It’s that time of the year when I look back at the past
year, and try to describe what went right and what went wrong with the
fisheries management process over the preceding 12 months. I know that I tend to get a little
long-winded in these blog posts, so I’ll provide this bit of reassurance at the
beginning: It won’t take you very long
to read about the things that went right.
On the other hand, the list of what went wrong will go on
for a while. This might be the first
time that just about all of
my predictions for the upcoming year came true, at least to some degree,
and most of those predictions were dire.
So, without more delay, let’s take them one at a time.
THE EXPECTED BAD NEWS
Striped bass:
Addendum III and beyond
My prediction with respect to Addendum III to Amendment 7
to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Striped Bass read,
in pertinent part,
“At best, the addendum may contain some modest measures intended
to make it more likely that the spawning stock biomass will be fully rebuilt by
2029. Based on the votes at the December
16 [2024] meeting [of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s
Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board], any such measures will probably focused
on the recreational fishery, while leaving the commercial fishery largely
untouched, although in all honesty, I’d be surprised in Addendum III [included]
any landings reductions at all.”
There were no harvest reductions at all.
And, of course, striped
bass recruitment remained painfully low for the seventh consecutive year,
establishing a new seven-year average low for the Maryland juvenile abundance
index, which over the past five decades or so has been the most reliable gauge
of future striped bass abundance.
An administration that weakened the National Marine
Fisheries Service and federal fisheries management
In addressing the National Marine Fisheries Service in 2025,
it’s difficult to draw a clear line between what NMFS has done and what the
current administration has done to NMFS.
A year ago, I had warned that
“we can only fear what [NMFS] will choose to do under an administration
that, its first time around, overturned an ASMFC finding that New Jersey was out
of compliance with summer flounder regulations, reopened the Gulf of Mexico’s
recreational red snapper fishery even though such action would lead to
overfishing, overturned the ban on commercial fishing in the New England
Canyons and Seamounts National Monument, abolished time and area closures
intended to protect giant bluefin tuna from longline bycatch and discard
mortality, and issued an executive order intended to “identify and remove
unnecessary regulatory barriers restricting American fishermen.”
Nearly a year has passed since that administration returned,
and so far, its regulatory actions impacting marine fisheries have been neither
as frequent nor as severe as they were the first time around, although it is
very clear that NMFS’ conservation mission has already been largely abandoned
in favor of strategies that imperil the future in order to increase short-term
landings.
The most egregious action taken by NMFS so far may have been
its refusal to honor its commitment, made to settle a
lawsuit brought by commercial red snapper fishermen, to end the recreational
fishery’s chronic overfishing of the red snapper stock in the South Atlantic. Last
January 14, NMFS issued a rule that would have honored its obligation to end
such overfishing, by closing an expanse of water off Georgia and northern
Florida to bottom fishing for three months, which closure would have not only
significantly lowered recreational discard mortality, but also allowed the agency
to roughly triple commercial and recreational red snapper landings. However, the
recreational fishing and boatbuilding industries, adamantly opposed to risking
a decline in short-term income, joined by militant
“anglers’ rights” organizations such as the Coastal Conservation Association,
convinced the agency
to renege on its word and issue watered-down regulations that avoided both the
area closure and any meaningful reduction in recreational red snapper discards. Thus, the
commercial red snapper fishermen have again brought suit, and this time
around, they will probably be far less willing to enter into settlements with
an agency which, under the current administration, has proven to be less than
trustworthy.
The administration’s failure to honor the government’s
obligations under the settlement of the red snapper lawsuit was not the only
time it reneged on a fisheries-related settlement agreement this year.
“when combined with other funding that the Administration is
anticipated to deliver to the region, will bring more than $1 billion in new
Federal investments to wild fish restoration over the next decade and enable an
unprecedented 10-year break from decades-long litigation against the Federal
government’s operation of its dams in the Pacific Northwest.”
Dam removal would have almost certainly been a part of the
remediation program.
