I still remember a night, maybe
25 years ago, when I was Chairman of the Babylon Tuna Club, and was running a
meeting addressing one of the more contentious issues in club history: Whether the club should adopt minimum sizes
for fish entered in its annual and weekend contests, which were higher than the
minimums imposed by the state and federal governments.
Just about everyone liked the
idea when it was first proposed, but after a couple of years of members having
their fish barred from contests because they didn’t meet the new minimums, quite of
few folks decided that the club minimums were a bad idea, because they apparently thought that $25 or
$50 or $100 that they didn’t win might have made a big change
in their lives.
The debate got pretty heated, and
a lot of angry and a few just plain dumb things were said, but one of the
comments that I’ll never forget went something like “The state has scientists
setting the regulations, so we shouldn’t be trying to adopt more restrictive
club rules.”
“The state has scientists setting
the rules.”
Ahh, if only that were true.
The unfortunate fact is that
fisheries regulation is a political process.
While I know, and have known, many state fisheries scientists, know how
hard they work, and how much they want to do the right thing, I have also seen
all their hard work go for nought when somebody who has the governor’s, or
other high-ranking official’s, ear disagrees with the professionals’ assessment
and convinces the folks in the Executive Mansion to take things in a different
direction.
Almost without exception, that
direction was the wrong one, but if the right (or, perhaps, the wrong)
person shares a Scotch or two with the ultimate decisionmakers, belongs to the
right political party, and/or makes appropriate contributions to the
appropriate candidates’ campaigns, all the science in the world won’t change
the outcome.
It’s a shame, because the people
who should be driving the management process—the people who are formally
trained in fisheries science, who have spent years in the field learning their
craft, and who have developed the professional expertise to draft and analyze
management measures—often have far less impact on management measures than they
should. At the state level they are,
after all, answerable to the state’s governor; in just about every state, the
head of the Conservation Department, or Environmental Department, or whatever
the state chooses to name the management agency, has either known the governor
for a long time or has been otherwise active in the governor’s party, and is
far more likely to resolve controversial issues based on political, rather than
conservation, concerns.
So it’s pretty typical to see the
fisheries scientists make the best recommendations that they can, trying to
maintain a healthy fish stock while also being aware of the impacts of their
decision on the various stakeholders. The
professionals’ regulatory proposals then go through lawyers, which may
change some things for strictly legal reasons, before they are kicked upstairs
for approval at the agency’s highest levels.
Throughout that process, everyone
with an interest in the outcome—anglers’ organizations, commercial fishermen
and their organizations, the party boats, the charter boats, the tackle shops,
and the rest—pull whatever strings they might pull, use whatever contacts they
might have, and call in whatever favors are owed to either support or overrule
the professional managers’ decisions, with the opponents hoping to either kill
the regulation outright or to change it in ways that will better serve their
interests, even if they end up hurting the resource and everyone else in the
end.
And when those efforts fail—in this
sort of contest, once everyone starts to fight everyone else, someone is bound
to fail—the next step is to call for the legislature to come in and pass a bill
that will overrule whatever the agency decides, and instead benefit those with the greatest legislative influence, even if the
legislation that emerges will cause everyone real harm in the end.
The latest example of that sort
of thing is happening now in the House
of Representatives, where Rep. Jared Golden (D-ME) teamed up with Rep. Michael
Lawlor (R-NY) to introduce an amendment to the Fiscal Year 2025 Commerce, Justice,
Science, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, which would supposedly prevent
regulators from increasing the minimum size for lobster caught in the Gulf of
Maine.
Should that effort succeed, it
could well cause long-term harm to both the Gulf of Maine lobster stock and the
lobstermen of Maine.
The unavoidable truth is that lobsters
are impacted by warming waters, and the Gulf of Maine is warming faster than
most oceanic regions on Earth.
Twenty
years ago, the Southern New England stock of American lobster began to show
signs of distress, as landings dropped sharply.
Such drop was not unexpected given that both abundance and recruitment
had been declining in the face of high fishing mortality. However, fishery managers were slow to
respond to the decline, as lobstermen tried to argue around the findings of the
2006 stock assessment.
“concerned that the stock assessment did
not take into account the increases in natural mortality (M) in some areas…[Advisory
Panel] members were also concerned that the assessment does not take into
account predation of lobsters by striped bass, cod, and dogfish to name a few.”
It was a classic, and all too
typical, example of fishermen trying to escape increased regulation by placing “blame”
for decreased abundance on naturally occurring factors, while doing their best
to ignore the fact that, regardless of the cause of a stock’s decline, current
levels of harvest were, nonetheless, unsustainable. And the fishermen did have substantial
success in delaying the management process and assuring that the ASMFC would
not adopt measures stringent enough to halt the decline in lobster abundance.
