YES, ANGLERS CAN HARM MARINE FISH STOCKS

I have been involved, to a greater or lesser degree, in marine fish conservation issues since the striped bass stock began to collapse in the late 1970s.  But I didn’t get heavily—some would argue overly—involved in the political side of fishery debates until about three decades ago, after the folks who supposedly represented the local angling community turned their backs on anglers, and instead chose to cater to the recreational fishing industry, in order to assure that the donations that kept their organization going would continue to flow.

It was a story that would repeat itself two decades later, when an association that had once prioritized the health of fisheries resources reinvented itself as a champion of “anglers’ rights,” became an industry shill, and by doing so forced me to leave and carve my own road.

In between, I worked with quite a few people who also cared about marine conservation.  They came from all walks of life, some scientists, some professional advocates, many just anglers who wanted to pass a healthy ocean along to their kids.  In the beginning, I worked very closely with someone who was both a recreational fisherman and the publisher of a widely-read angling newspaper.  While we agreed on just about all of our long-term goals, we differed on one major point.

I thought that proper fisheries management required managers toi regulate all sources of fishing mortality, while he focused on reining in the commercial fleet, and argued that fishing with hook and line, which required the fish to voluntarily strike a bait or lure and caught them one at a time, could never cause real harm to a fish stock, unlike commercial net fisheries that scooped fish out of the water en masse, regardless of whether they were in a feeding mood.

He was even the co-founder of an advocacy group, called the United Gamefish Association or maybe United Gamefish Organization—enough years have passed that I can’t recall precisely—which was focused on conserving striped bass by eliminating the commercial fishery.

Similar beliefs animate Stripers Forever, a contemporary advocacy group, although SF also recognizes that anglers can do their share of harm, and some of public relations efforts of the Coastal Conservation Association, which celebrates its efforts to have species such as speckled trout and red drum declared “gamefish,” eliminating the commercial fisheries, while themselves declaring that

“changes in recreational regulations have rarely, if ever, resulted in a direct fishery recovery.”

 What it really comes down to, in the end, is that everyone thinks conservation is a great idea, until conservation efforts begin to restrict their participation in their favorite fishery, at which point conservation is still a great idea, so long as someone else is bearing the conservation burden.

But every so often, someone relatively new to the management arena honestly asks the question of whether angling—defined as fishing with a hook and line—can really cause significant harm to a fish stock.  To many, it seems counterintuitive; after all, it’s a big ocean, big enough that just finding a fish, and convincing it to take a hook, can often seem like a daunting task.  The idea that enough people can find enough fish willing to bite, that they can impact the health of fish populations can  be a bit hard for some to believe.

On the other hand, we’ve seen the damage that nets can do.

We’ve seen purse seiners in the Atlantic nearly wipe out generations of young bluefin tuna, ultimately putting themselves out of business in the process.  

We’ve seen trawlers scour the banks off New England for cod and other groundfish, removing so many that, after a while, what were once some of the most productive fishing grounds in the world are now comparatively barren.  

And anyone who has ever read Peter Mattheissen’s book, Men’s Lives, will recall his description of a New York haul seine crew targeting striped bass off North Carolina, enclosing so many fish in their net that its meshes began to break, driving the fishermen to run additional nets around the first and eventually dragging so many fish to the beach that they flooded the markets, and had to bury thousands of pounds of unsold bass in the sand.

So yes, commercial netters can do, and have done, a lot of harm, but what we have to remember is that, at least in United States waters, all that damage was done in the days when fisheries were largely unregulated.  

Today, we have some of the most highly regulated commercial fisheries in the world, with fishermen licensed at both the state and federal levels, new entries into many fisheries tightly restricted, and catch monitored on nearly a real-time basis.  While commercial abuses still occur, it is typically by rogue individuals; for the most part, domestic commercial fisheries are managed well and do no harm to fish stocks.  The size of the commercial fleet is relatively small, and its numbers are on the decline.