“STOPPING RADICAL ENVIRONMENTALISM: Today, President Donald J. Trump signed a
Presidential Memorandum revoking an executive action issued by the prior
administration that called for ‘equitable treatment for fish.’”
The news hit recreational fishermen, the affected tribes,
and those concerned with the health of the salmon and the rivers extremely
hard. An article in Outdoor Life magazine
quoted a letter written by 68 leading fisheries scientists, who said
“The survival problems of various [Endangered Species
Act]-listed salmon and steelhead species in the Columbia Basin cannot be solved
without removing four dams on the Lower Snake River…
“These four dams must be removed to not only avoid
extinction, but also to restore abundant salmon runs.”
“We reserved the right to actually catch fish, not merely the
right to dip our nets into barren waters.”
So, with the administration abandoning this agreement as
well, another long and expensive course of litigation will continue to its
eventual and uncertain end; in the meantime, another United States fishery will
remain in peril.
Given the propensities of this administration, there is
little reason to believe that additional fisheries won’t be placed in jeopardy. Not happy with his Executive
Order of May 7, 2020, which among other things sought to
“identify and remove unnecessary regulatory barriers
restricting American fishermen,”
and instructed the regional fishery management councils to produce
a
“prioritized list of recommended actions to reduce burdens on
domestic fishing and increase production within sustainable fisheries,”
President
Trump issued a follow-up Executive Order on April 17,2025, in which he claimed
that
“Federal overregulation has restricted fishermen from
productively harvesting American seafood including through restrictive catch
limits, selling our fishing grounds to foreign offshore wind companies, inaccurate
and outdated fisheries data, and delayed adoption of modern technology,”
declared his intent to
“unburden our commercial fishermen from costly and
inefficient regulation,”
and called upon the Secretary of Commerce to
“consider suspending, revising, or rescinding overly burden
America’s commercial fishing…identify the most heavily overregulated fisheries
requiring action and take appropriate action to reduce the regulatory burden on
them…[and]
“request that each Regional Fishery Management Council…provide…updates
to their recommendations submitted pursuant to Executive Order 13921 [issued on
May 7,2020] to reduce burdens on domestic fishing and to increase production…[I]dentified
actions should stabilize markets, improve access, enhance economic profitability,
and prevent closures.”
While such directives are not very different from those
contained in his earlier Executive Order, the previous Executive Order was
issued in the last year of his term, and with an election only six months away,
did not have much time to degrade the federal fishery management system. The April 2025 Executive Order will have
another three years to undermine what has been at least three decades (counting
from the passage of the Sustainable
Fisheries Act of 1996) of progress in rebuilding and conserving United
States fisheries.
It is clear that the current administration wants to fully implement
the 2025 Executive Order. The regional
fishery management councils have all submitted suggestions for regulatory
change, and NMFS
opened a public comment period to obtain input on what changes might be
implemented. Apparently not receiving
enough input the first time around, on December 1, NMFS announced that it was
reopening the comment period, seeking more suggestions on industry-favored
changes, thus signaling its intent to weaken the current regulatory framework.
And while NMFS follows the administration’s instructions to
weaken the federal fisheries management effort, the
administration has successfully weakened NMFS itself, cutting its funding and its
scientific staff, thus making the agency less able to collect data, perform
stock assessments, and otherwise execute its fisheries management
responsibilities. A number of long-awaited
stock assessments have already been either delayed or indefinitely postponed,
an fact that can only harm the long-term sustainability of the affected fish
stocks.
It's virtually certain that the administration’s
ill-conceived fisheries actions in 2025 will have negative impacts on the
nation’s marine resources that will extend for years into the future.
