STRIPED BASS REBUILDING EFFORT STALLS AT THE ASMFC--WHAT MIGHT BE NEXT?

 

On December 16, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board met to consider possible new management measures for 2025.  Such measures would have made it more likely that striped bass spawning stock biomass will be rebuilt to its target level by 2029, as required by the striped bassmanagement plan.

A number of Management Board members had been concerned that the 2018 year class of striped bass would be entering the 28- to 31-inch slot size limit for the coastal recreational fishery next year, and that if additional management measures were not adopted, a significant proportion of the 2018s would be removed from the population during the 2025 season.  The fact that striped bass recruitment since 2019 has been far below average, with the Maryland juvenile abundance index for the years 2019 through 2024 indicating  the lowest average spawning success for any six-year period since 1957, convinced some fishery managers that protecting the 2018s was a particularly urgent concern.

But, in the end, that didn’t happen.  

Instead of opting to take certain, if admittedly imperfect, actions to further protect the striped bass stock in 2025, a substantial majority of the Management Board decided that it made more sense to kick the can down the road, and initiate an addendum to the management plan that might—or might not—lead to the adoption of additional management measures in 2026.

I can’t say that I was surprised by that outcome, as I thought some sort of delay—either deferring any possible action until the February 2025 Management Board meeting or doing what the Board ultimately did, initiating an addendum—was the most likely outcome, although for a time during the meeting, I had a real hope that a well-crafted substitute motion, that would have imposed modest reductions in landings, might prevail.

I could speculate as to why it didn’t, but my views would be only that—mere speculation based more on observations than demonstrable facts—and so would contribute little of value to the discussion.

I could opine that, if the Management Board was composed solely of professional fishery managers, and not dominated by amateurs who have no formal scientific training and/or do have a vested financial interest in killing striped bass, the vote would have been different, but we need to take the Management Board as we find it.  While we can work for change, we cannot dwell in the land of “if only.”

What matters now is what happens next, because the future is something that, with enough work, might still be changed.

Unfortunately, I fear that last Monday’s inaction may have convinced many formerly staunch conservation advocates that the ASMFC process is fatally flawed, because a majority of the Management Board lacks the will, the requisite sense of responsibility, and the political courage to make hard decisions when hard decisions are called for.  They are convinced that, when pressed, it will opt for delay rather than make a potentially controversial decision.  

Still, it’s too early to abandon hope. 

Recreational striped bass landings for March through August of this year were substantially lower than they were in 2022 and 2023, and it appears that landings for the months of September and October are following, if not slightly accelerating, the same trend.  Based on such landings, the Striped Bass Technical Committee has calculated that there is a 57 percent probability that the stock could rebuild by 2029 without any additional management measures being adopted.  

So it’s not impossible that, despite the Management Board’s inaction, rebuilding will still occur.

However, the Technical Committee also made two other projections, based on slightly different assumptions of fishing mortality, and if either one of those better mirrors future fishing mortality patterns, the stock with probably not rebuild on time.

And given that the Technical Committee advised that

“all three primary scenarios represent a credible range of what might happen,”

and none are deemed a more probable outcome than the others, the fact that the striped bass rebuilds without any further management action in only one out of three possible futures is not reassuring.

So if additional action is required, the bass’ next hope lies in the proposed addendum. 

The problem is that, If such addendum is to be adopted in October, as the Management Board contemplates, the ASMFC’s Plan Development Team will have to complete a draft addendum, which would go out for public comment, by the Board’s August meeting.  There was even some talk last Monday about having the draft ready by May.  That schedule would make it nearly impossible to know whether the most optimistic projection bears any resemblance to reality when it comes to removals of fish from the 2018 year class.

I suspect that such projection will predict 2024 landings with a reasonable degree of accuracy, but if those landings were atypically low, it may well underestimate landings in 2025 and beyond.  

Should that prove to be the case, the Technical Committee will have little chance to make a mid-course correction before the draft addendum is released for  public comment, as it will not receive Wave 2 landings data until mid-June, while wave 3 landings—those from May and June, which capture recreational harvest during the heart of the spring migration—won’t be available until around August 15, after the summer Management Board meeting is held.  Thus, there will be little or no 2025 data to inform the proposed addendum, which makes it difficult to understand what the Board gained by delaying any new management measures for another year.

If the 2024 landings match those in the most optimistic scenario, and support a 57 percent probability of the stock rebuilding if no further action is taken, there is a very good chance that more precautionary management measures will not be adopted for 2026.  And if that is the case, the Management Board night decide to abandon the new addendum.  Such things have happened before.

