"THE BIOMASS...DECIDED TO STAY OFFSHORE"

 

It’s a big ocean—big enough that, one would think, fish have many places to hide.

That’s certainly been a theme at many fishery management meetings that I’ve attended over the years, as fishermen rise to contest the need for management measures, arguing that various stocks aren’t overfished, but have merely moved on to places unknown.  And if you don’t know much about how the ocean supports life, it might even seem believable.

But the truth is that most of the ocean is pretty poor habitat.  Once you get past the edge of the continental shelf, which might mean heading a few hundred yards offshore in some places, and a hundred or more miles offshore in others, the bottom falls away quickly, to 10,000 feet or more, and the sea’s ability to support the sort of fish people typically like to catch and eat falls away just as quickly.

Back in the early 1970s, a musical group called “America” released a song titled "A Horse with No Name,” which included the line,

“The ocean is a desert with its life underground/And a perfect disguise above.”

I always liked that song, and it still plays in my truck from time to time, but back then I had not yet grown familiar with deserts, and only knew the ocean as a place where various party boats took me fishing for cod, so it took me a few years, and some meaningful time spent both in the desert and well offshore, before I realized how aptly its lyrics described the open sea. 

For, from the perspective of supporting life, the ocean is a desert.  The clear, indigo waters of the open sea only have such clarity and color because they hold so little life; the big offshore fish like the tunas and marlins are built to travel fast and far, to take advantage of baitfish concentrations that occur when a body of warm, clear offshore water rolls up against the cloudier, nutrient-laden ocean above the continental shelf, or collides with an upwelling of water from the deep ocean floor that also carries nutrients to the surface of the sea.  Fishermen refer to such places as color and temperature “breaks,” and seek them out knowing that, in the desert of the open sea, they form a sort of oasis where fish find a concentration of life on which they can feed.

Despite the size of the ocean, its most abundant life is found in the narrow strips of coastal sea, where phytoplankton thrives on nutrients brought down to the sea by rivers and up from the abyss by upwelling currents, zooplankton flourish among the abundant microscopic plants, and baitfish, feeding on the plankton, support a plethora of life that ranges from flounders to the great whales.

It's where almost all of the most common and most popular commercial and recreational fish species will be found.

Of course, when fisheries managers are contemplating more restrictive regulations, that can prove to be an inconvenient fact for those who don’t like the proposed rules.  For them, it’s always more convenient to think that the relevant fish aren’t in need of regulation, because they’re just somewhere out in the ocean.  

Thus, at the March meeting of New York’s Marine Resources Advisory Council, we saw a Long Island party boat captain, with a long history of opposing any restrictions on marine fisheries, argue that the state would be wasting its time if it considered adopting regulations to protect the false albacore (more properly, little tunny) fishery, because even if those fish sometimes seem scarce, they're just somewhere between the U.S. East Coast and Italy (false albacore are found in the Mediterranean Sea; however, there are no genetic studies, and no tag returns, that suggest that there is any interchange between the body of fish found off the United States and those found in the Mediterranean, or that the fish in the two areas are not reproductively isolated). 

A few years ago, when the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council held a hearing on what eventually became Amendment 7 to the Bluefish Fishery Management Plan, the same individual tried to argue that bluefish weren’t overfished, despite a recent operational stock assessment that found otherwise, but were merely in the ocean somewhere between the U.S. and Africa.  And given the amount of water between the two places, perhaps he thought that no one could conclusively prove him wrong.

Unfortunately, such comments aren’t limited to a handful of fishermen.

Half a dozen or so years ago, then-Congressman Lee Zeldin (R-NY, now the head of the federal Environmental Protection Agency) condemned striped  bass conservation efforts, claiming that

“the ASMFC used flawed data that measures the Atlantic Striped Bass stock based on the entire eastern seaboard, yet failed to account for Atlantic Striped Bass outside of the 3-mile fishing area, assuming fish abide by arbitrary bureaucratic boundaries.  Alternative data that shows the Striped Bass stock is in a better place outside the 3-mile limit was not only thrown out by the Commission, but the Commission also moved to no longer provide data collection in those waters, virtually assuring that any future decision regarding the Striped Bass fishery will be based on flawed data in perpetuity.”

The fact that there is no reliable data, alternative or otherwise, showing a healthy striped bass population that exists out beyond the 3-mile limit, and that striped bass surveys outside of state waters were halted largely because they weren’t finding enough fish to make such surveys worthwhile, was completely ignored by Zeldin, who was merely trying to help some of his constituents to keep killing too many fish, regardless of the health of the stock.

