STRIPED BASS AMENDMENT 7 AND ITS ACHILLES' HEEL

 Ever since the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission voted, more than a year ago, to initiate a new Amendment 7 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Striped Bass, striped bass anglers have been concerned with how the new document would impact the health of the striped bass stock.

The report of a so-called “Work Group,” assembled prior to the August 2020 Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board meeting, created cause for concern, as it emphasized

“the themes of stability [of management measures], flexibility, and consistency [as] guiding principles for future management changes.”

Such concern was warranted, as stable regulations, and giving managers the flexibility to act or refrain from acting in response to threats to the stock, are not compatible with the sort of nimble management system that is quick to adopt measures designed to keep a small problem from festering into a crisis.  (Coastwide consistency in management measures, on the other hand, is a good idea, which makes it easier for biologists to compute the impact of such measures, and also prevents one or two states from shifting some part of their conservation obligations onto the shoulders of their neighbors).

The Management Board released the Public Information Document for Amendment 7 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Striped Bass last February, and the response was extremely gratifying.  Over three thousand stakeholders took the time to comment in writing or at on-line hearings, and another 500 or so attended the hearings but chose not to comment.  Comments overwhelmingly favored conserving the striped bass resource; with very few exceptions, they called for maximizing striped bass abundance, not striped bass landings.

As a result of such strong stakeholder sentiment, the Management Board, at its May meeting, removed most of the bad proposals from future consideration.  The biomass target would not be reduced, nor would the fishing mortality target be increased.  The goals and objectives of the management plan would remain unchanged.  An overfished stock must still (so the plan says) be rebuilt in no more than 10 years.

The recreational striped bass fishing community was, for the most part, pleased with the meeting’s outcome.

At that point, it became the Atlantic Striped Bass Plan Development Team’s job to put together a draft Amendment 7 that addressed the remaining options:  Protecting the large 2015 year class, reducing recreational release mortality, restricting the use of conservation equivalency, and reviewing the “triggers” that, if tripped, would require the Management Board to act to protect the stock.

Although I’ve missed one or two, I have listened in on most of the Plan Development Team meetings, and can state without reservation that the PDT is working diligently and well to address those four issues.  They have come up with some very good ideas for protecting the 2015s, and maybe the 2017 and 2018 year classes as well.  While I don’t agree with all of their conservation equivalency and recreational release mortality decisions, I can’t deny that they’ve thought long and hared before coming up with their proposals, which will ultimately be debated and decided upon by the Management Board.

All things considered, thanks to the work of the Plan Development Team, Amendment 7 has the potential to champion a new and significantly improved era of striped bass management.

But like one of the best-known champions in Western mythology, it has a weak spot.  An Achilles’ heel.

That is the section which will deal with management triggers, for if the Management Board makes the wrong decisions there, much of the good work could be for naught.

The current management triggers

The management triggers determine whether the Management Board must take action to confront a potential threat to the striped bass stock.  Amendment 6 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Striped Bass, currently lists five such triggers:

1)      If the Management Board determines that the fishing mortality threshold is exceeded in any year, the Board must adjust the striped bass management program to reduce the fishing mortality rate to a level that is at or below the target within one year.

2)     If the Management Board determines that the biomass has fallen below the threshold in any given year, the Board must adjust the striped bass management program to rebuild the biomass to the target level within [no more than 10 years].

3)     If the Management Board determines that the fishing mortality target is exceeded in two consecutive years and the female spawning stock biomass falls below the target within either of those years, the Management Board must adjust the striped bass management program to reduce the fishing mortality rate to a level that is at or below the target within one year.

4)     If the Management Board determines that the female spawning stock biomass falls below the target for two consecutive years and the fishing mortality rate exceeds the target in either of those years, the Management Board must adjust the striped bass management program to rebuild the biomass to a level that is at or above the target within [no more than 10 years]

5)     The Management Board shall annually examine trends in all required Juvenile Abundance Index surveys.  If any JAI shows recruitment failure (i.e., JAI is lower than 75% of all other values in the dataset) for three consecutive years, then the Management Board will review the cause of the recruitment failure (i.e., fishing mortality, environmental conditions, disease, etc.) and determine the appropriate management action.  The Management Board shall be the final arbiter in all management decisions.

Triggers 1 and 2 address crisis situations; they only trip if the striped bass stock is overfished or experiencing overfishing.

Triggers 3 and 4 address pending problems; fishing mortality is rising too high, and female spawning stock biomass is falling too low, but there is still sufficient time to address the issues before a crisis occurs.

