Last Thursday, the House Natural Resources Committee
completed its markup of H.R.
4690, the Sustaining America’s Fisheries for the Future Act, and sent it
along for consideration by the full House of Representatives. H.R. 4690, which represents the first
meaningful effort to reauthorize the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and
Management Act since 2006, is a good bill, and legislation that’s very much
needed, both to plug some existing holes in current law and to shape Magnuson-Stevens
into a law better suited to meet future challenges.
Hopefully, the House will approve the bill later this fall, it
will find similar success in the Senate, and be signed into law before the 117th
Congress comes to an end.
Still, the version of H.R. 4690 that emerged from Committee
is not quite as good as the version that existed before. The political process, when it is working
well, is a process of discussion and compromise, where everyone’s concerns
receive due consideration, and not the sort of dysfunctional, winner-take-all
dogfight that it has too often been in recent years.
In that regard, the good news is that the version of H.R.
4690 that was voted out of Committee included amendments that arose out of
exactly the sort of discussion and compromise that should underlie the
legislative process. The bad news is
that some of those amendments, offered by Rep. Garret Graves (R-LA), who frequently
caters to some of the more conservation-hostile elements of the recreational
fishing community, could easily undermine shark conservation and management in
the northwest Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico.
One such amendment reads
“Within 1 year of the enactment of this section, the Secretary
shall enter into an agreement for an independent analysis to be done on shark
populations in the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic coasts and before starting
the survey, develop a plan to integrate the results of this study into
the Secretary’s own data sets and fishery management measures. [emphasis added]”
Another would create a funding and research priority for
“Projects to better understand shark depredation, what causes
increases in the behavior, and how to best address the behavior.”
Read in a vacuum, those amendments might seem relatively
benign. However, read in the context of the hostility exhibited by saltwater anglers in the southeastern United States toward
coastal shark populations, they suggest a real and growing threat to effective
shark conservation, and to efforts to rebuild overfished shark populations to
sustainable levels.
Consider how predators feed.
Any predator, whether it lives above or beneath the sea,
must find a way to capture and subdue its prey.
Prey may be taken by pursuit or by ambush, but in either case, it’s
always better for the predator if such prey is injured or otherwise
handicapped, so that it can be more easily caught and devoured.
Taking that proposition into the marine environment, I
learned when I was still very young that if I cast a treble hook into a school
of bunker (more properly, “Atlantic menhaden”) and jerked that hoottk through
the packed aggregation of fish quickly enough to foul hook one in the side,
there was a very good chance that a bluefish would attack that bunker and cut
it in half before I could reel it back to the boat. The menhaden school might
have been fifty or more yards in diameter; many covered a few acres, and contained
untold thousands of fish, but despite such rich abundance, the bluefish would choose
to ignore all of the healthy and free-swimming bunker and choose to attack my
hooked and struggling menhaden instead.
That fact is well-known to anglers. “Snag-and-drop,” a technique that sees
anglers foul hook menhaden, then allow the hooked fish to struggle within and
below the school, has been practiced for many, many years. It was arguably the most popular way to catch
big striped bass up until the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission
mandated the use of circle hooks when bait fishing for bass, beginning in the
2020 season; it is so productive that, despite its prohibition, many
unprincipled anglers continue to fish that way today.
And we’re not only talking about fish eating menhaden. When I fish on wrecks south of Long Island, I
have had days when the bluefish made it nearly impossible to bring a black sea
bass or scup to the surface; every one that was hooked was attacked and partially
eaten on the way back to the boat.
In the fish-eat-fish world of the ocean, that’s just the way
things work. I’ve had blue marlin attack
hooked dolphin. Bluefish will attack not
only scup and black sea bass, but just about any hooked fish if it’s smaller than
them; I’ve seen cod, weakfish, flounder, and even striped bass fall victim to
their jaws. In the South, barracuda will
frequently savage smaller fish as they struggle against an angler’s line; in
the Pacific, both lingcod and halibut will latch onto hooked rockfish.
All of those things are pretty well accepted as the price
that one pays for fishing in the sea.
But when it comes to sharks, for some reason, things are
different. Perhaps because anglers can’t,
or at least choose not to, eat them, their depredation earns them the label of
nuisance, and anglers call for their numbers to be reduced.
That is a particular issue in the southeast, where sharks
are picking off anglers’ hooked snapper and grouper, and both fishermen and
charter boat operators are beginning to complain that there are too many sharks
in the ocean.
Such claims are clearly groundless. Dusky
sharks, for example, have been badly depleted, primarily by the longline fleet;
the stock won’t be rebuilt any time soon.
The National Marine Fisheries Service has advised that
“The updated projections estimated that the target rebuilding
years range from 2084-2204, with a median of 2107.”
In other words, if we’re really lucky, and everything goes
right, there’s a chance of rebuilding the stock in 62 years, by which time most
of the people reading this will probably be dead, and a child born today would,
if current rules still applied, be eligible to receive Social Security. If things don’t go so well, we’re looking at
more than 180 years before the stock rebuilds, which makes it clear just how much
damage was caused by the overfishing of the past few decades. Even if we accept the 85-year median
rebuilding time as the most likely outcome, NMFS warns that
“In order to achieve rebuilding by 2107 with a 50%
probability, the final models project that [the fishing mortality rate] on the
stock would have to be reduced by 20-85% (median=35%) from 2015 levels.”
