The Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council’s August meeting
is arguably the most important meeting of the year, for it is the time when the
annual specifications—the overfishing limit, acceptable biological catch,
annual catch limits, etc.—will be set for the following year. It’s when the commercial fishery’s rules will
be finalized although, with the exception of bluefish, recreational management
measures aren’t typically set until the December meeting, after managers have a
better idea of how current regulations impacted recreational landings.
For the important recreational species--bluefish, summer flounder,
scup, and black sea bass--the Council meets jointly with the Atlantic States
Marine Fisheries Commission’s Bluefish and Summer Flounder, Scup, and Black Sea
Bass management boards. The current rules
require that both the Council and the appropriate management board agree on management
measures for those four species, although nothing prevents an ASMFC management
board from going rogue and refusing to cooperate with the Council.
We saw that last year in the case of black sea bass, whenthe Summer Flounder, Scup, and Black Sea Bass Management Board refused to adoptthe Acceptable Biological Catch set by the Council’s Scientific and StatisticalCommittee, which would have lowered black sea bass landings by approximately 20percent. The Management Board had the
flexibility to do so since it, unlike the Council, is not bound by the
provisions of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act,
which compels the Council to follow the SSC’s harvest advice.
However, such divergences are unusual, and this year, none occurred, perhaps because the SSC recommendations allowed more
liberal landings of all four species, something that the management boards, and
many Council members, often strive to promote.
The increased landings limits will make fishermen happy in
2026 and, in the case of the recreational fishery, where regulations are
maintained for two consecutive years, in 2027 as well. Whether they will benefit fishermen in the
long term is probably up for debate.
Although
that’s a big increase, the really big jump was in the acceptable biological
catch, which increased from 21.83 million pounds in 2025 to 44.61 million
pounds in 2026 and 45.41 million pounds in 2027. However, the
commercial and recreational harvest limits didn’t jump nearly that much, as
they were constrained by management uncertainty buffers imposed by the Council
and the Bluefish Management Board. Such uncertainty buffers reduced the commercial annual catch limit, which set at 14 percent of
the acceptable biological catch, by 25 percent, and the annual recreational
catch limit, set at 86 percent of the ABC, by 30 percent, to allow for
management uncertainty.
That is a very big deal, and should be seen as a very
welcome move in the right direction.
The
guidelines for setting harvest limits, established by the National Marine
Fisheries Service, call for reducing the annual catch limit to account for any
management uncertainty. However, in
the past, the Council has been very reluctant to do so, as such buffers reduce
the amount of fish that could be landed over the course of the year. But this
year, in the case of bluefish, the Council and Board adopted buffers which
“are intended to prevent management volatility and ensure the
continued rebuilding of the stock.
Council and Board members also noted that the upcoming changes to
the [Marine Recreational Information Program] estimates are a significant
source of uncertainty. [emphasis
added]”
(Remember that highlighted language, as we’ll be coming back
to it in a while.)
Hopefully, the Council’s and Board’s willingness to finally acknowledge
management uncertainty will set a precedent that we will see in future years
and with other species, although I’m somewhat skeptical about such a fortunate
outcome.
In any event, even with the uncertainty buffers, the 2026
commercial quota will be 50 percent higher than it was in 2025, while the
recreational harvest limit will rise by about 40 percent.
It’s going to be interesting to see fishermen’s reactions to
the increased harvest limit. Even
at 2025 harvest levels, commercial fishermen needed to be careful that they
didn’t land too many bluefish, flood the market, and drive down the price. So how much they might benefit from more
quota is an open question.
On the recreational side, the calculated increase in
bluefish spawning stock biomass has had an irregular impact along the
cost. In some places, bluefish have been
abundant, and anglers are catching a lot of them. In other areas, fishing for bluefish has been
sporadic at best, with a lot of slow days.
In my own experience, which mostly takes place offshore, I still haven’t
had a bluefish—with the exceptions of some 12-inchers in July 2023—in my shark
slicks since 2017, even though I often chum in places where bluefish swarmed
two decades ago.
Also, now that the recreational bag limit has increased to
five fish, it’s somewhat disturbing that the Council and Board have decided to
grant for-hire anglers special privileges, and increase their bag limit to seven,
thereby arbitrarily creating winners and losers within the recreational
fishery. As noted by Michael Waine, a
spokesman for the American Sportfishing Association, the largest fishing tackle
industry trade group, in a letter to the Council and Board,
“…ASA recommends increasing the private angler bluefish bag
limit to 5 fish, aligning it with the current limit for for-hire anglers. This change would reunite all anglers
under a 5-fish bag limit, ensuring consistent management and equitable access
ahead of the joint Sector Separation Amendment, which is expected to address
mode management more formally… [emphasis
added]”
Unfortunately, the for-hire sector’s dominance of the
management bodies, and particularly of the recreational seats on the Council, assured
that such consistent bag limit and equitable access would not occur.
