Thursday, April 3, 2025

STRIPED BASS ADDENDUM III CONTINUING TO TAKE SHAPE

 

This morning, the Plan Development Team charged with drafting the proposed Addendum III to Amendment 7 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan met for over three and a half hours, and made some important decisions on what the initial draft addendum will look like.

To get the big question out of the way first, if we keep regulations just the way that they are, and don’t touch the commercial quota, the stock may not fully rebuild by 2029, although it will probably come close. 

If the fishing mortality rate for the years 2026-2029 averages out at 0.122, the rate needed to provide a 50% chance that the stock is fully rebuilt, that’s exactly what we end up with—a 50% chance of rebuilding.

On the other hand, if the fishing mortality rate for those years averages out just a hair higher, to 0.123, the actual fishing mortality rate for 2024, it is slightly more likely than not that the stock won’t fully rebuild, with only a 48.7% chance of rebuilding (that calculation assumes a “normal distribution” of statistical values, while another calculation using a “skewed distribution” only finds a 43.6% likelihood of rebuilding; given that my degrees are in History, English, and Law, and that I avoided any class resembling math after freshman year Calculus, I have no idea what the technical differences between the two distributions are, and so can’t explain them to you, although the words “normal” and “skewed” seem to tell at least a small part of the story).

The Striped Bass Technical Committee recommended that the Plan Development Team use the assumption that the fishing mortality rate for 2026-2029 will be 0.123 when drafting Addendum III, so at least on paper, spawning stock biomass will probably fall a little short of its target by the end of 2029.  

I know a lot of folks won’t be happy with that—I know that I’m not particularly pleased—but the truth is that it’s impossible to craft meaningful management measures that will cut landings by just 1.3%--the data just isn’t that precise, and a 1% change would be lost in the statistical noise.

In fact, the Technical Committee said that any reduction of less than 10% would be “statistically indistinguishable from the status quo.” And that turned out to be an important statement, which I’ll discuss in a while.

But first, I need to point out that, in developing Addendum III, the Management Board doesn’t have to stick with its usual 50% probability of successful rebuilding.  At the last Management Board meeting, Chris Batsavage, a North Carolina fishery manager, asked that the Technical Committee also come up with management measures that have a 60% chance of fully rebuilding the stock by the end of 2029.  Using the same set of assumptions that led to the conclusion that the stock would not quite rebuild if no management measures were changed, the Technical Committee found that removals would have to be reduced by 7% to have a 60% probability of rebuilding by 2029.

The Plan Development Team will be including management options that will achieve that 7% reduction in its first draft of Addendum III.

But…  Remember the Technical Committee comment that anything less than a 10% reduction will be “indistinguishable from the status quo?”

The Plan Development Team will also develop management options that will reduce removals by 10%, and have a greater than 60% probability of rebuilding by the end of 2029.  Because the Management Board didn’t ask the PDT to do so, the 10% reductions won’t be included in the initial draft of Addendum III, but will instead be presented to the Management Board in a separate memorandum.  That way, if the Management Board wants to consider a 10% reduction, it only needs to instruct the Plan Development Team to include the already-prepared 10% options into the draft addendum when the Board meets again in May.

We don’t know what measures to reduce removals by 10% might look like, but this morning’s meeting provided some clues about what those attaining a 7% reduction might be.

The first question is who would have to take the reductions. 

For many years, the Management Board imposed seemingly symmetrical reductions on both the recreational and commercial sectors, which required the same percentage reductions of both.  In reality, the reduction’s weren’t symmetrical, as the recreational cuts were from actual landings, while the commercial cuts were from quota, and since commercial landings often fell far below state quotas, the cuts to cuts landings were far less; sometimes, a state's commercial landings were  not cut at all.

That all changed with Addendum II to Amendment 7 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Striped Bass, which called for anglers to cut their landings by 14%, but only required a 7% cut in commercial quotas, a reduction so small that Maryland commercial fishermen could have actually increased their landings in 2024, because they were so far below quota the year before.

