QUESTIONING WHAT YOU "KNOW"

If you’ve spent much time around fisheries management debates, one thing becomes pretty clear:  All of the folks speaking up at the hearings, along with the folks on the councils and management boards, are pretty sure that they know the right answers.

And they “know” that all of the other guys’ answers are wrong.

It’s not hard to think of examples.

Up in New England, we see a never-ending debate between biologists trying to conserve cod stocks and fishermen trying to catch them.

In the Gulf of Mexico, anglers have spent years fighting commercial fishermen, and more recently the for-hire fleet, over their share of red snapper.

And all along the striper coast, we have the current battle between recreational anglers and the for-fleet, who have different opinions about striped bass conservation.

Such thinking isn’t limited to fisheries issues.  Last week, while I was at work, I received an e-mail inviting me to read a blog written by someone called Rebel Brown, which had the absolutely awful title “When Leaders Wear Rose-colored Business Glasses.”

Despite its title, the blog itself wasn’t awful at all, and applied to far more than business—such as, for example, marine resources debates.

The premise of Brown’s essay is that we tend believe what we want to believe, regardless of whether it’s true.  She notes that

“Neuroscience has proven that when we are presented with information or insights that threaten our feeling good about ourselves or our situation, we bring out the rose-colored glasses. Our unconscious mindware proceeds to distort our reality, changing what we see and even fill in the blanks with evidence designed to reduce the threat and make us feel good.”

To put that into a fisheries context, New England trawlers are really convinced that there are plenty of cod on the banks; they believe that the science is wrong.

If they believed anything else—say, that they’re only catching a lot of cod on Stellwagen Bank because the fish are bunched up there feeding on herring, and are scarce elsewhere in the region—they would have to make an unpleasant choice between cutting back harvest and making less money, or knowingly overfishing the stock and driving it toward commercial extinction.

Since either of those alternatives could only bring them discomfort, they have naturally chosen a third opinion—convincing themselves that the fish are still there and the scientists have to be wrong.

It’s not only commercial fishermen who think in that manner.  

I spent a number of years listening to very bright and very decent people complaining that federal regulators were burdening red snapper anglers in the Gulf of Mexico with “unfair” regulations. 

It was interesting to be an “outsider” who knew the people, understood the management system and had even participated in the fishery from time to time, but didn’t live on the Gulf and wasn’t emotionally or physically involved with the fishery on a regular basis. 

Although they would never admit it, and would be embarrassed if they ever did, my then-colleagues sounded just like the codfishermen up in Gloucester; they thought that they were the “good guys,” beset by bad science, overzealous regulators and a conspiracy led by conservation groups who wanted to drive them out of the fishery.  They could never understand that, to me, they sounded no different than any other fish hogs wanting to increase their kill.

Why the difference in perspective?  Brown noted

"the human program that drives us to prove ourselves right. That program is even stronger when it comes to protecting our beliefs about our businesses and ourselves in times of threat, or opportunity!

"This instinctual response is aided by another one. In any situation, our unconscious mind is wired to fill in the details, details that make the situation more the way we want it to be. Even if those details are inaccurate. For example, when our self-image is threatened, our unconscious mind will fill in the data it needs to create the reality we want and need.

"The challenge is this. If we’re filling in what we want to believe, and tinting reality to our favor – how do we have any hope of seeing what’s really happening around us?

And isn’t that all often the problem with fisheries issues?  People denying the truth until a collapsed stock or suddenly oppressive—if necessary—regulations catch them by seeming surprise?

So folks try to tell us we don’t have a problem; the striped bass are merely “offshore,” weakfish are just in “a cycle” and winter flounder are not overfished.

It’s all what they want to believe.

Brown suggests that anyone wishing to step out of their personal blind spots in order to better view reality take three meaningful steps.  They need to make an active effort to prove themselves wrong, they need to view issues from multiple perspectives and they need to get outside of their comfort zone and talk to people with opposing views.

Those aren’t easy things to do, but having done (and failed to do) all of them at various times over the years, I believe that they are absolutely necessary if we’re to get to the truth that lies at the core of fisheries debates.

Trying to prove yourself wrong is probably the easiest approach to master, because in the end, it’s all about fact, not opinions.  Brown suggests that a person

“take any assumption or belief and go exploring. Look for evidence that says you’re wrong. Stretch your mind to see beyond information that agrees with you and find the information that says you are just plain inaccurate.”

What she describes is really the essence of science, approaching any situation with a skeptical mind open to the possibility that our interpretations of what we observe may be wrong.

