HOW NOT TO MANAGE A FISHERY

 

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.

At an April 2006 meeting of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s American Lobster Advisory Panel, panel members were

“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.

The ASMFC’s American Lobster Technical Committee issued a 2010 report titled Recruitment Failure in The Southern New England Lobster Stock, which stated that

“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.

Because the trigger was tripped so soon, the Management Board decided to delay any change in the minimum size to January 1, 2025, but to lobstermen, who questioned the science that triggered the increased minimum size—a spokesman for the Maine Lobstermen’s Association called it “too precautionary”—and worried that smaller Canadian lobster, some caught right on the Maine/Canada border, would reduce their market share, that was still too soon.

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.”

In response to such complaints, Rep. Golden introduced his bill (he will be up for election in November, after all), which would

“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.