HONORING THE PROMISE: REBUILDING STRIPED BASS

 

I’m always willing to try something new, or consider new facts or a new idea, but in one way at least, I remain a traditionalist who is very much rooted in the past:  Despite the fact that I’m an attorney, and am very aware of the value of written contracts, if you’re the sort of person who reneges on your word, and needs a written agreement to keep you at least halfway honest, I have no real desire to do business with you, written agreement or not.

I’ll admit that such outlook colors the way that I look at fishery management actions, and none so much as the current efforts to rebuild the striped bass.

And in the case of striped bass, we even have it neatly put down in writing,

“If the [Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Atlantic Striped Bass] Management Board determines that the biomass has fallen below the threshold in any given year, the Board must adjust the striped bass management program to rebuild the biomass to the target level within [no more than ten years]  [emphasis added]”

The Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board made that promise in 2003, when they first inserted such language into Amendment 6 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Striped Bass, and they renewed and reaffirmed it a little over two years ago, when Amendment 7 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Striped Bass was adopted.

In doing so, they created a solemn obligation owed to the public, that the Management Board would do all in its power to rebuild a depleted striped bass stock, should ever the need arise.

The Management Board hasn’t always lived up to its promises.  In 2013, a benchmark stock assessment demonstrated that spawning stock biomass had been below target for consecutive years, and that fishing mortality had been above its target during the same time.  That combination of factors triggered a related provision of Amendment 6, which also required the Management Board to implement a 10-year rebuilding plan.

However, even though Amendment 6 explicitly stated that the Management Board “must” initiate a 10-year rebuilding program under such circumstances, the Board nonetheless opted not to execute the duties spelled out in the management plan, and instead only reduced striped bass fishing mortality.  Richie White, New Hampshire’s Governor’s Appointee, asked at the August 2014 Management Board meeting,  

“in the document it says even with proposed measures [to reduce fishing mortality], probability of stock being overfished in 2015 and 2016 is high.  If that happens, are additional steps necessary?”

Such comment would have seemed to open the door to the required rebuilding plan, but Michael Waine, then the ASMFC’s Fishery Management Plan Coordinator for striped bass, downplayed the need for a rebuilding plan, perhaps even if the stock became overfished, saying

“technically if [spawning stock biomass] fell below the threshold, that would trigger Management Trigger 2.  This is in Amendment 6.

“Management Trigger 2 in Amendment 6 says that you need to rebuild the [spawning stock biomass] back to its target over a specified timeframe that should not exceed ten years.  I think that there is sort of a combination of things happening.  The Board is acting to reduce [fishing mortality].  Through that action we see the projections showing that [spawning stock biomass] will start increasing towards its target, but we’re uncomfortable with projecting out far enough to tell you when it will reach its target because the further on the projections we go the more uncertainty that is involved.  Therefore, I think the trend is to get back towards the target, but we can’t tell you exactly how quickly that will happen.”

When people qualify a statement by saying that something is “technically” required—particularly when such requirement is, in truth, explicit and unequivocal—it’s usually a prelude to finding a reason to circumvent the required action.  In this case, Waine never suggested that the Board already had an obligation to initiate a rebuilding plan, since another management trigger, Management Trigger 4, had been tripped by the 2013 assessment.  Instead, he was more than willing to assume that the stock would rebuild itself without any formal plan in place, and saw no need to encourage the Board to do what Amendment 6 clearly required. 

In retrospect, of course, we know that the stock wasn’t able to recover, and that instead of trending back toward the target, it instead became overfished.

While it’s impossible to know what might have been, had the Management Board dutifully discharged its obligations under the ASMFC’s striped bass management plan a decade ago, instead of merely reducing fishing mortality in the hope that the stock would manage to heal itself, there is an excellent chance that the scientists monitoring progress under the rebuilding plan that should have been put in place would have detected the further decline in the spawning stock biomass.  In such case, the Management Board would have been able to put corrective measures in place before the stock became overfished, while the large 2011 year class was still young and abundant, and perhaps before the even larger 2015 year class was large enough to harvest.

Had that been done, it is very possible that the Management Board could have prevented the stock from becoming overfished or, at worst, started the rebuilding before the recruitment drought of 2019 through 2023 occurred, putting the stock in a far better position to weather the poor recruitment years.

Unfortunately, that was never done

Instead, even after the 2018 benchmark stock assessment found the stock to be both overfished and experiencing overfishing, the Management Board again failed to promptly put the required rebuilding plan in place.  Instead, it reduced fishing mortality quickly, then embarked on the multi-year process of drafting and adopting Addendum 7.  Only after Addendum 7 was completed, and after three years of the 10-year rebuilding period had already passed by, did the Management Board take a serious look at the rebuilding process.

What it now faces is daunting.

In order to meet its obligations under the management plan, the Management Board must rebuild the spawning stock biomass to its target level by 2029.  Although it got off to a slow start, busying itself with Amendment 7 before getting down to the business of rebuilding the stock, once Amendment 7 was out of the way the Management Board has taken multiple actions to support rebuilding, including 2023’s emergency management action and the adoption of Addendum II to Amendment 7 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Striped Bass early this year.

