Sunday, October 2, 2022

AMENDMENTS TO MSA REAUTHORIZATION BILL PUT SHARKS IN THE CROSSHAIRS

 

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.

 



 

 

 

 

No comments:

Post a Comment