But even if the Board decides not to implement harvest restrictions, it could well decide to adopt measures that will make things worse for the bass, as well as for surf and private boat anglers.

To understand why, we need to take a look at the motion that was approved by the Board.  It reads

“Motion to initiate an addendum to support striped bass rebuilding by 2029 in consideration of 2024 recreational and commercial mortality while balancing socioeconomic impacts.  Options should include, if needed, a range of overall reductions, consideration of recreational versus commercial contributions to the reductions, recreational seasons and size changes taking into account regional variability of availability, and no harvest versus no target closures.  Final action shall be taken by the annual 2025 meeting to be in place for the 2026 rec and comm fisheries.  [emphasis added]”

The language that requires striped bass mortality—that is, landings data and the associated science—to be balanced with socioeconomic impacts opens the door to all sorts of mischief.

It could lead to the abandonment of risk-averse management strategies, because they impose greater short-term socioeconomic costs.  It could lead to an imbalance of commercial and recreational harvest reductions, based not only on the potential costs to commercial striped bass fishermen, but also because of “consideration of recreational versus commercial contributions” to overall removals.  It could lead to the Board creating special privileges for the for-hire fleet, allowing it a wider slot limit, a higher bag, or exemptions from certain seasons, or no-targeting requirements, that everyone else is required to obey.

Of course, if the Management Board wanted to do the socioeconomic analysis correctly, it would also consider the economic losses attributable to reduced striped bass abundance.  But in all of the years that I’ve been watching the Management Board do it work, such losses have never been considered, and I don’t expect the Management Board to begin considering them now.

The “socioeconomic impacts” language brings particular cause for concern given the comments made by Michael Wayne, a spokesman for the American Sportfishing Association, the primary trade association for the fishing tackle industry.  At Monday’s meeting, Wayne said

“…I think the public process is really important for such a significant decision of season closures.  And it seems like on the fly, the Board has chopped up this motion to look a lot like the conservation equivalency process that I think everyone had opposed moving forward with given the status of this resource.  And so, I think giving the addendum the opportunity to consider this more thoroughly, really develop options out that the public can consume and provide input on is the best way best path forward.  You know, I think about you guys know I am a part of a lot of these fisheries management discussions, and this is probably the most unique fisher that ASMFC manages, especially recreationally.  And I look at the public comments, and I know there’s millions of striped bass anglers out there.  Millions.  And I’m only seeing twenty five hundred comments from a lot of the same people that we know have been commenting.  And so, as an organization, we’re going to work with our members to try to get more people integrated into this process.  We know that the recreational fishery is very diverse, and I don’t feel the public comments really are a good reflection of that diversity.  And so, where is the opportunity to get those individuals into this process?  Where is the opportunity to give folks the chance to get involved and engaged?  I don’t think it’s on the fly with this substitute motion, and I challenge the Board to go the addendum route and reach out to the constituents that they haven’t heard from.  Don’t talk to the same folks  that you’ve been talking to all the time.  Find the people who care about this resource and value it in a way that their voices should be heard, too.  And that’s what we’ll do as an organization ourselves.  [emphasis added]”

It's a significant comment, not only for it’s unintended irony (if the ASMFC heeded his advice “Don’t talk to the same folks that you’ve been talking to all the time,” they would stop talking to Waine, who comments at just about every meeting), but because it appears to be something very close to the tackle industry dismissing the concerns of the conservation community and the anglers who have long sought to protect the long-term health of the striped bass stock—“the same people that we know have been commenting…the same folks that you’ve been talking to all the time”—while expressing the ASA’s intent to stack the deck when it comes to public comment, to “work with [its] members to get more people integrated into this process,” because it’s not hard to figure out that if the ASA is going to get more people involved in the management process, the people who it turns out will support the interests of the tackle industry, and not necessarily the interests of the striped bass or dedicated striped bass fishermen.

Thus, we can expect the fishing tackle industry to make every effort to shape the proposed amendment in a way that maximizes short-term profits, and not the long-term health of the striped bass stock.

And then there’s the benchmark assessment.

Our first look at the impact of Monday's delay, and of the addendum that the Board has initiated, on the success or failure of the rebuilding effort will come in 2027, after the next benchmark stock assessment is completed.  The assessment is scheduled for peer review in June 2027, which means that it will be released too late for the Management Board to adopt a responsive addendum that year.  Should the benchmark suggest that a new addendum is called for, such addendum won't be finalized before February 2028, giving whatever measures might be included little time to affect stock rebuilding before December 2029.