However, it now seems clear that such actions will not be enough to make timely rebuilding likely, and when the Management Board meets in October, it will need to consider additional reductions in fishing mortality to get the job done.

With a 1-fish recreational bag limit, and narrow slot limits in both the Chesapeake Bay and on the coast already in place, it is clear that any new management measures are going to be painful.

But they are also going to be necessary, if the stock is to rebuild and be in a position to cope with the consequences of the five years of poor recruitment, including the lowest 5-year average of the Maryland Juvenile Abundance Index ever recorded.

Yet there are those who are already suggesting that the Management Board ought to again renege on its promise to the public, and not rebuild the striped bass stock in accordance with the terms of the management plan.

A few weeks ago, Michael Waine—the same Michael Waine who failed to remind the Management Board of its obligation to initiate a rebuilding plan back in 2014—appeared on a podcast, called “The Qualified Captain,” in his current role as a hired gun for the American Sportfishing Association, the largest fishing tackle industry trade association.  One of the topics he touched on was striped bass, when he talked about intentionally failing to fully rebuild the stock, in order to allow anglers to kill—he preferred the weasel-word “access”—a few more fish.

He described striped bass management as

“Another scenario where management has gotten more strict through time.  We’re in a rebuilding period for the striped bass population.  The trajectory is good right now, the rebuilding trajectory.  (Remember that you’ve got to take all this with a grain of salt.  I think it’s better to talk about trajectories rather than talk in absolutes given all the uncertainty.)”

Of course, he also said that the striped bass stock was headed in the right direction—would be on the right trajectory—back in 2014, yet we all know where the stock stands today. 

In any event, when the Technical Committee met a week or so ago, it made it clear that the current trajectory of the stock will probably not achieve rebuilding by the 2029 deadline, so there’s objective evidence indicating that the stock’s trajectory is not quite as good as Waine suggests.

But then he went on:

“So we have an increasing trend for striped bass, but we know on the horizon there’s been poor recruitment in the Chesapeake Bay, which is a major spawning area for striped bass and that’s been a good indicator of future, or what the fishery will look like in the future, right.  You cannot catch an adult striped bass without starting with a lot of babies.  We know these, what we call “poor year classes,” that have been spawned over the last five years are coming down the road, meaning when the fish get large enough to be a part of our fishery, that we’re catching, there are going to be fewer of them, and so the question becomes, like what do we do in the meantime, to plan for that?”

It’s a fair question to ask, and Waine laid a good foundation before asking it, so people could understand what was going on.  But after that, he makes his real intentions clear, and they aren’t something that will make many striped bass anglers happy.

“And so that coupled with very ambitious conservation goals, very ambitious, like we’re trying to rebuild the striped bass population to a level that it has rarely ever been to in the history of striped bass, that we’ve been measuring.  And so the question becomes like how far are we willing to go from a management and policy side to meet these very ambitious conservation goals, and you can see the byproduct of that, we have a very narrow slot limit.  And so where we, where we’re currently focused is where do we go from here?  We want to avoid like the scenario like southern flounder and a scenario like red snapper [where recreational landings are sharply curtailed].  We want to make sure that management…is aware of the headwinds but also allows for access for anglers to go out and catch a fish, and so how do we balance these values?  How do we balance building back a population to a conservation level that we can all agree on, which we never likely will, with fishing access, with the ability to actually go out and catch these fish, and what worries me, worries on this specifically is like we’ll go too far, meaning we’ll actually tell people to stop fishing for striped bass, which is where I think everyone loses…”

From those comments, there’s little question that Waine is more than willing to compromise the health of the striped bass stock in order to promote striped bass fishing, which is exactly what you’d expect from someone paid to protect the interests of the fishing tackle industry.  But his comments are misleading enough to deserve a little special attention.

In debunking those comments, it’s probably best to begin near their start, with the statement that
“we’re trying to rebuild the striped bass population to a level that it has rarely ever been to in the history of striped bass, that we’ve been measuring,” because such statement, while true, is also very misleading. 

In recent times, spawning stock biomass only exceeded the target level during a four-year period in the early 2000s.  Looking at the status of the stock at that time, it’s surprising that the biomass managed to reach target levels for even those few years, because fishing mortality exceeded the threshold level for 25 consecutive years; from 1995 through 2019, the striped bass stock experienced overfishing, yet even under such adverse conditions, biomass managed to rise above target from 2002 through 2005.  

Waine ignores that critical detail—excessive fishing mortality—when describing how rarely spawning stock biomass achieved its target level.  But such details matter, and if managers did their job properly, as they have been trying to do in recent years, and constrained fishing mortality to its target level, a biomass that hovers near, and even above, it target level should be readily achievable.

Waine also ignores the fact that stakeholders have already had a long, thorough, and heated conversation about whether the striped bass stock should be fully rebuilt, or whether the target level should be lowered to allow a larger striped bass kill.