Trigger 5 is a sign of future trouble; recruitment has fallen far too low for three consecutive years, presaging a future drop in spawning stock biomass.  However, this trigger can trip even though, to a casual eye, the stock appears healthy, with both fishing mortality and biomass hovering at or near their target levels.  This is the situation we faced in the late 1970s, when the Maryland Juvenile Abundance Index began to crash but, because there was still an abundance of large bass around, neither most fishermen nor most fishery managers were willing to admit that we were on the road to what became a stock collapse that continued well into the ‘80s.

The Plan Development Team has crafted a number of options that will be considered as replacements for each of the existing management triggers.  Most would inject additional delay into the management process (although, in each case, maintaining status quo remains an option).  Let’s look at them one at a time.

Proposed fishing mortality triggers raise concerns

With respect to Management Trigger 1, the PDT offered two options:  Maintaining the status quo, or replacing the current trigger with one that is only tripped if the three-year average fishing mortality rate exceeds the threshold.  In other words, the proposed option could allow the striped bass stock to experience overfishing for three consecutive years before the Management Board would have to bestir themselves to address the problem; during those three years, while the Board did nothing, the spawning stock biomass would, presumably, decline.

At least one PDT member objected that any such trigger would, of necessity, create a new definition of “overfishing” (currently, overfishing occurs if, at any time, fishing mortality exceeds the fishing mortality threshold).  However, Max Appelman, NOAA Fisheries’ representative on the PDT, disagreed, correctly observing that

“The stock may be experiencing overfishing, but the Board doesn’t necessarily have to take action, depending on what the triggers are.”

That statement sums up, in a single sentence, why changing the management triggers could undercut the effectiveness of Amendment 7 and the ASMFC’ striped bass management plan.  It admits that even if overfishing occurs, the Management Board could sit back and do nothing, at least for three years.

That could only do harm to the stock.

Compare the proposed change to Management Trigger 1, and its impact on the Management Board’s actions, to the imperative language of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act’s National Standard 1:

“Conservation and management measures shall prevent overfishing while achieving, on a continuing basis, the optimum yield from each fishery for the United States fishing industry.  [emphasis added]”

That directive is amplified in Section 303(a) of Magnuson-Stevens, which reads

“Any fishery management plan which is prepared by any Council, or by the Secretary, with respect to any fishery, shall contain the conservation and management measures…which are necessary and appropriate for the conservation and management of the fishery to prevent overfishing and rebuild overfished stocks…  [emphasis added; internal numbering and formatting omitted]”

Amending a management plan to explicitly permit overfishing to continue for up to three years would hardly comply with such mandate.

Having said that, we must concede that neither Magnuson-Stevens nor any similar statute currently governs the actions of the ASMFC, which is free to allow overfishing if it chooses to do so.  Still, it’s impossible not to observe the current difference between Magnuson-Stevens and the Atlantic Coastal Fisheries Cooperative Management Act, which enables the ASMFC’s to adopt coastwide management plans.  

The former sets clear, legally-enforceable standards for fishery management actions, which place the health of fish stocks above all other considerations; the latter is largely an exercise in herding cats, which helps the ASMFC get all of the states headed in the same direction, but does not dictate what that direction must be.  That difference goes a long way toward explaining the ASMFC’s continued lack of success in rebuilding fish stocks and maintaining such stocks at sustainable levels in the long term.

The debate over striped bass management triggers illustrates why that matters.

The Plan Development Team offered many more options to replace Management Trigger 3. 

Max Appelman called Trigger 3

“unique and very conservative,”

because it required action when fishing mortality rose above the target (provided that spawning stock biomass declined at the same time), while most fishery management plans, including those drafted pursuant to Magnuson-Stevens, only require new management measures when overfishing actually occurs (the same can be said of Management Trigger 4, which relates to the biomass target). 

While that’s true, and should provide the PDT and Management Board with a little more freedom to rethink this trigger, it should also be noted that federal fishery managers are required to set annual catch limits, based on stock size, each year, and adopt management measures that should prevent such limits from being exceeded.  The ASMFC does not impose recreational harvest limits on the striped bass fishery, and thus fishing mortality rates that hover just below the overfishing threshold can continue for years at a time.

One of the things that the Plan Development Team proposed was amending Management Trigger 3 so that no action was needed unless both fishing mortality rose above its target, and spawning stock biomass fell below target, for two consecutive years. 

The other proposals all decoupled fishing mortality from biomass, which seemed to be a good idea to many on the PDT, although it could be argued that by keeping them coupled, the trigger isn’t tripped unless it can be demonstrated that excessive fishing mortality might be causing a decline in biomass.  Other proposals would defer action unless fishing mortality exceeded its target for three years, or a five-year average of fishing mortality exceeded the target; yet another would eliminate any trigger related to the fishing mortality target.