On the other hand, there are a lot of recreational fishermen out there and, collectively, they catch a lot of fish.  The most recent version of Fisheries of the United States, a report issued by the National Marine Fisheries Service, noted that

“U.S. anglers took nearly 200 million trips in 2020.  These recreational anglers caught an estimated 2 billion fish and released 65 percent of those caught.  The total recreational harvest was estimated at 344 million fish with a combined weight of more than 353 million pounds.  The top U.S. species ranked were striped bass, bluefish, red snapper, spanish mackerel, spotted seatrout, and dolphinfish.”

That “top U.S. species ranked” statement is a little misleading, and probably reflects angler preferences more than anything else.  When ranked by the weight of fish landed, yellowfin tuna led the pack, with over 17 million pounds (about 595,000 fish) landed.  Ranked by numbers of fish caught, the leader was spotted seatrout (54 million), followed by Atlantic croaker (53 million), black sea bass (44 million), gray (“mangrove”) snapper (42 million), and hardhead (“sea”) catfish (39 million).  However, the number of fish caught doesn’t necessarily track the number of fish killed and taken home, a list led by spot (20 million), scup (14 million), Atlantic croaker (14 million), spotted seatrout (13 million), and bluefish (10 million).

Some of those popular recreational species, most notably yellowfin tuna, black sea bass, and red snapper, support very active commercial fisheries.  Others, such as striped bass and bluefish, support far more modest commercial efforts.  Others, including spotted seatrout, see relatively low commercial landings.

So when we ask the question of whether recreational fishing can harm a fish stock, we should examine one of the species which supports relatively little commercial activity, but is very popular with anglers.  Spotted seatrout in the Gulf of Mexico and, more particularly, Louisiana might be a good place to begin.

The National Marine Fisheries Service reports that commercial spotted seatrout landings in the Gulf of Mexico for 2022 were just under 30,000 pounds, with the bulk of that, 28,252 pounds, taken in Mississippi and almost all of the rest from the Gulf Coast of Florida.  Louisiana had no reported commercial landings at all.

Recreational landings for the entire Gulf of Mexico are much harder to discern, since neither Louisiana nor Texas participates in NMFS’ Marine Recreational Information Program.  Thus, all we know for sure is that recreational spotted seatrout landings for 2022, in Alabama and Mississippi, and along the Gulf Coast of Florida, were a little over 8,200,000 pounds—recreational landings for just three of the five Gulf states were well over 250 times that size of commercial landings for the entire Gulf of Mexico—so it’s probably safe to say that, whatever problems might beset the Gulf’s spotted seatrout population, outside of those caused solely by cold snaps and other natural events, they lie at the feet of anglers and not the commercial fishery.

Spotted seatrout aren’t a migratory species, and so tend to stick relatively close to their home waters.  Different states manage them differently.  

Florida maintains relatively conservative rules for anglers fishing its Gulf Coast, who may retain between 3 and 5 spotted seatrout per day, which must measure between 15 and 19 inches in length, although anglers may keep one larger fish each day.  Florida’s spotted seatrout population is in relatively good shape, except where populations have been devastated by the red tide.

In Texas, anglers may keep 5 spotted seatrout between 15 and 25 inches long, again with one of the five fish allowed to be larger.  However, the state admits that its regulations would not allow a sustainable fishery if hatcheries weren’t used to artificially inflate the overall population.

But in Louisiana, anglers may—with some local exceptions—keep 25 spotted seatrout per day, as long as such fish are at least a foot—just 12 inches—long.  And Louisiana’s spotted seatrout are badly overfished and in serious trouble.

Louisiana is trying to improve its spotted seatrout management program, but it is getting strong pushback from elements of its recreational fishing community, particularly the Louisiana Charter Boat Association and the state chapter of the Coastal Conservation Association, which are dead-set against increasing the size limit above 12 inches, even if such increase would make a meaningful improvement in the spotted seatrout’s spawning potential.