That conversation occurred just a couple of years ago, during the debate over Amendment 7, after fisheries managers from a handful of states, most notably Delaware and Maryland, argued for a reduction of the target level and an increase in landings.  Such suggestion was incorporated into the Public Information Document for Amendment 7 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Striped Bass, which was sent out for comment in the spring of 2021. 

Stakeholders thoroughly rejected the proposal to compromise striped bass rebuilding in the name of higher landings.

Out of 2,764 comments received on the issue, only 18 supported reducing the spawning stock biomass target in order to allow more striped bass harvest.  When only 0.65%--that is, just sixty-five one-hundredths of one percent—of the stakeholders support reducing the biomass target in order to allow more fishing activity, and 99.35% of such stakeholders oppose the reduction, it’s pretty safe to say that the people have spoken and that the issue should not see the light of day for a very, very long time.

The Management Board seemed to agree with that conclusion, and removed the issue from further Amendment 7 deliberations.  The matter should be deemed resolved, and not reopened so soon after such a clear rejection by the striped bass fishing community.

Yet Waine continued to harp on the point, saying

“At what point do you, you know, how far do you want to take it?  Is it really where we are in the striped bass conversation, and I think things got to be some really hard decisions pretty soon, because we’re going to be in a scramble where if you want to reach this goal you basically have to tell people to stop fishing for striped bass…

“I think at some point a conversation about where are we really going with this fishery.  Like are we willing to accept a slightly lower conservation goal to still allow people to go fishing for striped bass, or are we wanting to reachg this conservation goal at the expense of telling people you can’t even go and fish for them, and that is what’s coming on striped bass.”

But, as I noted above, that conversation was already held, in detail, as part of the Amendment 7 debate, when stakeholders came out by the thousands and, nearly unanimously, said that conservation, not more fishing, should be the Management Board’s guiding star.

And should anyone believe that the stakeholders may have had a change of heart over the past couple of years, they only need look at the comments on Addendum II to realize that conservation remains most striped bass fishermen’s primary concern.

Out of 2,488 stakeholders who commented on the recreational size limit in the ocean fishery, 2,289, or 92%, preferred the most restrictive option, the 28- to 31-inch slot size, along with a one-fish bag.  And out of the 2,399 stakeholders who commented on recreational regulations for the Chesapeake Bay, 2,275, or 94.8%, again supported the most restrictive management measures, a 1-fish bag limit and a slot that spanned either 19 to 23 or 19 to 24 inches.

So when Waine tries to claim that

“What we feel our responsibility is, making sure that we understand the needs of our community and really trying to craft policies that allow for all the different individuals within our community to be able to access the resource the way they want to, and not pick winners and losers in the decision-making,”

he’s really either trying to kid himself or to blow smoke at us.

When it comes to striped bass, the stakeholders have spoken, not once but multiple times.  And they spoke with remarkable unanimity, with the diverse stakeholder community of surfcasters and boat fishermen, fly fishermen, trollers, pluggers, and bait fishermen, all coming together in the common cause of conservation.  Each time they spoke, they made it clear that rebuilding the stock, and not killing more fish, is their primary goal. 

While Waine is focused on what he calls “access,” which is a more polite way of saying “dead fish on the dock,” he might be better off recognizing that the report of public comments on the Amendment 7 Public Information Document noted that

“Most comments related to harvest control supported a moratorium on all commercial and recreational harvest for some period of time.  Suggested time periods ranged from 3 years to 10 years or until the stock is rebuilt.”

Although that wasn’t a majority position, 170 of the approximately 3,000 comments supported such action, a substantial number of stakeholders willing to give up their ability to harvest a bass in order to rebuild the depleted spawning stock.  And while, at this point, talk of a moratorium is probably premature, there are few dedicated striped bass anglers who wouldn’t be willing to forego keeping their fish if that was necessary to rebuild the spawning stock.

Because the conversation on conservation vs. “access” has been held, and conservation won in a walk.

As the date of the October Management Board meeting approaches, and as managers get closer to the day when they are going to have to decide whether to honor their promise to the public, we can expect to see more people like Waine, arguing that half-measures are fine.  Like Waine, most will represent some aspect of the fishing industry, and will be seeking to elevate short-term profits above the long-term health of the stock.

It is up to the stakeholders, and the responsible members of the Management Board—who, I hope, are in the majority—to resist such arguments, and rebuild the stock.

Because Waine was right about one thing:  Given the poor recruitment in the Chesapeake Bay, hard times are coming to the striped bass fishery.  And when those hard times come, the striped bass will be in far better shape to survive them if it enters those trials fully rebuilt, and not already somewhat diminished, because people were willing to compromise conservation imperatives in exchangefor a few more deead fish.

I saw the striped bass collapse once, more than 40 years ago.  That time, managers were largely caught by surprise.

That excuse won’t gain them much sympathy if they let the stock collapse again.