Congress predictably disappoints
Again, my predictions of a year ago did, unfortunately,
prove accurate. I wrote,
“there is no reason to believe that the incoming Congress
will be any more protective of marine fish stocks than the incoming
administration. Instead, we can expect
to see an activist, conservation-averse Congress shutting down important
conservation initiatives, interfering in the work of professional fisheries
managers, and perhaps even threatening the core provisions of Magnuson-Stevens…
”Federal fisheries in the South Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico
will probably suffer the greatest level of Congressional interference, but we
should also expect damage on a far wider scale, including efforts to cripple
the Marine Recreational Information Program, turn responsibility for some
federally-managed species over to more politically-influenced state agencies,
and very possibly weaken key provisions of the Magnuson-Stevens Act.”
While Magnuson-Stevens remains intact, the fisheries-related
bills introduced in Congress so far were in line with what was expected.
I opened the previous section by explaining how the federal
government had agreed to settle a lawsuit challenging NMFS failure to rein in
recreational overfishing of red snapper in the South Atlantic, and how the
current administration reneged on that earlier agreement. But just in case that didn’t happen, Congress was
preparing to intervene, with Rep. John Rutherford (R-FL) and 26 cosponsors (19
from Florida, two each from North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, and
one from Mississippi) introducing H.R. 470, the so-called “Red Snapper Act of
2025,” just two days after NMFS issued proposed regulations intended to
effectuate the settlement.
A bill summary for H.R. 470 stated that
“This bill prohibits the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA) from restricting certain fishing activities in the South
Atlantic until data from the South Atlantic Great Red Snapper Count study is
integrated into the next South Atlantic red snapper Southeast Data, Assessment,
and Review (SEDAR) stock assessment.
“The bill provides that NOAA may not issue an interim rule,
final rule, or Secretarial Amendment establishing an area closure or a bottom
fishing closure for specified species until (1) the study is complete, and (2)
the study data is integrated into the first South Atlantic red snapper SEDAR
stock assessment that is carried out after the bill’s enactment. The limitation applies to fishing for species
managed under the Fishery Management Plan for the Snapper-Grouper Fishery of
the South Atlantic Region, including red snapper, grouper, and porgy.
“(Closures generally restrict recreational and commercial
fishing to prevent overfishing and for other conservation purposes.)”
So yes, as soon as January 16, 2025, members of Congress
were already taking action to “[shut] down important conservation initiatives”
and “[interfere] in the work of professional fisheries managers.”
And Rep. Rutherford wasn’t finished.
On
October 8, he introduced H.R. 5699, which he titled the “Fisheries Data
Modernization and Accuracy Act of 2025,” and is described
in the Congressional Record as
“A bill, to require the Administrator of the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration to reform the Marine Recreational Information
Program of the National Marine Fisheries Service, and for other purposes.”
But H.R. 5699 doesn’t merely seek to “reform” the Marine
Recreational Information Program, but rather to replace it with a patchwork of
state data collection programs, which would almost certainly not produce
mutually comparable data, but would be legally barred from calibrating their
output with MRIP’s, interspersed with other states that chose not to invest in
their own programs and continued to use MRIP as their primary recreational data
source. H.R. 5699 would also require
NMFS to employ and base its decisions upon state data, when available, instead
of its own MRIP data, regardless of the relative quality of the data produced.
So saying that the bill would “cripple the Marine
Recreational Information Program” is, if anything, an understatement.
H.R. 5699 would probably also severely damage NMFS’ regional
science centers, as it would require the agency to enter into contracts with
so-called “independent” entities to develop fisheries data and the resultant
science, which would have to be included in stock assessments, provided that the
data passed peer review, regardless of NMFS’ scientists’ views of its
merits. Given that Congress only
allocates so much money for NMFS’ scientific efforts, the expense of
contracting with such outside entities would constitute money no longer available
to hire and support the agency’s scientific staff.
The bill is very much alive, and could easily become law
before the 119th Congress ends.
Still, although I predicted some of the unfortunate things
that happened this year, I didn’t predict them all.