Summer
flounder also saw a very large increase in the acceptable biological catch,
which jumped by 55 percent from its 2025 level. Once again, that increase was tempered by a
decision to apply a 12 percent buffer for management uncertainty to both the
commercial and recreational annual catch limits.
“concerned about the implications of such a substantial
increase, particularly given the volatility of ABCs over the past several years…The
Monitoring Committee emphasized the importance of maintaining quota stability
and ensuring the specifications process remains responsive to uncertainty and
stock dynamics without overcorrecting from one specifications cycle to the
next.”
In addition,
“The Monitoring Committee expressed reservations around the
stock projections used to inform the ABC.
The [Scientific and Statistical Committee’s] recommendation relied on
short-term projections from the most recent management track assessment, which
were based on the recruitment stanza from 2011-2024. The Monitoring Committee noted that while 2023
and 2024 recruitment appear stronger than those in the preceding decade,
recruitment in nearly every year since 2010 has remained below the long-term
average. This persistent pattern raised
concern about whether the recent increase reflects a meaningful shift in stock
productivity or merely a short-term fluctuation, as it appears to have in the
past. The Monitoring Committee emphasized
that recruitment has been highly variable over time, and the stock has yet to
demonstrate a consistent return to higher recruitment levels…”
Thus, the Monitoring Committee recommended precaution, and
the Council and Board agreed.
Even so, the commercial quota will increase from 8.79
million pounds in 2025 to 12.78 million pounds in 2026 and 2027, while the recreational
harvest limit will change from 6.35 million pounds to 8.79 million pounds over
the same period of time.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that 2026 or 2027 recreational regulations will allow landings that are higher than those predicted for 2025. That’s because summer flounder spawning stock biomass is currently at 83 percent of the target level, and the so-called “Percent Change Approach” used to set recreational management dictates that, if a stock is at “low” abundance levels—defined as not overfished, but less than 90 percent of the biomass target—even if 2026 and 2027 recreational landings are predicted to be below the recreational harvest limit for those years, no increase in the recreational landings limit will occur.
However, that doesn’t mean that
recreational management measures might not change; if 2026-2027 recreational
landings are likely to fall well below the recreational landings limit under the current rules,
regulations could be liberalized to make it more likely that landings will approach
the landings limit in those years. At the same time,
should 2025 recreational landings be likely to exceed the 2025 landings limit,
regulations could become more restrictive.
We won’t know that until the December joint Council and
Management Board meeting.
But if the August meeting saw managers take a more
precautionary approach with bluefish and summer flounder, it saw them exercise
their usual profligacy with black sea bass and scup, undoubtedly because, while
the former species are at 89 percent and 83 percent of their target levels,
respectively, the two latter species are at levels approaching or exceeding 300
percent of target, which makes it a little easier to recover from management
mistakes.
Still, there are warning signs in the data suggesting that the
future for both scup and black sea bass might not be quite as favorable as conditions
are today, and that a little bit of precaution might also be justified.
However, despite all the seemingly good news in the short
term, there is some troubling information in the management track assessment,
in the form of continued low recruitment.
Scup recruitment peaked in 2015, an exceptionally productive year, when
nearly 696 million Age 0 fish entered the population. But recruitment has been down since then,
dropping to about 319 million in 2016, to 160,000 the year after. Recruitment fell to 88 million in 2019 before
rebounding to 153 million in 2021, but then fell to its lowest levels in the
last 10 years in 2023 and 2024, at 40 million and 16 million, respectively.
Managers can only hope that recruitment improves to more
typical levels. Even if it does, the
last two years are going to be felt once the fish that recruited in those years
grow into the minimum size. Given that,
perhaps a little precaution now might have helped moderate the shock when rules
need to be tightened again, perhaps for 2028, perhaps not until 2030.
In addition, there is the question of the revised Marine
Recreational Information Program estimates of anglers catch, landings, and
effort, which we first encountered in the bluefish discussion. The
problem is that in 2023, a pilot study conducted by NMFS suggested that MRIP
might be overestimating angler effort, and so recreational catch and landings,
by as much as 30 percent. That
created significant management uncertainty, since if the pilot study’s findings
were even close to accurate, the true level of recreational catch and landings can not be known with any reasonable degree of precision.