As an attorney, I learned long ago that the best way to prepare to make comments before a regulatory body or present a case in front of a court is to first try to write your opponent’s comments or brief.  Your opponent’s strongest arguments will be the weakest points in your case, and it you can’t craft an even stronger counterpoint, it’s time to stop and ask yourself what to do next.

On the other hand, if you can easily dismiss the best that the other side can offer, your argument is probably pretty strong.

Yet science alone doesn’t decide fisheries issues; the management process is highly politicized, and to succeed in the management arena, it helps to understand what everyone wants.

Normally, everyone wants more than they’re likely to get, but the key to a reasonable outcome is to listen to folks, and figure out what they actually need, and what they can live without.

Striped bass provide a good example.

For years, many anglers have wanted to end the commercial fishery, and make striped bass a “gamefish.”  In some states they have succeeded; in the rest, they currently lack the political support needed to get the job done.  Yet they still keep banging their heads against the same big brick wall.

Instead of doing that, they should be looking at things from a commercial perspective, seeking shared concerns. 

Here in New York, a large percentage of the commercial striped bass fishermen use rod and reel rather than nets of any sort.  When they see a hundred dead striped bass afloat in the wake of the trawler that killed them after boxing its 21-fish “bycatch” allowance, commercial “pinhookers” are, by and large, as disgusted as any angler.  They’re also unhappy when gillnetters kill loads of fish at one time, flooding the markets and driving down prices for everyone.

If anglers looked at this situation from the pinhookers’ perspective, not only their own, they might work together to bring both trawls and gill nets under control.

But that doesn’t happen, largely because the groups do not talk.

Go to a fisheries hearing, and you’re likely to see factions assembled like street gangs fighting a turf war.  Each side applauds its own spokesmen, and often hoots in derision at opposing groups’ spokesmen, whom they view with disdain.

I will never forget a winter flounder hearing that ASMFC held here in New York, when the perennially obnoxious captain of a Huntington party boat, as part of his recorded comments, publicly derided the speaker before him for wearing a suit, which proved that such speaker could not have a clue about what was happening out on the water…

That’s not atypical in the tribal world of fisheries management, where each user group shares a faith comprised of the “facts” that they choose to believe, and zealously defends that faith against heretics and outsiders.  

Because they talk only to one another, such faith is constantly reinforced, those with other beliefs are generally shunned, and objective truth is largely irrelevant.

Once people stop listening to one another, it gets much harder to get anything done.

And the first step toward listening is to concede that there’s a chance that you might be wrong.

You can only find answers if you’re willing to question. 

And there’s no better place to start than questioning yourself, and all you believe.

WHAT IS "CONSERVATION"?

You hear the word at all sorts of times, and most people think that it’s good:

     “Conservation”.

In the world of fisheries management, we have plenty of “Conservation” associations, “Conservation” partnerships and the like, and even clubs that don’t have the word in their names mention it often in bylaws and mission statements. 

States have adopted it, too.  Here in New York, our fisheries are managed by the Department of Environmental Conservation.

But exactly what does "conservation" mean?

For too many folks, it means making the other guy kill fewer fish, without reducing their own harvest at all.  We typically see this with recreational folks trying to cut down the commercial guys’ kill, and calling for “gamefish” and such, although in the past year or two, we’ve seen the commercials using “conservation” as cause to cut down—or cut out—recreational landings.

To others it means just not wasting fish; to them, anything that’s legal and eaten is fine, regardless of the health of the stock that they’re caught from.

Last Sunday I quoted author, hunter and angler Robert Ruark, who once wrote that conservation is trying to

“preserve the very same thing that [we kill] a little of from time to time.”

That’s starting to get close to the core of the matter, although the fact that Ruark was already speaking of sportsmen who only kill “a little” of the resource in question probably means that conservation efforts were well underway before anyone began to “preserve” things.

Earlier this week, I received a message from a group called “Save the Tarpon” that might have gotten it right.  It didn’t exactly define conservation, but rather described what it’s for, saying

“The purpose of conservation:  The greatest good for the greatest number of people for the longest time.”

That’s not a new statement.  It didn’t come from an angler or modern-day advocate, but rather was spoken a bit over a century ago.  The speaker was Gifford Pinchot, the first Chief of the United States Forest Service.

It seems to reflect plain common sense.  Yet, in reality, how often is it applied?

To answer that question, we should take a long look at Pinchot’s statement, and figure out just what it means.