UNEXPECTED BAD NEWS—THE ASMFC BACKSLIDES
For a while, I thought that the ASMFC might be changing its
ways. Its approach to Amendment
7 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Striped Bass, which saw it shore up the conservation provisions
of the management plan; its adoption of emergency
striped bass management measures in 2023 to help protect the relatively strong
2015 year class; and its adoption of
Amendment II to Amendment 7, which made the emergency measures permanent and
enhanced them with further restrictions on the commercial fishery and the
recreational fishery in the Chesapeake Bay gave me reason to hope that the
ASMFC was finally focusing on the long-term health of fish stocks, rather than
the short-term economic interests of the recreational and commercial fishing
industries.
But multiple events in 2025 more or less dashed those hopes.
American lobster
The
first step backward occurred on February 4, 2025.
After a decline in lobster recruitment tripped a management
trigger included in a recent addendum to the American lobster management plan, the
ASMFC’s American Lobster Management Board voted to increase the minimum size
for the Gulf of Maine/Georges Bank lobster stock, but then delayed implementation
of that reduction for over a year due to extremely strong opposition from the
fishing industry.
New Hampshire’s governor, Kelly Ayotte, ended up refusing to
comply with the increased size limit, should it be implemented, while in Maine,
it was clear that any increase in the minimum size would not survive the state’s
rulemaking process, which requires some level of fishing industry cooperation.
As a result, at the Management Board’s Winter 2005 meeting,
the Board approved a motion
“to initiate an addendum to repeal all gauge and [lobster
trap escape] vent changes in Addendum XXVII,”
thus admitting that industry’s concerns about short-term profit
declines took precedence over the long-term health of the lobster stock.
To be completely fair, there were extrinsic factors
impacting the Management Board’s decision, that had nothing to do with lobster
and everything to do with the overall political climate, but the vote represented
a step backward, all the same.
Atlantic menhaden
The ASMFC’s spring and summer meetings generally saw the
Commission conduct business as usual; nothing notably negative occurred. However, when the Annual Meeting rolled
around in October, a veritable backsliding Olympics occurred. The failure to include any meaningful
conservation measures in Addendum III to the striped bass management plan has
already been mentioned, and caused considerable ire among the hard-core striped
bass angling community.
But the failure that was probably the most publicized,
largely because it involved a heavily politicized fish and got a lot of
coverage in the popular press, was the Atlantic Menhaden Management Board’s
failure to reduce menhaden landings in response to an updated stock assessment.
Up
until this year, scientists believed that the Atlantic menhaden stock was very
healthy, with fecundity well above the target and fishing mortality well below. Unfortunately, a
stock assessment update released ahead of the October meeting revealed an error
in the previous assessments. As a
result, menhaden abundance over the past few years was 37% lower than
previously believed, fishing mortality hovered between its target and the threshold
that defined overfishing, and fecundity was just 5% above the threshold that defines
an overfished stock.
If the Management Board left the total allowable catch
unchanged at 233,440 metric tons, and that full amount was landed, there was a
100% chance that the fishing mortality target would be exceeded, and a 4%
chance that overfishing would occur.
The total allowable catch clearly needed to be reduced.
In order to have at least a 50% chance of keeping landings
below the fishing mortality target, the total allowable catch would have to be
reduced to 108,450 metric tons—about a 54.5% reduction. That was a very big cut in landings to take
in a single year, but it could be hoped that the Management Board might have
initiated a phase-in process that used a series of annual cuts to eventually
get landings down to where they belonged.
But that didn’t happen.
Instead, the Management Board entertained a series of
motions that began with one to achieve the entire 54.5% reduction in a single
year. Not unsurprisingly, that motion
failed. So did a motion to adopt three
years of phased-in reductions.
While that sounds like progress, the 20% reduction to
186,840 metric tons didn’t do much of anything to reduce landings, since the
menhaden fishing industry only landed about 80% of its quota in recent years;
thus, the supposed “reduction” only maintained the status quo, and took no
pressure off the stock at all.
