MARINE FISHERIES MANAGEMENT: THE COSTS OF DELAY

 

Whether we like it or not—and whether we want to admit it or not—fish stocks can decline.

Most of the time, such decline is the direct result of commercial and/or recreational fishermen removing too many fish from the population, but that’s not always the case.  Sometimes, environmental conditions can drive a drop in fish numbers.  

We are currently seeing that with striped bass, as five consecutive years of warmer-than-normal winters and warm, dry springs have led to poor spawning success in the Chesapeake Bay (although there is reason to hope that conditions were better this spring, and that 2024 just might produce an above-average year class).  

More ominously, we are seeing warming trends in places like the Gulf of Maine push fish out of their traditional range; sometimes, they can successfully move farther north or out into deeper, cooler waters, but a species’ ability to do so is not guaranteed.

Yet, in the end, the cause of a fish stock’s decline is probably less important than fishery managers’ response to the dropping numbers.  Whether a decline is due to overfishing, to increased predation, or to adverse environmental conditions, the needed response is essentially the same: reducing mortality so that the stock may be restored to sustainable levels.

Unfortunately, putting the needed reductions in place, and keeping them in place until the stock fully recovers, is something that is often far more easily said than done.  Consider the plight of Louisiana’s red drum.

The drum aren’t overfished, but they may be experiencing overfishing.  Louisiana fishery managers believe that, in order to maintain a sustainable red drum stock, about 30% of the fish must be able to survive long enough to exceed 27 inches in length—the maximum size red drum that may be retained by anglers (although soon-to-be-defunct regulations permit anglers to keep one fish per day over that size)—and so “escape” into the spawning stock biomass.  In recent years, the red drum escapement rate has fallen to just 20%, and red drum abundance has fallen as well.  Fishery managers have to go back to the 1980s to find a time when recreational red drum landings fell as low as they did in 2021.

The question then becomes what to do about the decline.

Louisiana fishery managers originally proposed reducing fishing mortality by 35%, a move that, in theory, would restore the stock in about 30 years.  While that might sound attractive to some, the big problem is that the farther you push off rebuilding, the more uncertainty creeps into the rebuilding plan.  While it is relatively easy for fishery managers to estimate fishing effort, landings, recruitment and other variables five or even ten years from now, trying to figure out what they’ll be three decades hence virtually guarantees that such estimates will be beset by substantial error.

Thus, a contingent of Louisiana’s fishing guides urged managers to impose greater restrictions—a  50% landings reduction—which would cut the rebuilding time in half, to just 14 years, and make it substantially more likely that such rebuilding would actually occur.

Unfortunately, as long-time Louisiana angler and YouTube personality Todd Masson observed,

“Fisheries management obviously is as political as it is biological, and by that I mean you’ve got to bring the constituency along in steps.  If we did what was biologically prudent, it may not be politically popular.  In fact, certainly in this case, it would not be.”

And comments made by members of Louisiana’s charter boat community demonstrate his point.  While some guides aggressively argued for a shorter rebuilding time others, apparently ignoring the fact that the red drum population was close to a 40-year low, fought any new restrictions.

While Mr. Masson maintains that

“The fishery is nothing, nothing, nothing like it used to be.  It’s a pale shadow of its former self,”

and some guides, echoing such observations, call for additional restrictions, others disagreed.  Ron Price, a guide who operates out of Venice and believes that no additional restrictions are needed, claimed that

“Every guide down there right now in Venice, for example, will tell you:  ‘We’re catching as many redfish that I’ve caught my entire career’ [sic].  That’s a pretty good indicator, when you have 100 guides go out, and every fishing guide will tell you they’re not seeing a reduction in catches.”

Of course, people often see what they want to see, rather than what’s really there, and some Louisiana guides have a reason for wanting to see a healthy redfish stock.  As writer Mike Smith noted in an article appearing on the nola.com website,

“Ron Price…and others point to their experience on the water and warn that new limits on both trout and redfish will badly hurt their charter businesses.

“Louisiana has had looser limits than other Gulf Coast states on both species, a draw for out-of-state anglers.”

So in the end, as far as such guides are concerned, ending overfishing and conserving red drum is less important than conserving their short-term incomes.  They and like-minded anglers had enough political clout to fight off the 50% harvest reduction, and convince the state to adopt a less conservative, if more uncertain, management approach.

Such efforts to stretch out rebuilding times and delay the adoption of needed management measures aren’t limited to Louisiana’s red drum.  They occur far too often, affecting multiple species along every section of the coast.

Perhaps the most blatant example was the mismanagement of the Southern New England/Mid-Atlantic stock of winter flounder.  Here in New York, where anglers once landed about 13.5 million winter flounder in a single year, the species’ decline became apparent in the late 1980s.  The recreational flounder fishery was entirely unregulated at that time, and when biologists at the Department of Environmental Conservation attempted to craft regulations that might help to stem the decline, and perhaps help to rebuild the stock, they ran into stiff opposition from the recreational fishing industry which, like some of the guides in Louisiana, saw regulation as a threat to their incomes.