That’s a deceptively difficult thing to do, and probably the hardest part of all is defining “the greatest good.”  If you asked, it’s pretty likely that a gillnetter, a scuba diver and a once-a-week angler would provide three very different answers.

So maybe we should start with the end of the quote, and work our way backward from there.

If we do that, we learn that “conservation” is all about passing the test of time.  We conserve something—like a fish population—to make it last, rather than using it up all at once.  The best conservation measures are the ones that keep our fish stocks healthy the longest.

In other words, for a management measure to have conservation value, it must promote long-term sustainability.

So far, so good.

But the next step is a little trickier, because it says that conservation measures must benefit “the greatest number of people.”  Thus, the quick fix—shutting down a fishery or closing off waters to access—won’t quite fill the bill.

While such heavy-handed alternatives might well sustain fish stocks, and perhaps make a handful of divers and other folks happy, their benefit to large numbers of people is up for debate.  Fishermen—recreational or commercial—wouldn’t like it, and neither would folks who turn fish into meals.

So now the regulators’ jobs get a lot tougher.  They don’t only have to conserve the fish for the long haul, but they need to do it while figuring out how to let a wide array of folks derive benefits from those fish as well.

That’s pretty tough to do with a scanty and overfished stock.  

If regulators are going to get the job done, they need to restore stocks to abundance, just to give themselves something to work with.

Because healthy, abundant stocks are good for us all. 

And there can be little doubt that healthy stocks provide a greater good than those that have been depleted.

So when we apply Gifford Pinchot’s quotation to fisheries issues, what we get is hardly surprising.  Conservation means managing stocks for long-term abundance, rather than short-term gains.

What may be surprising is that twenty years ago, here in New York, the State Legislature actually instructed our Department of Environmental Conservation to achieve Pinchot’s purpose.

They did that by enacting Section 13-0105 of the Environmental Conservation Law, which begins

"It is the policy of the state that the primary principle in managing the state's marine fishery resource is to maintain the long-term health and abundance of marine fishery resources and their habitats, and to ensure that the resources are sustained in usable abundance and diversity for future generations.  Utilization and allocation of available resources will be administered consistent with the restoration and maintenance of healthy stocks and habitats."

By making long-term sustainability—not just for those living today, but for “future generations”—the “primary principle” of fisheries management here in New York, the law clearly meets Pinchot’s “for the longest time” standard.

But it doesn’t stop there.

The law also recognizes the need to manage for the “greatest benefit for the greatest number of people” when it says

"The state shall optimize the benefits of resource use so as to provide valuable recreational experiences and viable business opportunities for commercial and recreational fisheries."

It really is a very good law.

The problem is, it’s completely ignored.

The political reality is that short-term economic concerns are elevated above the long-term health of fish stocks, contrary to both the law and common sense.  Fish don’t donate cash to politicians, while folks out to kill those fish do.

Nor do fish hire lawyers, to fight bad regulations and enforce that good law in court.  And no one has acted in the fish’s stead.

So the law is an orphan, bereft of protection, unable to achieve its true goals.

That’s unfortunate.  For if the law is ever applied as intended, New Yorkers will finally get to learn for themselves just what "conservation" means.

"LEGAL" DOES NOT EQUAL "RIGHT"

You hear it all of the time, regardless of the species in question or the health of the stock.

“You shouldn’t criticize someone for keeping a limit of fish.  It’s not illegal, and they have a right to take them.”

The topic came up most recently in a long thread on the 1 @ 32 Pledge Facebook page, after an angler, disgusted with a charter boat captain’s disregard for the resource, posted one of the captain’s kill shots and used it as an example of what not to do.

Immediately, a New Jersey angler leaped to the captain’s defense, asking

“Was something about the above catches illegal?”

Which, of course, was not the case, because—if we believe the latest benchmark striped bass stock assessment and its December 2013 update—the law already allows anglers to kill too many bass.  What was depicted was perfectly legal but, given the current stock, it was also the wrong thing to do.

However, the captain’s defender kept on, arguing that

“It’s not the Capts [sic] job to set the season, bag, or size limits.”

Which is true, although it probably is the captain’s job to educate his customers a bit about sportsmanship and the health of the stock, if for no other reason than to keep some fish in the water so those customers have a reason to charter him next year.