The stock might not be subject to overfishing, but there was
also no legitimate effort to reduce fishing mortality at all. The fishing mortality target became a hypothetical
number, completely disconnected from the actions of the Management Board.
Red drum
Typically, when managers establish biological reference points
for a stock of fish, they set both a target and a threshold level for both
fishing mortality and the biomass (or another value, such as fecundity, which
serves as a biomass proxy). When
adopting management measures, managers will try to keep fishing mortality at
its target level, and maintain biomass close to its target level as well.
Things don’t always work out that neatly—neither fish nor
fishermen always act according to the managers’ script—but so long as the values
stay somewhere between target and threshold, the stock usually remains in
reasonably good health. It’s only when
fishing mortality rises above the threshold, or biomass falls below, that the
stock is deemed to be experiencing overfishing or to be overfished, and real
problems occur.
So managers normally won’t try to manage to the threshold
level, as the slightest miscalculation could result in the stock becoming
overfished or experiencing overfishing.
Somehow, members of the ASMFC’s Sciaenids Management Board,
which manages the species, seem to have missed that message.
Atlantic coast red drum are managed as separate northern and
southern stocks, and the problems began after the 2024
benchmark red drum stock assessment reported that, for the southern stock,
“Terminal Age-2 [fishing mortality] (0.509) was above the [fishing
mortality] threshold (0.396) and [fishing mortality] target (0.301), while [spawning
potential ratio] (0.207) was below SPR threshold (0.300) and SPR target
(0.400). In addition, the stock is below
the [spawning stock biomass] target (13,250 mt) and SSB threshold (9,917 mt)
with a terminal SSB 0f 8,737 mt. The
southern stock of red drum status is overfished and experiencing overfishing. [emphasis added]”
Under such circumstances, one would expect managers to do
their best to reduce fishing mortality to the target level, or perhaps even to
some level below target, in order to rebuild the stock to the spawning stock biomass
target within a reasonable timeframe. Given
the degree to which red drum fishing mortality and spawning stock biomass exceeded
their respective thresholds, not to mention their targets, it would be
reasonable to also expect managers to adopt fairly restrictive regulations to
achieve those goals.
“Southern stock state measures are to achieve the
threshold and end overfishing (i.e., F<F30% or 30% SPR
under terminal year fishing selectivity patterns), with a target of decreasing
fishing mortality such that it is less than the fishing mortality associated
with 40% SPR under terminal year fishing selectivity patterns. [emphasis added]”
Thus, the Addendum abandons the objective of achieving
target fishing mortality and fully rebuilding the stock, relegating such
concepts to mere aspirational goals, while requiring the states
to accomplish only the bare minimum—ending overfishing—and nothing more.
The man behind the curtain
While the above-described ASMFC actions all describe
occasions when the Commission failed to take decisive action to correct an existing
problem in a fishery, it is impossible to ignore the role that the federal
government plays in Commission decisions.
Representatives of NMFS and, in some cases, the United
States Fish and Wildlife Service sit on ASMFC’s species management boards. In the case of striped bass, both agencies voted
against adopting management measures to reduce striped bass fishing mortality
in 2026. I was told by a member of the
Atlantic Menhaden Management Board that the federal representative on that
panel made it clear that the administration would not support a reduction in
the total allowable greater than 20%.
The administration’s position plays an important role in the
ASMFC’s actions, because only the Secretary of Commerce can compel a state to
comply with an ASMFC fishery management plan, by imposing a moratorium on the
relevant fishery in noncompliant jurisdictions. In the first Trump administration, we saw Secretary
of Commerce Wilbur Ross refuse to support the ASMFC’s finding that New Jersey
was out of compliance with the ASMFC’s summer flounder management plan, the
first time that any Secretary of Commerce refused to stand behind a Commission
determination. Had the ASMFC gone ahead
with an increase in the lobster size limit, or imposed a meaningful reduction
in menhaden language, earlier this year, and had a state gone out of compliance
with either action, it is very likely that the current Secretary would have
again undercut the ASMFC’s management authority. It is very conceivable that the same thing
would have happened if a state demurred from a more restrictive addendum to the
striped bass or red drum management plans.