That’s a pretty substantial cut to achieve in a fishery
where mortality is almost entirely attributable to bycatch, and not to a
directed fishery. And it strongly
suggests that there aren’t too many dusky sharks around.
Sandbar
sharks, which are closely related to duskies, are faring a little better. Scientists believe that they may be fully recovered
by 2071, in only about 50 years. So
there probably aren’t an excess of sandbars out there either.
Another fairly
close relative, the bull shark, may be faring a little better. A study published in 2013 suggests that bull
sharks off the coast of Texas may be experiencing an increase in abundance, which
is probably attributed to a gill net ban in Louisiana, since such nets will no
longer be ensnaring and killing the bull sharks as bycatch. But even if that is true, it’s important to
note that the increased number of fish represents a return to more normal
levels of abundance after the Louisiana gill nets were outlawed, and not some
unexpected spike in the population.
With
respect to lemon sharks, another common southeastern species, a study that came
out last year
“suggested that Lemon Shark stock abundance has been
relatively stable since the mid-1990s, with some estimates of prior depletion.”
So lemon shark populations, far from increasing, are holding
steady at levels that are probably lower than they once were.
But that’s not what we’re hearing
from a lot of southeastern fishermen. They
believe that there are already too many sharks in the ocean, and that numbers
need to be reduced, to keep them from stealing too many hooked fish. One
charter boat captain, who helped to organize a tournament specifically designed
to kill sharks, particularly bull sharks, and remove them from the ecosystem tried
to justify such event by saying,
“What we’re doing brings [shark overabundance]
to the fore. There is a small imbalance
in our shark population and we would like our federal government to conduct a
stock assessment.”
Another
charter boat captain, also a tournament organizer, complained,
“Any boat that comes out and parks on the
local reef immediately has 10 or 12 sharks under your boat every second or
every time you go out there to fish.”
He, too, believes that the shark population
should be whittled down.
Put in that context, the motivation behind Rep. Graves’ amendments to H.R. 4690 becomes clear. Once again, he is attempting to assuage the recreational fishing community, and play to some of their baser motivations, in this case to kill off marine competitors for snapper, grouper, and other recreationally important fish, regardless of the impact on the marine ecosystem.
To such fishermen, the shark that picks off a fish hooked by an angler is no longer merely a marine predator doing what comes naturally, feeding on crippled prey, but a malevolent pest that must be removed. Echoes of now-discredited terrestrial efforts to kill off wolves, foxes, coyotes, hawks, etc. in order to reduce competition for game animals prized by human hunters cannot be ignored.
NMFS has already found that a number
of shark species, including sandbars and duskies, are overfished and in need of
rebuilding. But that finding, as
accurate as it may be, is not the answer that fishermen want to believe, so Rep.
Graves’ amendment calls for “an independent analysis” of shark populations conducted
by someone—who and how they are chosen remains unclear—who Rep. Graves and the
fishermen undoubtedly hope will come up with a different conclusion.
When and if they do, the real kicker in the amendment comes in: NMFS will not only be required “to integrate the results of this study into the Secretary [of Commerce]’s own data sets and fishery management measures,” regardless of the quality of the study and the information on which it is based, but NMFS must also figure out how to achieve such integration “before starting the survey.”
Thus, the results of the so-called “independent
survey” must be used to manage shark stocks regardless of the quality of the
science and regardless of whether federal fishery managers believe the results
of such survey are useful for shark management.
And they must figure out how to do such things before they even know how
such survey is conducted and what it will say.
Because, after all, the purpose of
the amendment is not to find the true answers to fisheries issues, but rather
to find the answer that the fishermen Rep. Graves opts to support are looking
for.
Of
course, the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act also requires
that
“Conservation and management measures shall
be based upon the best scientific information available,”
so Rep. Graves’ amendment seems to
set up an potentially irreconcilable conflict:
The law demands that, if the results of the “independent study” do not
represent the best scientific information available, they should not be used
for conservation and management of the shark fishery, yet if the amendment becomes
law, the law will also require that the results of such independent survey be used
for conservation and management, even if the scientific information provided by
such survey is suspect.
Given such conflicting provisions,
it would seem that if such amendment becomes law, at least one lawsuit will be
inevitable.
Rep. Graves’ other shark-related
amendment doesn’t create the same sort of legal issue, but it does create some
confusion. It would make a study of shark
depredation a priority for NMFS research and funding. That wouldn’t be particularly remarkable, if
a NMFS study of shark depredation wasn’t already going on.
A
year ago, NMFS awarded a $195,000 grant to Florida Atlantic University’s Harbor
Branch Oceanographic Institute and to Mississippi State University to study
shark depredation in the South Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico regions,
respectively. There seems to be
little need to prioritize research and funding for such topic, when the funding
has already occurred, and the study is already going on.
Once again, one has to wonder
whether prioritizing new research on the same subject is intended to provide
some sort of insurance that, if the current study doesn’t come to the
conclusions that Rep. Graves and the fishermen want, another study already in
the wings might do so.
When someone starts funding studies,
already knowing what they want those studies to conclude, there is a serious
problem.
Such problem should not be seen as
H.R. 4690’s fatal flaw. Even with those
amendments in place, H.R. 4690 ought to be passed. It will improve fishery management too much
to be allowed to die.
At the same time, if the Rep.
Graves’ two shark amendments could be removed on the House floor, those
concerned with good conservation and management certainly wouldn’t complain.
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