the other moratorium proponents were looking for.  Those folks were seeking a complete ban on striped bass retention, that was applied to both sectors.  Leaving the commercial sector free to kill bass that anglers were legally compelled to release—a sort of “anti-gamefish” measure that would be 180 degrees opposed to what StripersForever has long worked for and some individuals requested at last spring’s hearings—would almost certainly be an unacceptable option, both to moratorium proponents and to the great majority of recreational fishermen.  

Frankly, I don’t see it as a politically viable option for the Management Board to approve.

Still, there is a very remote chance that it could happen, and if it does, it will happen because some well-meaning people asked for an action that wasn’t needed, based on a belief in past events that never really happened.

I was fishing for striped bass before the crash occured.  I fished through the collapse, and I celebrated the bass’ recovery in the mid-1990s.

And because I was alive and on the water at the time, I know one thing to be true:  A coastwide “emergency moratorium” was never imposed.  Not in 1984, and not in any other year.

Yes, many states closed their striped bass fisheries for a period of time.  But such closures were neither uniform, coordinated, universally imposed, nor even necessarily adopted in order to restore the bass population. 

Maryland and Delaware shut down their fisheries for a few years, 1985 through 1989.  But Virginia, Maryland’s neighbor in the Chesapeake Bay, only closed its season down for a single year, in 1989, when the stock was already clearly on its way to recovery.  Connecticut and Rhode Island imposed striped bass moratoriums in 1986, to preserve the remaining fish.  New York also shut down its fishery that year, but such closure was brief, lasting only one year, and was done to keep people from eating striped bass loaded with PCBs released by factories along the Hudson River, and not to conserve the striped bass.

On the other hand, Massachusetts and New Jersey, which are some of the most important states on the coast, with respect to striped bass harvest, never closed their fisheries at all.

While the state landing bans probably did benefit the fishery, the striped bass found its salvation not in an irregular patchwork of state moratoriums, but in federal legislation called the Atlantic Striped Bass Conservation Act, which became law in 1984 and, once that legislation empowered the ASMFC to adopt binding striped bass management measures, in Amendment 3 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Striped Bass, which protected the female spawning stock biomass until recruitment was again strong enough to rebuild and maintain the stock.

Right now, the PDT can’t even provide a good idea of how a moratorium would impact the stock, and whether it might significantly accelerate its rebuilding, for the factors that need to be considered are very different from those addressed with a size or bag limit change.  When managers adopted the current size limit, for example, they presumed that recreational fishing effort would remain roughly the same, and that harvest would merely be focused on a particular size class of fish.

But such assumption doesn’t hold true in a moratorium.  How much would recreational fishing effort chage if anglers could no longer retain striped bass?  No one really knows.

And no one knows how much of the fishing mortality, now attributable to recreational landings, would merely be converted into release mortality if a moratorium was imposed.

Thus, while I’m not categorically opposed to a moratorium on striped bass harvest—so long as it prohibits all striped bass harvest, and not just apply to of one particular sector—I’m far from convinced, given the current state of the stock, that such drastic action is needed.  After all, as depleted as the stock is today, the current female spawning stock biomass is between three and four times as large as it was in the early 1980s, and the ASMFC managed to fully rebuild the bass population by 1995 without ever completely closing the fishery.

I strongly suspect that the Management Board will feel the same way, and not impose a moratorium, even if it does leave a moratorium option in the Draft Amendment 7 that goes out for public comment.

That doesn’t concern me. 

What does concern me is that, by focusing on a moratorium, anglers and other stakeholders might not pay enough attention to things that really could hurt the striped bass.  Things like amended fishing mortality management triggers, that would allow overfishing to go on for up three years before any remedial action is taken, and then give the Management Board another three years to fix the problem—and such options will appear in the Draft Amendment.

Trading a ban on recreational harvest for a management plan that still allows commercial landings, while giving the Management Board more excuses for delay after a threat to the stock first appears, seems like a bad deal.

But if stakeholders convince the Management Board to adopt a moratorium in Amendment 7, that might just be the deal that they get.