BASELESS CRITICISM MASKS MAGNUSON-STEVENS' SUCCESS

 

Bashing the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, and the resultant federal fishery management process, has become a cottage industry for some spokesmen for both the recreational and commercial fishing industries.

In this blog, I tend to focus on the recreational whining, largely because I’m a recreational fisherman, but also because I find it personally offensive, and feel as if I’m being stained by some of others’ selfishness and aggressive ignorance merely because I’m a part of the recreational community.  Thus, when I read an op-ed piece written by the representative of a once-respectable angling group, who is trying to stir up fishermen’s sentiments against a recreational fishing permit likely to produce much-needed data in a difficult-to-manage fishery, I feel obliged to criticize the effort.

And I can only laugh when I see John DePersenaire, now in charge of government affairs for the Viking Yacht Company, complain that

“For far too long, the absence of robust data has led NMFS to default to a precautionary approach which negatively impacted impacting [sic] stock assessments, recreational catch estimates, and even marine mammal conservation efforts,”

given that DePersenaire once confessed to, and was found guilty of, taking nearly $30,000 from NMFS as a fishery observer, and then never (alright, he went out once out of sixty supposed trips) actually doing what he was paid for.  Instead, he faked the observer reports, going as far as to include coffee and blood stains to make them look real.

I suppose that might give him special insight into the quality of NMFS data, but it still seems just a little bit much to hear him criticizing the robustness of data that he, at one time, actively helped to corrupt.

But complaining about NMFS, Magnuson-Stevens, and data quality certainly isn’t limited to the recreational sector.  Recently, we’re seeing the same thing coming from the commercial side of the room.

Up in New England, a commercial fisherman named Jerry Leeman has founded a group called the New England Fishermen Stewardship Association,

“because federal regulators are grossly mismanaging our fisheries and pose a lethal threat to fishermen and the oceans.”

It appears that he, too, is a critic of federal fisheries data, since he has observed that

“The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is convinced the fish stocks in New England are declining, and they’re regulating fishermen into oblivion as a result.

“There’s no evidence that they’re right.  NOAA doesn’t have any reliable evidence at all.  The agency has not completed a full survey of New England fish stocks in four years.  The government’s recent attempts to jump start the process are foundering.”

To claim that there is “no evidence” that at least some New England fish stocks are declining may be one of the most blatant misstatements that I’ve ever heard.  I don’t know what kind of records, maybe in the form of party or charter boat log books, might document the summer cod fishery off Rhode Island prior to the early 1980s, but having been a participant in it from the late 1960s until its waning days in the early 1980s, I can assure Mr. Leeman that it has declined to near irrelevance since then.

How irrelevant?

The fishery was already headed downhill by the time semi-reliable recreational landings estimates began in 1981, but Rhode Island anglers landed about 328,000 cod in 1981, 608,000 in 1982, and 579,000 in 1983, compared to roughly 9,700 landed in 2020, 9,100 landed in 2021, and a little under 3,000 landed in 2022.  

Hard to argue that’s not evidence of a New England groundfish decline.

At least the cod are doing better then winter flounder,  In 1984, recreational fishermen here in New York took over 14 million flounder home.  This year, their tally was around 500.  And if New York isn’t quite New England, we can look back on the flounder fishery in Quincy Bay, Massachusetts.  Back in the ‘70s, anglers would charter buses to take them up to Quincy, where they’d buy flats of sandworms (12 dozen to a flat) and need all that bait to fill coolers with flounder. 

Today, they’re happy to catch an 8-flounder limit.  Massachusetts’ recreational winter flounder landings fell from over 16.5 million in 1981 to just under 110,000 last year.  That’s a decline of more than 99%.

So yes, there’s anecdotal evidence of a decline in many New England fisheries, which is amply supported by reams of fishery data.  However, Mr. Leeman makes light of the information available to New England fishery managers, instead trying to play a game of “gotcha” by picking out small issues and trying to grow them into a major indictment of the management system.

He complains that samples aren’t taken at night, and that all sample stations haven’t been covered in recent years, then argues that

“owing to shoddy tactics, reduced trawls, and diminished coverage, it seems inevitable that [the research vessel] Bigelow will produce a small and inaccurate data set,”

without even attempting to provide an analysis demonstrating that the results of the trawl survey are statistically invalid.  He then falls back on the timeworn argument that

“It’s worth noting that we fishermen cover far more water than does NOAA.  We fish hundreds of miles of marine habitat each voyage.  Thus, we have the best sense of the stocks.”