But—and this is really the point of the story—the captain wasn’t merely following the law.  He was fighting very hard to keep a bad law from being changed for the better, and apparently encouraging others to fight changes as well by writing

“It’s all bs.  There’s millions of bass…Our only worry is the tree huggers who think the bass are going extinct.  These govt [profanity deleted] don’t even know one bit about the fishery whatsoever… 

“We all need to send an e-mail!!!!  It takes less than 5 minutes!!!   This can really hurt us full time fishing boats and surely hurt the recreational fisherman as well…

“I am for a status quo option for the Striped Bass Management Regulations…”  

So what we have is a charter boat captain with complete contempt for the science and the regulators, who celebrates killing limits of big, mature fish, being defended because his actions are not illegal and he does not make the laws—although he does try really hard to keep the law from being changed.

Does anyone see a problem here?

With the striped bass population hovering on, or perhaps already sunk below, the threshold defining an overfished stock, most serious anglers would agree that the right thing to do is to kill fewer bass, so that the population might start to rebuild.  So why shouldn’t people criticize folks who do the wrong thing, merely because it is legal?

Let’s think back a few years, to the 1970s and 1980s, when bluefish were everywhere and seemed to drive anglers into a frenzy of killing more intense than anything done by the bluefish themselves.  Far too often, when those anglers returned to the dock with a boat filled with blues, they’d realize that neither they nor anyone else wanted to clean and eat all those fish, so they’d dump them overboard. 

The same thing happened on party boats and charters, as fares killed far more fish than they could ever use, and then left them behind for the crew to sell, if they could, or tossed them into dockside dumpsters.

That waste was all perfectly legal—but does anyone even want to suggest it was right?

Not too many years ago, I was out in Montauk during late summer, in a marina that catered to the charter boat crowd.  The dumpster was filled with false albacore—all perfectly legal, and all perfectly wrong.

Which leads us to the offshore scene, that once saw sharks, billfish and—when the price was still under ten cents per pound—even bluefin tuna killed and hauled in to the scales to be weighed for tournament dollars or maybe just to bulk up someone’s ego, and then tossed on a landfill or dumped back out at sea.  That was legal, too, but was it right?

Today, angling ethics have evolved to the point that for most of us, such blatant waste of a finite resource is just plain unacceptable, even though it’s permitted by law.

So, now that we’ve reached the point when “It’s OK—it’s legal” does not offer cover to those who kill and waste the resource, we need to take the next step, and admit that the argument is also absurd when applied to less blatant abuses.

In other words, we need to start thinking like sportsman.

And what is a sportsman?  I’ve always liked the way the late Robert Ruark, an author, angler and hunter himself, once defined the term.

"A sportsman, is a gentleman first. But a sportsman, basically, is a man who kills what he needs, whether it's fish or bird or animal, or what he wants for a special reason, but he never kills anything just to kill it. And he tries to preserve the very same thing that he kills a little of from time to time. The books call this conservation. It's the same reason why we don't shoot that tame covey of quail down to less'n ten birds."

That pretty well says it all.

It’s fine to take a fish home for dinner.  But you don’t kill a striped bass, or anything else, just because it’s legal to do so, and you “don’t shoot that tame covey of quail down to less’n ten birds”—or take too many striped bass when the stock is declining, or try to catch the last winter flounder in the bay—even though there is no legal penalty if you do.

Because, as a sportsman, you have an obligation “to preserve the very same thing” that you take home and eat once in a while.  Even if that obligation isn’t enshrined in the law.

And that is why I take such exception to those who say that anglers shouldn’t criticize other anglers who’s are merely doing what the law allows.  For the law establishes a very low bar, the bare minimum standard for conduct.

We, as sportsman, can set a higher standard.

And we should.

A lot of the reason that folks post pictures in magazines, on Internet sites and on tackle shop walls is to gain recognition and perhaps admiration from their fellow anglers.  Criticism is the last thing that they want to hear.

So when we let photos of excessive fish kills, dead-and-dumped marlin or any other behavior that shows a lack of respect or concern for the resource involved, go without comment, we are implicitly endorsing such conduct.  We’re giving the angler in question positive reinforcement, and encouraging him or her to do the wrong thing again.

Instead, it is our responsibility to make it clear to such anglers that their behavior falls short of those accepted by the community of sportsmen, and far from giving them the approval they seek, provide measured criticism instead.

This is nothing new.

The phrase “Limit your kill, don’t kill your limit” has been heard on the nation’s fresh waters for years.  Why is still alien to salt water anglers?