Thus, as easy as it may be to blame the ASMFC for everything
that goes wrong with coastal fisheries, when we look at the bigger picture, we
often find that there are others who might not be named in a press release, but
whose influence contributed to some of the worst management decisions of the
year.
SOME POTENTIALLY POSITIVE ACTIONS—ALSO AT THE ASMFC
It would be wrong not to point out that some good things
happened at the ASMFC this year, too.
All of them happened in October, and all remain incomplete,
but they show at least some movement in the right direction.
In the case of striped bass, the same motion that ended any
chance for landings reductions in 2026 also created a Working Group to examine
a host of issues impacting striped bass management, and inform future
management actions, which are more likely than not to occur after the 2027
benchmark stock assessment is released.
The one problem may be that, while the motion seeks to people the
Working Group with a wide variety of stakeholder representatives, including
recreational fishermen, the ASMFC’s rules require such working groups to be
made up of management board members, and there are very few recreational
fishermen who sit on the Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board, particularly
outside of the New England states. That
creates a real risk that the supposedly “recreational” slots will be filled by
representatives from the recreational fishing industry, or from industry-affiliated
groups such as the Coastal Conservation Association, and not by those who will
reflect the thoughts and concerns of dedicated striped bass anglers.
In the case of menhaden, the
Atlantic Menhaden Management Board has initiated a new addendum which will
consider reducing the cap on reduction fishery landings in the Chesapeake Bay
by as much as 50%. The question of whether
the reduction fishery causes “localized depletion” of menhaden within the Bay
has been debated for close to two decades, and while no one has ever been able
to demonstrate that such depletion occurs, it is also true that no one has ever
been able to prove that it is not an issue. The proposed addendum will provide an
opportunity to gather all of the science on both sides of the debate, and
perhaps cast some light on what has long been a contentious subject.
Finally, an
update to the tautog stock assessment has shown substantial improvement in the
health of three of the four recognized stocks, with the New Jersey/New York
Bight stock still experiencing overfishing, but no longer overfished. Unfortunately,
the Delaware/Maryland/Virginia stock, which had been experiencing relatively
good health, was found to be both overfished and experiencing overfishing. However, the Tautog Management Board has
initiated a new addendum intended to address the remaining problems with the
latter two stocks.
THE GOOD NEWS
Just over a year after the last dam was removed, and access
to traditional spawning areas was restored, Michael Harris, the Environmental
Program Manager for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s Klamath Watershed
Program, said that
“The speed at which salmon are repopulating every nook and
cranny of suitable habitat upstream of the dams in the Klamath Basin is both
remarkable and thrilling. There are
salmon everywhere on the landscape right now, and it’s invigorating our work.”
Salmon have ascended the Klamath River all the way into Oregon,
and have been seen spawning in tributaries that had been closed to the fish for
over one hundred years. Last summer, juvenile
salmon and steelhead trout occupied nearly all of the newly accessible
tributaries; in one, biologists counted over 65,000 juvenile Chinook salmon.
Thus, hope remains.
And that may be a lesson that all of us involved in the
fishery management process should take to heart.
For over a century, ill-considered government policies
denied Chinook salmon access to their upstream spawning grounds on the Klamath
River. But because people were willing
to do the hard work, regardless of the obstacles placed in their path, the way
was opened for the salmon to return, and once given the opportunity, they are
spawning in the river again.
Today, an administration interested only in monetizing our
living marine resources is trying to turn back the clock, and return to an age
where exploitation and short-term gains were the only objectives, and
conservation concerns had no place in the conversation. Over the next few years, it will probably
succeed.
But with time, and work, changes can be made, and the damage
done can be overcome.
It will not be easy.
It will not be without costs, and some of those costs will be
substantial.
Nonetheless, it can be done.
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