The initial draft of Addendum III will carry on that tradition, and offer three options:  Reducing both commercial quota and recreational removals by 7%, reducing recreational removals by 8% while leaving the commercial quota unchanged, and a third, bizarre option, which has appeared in previous draft management documents, that would multiply the necessary 7% commercial reduction by the commercial sector’s 11% share of overall fishing mortality, and so only cut the commercial quota by 0.8% while reducing recreational removals by 8%.

Although the Management Board still needs to decide, it’s probably a good bet that all three options will appear in the draft amendment that is finally released for public comment.

The next question is how any reductions will be achieved.

Commercial reductions are fairly straightforward, with the quota cut by the agreed-upon amount.  But when it comes to cutting recreational removals, things get complicated.

Given that anglers can already retain no more than one fish, the bag limit can’t go any lower, and certainly won't increase in Addendum III, so size limits and seasons will become the only available management tools.

In the ocean fishery, where the Management Board has already agreed not to consider the harvest of fish less than 28 inches long, or slot limits narrower than three inches, the size limit, too, is unlikely to change, as none of those considered would achieve even a 7% reduction in removals.  

That’s because the current spawning stock biomass is skewed heavily toward larger fish, with the 2018 year class, which will fill the slot this year, the last of the larger year classes; every subsequent year class has been far below average.  So the 36-inch minimum size that served so well a generation ago, and is supported by many anglers today, would actually increase removals by 10%.  

Of the five alternative size limits considered for the ocean fishery, only two would decrease 2026 removals.  A slot limiting harvest to 31- to 35-inch fish would lead to a trivial 1% reduction, while a 40-inch minimum size would reduce recreational removals by 5%; neither would achieve the minimum 7% reduction needed for a 60% probability of success.  While it’s possible that Addendum III might couple a new size limit with a season, the fact that the Management Board has decided that no closed season may be shorter than two weeks makes it likely that the 28- to 31-inch slot will remain in place, and seasons will be the only tool used to reduce ocean landings—although that’s only my opinion, and not the PDT’s.

The picture in the Chesapeake Bay is a little different.  There, changes to the size limit can achieve a 7% reduction.  Moving the bottom end of the slot up an inch, to 20 to 24 inches, would cut recreational removals by 8%, while taking two inches off the top end of the slot, resulting in a 19- to 22-inch size limit, would almost double that, and reduce recreational removals by 15%.  Adopting the 19- to 22-inch slot for private boat and shore-based anglers, while leaving the current 19- to 24-inch slot in place for those fishing from for-hire vessels, would yield a slightly smaller, 14% cut.  The only minimum-size option, 22 inches, would reduce recreational removals by 10%.  

Any one of those choices could allow the current seasons to remain unchanged.

As far as possible seasons go, none have yet been calculated, although they will be soon.  However, two related issues were discussed at today’s meeting.

One was whether the seasons will be of the traditional no-harvest sort, or whether they will also ban targeting striped bass.  While I suspect options for both will be included in the draft addendum, anyone calculating no-target options must consider whether people who would have fished for striped bass will merely stop fishing during any closure, or whether they will switch to other species, but might accidentally catch bass during that time (a third scenario, that people will keep fishing for bass, but say that they’re fishing for something else, was never explicitly discussed, although I have to believe that at least some people are thinking about it).

The other issue is whether, when establishing seasons, Addendum III ought to break the coast down into two or three regions, and what states such regions should include.  The ASMFC’s Law Enforcement Committee supported a two-region breakdown, with one region running from Maine to Massachusetts and the other from Rhode Island to North Carolina, as they felt it important to keep all of the states active in the Block Island fishery in a single region.  

However, the ocean fishery in the southern states can be very different from that on the rest of the coast, militating in favor of a three-region approach.  Should such an approach be adopted, the Law Enforcement Committee supported regions consisting of Maine through Massachusetts, Rhode Island through Delaware, and Maryland through North Carolina, for ease of enforcement in the Delaware Bay.