Largemouth bass are the most popular gamefish in the country.  They support a multi-billion dollar fishing industry, tournaments and television shows.  And all of the hype is built around catch and release.  Anyone who showed up at a popular bass-fishing lake with a stringer of bigmouths stiff and dead in their cooler would meet a very hostile reception from fellow "bassmasters."  Using “It’s legal” as a defense might lead to an unscheduled swim…

The late Lee Wulff is famous for writhing that “A good gamefish is too valuable to be caught only once,” and spawned a catch-and-release ethic that led to no-kill trout waters all across the United States.  And he did it at a time when filling a bamboo creel was both legal and the accepted norm.

For the standards of the angling community are only as good--or as bad--as the majority of anglers want them to be.

We need to work hard to change fisheries laws so that they will restore our fish stocks and keep those stocks healthy for the benefit not just of us, but of generations yet to be born.

We need to work equally hard to create an angling ethic on America’s coasts that is just as rigorous as the ethic that already thrives along the nation's trout streams and on the lakes where largemouth bass swim. 

And in building that ethic, we must point out what’s wrong, even when the law fails to do so.

"GAMEFISH": CONSERVATION OR CON

The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Striped Bass Management Board met today, and to no one’s surprise, approved “conservation equivalency” measures that are likely to frustrate the goals of the management plan and assure that the stock becomes overfished at some time this year—if it isn’t already.

Members of the Management Board recognized the flaws in conservation equivalency throughout the discussion, but approved the measures anyway.  That included smug representatives of the State of New Jersey, a so-called “gamefish” state that outlawed its commercial fishery but kept its commercial quota, and could use it to increase the “commercial” portion of New Jersey’s striped bass harvest by over 200,000 pounds this year—when we’re supposed to cut back.

To hear the “gamefish” advocates tell it, outlawing commercial harvest and sale is a sound conservation measure, that would assure the health of the resource well into the future.

But when commercial fishermen tell the same tale, they condemn “gamefish” status as nothing more than a “fish grab,” a naked effort to reallocate all of the striped bass resource to the recreational sector,  garbed in a cloak of tattered virtue that anglers call “conservation.”

So who is right?

As an angler, I’m inclined to favor the former argument, but as someone who spends a lot of time working for effective fisheries management—and who tries to tell the truth in these columns I write—I have to admit that both sides go a little too far.

Start with just two basic truths.

ONE:  The easiest way to rebuild an overfished stock is to kill fewer fish.

TWO:  A fish doesn’t care who kills it; a striped bass (or anything else) is just as dead when killed by an angler as it is when killed by a commercial fisherman.

So shutting down commercial fisheries could lead to fewer fish being killed.  So could shutting down recreational fisheries—or letting both recreational and commercial fisheries continue, while placing greater constraints on both of their harvests.

“Gamefish” has proven effective offshore, by ending the commercial harvest of Atlantic-coast sailfish and marlin, and it’s difficult to argue that it didn’t play a big role in the recovery of the Gulf of Mexico’s red drum population.

On the other hand, when it comes to striped bass, “gamefish” has a notably checkered record.

In some states, such as Maine and New Hampshire, it works.  When those states closed their commercial striped bass fisheries, they didn’t reallocate their commercial quota to anglers, but instead allowed the fish “saved” from harvest to remain a part of the spawning stock biomass.  That truly promotes conservation.

On the other hand, in Connecticut and New Jersey, “gamefish” doesn’t look like conservation at all.

New Jersey started the ball rolling many years ago when it initiated it’s “bonus fish” program shortly after ending the state’s commercial fishery.  That program reallocated the state’s commercial quota to the recreational sector, provided that anglers participating in the program buy the requisite “bonus tag.”

The supposed logic behind the program was the sort of warped thinking that you often hear coming out of the Garden State’s fisheries managers—they had to create a mechanism that allowed local anglers to kill “New Jersey’s” striped bass—which represent the state’s commercial bass quota—from being transferred to and killed by commercial fishermen in other jurisdictions. 

For those old enough to remember the Vietnam War, it was akin to the argument that “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.”

And the Jersey boys will tell you that it’s good conservation.

Of course, they won’t tell you that ASMFC’s striped bass management plan assigns each state a commercial quota based on its historical landings, and does not permit the transfer of quota between states.  That would ruin the narrative, and anyway, scare tactics work better...

If they stuck just to the facts, folks might believe that the real motivation behind New Jersey’s “gamefish” law wasn’t conservation at all, and that it was merely a ploy to let New Jersey anglers kill some more stripers.  And that wouldn’t look good in the papers at all…

Connecticut, on the other hand, eased into its misuse of “gamefish” far more slowly.