The latter action would undoubtedly be a mistake, as it would lock the Management Board into a continuing pattern of crisis management, in which it fails to take any action until overfishing occurs.  

And when overfishing occurs, or when Management Trigger 3 is tripped, the Plan Development Team is proposing to drag out the process of correcting the problem, with options that would allow the Management Board two or three years to reduce mortality to target. 

That means, depending on the measures ultimately selected by the Management Board, overfishing could continue for three years before the Board took any action, and then the Board could have another three years before it reduced fishing mortality to the target level; somehow, the current Management Trigger 1, which requires overfishing to be ended and fishing mortality to be reduced to target within 1 year, would seem much better for both the bass and those who seek them.

Proposed biomass triggers could bring improvements

A similar pattern played out with the spawning stock biomass triggers although, taken as a whole, the changes to the biomass triggers were more benign; a few proposals would make things better than they are today.

The most significant of those would address the implementation of a rebuilding plan. 

The current Management Triggers 2 and 4, when they are tripped, require the Management Board to adopt a plan to rebuild the stock within 10 years, but never state when such plan must be implemented; thus, even though Trigger 2 was tripped in May 2019, and the Management Board has not yet implemented a rebuilding plan, it is probably not yet in violation of the explicit terms of Amendment 6.  The Plan Development Team’s proposal to require that a rebuilding plan be implemented within two years would both set a firm deadline for action and emulate the deadline that currently applies in federally-managed fisheries.

The PDT’s proposal to replace the current Management Trigger 4, which is more conservative than anything required by Magnuson-Stevens, with a requirement that rebuilding be initiated if biomass is below target and a stock assessment predicts that there is at least a 50% probability that the striped bass will become overfished within three years, would also be a step in the right direction, and would even be somewhat more conservative than a similar requirement in Magnuson-Stevens. 

The other proposed changes to Triggers 2 and 4 possess far less virtue.

One option would eliminate Management Trigger 2 altogether, leaving no trigger that addresses an overfished stock, and instead rely on the Management Board acting after Management Trigger 4 is tripped, which would be a more conservative approach, since Trigger 4 is based on the biomass target, and not the lower threshold.  That might be the right way to go, since it would seem to guarantee swifter action, provided that the Management Board took prompt action if the Trigger 4 was tripped.  

Another Trigger 4 proposal would require a rebuilding plan if the biomass fell below target for two or possibly three years, while a third would require biomass to fall below target for two years, and the 3-year average of fishing mortality to rise above target as well, before action need be taken.

Depending on the options selected, new spawning stock biomass triggers could make things either better or worse fof the bass; still, the opportunity to improve the management system is there.

Proposed recruitment triggers hold promise

Finally, the Plan Development Team provided some proposals to make Management Trigger 5, the recruitment trigger, more effective.

The current recruitment trigger sets a very high bar.  Even though striped bass have seen periods of poor recruitment since 2003, the current trigger was tripped only once during that period.  A proposed new trigger, deemed to be of “moderate sensitivity,” would be tripped if a juvenile abundance index for any of the four “core” producer areas fell within the lower 25% of all values for the period1992-2006; if that trigger had been in place since 2003, it would have been tripped three times.  A second proposed new trigger, deemed to be of “high sensitivity,” would be tripped if a core juvenile abundance index fell below the median value for the period 1992-2006 for three consecutive years; that trigger would have been tripped most often—six times since 2003.

The question is what managers need to do when Trigger 5 is tripped, for unlike triggers 1-4, Management Trigger 5 does not reflect the current health of the stock. 

Because there striped bass recruitment is primarily driven by environmental conditions in the spawning rivers, and not by the size of the spawning stock, poor recruitment can occur even when spawning stock biomass and fishing mortality are both around their target levels.  Instead, the recruitment trigger is a warning that, perhaps six or seven years in the future, poor recruitment will lead to a decline in the spawning stock.  The Atlantic Striped Bass Technical Committee noted that

“Management response options are intended to reduce fishing pressure as weak year classes enter the population.”

The Plan Development Team came up with a number of options to address a low-recruitment scenario, and while they differed in their particulars, all called for managers to reduce fishing mortality in response to low recruitment; one would require rebuilding the spawning stock, should it fall below its target, on the assumption that recruitment would remain low. 