“Since the release of the 2009 Assessment,
additional monitoring information has been reviewed which documents that the
reproductive potential and abundance of the [Southern New England] stock is continuing
to fall lower than the data presented in the latest assessment. The [American Lobster Technical Committee]
contends that the stock is experiencing recruitment failure caused by a combination
of environmental drivers and continued fishing mortality…
“The southern New England stock is
critically depleted and well below the minimum threshold abundance. Abundance indices are at or near time series
lows, and this condition has persisted.”
The report further stated that,
“Given additional evidence of recruitment
failure in [the southern New England stock] and the impediments to stock
rebuilding, the Technical Committee now recommends a 5-year moratorium in the
[southern New England] stock area…”
Even after an external peer review, conducted by three internationally recognized experts, essentially endorsed the Technical Committee’s advice, neither fishermen nor fisheries managers were willing to take it. Instead, they subordinated the scientific recommendations to the short-term desires of the lobster fishermen. The ASMFC’s American Lobster Management Board hemmed and hawed, continually proposing trivial solutions to a very real and serious problem, and never mustered the courage to stand up to hostile stakeholders, and do what was needed to halt the lobster’s decline. Thus, the ASMFC’s summary of the 2020 American lobster stock assessment notes that
“The abundance threshold is calculated as
the average of the three highest abundance years during the low abundance
regime. A stock abundance level below
this threshold is considered significantly depleted and in danger of stock
collapse. This was the only reference
point recommended for the [southern New England] stock due to its record low
abundance and low likelihood of reaching this threshold in the near future.”
Managers’ concessions to the
lobster industry, and their failure to take any meaningful action to stem the
southern New England stock’s decline has thus put that stock on the path toward
collapse.
While all that was going on, Gulf
of Maine lobstermen were catching more lobster than ever before, benefitting
from an ocean that, while far cooler than that off southern New England, was
beginning to warm.
Now, however, there are signs
that Gulf of Maine temperatures may be getting a little too high. The ASMFC notes that
“since 2012, lobster settlement surveys
throughout the [Gulf of Maine] have generally been below the time series
averages in all areas. These surveys,
which measure trends in the abundance of juvenile lobsters, can be used to
track populations and potentially forecast future landings. Persistent low settlement could foreshadow
declines in recruitment and landings. In
the most recent years of the time series, declines in recruitment indices have
also been observed.”
That’s how things started in
southern New England a couple of decades ago.
But this time the Management Board, apparently having learned the folly
of inaction, decided to move quickly, and adopted Addendum
XXVII to Amendment 3 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for American
Lobster.
Addendum XXVII provides, in part,
that the minimum size of Gulf of Maine lobster would increase, and the escape
vent sizes in lobster traps used in the Gulf of Maine would also increase,
“based on an observed decline in recruit
abundance indices of 35% from the reference level (equal to the three-year average
from 2016-2018).”
That decline occurred much more
quickly than anyone anticipated. In
October 2023, the Technical Committee determined that once 2022 data was
included in the index time series, the recruit abundance index would fall by
39%, when compared to the reference level.
The minimum size would have to change much more quickly than anyone
expected.
Kristan
Porter, president of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association, complained that
“I fish in an area called the gray zone in
Downeast Maine. We share the same area
as Canada, so if I am going to have to throw lobsters back that they will still
be able to keep, then it’s putting us on an uneven playing field with our
neighbor.”
“block federal funding from being
used to implement, administer, or enforce ASMFC’s proposed gauge increase.”
It’s the perfect example of an ill-informed fisheries bill.
First, it ignores
the best available science on Gulf of Maine lobster recruitment, without having
any countervailing science at all (as demonstrated in southern New England,
fishermen’s assurances that the science is wrong can be very wrong). If Rep. Golden was truly concerned about the
science, he could have taken the
path of his colleague, Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), who successfully urged the
Senate appropriators to set aside $2 million in funding
“for Gulf of Maine and Georges Bank
American lobster research through Maine Sea Grant…with a focus on ‘stock
resilience in the face of environmental changes…’”
and so be sure of his facts
before taking legislative action that could harm the lobster—and so his
constituents—in the long term.
But it’s also unclear how
effective Rep. Golden’s bill would be even if it became law, since the ASMFC’s
management actions are binding on the states, not the federal government, and
Maine would be legally obligated to enforce the terms of Addendum XXVII or risk
having its entire lobster fishery shut down as noncompliant, a result that
would certainly be worse for the state’s lobstermen than an increase in the
minimum size.
But that’s what happens when
legislators get involved in what should be science-based fisheries issues.
Not only don’t they understand
the implications of the science but, too often, they misunderstand the
implications of their own actions as well.
The gray zone should be a Marine Protected Area
ReplyDeleteGood piece. One of the strengths of the federal system vs state is that the SSCs (made of scientists) set a managerial cap on harvest, which the Councils cannot exceed.
ReplyDeleteAgree completely.
DeleteWe keep hearing some angling groups claiming that state management is better than the federal system, but the only reason for such claims is that they want to manipulate the state systems to get around the scientific advice and kill too many fish.