I think that it may have been the first “gamefish” state on the coast, adopting the measure back in the ‘50s.  I know that I grew up in that state, and never recall at time when selling striped bass was legal. 

Of course, that didn’t stop the “regulars” from selling their fish.  There was a big seafood restaurant in the middle of Cos Cob where they showed up each morning, lining up at the kitchen door to sell the night’s catch before heading off to their day jobs; the place was notorious for buying poached fish, but in all of the time that I lived there, the law never once came around.

And there were plenty of country clubs, markets and such would gladly fence your illegal bass.  There was at least one marina in Stamford that, for a few dollars, would actually ship your illegal bass to the Fulton Fish Market for you.  Fulton was a “family” business back then, that paid folks in cash and didn’t keep perfect records, which pleased everyone at the time.

In those days, there was a 16-inch size limit and no bag limit at all, so an awful lot of “gamefish” were sold.  By comparison, Connecticut’s current rules, which convert the state’s commercial quota into a “voucher” program that let anglers keep a total of 3,018 bass, with a size limit of just 22 inches, probably look pretty benign. 

But at least in years past, the state tried to conserve a few fish.  Today, its regulations encourage anglers to kill the entire commercial quota, making Connecticut’s “gamefish” law a sham effort at conservation.

“Gamefish” for billfish works because regulations governing anglers catch are actually far more restrictive today than they were when the sale of Atlantic-coast sailfish and marlin was outlawed.

“Gamefish” for Gulf red drum is also effective, because no one—including recreational fishermen—can kill the big spawners when they school up in the EEZ, where they spend most of their time.

But when we talk about “gamefish” being the striped bass’ salvation, we must keep Connecticut and New Jersey in mind.  There’s not much salvation to be found in their waters…

Close to a decade ago, Pat Murray, then the Vice President (and currently the President) of the Coastal Conservation Association summed it all up in an elegant and eloquent little essay that he called “The Last Fish,” where he wrote

“It has often been said that commercial fishermen want to catch the last fish.  But are we recreational fishermen trying to stop them simply because we want to catch the last fish?”

That really gets to the heart of the “gamefish” debate.

Ending the commercial harvest of striped bass would help the stock, IF—and only IF—the fish saved from commercial exploitation are “reinvested” into the stock, to reduce fishing mortality and allow more older and larger—and more fecund—striped bass to remain a part of the spawning stock biomass.

If we merely turn the bass “saved” from commercial harvest into “trophy fish,” “bonus fish,” “voucher” fish or anything else that can be legally killed, then “gamefish” status has no conservation value at all,  and becomes just a con used to justify snatching fish from the commercials and giving them to the anglers to kill.

So let’s try to be honest.  

There might be economic and policy arguments that justify reallocating the kill.

But if the kill’s only reallocated, and not materially reduced, it’s not, in any way, conservation.

HOW MANAGEMENT DECISIONS ARE MADE

Regular readers of this blog know that I have a lot of respect for professional fisheries scientists.  On the whole, they are dedicated, underpaid, overworked public servants who generally try to do the right thing.

On the state level, where there is no Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act to set legal standards and guidance, fisheries managers often find themselves sandwiched between biological and political realities, with the former demanding conservative approaches that assure the long-term health of state fisheries, while the latter demands that fish stocks be managed for maximum exploitation to assure the short-term profit of those having the ear of elected officials.

And since one of those elected officials is usually the fisheries managers’ boss, that means that politics win over science a good part of the time.

Even so, sometimes we come across management decisions that are so divorced from the realities that we see on the water that we have to wonder just how they were made.

Consider “Fish X”.

“Fish X” is a real species that lives in our waters here in New York.  I’m not naming it just yet because, in this context, it’s more than a fish, but a greater symbol of how things ought not to be done.  Thus, it has relevance to all of us at one point or another, and I don’t want to turn off any readers—who are perhaps most of my readers—who fish in those waters where Fish X never swam.

Fish X was once one of the most popular and abundant recreational fish in New York.  Thirty years ago, anglers took home almost 6.8 million pounds of them.  However, Fish X has since fallen on hard times, and only 0.03 million pounds were landed last year; the recreational harvest has fallen by more than 99 percent.

And that’s because the population has just fallen through the floor.  

The number of fish has fallen so far that researchers at Stony Brook University’s School of Marine and Atmospheric Science have found that inbreeding now threatens the population, and that they can now estimate the number of Fish X in New York’s bays by examining the genomes of a few individuals that are caught there.