In addition, the lower fishing mortality rate adopted in response to low recruitment would continue in effect until the next stock assessment was completed; as the Technical Committee’s Katie Drew pointed out, flipping back to a higher fishing mortality rate as soon as then 3-year recruitment value improved would help neither the striped bass stock nor the fishery, for the low-recruitment years would continue to impact the stock for some time, while it would take a few years for the new, stronger year classes to fully recruit into the fishery.

Amendment 7’s Achilles’ heel

The trick, in setting management triggers, is to avoid injecting additional delay into a management system that is already too slow to respond to threats to the stock.

Opportunities for delay abound.  

Some have already been described in the proposed changes to Management Triggers 1 and 3.  Others arise out of worries that managers might have to deal with too many triggers being tripped simultaneously.  

We have already seen that occur twice; first in 2014, when Management Triggers 3 and 4 were tripped by the 2013 stock assessment, and again in 2019, when the 2018 stock assessment tripped Management Triggers 1 and 2.

In both cases, the Management Board was obligated to reduce fishing mortality to the target level within 1 year, and rebuild the female spawning stock biomass target in no more than 10.  And in both cases, the Management Board failed to fully live up to its obligations; while it successfully reduced fishing mortality within the required period, it never implemented a 10-year rebuilding plan.

I have heard members of the Plan Development Team challenge that claim and assert that, because reducing fishing mortality to target will initiate rebuilding, the Management Board did their job.  However, such arguments miss an important point.  Management Triggers 2 and 4 do not require the Management Board to rebuild the stock in 12 or 13 or more years, or even at some uncertain point in the future.  The language of the triggers gives the Management Board no discretion to drag out rebuilding; rather it clearly states that the Board “must” modify the management program to rebuild the stock in no more than ten years.

And that, the Management Board has, to date, failed to do.  It has never produced a plan that is likely to rebuild the stock in ten years or less.  

To address the perceived problem of multiple management triggers being tripped within a short time of one another, the Plan Development Team is proposing a number ways to justify the Management Board sitting on its hands and injecting more delay into the management process.

The PDT seems to be worried that too many changes to the management plan could be required if a number of management triggers were tripped within a short period of time.  But is that really a valid worry?  Amendment 6 was adopted in 2003, and in the 18 years between then and today, management triggers were tripped only twice, in 2014 and 2019, in both cases by benchmark stock assessments that revealed real and serious threats to the striped bass stock. 

Two new management documents in an 18-year span hardly represent excessive change.

A comment was made at the most recent PDT meeting that, in addition to Addendum IV in 2014 and Addendum VI in 2019, the Management Board and ASMFC staff had to work on three other management documents—an Addendum V that never went out to public comment, the pending Amendment 7, and an Addendum VII that is also being drafted right now. 

But it’s important to note that none of those three documents can be attributed to a management trigger; instead, they were voluntarily initiated by the Management Board.  

Addendum V was initiated at the behest of Michael Luisi, the Maryland fishery manager, who was trying to squeeze more blood out of the striped bass stone by relaxing management measures after an initial analysis of Addendum IV’s impacts showed a 2015 fishing mortality rate of 0.16, slightly below the fishing mortality target of 0.18; Luisi was also among the most insistent voices calling for the Amendment 7 process to begin.  And Addendum VII was largely driven by Delaware’s desire to increase its commercial quota.

Neither Addendum V, Amendment 7, nor Addendum VII can be attributed to a tripped management trigger, and none of the three were initiated to address a threat to the striped bass stock; all were attempts to increase landings for someone. 

Instead of seeking ways to defer management actions needed to protect the stock, perhaps some members of the Management Board should pay more attention to the needs of the resource, rather than persistently trying to up their states’ kill.  That would certainly lessen the workload of the Board.

In the end, delaying needed management action is always a bad idea.  Whether that delay comes in the form of an amended management trigger, that pushes off the time for management action until the stock has a chance to decline a bit more, or whether it comes in the form of a formal deferral intended to ease the burdens on the Management Board, it can never to the striped bass any good.

It is impossible to overfish a stock back to health, and it is difficult to rebuild an overfished stock without a clearly defined rebuilding plan, that allows managers to gauge the state of the stock against established rebuilding benchmarks, and will warn if more restrictive measures are needed to timely achieve the rebuilding goal.

In the hearings held on the Public Information Document last spring, stakeholders made it clear that they wanted to see a more rapid management response; they already believed that the Management Board was moving too slowly, and would not be amenable to more delay.

Right now, the draft Amendment 7 being crafted by the Plan Development Team seems to have the potential to improve the way striped bass are managed.  But the Management Board can cut easily cripple Amendment 7’s potential.

If it votes for more delay.