The party boats, in particular, argued that even though there were fewer and fewer fish around, regulations could not be too restrictive, because their customers needed to maintain the “perception” that they might sometime have a “good day” when they could still take home a full bucket of fish.  Faced with such opposition, the state backed off what Mr. Masson might have referred to as “biologically prudent” regulations, and instead adopted politically expedient compromise regulations.

But winter flounder demonstrated the flaw in Mr. Masson’s argument that “you’ve got to bring the constituency along in steps.”  For as flounder continued to decline, the regulations remained politically expedient, always too little, too late to halt the slide.  Even when the stock had collapsed, the recreational fishing industry battled to kill what few remained.  The bulletin describing the proceedings of the September 2009 meeting of New York’s Marine Resources Advisory Council tells of a party boat captain who said

“describing the winter flounder as a collapsed stock may be inaccurate [because] when he speaks to fishermen, he hears that winter flounder are perhaps not plentiful, but are definitely accessible.”

By 2009, New York’s recreational flounder landings had dropped from about 13,500,000 to just a little over 100,000 fish, but the industry was still intent to squeeze what little blood was left in that dry and crumbling stone.  At the same meeting, a representative of the state’s tackle shops

“not[ed] that the recreational fishing community is in trouble, and they need to have the opportunity to fish…They need to keep the [tackle] shops open.”

Today, New York’s flounder population has fallen so low that 2023 landings were estimated to be just a little over 500 fish—that’s down a long way from the 13.5 million landed four decades ago—yet at the January 2024 meeting of the state’s Marine Resources Advisory Council, there were still party boat captains who asked the state to relax regulations so that their customers could kill more of the few flounder that remain.

Winter flounder, perhaps more than any other species, demonstrates what happens when needed management measures are delayed, because managers try to “bring the constituency along in steps” that are more politically palatable than the "biologically prudent" measures might be.

There is a real risk that the fish disappear.

Right now, North Carolina is confronting a similar issue with southern flounder.

The decline of the southern flounder didn’t happen overnight.  Commercial fishermen, recreational fishermen, years of ineffective management, and a warming ocean all contributed to the species' demise.

StarNews Online, a North Carolina news outlet, notes that

“Dr. Louis Daniel was the former state [of North Carolina] marine fisheries director for nearly a decade…

“He said that the plight the state and flounder fishermen find themselves in today didn’t just happen, but has been an issue for several decades as stock assessments showed pressures growing on the fishery even as rules were put in place to supposedly help it recover…

“Daniel said overfishing and discounting the impacts of discards, especially in the state’s commercial fisheries, is hampering stock recovery efforts—even as many fishermen claim that they are seeing more flounder on the water than they’ve ever seen before.”

Because, like some of the Louisiana guides, fishermen who make money from a fishery almost always see what they want to see, regardless of the reality.

Eventually, North Carolina regulators followed the science, and decided not to open the recreational flounder fishery this year, due to anglers’ exceeding their quota in 2023. 

It’s possible that such action might mark the beginning of the flounder’s recovery, although it’s hard to argue that, had meaningful—that is, “biologically prudent”—regulations been adopted a long time ago, such closure might not have been needed.

But before we blame state fisheries managers for delaying action, we should think about blaming state politicians instead, for as was the case with Louisiana red drum, politicians often prevent biologists from doing what’s needed, and what they really want to do.  That’s a particular problem at the state level, where both the legislature and the governor’s office are more accessible to special interests than they are in Washington, where it takes a little more influence (and money) to get through the door.

Thus, despite all the protestations we hear coming from the angling industry and the “anglers’ rights” organizations, state fisheries management is far from ideal, and is often problematic.

In fact, had the fisheries described above been federal waters fisheries, many of the problems could have been avoided, for the beauty of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, which governs federal fisheries, is that it largely takes politics out of the picture.  Yes, politicians fret and fume when their constituents aren’t allowed to kill as many fish as they might like, and they may, from time to time, make little tweaks to the law in an effort to satisfy a few voters.

But Magnuson-Stevens brings something to fisheries management that is absent from most state programs:  Structure.  Overfishing must not occur.  Overfished stocks must be rebuilt, and within a time certain, making the sort of delays seen in the Louisiana red drum scenario impossible to maintain.

And science, not politics, must drive fishery management measures.

That doesn’t mean that Magnuson-Stevens is perfect.  Sometimes, it can seem a bit arbitrary, and its insistence on managing according to “the best scientific information available” can sometimes force managers to rely on very uncertain data.

Still, when we look at federal fisheries, it is difficult to find many—or any—recent situations where stocks have been allowed to languish, or even wither away, because managers have given in to politics and delayed “biologically prudent” management measures.

And given the cost of such delay, to both fish stocks and to fishermen, that fact alone stands as mute testimony as to why state fishery management systems do not yet live up to the example set by their federal counterparts.