While politicians sometimes take such positions, it is usually to appease fishermen in their districts, who are attempting to stave off more restrictive rules.  However, it often seems that the fishermen themselves actually believe what they are saying, either because they honestly can’t believe that fish populations could have fallen low enough to threaten their livelihoods or, perhaps more often, because of deeply-ingrained confirmation bias, which leads them to focus on the good news (“my friend Joe caught so many cod in a single tow yesterday, that he had to shovel them off the deck, dead, in order to stay within his trip limit”) while ignoring the bad (“for the last couple of months, almost none of the boats in this entire harbor have come close to catching their trip limit of cod when they go out.”)

Thus, even though New England’s northern shrimp population has been a clear victim of a warming ocean, with the stock collapsing well over a decade ago, it wasn’t surprising to see a fisherman, who had been allowed to participate in a fishery designed to sample the stock during the winter of 2024-25, note that

“The traditional places the shrimp would be during the year, they weren’t there.  I don’t know why.”

But instead of conceding that a warming ocean and past overfishing might have badly depleted the shrimp population, the fisherman assumed that there was a very different reason for his inability to catch any shrimp:

“It seems as though the biomass of shrimp decided to stay offshore this year, but we haven’t been out in so many years, I don’t know it that’s the new normal or just something that happened now…

“There’s a couple of guys left who have done it throughout time, and some older guys said that, in the ‘70s and another time in the ‘80s, they saw the exact same thing happen…

”We had some years when the shrimp catch was crazy…One time, I went out and  made a tow, and I had almost 6,000 pounds in less than an hour.  That may sound discouraging, because I didn’t see that this time, but if you talk to the older guys, they’re like, ‘This has happened in cycles forever.’

“Maybe the shrimp are not going to come back into these waters.  I don’t know.  You could say it’s because the water’s warming, but if you look at studies this year, the Gulf of Maine was colder, more like a traditional temperature for the Gulf of Maine.  So maybe the shrimp are just waiting for the email.”

It’s just very, very hard for fishermen to accept that the abundance of fish or other marine resources that they have depended upon for so long has crashed; thus, if they can’t catch, it’s not because the population has declined.  The fish have just moved.

Such thinking isn’t limited to the northeast. 

Down in North Carolina, fishery managers are trying to rebuild a badly depleted southern flounder stock.  They’re having some difficulties, because a stock assessment completed earlier this year did not survive the peer review process; the review panel found that there was no unique North Carolina population of southern flounder, that fish from North Carolina mixed with fish from other states offshore and were caught by fishermen from those other states, and that trying to manage flounder in North Carolina without considering the rest of the fish in the same stock was a flawed approach.

However, a regional assessment of the southern flounder stock completed in 2018 found that the stock was badly overfished, overfishing was continuing, and the recruitment of young flounder into the population was at a time-series low.  It predicted that if fishing mortality continued at the then-current rate and recruitment didn’t improve, the spawning stock biomass would be depleted by 2046, and advised that total catch (landings plus dead discards) would have to be reduced by 31% just to end overfishing, and by 51% to reach the fishing mortality target.  But even if the latter reduction was achieved, it would not be sufficient to rebuild the stockhin the statutorily-required ten years.  A 72% reduction would be needed to achieve such timely rebuilding.

Soon after that stock assessment was released, North Carolina attempted to cut catch back far enough to allow the stock to rebuild within ten years.  However, recreational fishermen exceeded their annual quotas, and some have argued that trawling inside the state’s sounds has increased discard mortality. 

The stock remains overfished, and in the interim, the North Carolina Marine Fisheries Commission has opted to move forward with a management change that would allocate 50% of the catch to each of the commercial and recreational sectors, a big change to the current, 70% commercial/30% recreational allocation (which was already scheduled to go to 60% commercial/40% recreational in 2025).  But members of the commercial fishing industry oppose the quota change, and once again are claiming that there are more fish in the water than scientists believe.

This time, they’re not trying to argue that the flounder are somewhere far offshore, just that there are

“plenty of flounder out there,”

wherever "there" might be, and that

“We’re doing a good job [rebuilding the stock], we just don’t have the data to show it.”

But then, that’s always the problem.

Whether talking about New York false albacore that suddenly decided to take an Italian vacation, bluefish that went on safari, shrimp that departed their traditional waters to sojourn at some undetermined offshore spot, or southern flounder that are exhibiting new, if undocumented, levels of abundance, fishermen regularly assure us that such fish are there, even though they have no data to support their claims.

But without data, assurances are words that lack context, and mean next to nothing at all.