That might seem OK at first glance, since if recreational
landings were overestimated, then it’s easy to believe—falsely—that such
overestimate built a margin for error into the process of designing
recreational management measures. If the
actual recreational removals were less, one might think, then fewer fish were
being killed, and no harm was being done.
But that’s not true, because recreational landings aren’t
only used to set recreational management measures. They are also one of the data sets that are
used in stock assessments, and contribute to the calculation of things like
spawning stock biomass. So if
recreational landings are high, and fishery-independent surveys seem to show
that the stock can sustain that level of removals, then biologists assume that
the stock must be larger than previously believed, increase their estimates of
spawning stock biomass, and also their estimates of things like the spawning
stock biomass target, the overfishing limit, the acceptable biological catch,
and the annual catch limit for both the recreational and
the commercial sectors.
That’s where things start heading downhill, for while the
increase in the recreational catch limit doesn’t really matter—the overestimate
of recreational landings and the overestimate of stock size more-or-less offset
one another—overestimating the biomass also leads to commercial quotas that are
set higher than they ought to be, which could be the case with scup.
Yet neither the Monitoring Committee nor the Council and Board
chose to adopt a buffer for the management uncertainty that very definitely
exists for scup, as they did for bluefish and summer flounder. One has to suspect that it was the political
aspect of reducing landings for a fish of very obvious abundance that stayed
their hand.
Black sea bass decisions followed a very similar
course to those affecting scup. With
the 2025 management track stock assessment indicating a spawning stock biomass
that was 284 percent of the target level, the
acceptable biological catch was increased from 16.66 million pounds in 2024-2025
to 21.34 million pounds for 2026-2027.
That led to a 31 percent increase in the commercial quota, from five
million to 7.83 million pounds, and a 30 percent increase in the recreational
harvest limit, from 6.27 to 8.14 million pounds.
But black sea bass have some of the same threats lurking in
the shadows as scup.
The reset of the Marine Recreational Information Program creates the same sort of management uncertainty, and black sea bass recruitment is also headed downhill. The 2025 management track assessment shows that, over the past ten years, recruitment—which is measured at Age 1—hit its lowest point in 2024, at about 28 million fish, compared to peaks of 62 million in 2016 and 61 million in 2023.
While the 2024 number could be viewed as
merely a one-year anomaly, and thus fairly meaningless, a recent
report issued by NMFS informed us that, because of a temporary, southerly jog
in the Gulf Stream, cooler, fresher water from northern regions are flowing onto
the continental shelf off New England and the upper Mid-Atlantic. That cooler, fresher water may be present at
the edge of the shelf for years.
That
matters for black sea bass, because the strength of a black sea bass year class isn’t
determined by the success of the spawn, but by ocean conditions at the edge of
the continental shelf during the fish's first winter. Warm, saline water generally produces large
year classes, while cooler, fresher water tends to produce small ones. Thus, the small 2024 year class may well be
the first in a series of low-recruitment years, driven by unfavorable ocean
conditions that could persist for as long as a decade.
Another thing that the Monitoring Committee noted was
“comments from several advisors about high numbers of small
black sea bass this year.”
Unfortunately, the Monitoring Committee only interpreted
those comments to mean that there might be higher levels of release mortality,
due to a higher number of undersized fish, and not as a warning that a lack of
large black sea bass may be an indication that fishing mortality has risen so
high that few fish are surviving long enough to reach larger sizes. Again, like the cooling water and lower
recruitment, the small fish could be a sign that a population decline is on the
way.
But despite the uncertainty, as was true in the scup
fishery, no buffer was put in place.
And maybe it doesn’t matter.
The best available scientific information for bluefish,
summer flounder, scup, and black sea bass all suggested that higher annual
catch limits are justified, and at least in the short term, they almost
certainly are.
But maybe managers should also take time to read the warning
signs that flash around all of the Mid-Atlantic Council-managed recreational
fisheries. They did so for bluefish and
summer flounder, but not for scup and black sea bass. ‘
Maybe they don’t have to.
Maybe with populations as high as they are, managers can intervene
later, and still maintain the stock at or near the biomass target.
But still, we have to ask ourselves, is it better to be a
little cautious, even if there’s no immediate need, than to wait until a real
problem looms, and then try to fix things all at once?
In the case of scup and black sea bass, future events might well answer that question.
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