To make matters worse, other research done at Stony Brook suggests that the overall population of Fish X is composed of two subpopulations, one of which migrates to deeper ocean waters, and one of which remains inside coastal bays during the summer and may be at risk of extirpation.  A relevant paper written by scientists at the university recognizes the vulnerability of such resident fish and notes that

”Resolving the stock structure and migratory behavior of Long Island [Fish X] is crucial to determine the impacts of local harvest on the sustainability of the species. If resident [Fish X] represent a separate genetic population, the seasonally more abundant dispersive population may mask a long-term decline in resident [Fish X] that once supported Long Island fisheries and may eventually lead to extirpation of residents. This outcome would require management of each population separately based on population-specific life history variables. On the other hand, if resident and dispersive [Fish X] are contingents within a single genetically distinct population that exhibit partial migration, the relative impact of harvest on resident and dispersive individuals can be complex. Management would need to consider the relative abundance of each contingent through habitat or other conservation efforts aimed at a specific contingent.  [emphasis added]”

New York State’s Department of Environmental Conservation knows that Fish X is in dire straits. 

An October 2014 memo from the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s [Fish X] Technical Committee notes that

“Nearly all the survey indices are near time-series lows.  The [Technical Committee] concludes that the [Fish X] biomass remains near time-series low.  Young of year indices generally remain low, although a few indices have improved in recent years.  Rebuilding is likely to be slow (if at all) especially if recruitment remains poor…”

In December 2014, NY DEC issued a proposed revision of its list of “New York Species of Greatest Conservation Need”.   It noted that

“The status of these species is known and conservation action is urgent in the next ten years.  These species are declining and must receive timely management intervention or they are likely to reach critical population levels in New York.  [emphasis added]”

Fish X is a part of that list.

Thus it seems inexplicable that the New York Department of Environmental Conservation would move to increase the number of Fish X that are killed by anglers each year, and would open the fishing season in a way that would directly jeopardize the vulnerable resident fish and increase the likelihood that they would be extirpated.

Yet that is just what the agency is planning to do.

In a notice of proposed rulemaking released just last week, the State of New York announced that it would be extending the fishing season for Fish X, which currently runs for just 60 days in the spring, to a full 10 months.  For much of that added time—perhaps mid-June through early October—all of the angling pressure would fall on the few remnant resident fish, since the larger body of migratory individuals would be out of reach in deep ocean waters.

It doesn’t seem to make any sense, although the state tries to justify its actions by saying

“These regulations are necessary for New York to maximize [Fish X] fishing opportunities for its marine recreational anglers while remaining in compliance with the Interstate Fishery Management Plan (FMP) adopted by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC). The proposed rule will extend the current 60 day open season (April 1 - May 30) to 306 days (March 1 - December 31) without altering the current 12 inch minimum size limit or the 2 fish possession limit. This regulatory change will provide New York marine recreational anglers with similar access to [Fish X] as anglers in NY's neighboring states of Rhode Island, Connecticut and New Jersey. The proposed season will provide additional fishing opportunities during periods of the year when there are few other species to fish for. It is hoped that these relaxed regulations will increase interest and fishing activity, resulting in economic benefits to a number of different types of associated businesses.”

You might have noted that the health of the Fish X stock was never mentioned, not even once.  It was all about business, and fishing opportunities for a species that, in these times, is not even there.  (I can’t go on without noting that the “when there are few other species to fish for” line is purest fiction, as the summer and fall months, which account for most of the extension, are when New York’s anglers enjoy their waters’ greatest abundance.)

The poor health of the stock is considered briefly when the DEC discusses closing the Fish X season altogether, although it was quickly dismissed in comments that said

“Some stakeholders have said that the [Fish X] fishery should be closed or more restrictive than it is currently managed to eliminate fishing mortality on these fish. However, neighboring states have already decided to extend the [Fish X] season. This alternative was rejected because such a closure would deny New York State anglers fishing opportunities made available to anglers in neighboring states and because a closure may adversely impact the incomes of New York State recreational fishery businesses.”

Not too much mention of how many “fishing opportunities” New York anglers might have or how good “recreational fishery businesses” would do if Fish X was wiped out, but that doesn’t seem to matter to folks.  At the March 2014 meeting of New York’s Marine Resources Advisory Council, representatives of the recreational fishing industry strongly endorsed an increased kill, as always elevating short-term profits over the long-term health of the stock

No, it doesn’t make any sense, but it is being done nonetheless.

