MARINE FISHERIES: MANAGING FOR THE LONG TERM

 

I’ve been involved with fisheries management long enough to know that, whatever issue arises, fishermen tend to focus on what new management measures will mean for their next trip or for the next season.  Long-term impacts, for good or ill, are just about always ignored.

In my grumpier moments, which occur with some frequency, I’ve been known to comment that, where fisheries are concerned, anyone looking as much as one year ahead ought to be viewed as a visionary.

In my more reflective moments, I know that’s a little unfair, because such short-term focus isn’t limited to fisheries issues.  I spent just about all of my professional life on Wall Street, as in-house counsel at several large banks and brokers.  The short-term mindset was just as prevalent there.    

A thousand or more people might lose their jobs after a bad year, just so management could show investors that it was cutting expenses and so—at least in theory—increasing profits; the fact that the same managers might have to pay 25% more to replace those people once the business cycle turned around was never a part of the conversation.  And given that managers’ bonuses are usually based on the current year’s bottom line, and not on positioning their company for future success, perhaps that’s understandable.

But in fisheries, things are different—or at least they should be.  The key metric is maximum sustainable yield, not a maximum current yield that impoverishes the future.

Yet, while maintaining healthy, sustainable fisheries is the theoretical long-term goal, in practice, things aren’t that simple.  Short-term thinking often impinges on long-term goals.

We see that in current management actions.

The so-called “Harvest Control Rule” adopted by the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council and Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission is supposedly intended to

“ensure that [management] measures prevent overfishing, are reflective of stock status, appropriately account for uncertainty in the recreational data, take into consideration angler preferences, and provide an appropriate level of stability and predictability in changes from year to year.”

Yet the control rule wasn’t needed to achieve most of those goals.  The method previously used to set recreational management measures, which largely compared past fishery performance with the recreational harvest limit for the upcoming year, was already very successful at preventing overfishing (the notable exception was bluefish, which did become overfished, largely because recreational fishing effort and the resultant fishing mortality had been grossly underestimated prior to 2018, as had the spawning stock biomass needed to produce maximum sustainable yield).  

As Julia Beatty, the Mid-Atlantic Council staff member who led the Fishery Management Action Team responsible for overseeing the development of such control rule noted in a memo to the Mid-Atlantic Council, the models used to consider angler preferences in the specification-setting process could readily be employed outside of the control rule context. 

And questions of uncertainty in recreational data, as well as those of regulatory stability and predictability, could easily be addressed by considering management uncertainty when setting annual recreational specifications, as is recommended in the National Marine Fisheries Service’s published guidelines.

Of course, adopting a management uncertainty buffer would reduce landings somewhat, and that could conflict with the final purported goal of management measures that are “reflective of stock status.”  And therein lies the problem, because we all should be perfectly clear about one thing—the motivation behind the Harvest Control Rule was far less a desire to improve the management process than it was to find a way to let anglers harvest greater amounts of currently abundant scup and black sea bass. 

That becomes very apparent when one reads the letter that Michael Pentony, regional director of the National Marine Fisheries Service’s Greater Atlantic Regional Fisheries Office, wrote to the Mid-Atlantic Council’s chair in support of the control rule.

“A consistent theme in the discussions about recreational management over the last few years, from both Council and Board members as well as public comments, is that we should explicitly consider stock status when making recommendations about recreational management measures…The current regulations, which the staff recommends remain the same, require us to propose measures that achieve the recreational annual catch limit (ACL), irrespective of stock status…

“The staff recommendation references recent improvements in the management process, including the use of multi-year averages and outlier identification.  As you know, these measures are not new, and even when used while considering recreational measures for 2022, they resulted in the need for a 20.7-percent reduction for black sea bass harvest and a 56-percent reduction for scup; reductions that many around the Council/Board table argued were unnecessary given the stock status and trend of these stocks…

“It is my strong opinion that the Council/Board outcomes for 2022 clearly demonstrate that status quo recreational management for these fisheries is not an acceptable way to move forward.  This should be particularly clear given that the Council and Board have explicitly asked us, as recently as this year, to disregard the current regulations by implementing measures that do not meet the requirements of the status quo regulations…”

Which all boils down to, “We need to change the rules, in order to let recreational kill more fish,” which, in all honestly, might not be an unreasonable position when stocks are at the levels of abundance currently enjoyed by scup and black sea bass.  

The problem is that the control rule will be in place when the stocks begin their next decline, when it may make it difficult to halt the decline before it gets out of hand.

After all, the Mid-Atlantic Council’s Scientific and Statistical Committee hardly gave the control rule a strong vote of confidence, while the Council itself admits that thecontrol rule

“cannot be demonstrated to proactively prevent overfishing every year in all circumstances,”

and that

“even at high biomass levels, exceeding the [recreational harvest limit] overages can result in overfishing,”

so it is pretty clear that exceeding the annual recreational catch limit can only up the odds that overfishing will occur.

It is also pretty clear that the Harvest Control Rule is closely focused on an immediate goal, increasing the harvest of abundant scup and black sea bass, while paying far less attention to the long-term health of fish stocks.

The southern New England/mid-Atlantic stock of winter flounder has long been the victim of the same sort of thinking.

That stock began declining in the 1980s, and has been on the skids ever since, but fishery managers never really took actions needed to stop the decline.  

For many years, the New England Fishery Management Council, which is responsible for managing winter flounder in federal waters, refused to set an annual harvest quota for the commercial fishery, instead choosing to manage the stock with “input controls” such as restricting a vessel’s days at sea. 