Mr. Leeman conveniently ignores that those “hundreds of miles of marine habitat” are places where fishermen believe that fish are most likely to be, and do not include the many more miles of marine habitat where fish used to be, but no longer exist in economically exploitable quantities, at least on a regular basis.  Certainly, by fishing only where the fish happen to be, fishermen can give the impression—perhaps even convincing themselves—that fish stocks are abundant, but it is the statistically valid, random surveys that provide the more accurate picture of stock health.

Still, Mr. Leeman at least tried to back up his arguments with concrete examples.  Such efforts were never made in an editorial that appeared in the Boca Raton [FL] Review.  Titled “NOAA’s Catch Quotas Rest on Shaky Grounds of Inaccurate Data,” the piece makes the same broad allegations made by Mr. Leeman, claiming that

“it has come to light that [NOAA’s] catch quotas may be built upon a foundation of inaccurate data.  This revelation raises serious concerns about the effectiveness and fairness of NOAA’s fisheries management practices, and the impact it has on both the industry and the environment…

“A closer look reveals that NOAA relies heavily on outdated and incomplete information, often leading to flawed estimations of fish populations and catch limits.  Such inaccuracies can have far-reaching consequences, including overfishing, depletion of fish stocks, and ecological imbalances that can harm entire marine ecosystems.

“…Fishermen and fishing communities bear the brunt of NOAA’s flawed quotas as they face unnecessary restrictions and economic hardships due to arbitrary limitations…”

The editorial goes on like that for quite a while, but never cites even a single, concrete example to support its arguments.

Which may be because there are none to find.

The simple if, in some quarters, unpopular reality is that Magnuson-Stevens, and the federal fishery management system, works, and works well.  That was illustrated once more in two bits of research conducted by Dr. Eyal Frank, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago, and Dr. Kimberly Oremus, an assistant professor at the University of Delaware’s School of Marine Science and Policy. 

One study investigated the commonly heard claim that Magnuson-Stevens creates an overly restrictive fisheries management regime which, while largely effective in ending and preventing overfishing, also leads to the “underfishing” of abundant and widely available fish stocks.  In a paper titled “Underfished or unwanted?,” which appeared in the May 11, 2023 issue of Science, the researchers revealed that most such allegedly “underfished” species were, in fact, being intentionally ignored by commercial fishermen because there is not enough demand for them to make fishing profitable.  Magnuson-Stevens played a role in only a small number of the 88 species examined, and only four of those accounted for most of the economic value of “underfishing”.

Thus, the notion that Magnuson-Stevens promotes underfishing has, in most cases, been fully debunked.

The other study was intended to investigate two other, seemingly contradictory, criticisms of federal fisheries law.  One is that it does not do enough to rebuild overfished stocks; the other is that it is largely ineffective, and that fish stocks would naturally rebuild on their own.

Both appear to be untrue.

The researchers looked at comparable stocks in United States waters, where Magnuson-Stevens applied, and in European waters, where no similar statute was in force.  They found that the fish in United States waters were, on average, 52.2% larger than comparable species found off Europe. 

Taking another tack, the researchers compared fish stocks that were depleted prior to 1996, when the mandatory stock rebuilding provisions were added to Magnuson-Stevens, to stocks that were depleted after that date.  They found that without a mandatory rebuilding policy, stocks continued to decline by about 45%, but that once a rebuilding policy was put in place, stock size typically doubled in five to ten years.

Finally, the study found that mandatory rebuilding requirements brought long-term benefits to not only to the fish, but to the fishermen who catch them.

While the first few years of a rebuilding plan led to declines in both landings and revenues, they recovered to or above pre-rebuilding levels within ten years, with catch levels being nearly 52% higher than the catch of equivalent species in European waters.

That’s a pretty good track record for fishery managers who, if their critics are to be believed, rely on bad data—at least, when they rely on any data at all.

It would almost suggest that it is the critics, and not federal fisheries managers, who are proceeding on flawed assumptions.