In fact, the quote that I provided at the start of this essay, about changed regulations not leading to stock recovery, came directly from CCA Louisiana’s campaign to keep foot-long seatrout vulnerable to recreational harvest.

So, do anglers killing so many little seatrout actually impact the Louisiana population?  Given the lack of a commercial fishery, it seems that there is little other likely cause for that population’s decline.  Louisiana’s state fisheries managers have said that

“[O]verfishing and other factors have caused the [spotted seatrout] stock to become almost completely comprised of smaller, younger fish…Given this imbalance, there is concern that a major collapse could occur in the event of a poor recruitment year (e.g. major freeze)…

“ Very few more speckled trout can be produced from other sources…This means that gains and losses will be the result of management within the recreational fishery.”

And that makes sense, given that the truncation of a population’s age and size structure is almost always tied to excessive fishing mortality, and the only people killing spotted seatrout in Louisiana are anglers.

The problems besetting Louisiana’s speckled trout are a textbook example of how recreational fishing pressure, and recreational pressure alone, can decimate a fish population.

Of course, most fish populations support at least a somewhat more active commercial fishery.  Striped bass are a perfect example; in that fishery, commercial fishing may account for as much as 20% of all fishing-related removals.  

In such situations, where an extremely popular recreational species is also targeted by a commercial fishery, anglers need to recognize that recreational fishing still accounts for a substantial majority of the fishing mortality, placing significant pressure on the species, and that commercial fishing only adds to the stresses already placed on the stock by the recreational sector.

While, in such situations, it wouldn’t be accurate to blame the recreational sector for the entirety of the stock’s problems—anyone who catches fish and/or kills fish, intentionally or incidentally, is part of the problem confronting the stock, and should contribute to the management solution—it is equally wrong to minimize recreational impacts and try to argue that “gamefish status” would put the management effort back on the needed track.

Even anglers who release every fish they catch can contribute to a stock’s decline.  The most recent benchmark stock assessment for striped bass found that, for the period 2015-2017, release mortality accounted for 48% of all recreationally-related fishing mortality.  And that assumes that the estimate of just 9% of all bass dying shortly after release is accurate. 

While some anglers argue that such estimate is high, there is reason to believe that, at least in the case of larger bass, it may be underestimating the number of fish that don’t survive after being returned to the water.

In a recent Facebook post, John McMurray, an experienced and capable charter boat captain from western South Shore Long Island, noted that most anglers were ignoring the regulation requiring anglers to use circle hooks when fishing with bait.  Instead, the nearly universal practice is to cast a barbed, weighted treble hook into a menhaden school, snag a bait, and then allow the bait to sink beneath the school, so that the bass ends up hooked on the big treble, not on a single circle hook.  Such bass can frequently end up fatally gut-hooked—although Capt. McMurray observes that he sees a lot of bass gut-hooked with circle hooks, too.  But his most relevant observation, with regard to this post, is that

“during the last several days I’ve seen A LOT of floaters around, which REALLY has me questioning the efficacy of the slot limit.”

That’s a valid observation.

Anglers often point to, and complain about, the striped bass that they occasionally see floating behind a commercial boat, and argue that the commercial boats do all the damage.  But they are far slower to acknowledge the floaters that appear around the recreational fleet, both in the ocean and in the Chesapeake Bay, or that wash ashore on the beaches frequented by surfcasters, fish that don’t show up in the landings estimates, are undercounted in the release mortality numbers, but nonetheless contribute to the stock’s problems, as untallied victims of snag-and-drop, gut hooking, exhaustion, and cameras. 

And that doesn’t count recreational poaching, which is not insubstantial.

So yes, recreational, hook and line fishing can and has contributed to the depletion of various fish stocks.  Fingers pointed only at the commercial fleet are often pointed in the wrong direction.  Yet there is still good news.

Good regulations, good law enforcement, and good angler behavior can eliminate most of the problems, and lead to sustainable fisheries, for recreational and commercial fishermen alike.  We all have the power to help those things come about, and should make an effort to do so.