The Plan Development Team will also calculate how seasonal closures will impact the individual states in each region, to determine whether any one state shoulders a disproportionate share of the conservation burden.  While such action may seem reasonable on its face, it carries the risk that a state--say, perhaps, New Jersey--will try to use such calculations reintroduce conservation equivalency into the management process, and use it to wiggle out of the region-wide rules, so undercutting the rebuilding process.  Although Amendment 7 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Striped Bass explicitly prohibits the use of conservation equivalency when the stock is overfished, the Management Board has the power to end that prohibition in Addendum III.  We can only hope that such power is never used.

Specific season-related proposals will be developed at future Plan Development Team meetings, and will be discussed in a future edition of One Angler’s Voyage.

Beyond that, the only topics discussed at today’s meeting were mode splits—providing special, more lenient harvest privileges for anglers fishing from for-hire vessels, which would not be shared by the shore-based and private boat anglers, who account for 98% of all directed striped bass trips—commercial tagging procedures, and creating a uniform way to measure striped bass.

Although I believe the first issue is the most important of the three, I can’t write much about it because my internet provider chose that point in the meeting to shut down, and couldn't be restored until the discussion was over.

The commercial tagging issue revolved around the question of whether commercially caught bass should be tagged as soon as they’re caught, or in any case, before being taken off the fisherman's boat, or whether it’s acceptable for them to be tagged at the point when they’re purchased from the fisherman.  

The Law Enforcement Committee generally preferred the former option, which is already in force in all states but Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and North Carolina, believing that tagging upon capture reducing highgrading (the practice of throwing back a smaller fish, that is often dead, and replacing it with a larger, more valuable individual) and increases fishermen’s accountability, although a small minority preferred tagging at the point of first sale, saying that it reduced the administrative burden associated with sending tags to all eligible fishermen, and made it less likely that a fisherman will pass tags to someone else to conceal a black market sale.

The measurement issue arose because some states don’t specify how a striped bass should be measured, which results in the slot size limit being applied inconsistently.  A Massachusetts representative suggested language that read

“Total length means the greatest straight line length in inches as measured on a fish with its mouth closed from the anterior most tip of the jaw or snout to the farthest extremity of the tail with the upper and lower fork of the tail squeezed together.”

It seemed a simple suggestion, but led to discussions about whether a fish should be measured flat, as it would lie on a measuring board, or along the curve of its body, as anglers often measure fish with a flexible tape.  There weere also discussions of whether the rack of a filleted fish would, if measured, be the same length as the fish was when whole.

No decisions were made on either of the last two issues, but significant progress was nonetheless made.  And this morning’s meeting was only the first of four that will lead to in the initial draft of Amendment III.

Before I close, I want to make one more point.

Often, I hear fishermen—whether recreational, commercial, or for-hire—attack proposed management measures with comments like “The data’s no good,” or “It’s MRIP [the Marine Recreational Information Program, used to estimate recreational catch, effort, and landings], and I just don’t believe it,” without really understanding what folks on the Technical Committee and Plan Development Team do to assure that the data used really does represent the best scientific information available.

This morning, there were two examples of what appeared to be “outliers” in the data, data points that deviated significantly from all of the others.  One was a seemingly anomalous spike in the number of 19-inch fish caught in 2019; the other was a similar spike in the number of live releases during March and April in Rhode Island in 2021. 

In both cases, the Plan Development Team addressed the outliers in great detail, using Technical Committee advice and other analysis to resolve the seeming incongruities.  As I noted at the beginning of this essay, I am not a statistician, and have no desire to become one.  However, to my layman's eyes, the analysis and the outcomes reached this morning appeared both comprehensive and logical, and I could only come away with the belief that the PDT was doing its best to assure that the data is relies on truly reflects reality.

And on that note, I will end.

The Plan Development Team will meet three more times before it prepares the first draft of Addendum III, on April 4, 9, and 10.  I hope to sit in on all of those meetings, and let you know what went on.  Right now, the draft addendum seems to be progressing fairly well, but it remains important for all concerned anglers to monitor the document’s progress, and do their best to assure that the process remains on track, and doesn’t get hijacked by one interest group or another.

Because, if history is any guide, someone will certainly try.

1 comment:

  1. Thank you once again! This is important to the future.

    ReplyDelete