Right now, we don’t know what the 2027 benchmark assessment is going to look like, but we can already predict that it might and probably will be significantly different from the last benchmark, which was completed in 2018.

The benchmark assessment is the time when the Technical Committee and the Stock Assessment Subcommittee reexamine the assumptions underlying striped bass management.  Such review can include a reconsideration of whether the model used to evaluate the health of the stock is the right one to employ, or whether another model might be more appropriate.  There has already been some speculation that the model might change this time around.

Any new model could attempt to regionalize the assessment, and separate bass hatched in the Chesapeake Bay from those that originate in the Delaware and Hudson rivers.  Scientists tried to do that in the 2018 assessment, but their effort did not pass peer review.  It’s very possible that, by 2027, they will have refined their approach enough to have it accepted by the peer review panel.

In addition, the apparent problemwith the Marine Recreational Information Program, which seems to cause it tooverstate the number of trips taken by recreational fishermen, and so leads to inflated catch and landings estimates, will probably have been corrected before theassessment is prepared.  If that is the case, it is likely that recreational catch and landings estimates will be reduced as part of the correction process and, because such data is an important input in the striped bass stock assessment, that the species' spawning stock biomass estimate will be redfuced; if that happens, the biomass target and threshold for striped bass will almost certainly be lowered as well.

That probably won’t change the stock's status, because all of the reductions will be on about the same scale, so a stock that was overfished based on the current calculations will probably also be overfished after any MRIP revisions, although that might not be true if the stock is very close to the biomass threshold, whether above or below.

However, we can probably also expect to see an effort to reduce the biomass reference points that is unrelated to any changes to MRIP, driven by Management Board members who merely seek higher striped bass landings.  While we can hope that any such proposal would fail—an effort to lower the biomass reference points was quickly and decisively shot down a few years ago, during the development of Amendment 7 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Striped Bass--there are still some Management Board members who are very much in support of such change.

Finally, the 2019 year class—the first of what, so far, has been six consecutive striped bass year classes that were far, far below the long-term average—will enter the spawning stock biomass in 2026, the terminal year of the benchmark assessment.  How the assessment will handle the impacts of the small 2019 year class and subsequent poor recruitment has yet to be seen.

With all of those changes, it is impossible to guess whether the benchmark assessment will  find that the stock is no longer overfished, or whether it might find that overfishing is once again occurring.  It might find that the stock is in better shape than we currently believe, or it might find its status has deteriorated at some point since 2018.

But the next question is:  What will the Board do if the 2027 benchmark assessment brings bad news?

Given the Board’s non-response on December 16, it is far from unlikely that, if rebuilding is only somewhat unlikely to occur—say, no less than a 40 percent probability—it may choose to do nothing once again, and try to learn to live with a stock slightly below the threshold.  I hope that’s not what happens, but if socioeconomics is given parity with the needs of the stock, as called for in the recently adopted motion, it could well occur.

A bigger question is what the Board might do if the benchmark advises that the bass are headed for serious trouble, and that instead of worrying about rebuilding the stock, managers will have to make a serious effort to keep the stock from  collapsing.

Hopefully, we won’t get to that point, but if recruitment continues to tank, and if fishing mortality drifts upward again, the odds favoring a stock collapse could increase.  Should he possibility of a collapse ever become a probability, provided that no management action is taken, we have to wonder whether the Management Board would be willing to take decisive action to avert a crash, or whether it will again pick  the least disruptive option—say, something with a bare 50 percent probability of success, assuming that the most optimistic assumptions prove true--and so set the table for a calamity.

After last Monday, I can’t set that possibility aside.

But I also can’t sit by and watch it happen.

I know that for a lot of the folks who have been fighting for the health of the striped bass stock over the last three, five, ten or more years, last Monday’s decision felt like a punch in the gut, that made them just want to throw up their hands and walk away.  I know because I’ve spoken with some of them, and corresponded with others, and that’s what I’ve been told.

The fact is, that’s just what folks like Michael Waine and his cronies at the American Sportfishing Association want to hear.  They want concerned anglers, who understand the management system and the needs of the striped bass, to walk away and not call for responsible management.  They want the ASMFC to stop listening to those who advocate for the resource, so that the industry can flood the arena with shills who will advocate for business interests instead.

And if folks walk away, that’s just what will occur.

I know that recent events make the bass’ future look bleak.  But, as I noted before, that future is not written in stone.

It can be changed.

By us.

If we shake of this loss, and get back in the fight.