Such tentative actions never got overfishing under control, although they did keep short-term landings higher than they ought to have been.

At the end of 2006, Congress passed the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Reauthorization Act, which required regional fishery management councils to specify hard-poundage annual catch limits for every managed species.  In response, the New England Council eventually set a quota for the southern stock of flounder; they waited until 2010 to do so, and by then, the flounder’s plight was dire enough that the quota was set at zero; a moratorium on landings had been imposed.

Unfortunately, that moratorium only applied to vessels fishing in, or at least licensed to fish in, federal waters.  State-waters fishing, both recreational and commercial, was governed by actions of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, which did not adopt the federal moratorium, but instead adopted management measures intended to reduce inshore landings of southern New England/mid-Atlantic flounder by 46%, while permitting a limited fishery to continue. 

Even that imperfect management scenario didn’t last very long.  The federal moratorium was lifted in 2013, giving it far too little time to make a meaningful difference in the health of the southern winter flounder stock.  And in 2014, despite their acknowledgement that the southern New England/mid-Atlantic winter stock was “in such a desperate situation,” the ASMFC’s Winter Flounder Management Board increased the recreational fishing season from 60 days to 10 full months, and doubled the commercial trip limit from 50 to 100 pounds, largely accepting an argument that boiled down to “if federal-waters fishermen are allowed a large winter flounder bycatch, it’s only fair to let state-waters anglers kill more fish, too.”

Tom Fote, the Governor’s Appointee from New Jersey, also made the argument that

“when winter flounder starts doing it, it gets traffic into the tackle stores, the bait shops, the rowboats and things like that.”

Both arguments focused on short-term concerns, not the long-term health of the flounder, which is now in a more perilous state than ever.

In October 2021, the academic journal Marine and Coastal Fisheries published a paper titled “The Relative Influence of Age Structure, Predation, and Temperature on Stock-Recruitment Dynamics:  A Case Study of Southern New England/Mid-Atlantic Winter Flounder,” which suggested that, after suffering years of overfishing, the southern stock of winter flounder lacked the older, larger females needed to provide strong year classes when favorable conditions occur, and further suggested that given the current condition of the stock, a 10 to 15 year moratorium might be required to rebuild it.

Instead, relying upon a recent stock assessment update which included the assumption that current low recruitment will continue into the foreseeable future, and that given such recruitment, the stock is currently about as large as it is ever going to be, the New England Council recently decided to up the southern New England/mid-Atlantic stock quota by 53%, forestalling any possibility of a recovery.

The chance of rebuilding the stock in the long term, however good or slim such chance might be, was subordinated to a short-term increase in landings that, because of the poor condition of the stock, might not even occur.

Shortsighted management actions don’t always have to involve major regulatory changes, nor doom a stock to a permanently depleted state.  Others—undoubtedly most—are far more limited in scope and effect.

In 2019, New York’s commercial fishermen were having a very difficult time finding striped bass that fell within the state’s 28- to 38-inch commercial size limit, and ended up landing only 45% of the state’s quota.  In itself, that wasn’t surprising, as the striped bass stock was overfished, and neither commercial nor recreational fishermen were encountering as many bass as they had a few years before.  However, Maryland produced a strong year class of bass in 2015, which would hopefully help fishery managers rebuild the stock.

The 28-inch minimum size was originally adopted because it marked a point when most female striped bass matured (although some females do not mature until 34 inches in length).  On average, a 28-inch striped bass is seven years old.  But commercial fishermen were complaining that there were a lot of small striped bass around, and asked New York to lower the minimum slot size to 26 inches, so that such smaller, and more probably immature fish, could be landed.  The state complied, changing its slot to 26- to 38 inches in 2020; in doing so, they made at least some of the 2015s vulnerable to the fishery.

As a result, New York’s commercial fishermen landed 83% of their quota in 2020 and 98% in 2021, which increased their landings in the short term, but also removed immature fish from the spawning stock before they had an opportunity to reproduce.  New York’s commercial quota was supposedly reduced to offset such loss of production, but still—the 2015s would have eventually grown into the 28- to 38-inch slot; was the need to increase commercial landings so imperative that it justified prematurely removing females from the spawning stock?

Personally, I tend to doubt it,.

It is said that when the Haudenosaunee Nation—the people better known in New York and southern Canada as the Iroquois—formed the five- (and eventually six-) nation confederacy that became the Haudenosaunee, a leader known to history as the “Peacemaker” instructed

“when you sit in council for the welfare of the people, you must think not of yourself or of your family, not even of your generation…make your decision on behalf of the seven generations coming, so that they might enjoy what you have today.”

While there is no hard evidence as to when such injunction was handed down—speculation dates it to somewhere between 1142 and 1500—and the precise language may have been unintentionally altered a little over the years, the concept remains valid today.  When setting policy, focus should be on long-term outcomes, and not on the benefits or harms that might immediately accrue.

If managers could stop concerning themselves with who might lose some business, or forfeit some landings, in the short term, and work to guarantee the long-term sustainability of fisheries resources, both the public and the resources themselves would benefit.  While I’m not suggesting a multi-generational outlook, and recognize that the inherent uncertainties in the data would make such an outlook impossible, I do suggest that the focus should be at least five years out, as concentrating on nearer-term consequences only serves to stall management efforts and make it more likely that any such efforts will fail.

Looking out five years is not too much to ask.

As someone who has nearly completed seven decades on Earth, I can say with some certainty that five years passes quickly.  You hardly notice it passing at all.