And so it is probably time to end the charade.  If you live in New York, if you know me personally or if you have read this blog for very long—or if you clicked on one of the hyperlinks above—you know that “Fish X” is New York’s winter flounder.  

And knowing that, you realize that the proposal to extend the season makes no sense at all.

Perhaps the best explanation comes from an e-mail that was forwarded to me soon after the proposed rule became public.  It was written by an angler in Moriches Bay (I won’t mention his name), who may have finally figured out how and why fishery management decisions such as this one are made. 

He noted that

“Now we can catch no flounder for 306 days rather than just for 60 days.  (The last one being caught in Moriches bay in February 1992 by a bayman towing a scallop dredge in an uncertified area. The uncaring lout carried that fish around to all the local seedy gin mills, comparing himself to the last of the buffalo hunters and trying to pick up loose women…)

“Anyway, being a master of several manly sports, namely hunting, I cleverly figured out why fisheries managers would expand a season on a species of fish nearly extinct on Long Island. Let me slowly explain it to you so that you may possibly grasp this ingenious management concept.

“Every fall, happy little ducks migrate south from the North Pole, after saying goodbye to Santa to spend their winters in the relatively warm southern climes of New England and Long Island. These gullible naive birds believe they have hit the duck lottery coming to our shores eating everything in sight. Heck, a flock of geese was seen trying to eat a local golf course the other day. Their wanton feeding gets them killed off by local hunters. (I actually got one last week after a season of trying, their numbers really not much more than flounders but that's not the point.) The ducks are stupid when they get here, and smarten up as the season progresses as sportsman send lead projectiles at them and try to shoot their asses off.

“Now take flounder. The fish that sees those flounder rigs in the early season is young, dumb, and full of milt. Eager to take a bait. This is dangerous to the species. Sometimes they swarm to the chum slick. During one tide twenty years ago I spotted three in a span of four hours! 

"With the proliferation of party boats on Moriches bay it has been determined with telemetry studies the biggest threat to flounder is actually not by catching but by head injury. Frustrated fisherman violently jigging their rods, rumored to work by flounder fisherman 100 years ago, send lead weights crashing to the bottom in an effort to get the flounders attention. These inexperienced flounder swim up to these boats are many are simply knocked unconscious and eaten by crabs or seals.

“The current sixty day season is too short for the flounders little brain to register that chums slicks mean missiles of death and flying corn beads. Now 306 days of pure mayhem, party boats throwing clams, mussels, corn and thousands of hours of sports pounding the bottom with lead weights will indoctrinate even the dumbest flounder to equate dancing corn beads and twister tails with death from above and will most surely save the species from imminent destruction. A rather brilliant strategy by fisheries managers that may even convince the most skeptical amongst us…”

I have to admit that it makes more sense than any of the reasons that I’ve heard coming out of ASMFC, MRAC or the DEC.

Which probably tells us all that we need to know about the proposal.

NOTE:

If the effort to extend New York’s winter flounder season disgusts you as much as it does me, please make a comment to the Department of Environmental Conservation and tell them so.  Comments should be sent to

Stephen W. Heins
NYSDEC
205 North Belle Mead Road, Suite 1
East Setauket, NY 11733

or e-mail comments to: Proposed Rulemaking Part 40 - Marine Fish - Open Seasons, Size and Catch Limits (Winter Flounder)

I’d really thank you if you did.

 

MOVING FORWARD WITH MENHADEN MANAGEMENT

Just about two years ago, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Atlantic Menhaden Management Board adopted Amendment 2 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Menhaden, which for the first time established biological reference points for managing the menhaden fishery.

It was a landmark action that was achieved only through a lot of hard work, with anglers and the broader fisheries conservation community working together. 

At the beginning, it was a struggle to bring menhaden management out of its version of the Dark Ages, when the initial Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Menhaden contemplated an Atlantic Menhaden Management Board and an Atlantic Menhaden Advisory Committee dominated by representatives of the menhaden reduction industry and officials from reduction industry states.

Once the first, most difficult battle to drive the foxes out of the henhouse was won, the fight became an incremental grind to improve the science and put menhaden management on a par with that of other species.

How long did it take?

Let’s put it this way.

The Coastal Conservation Association was one of the organizations at the forefront of the menhaden battle from the beginning.  When I joined CCA’s Board of Directors in 1996, and became Chairman of its Atlantic States Fisheries Committee a or so year later, CCA had already been involved in with the issue for about half a decade.  And when I resigned from CCA’s board in 2013, the fight to manage menhaden the right way was—IS—still going on.

Because Amendment 2 was a big step, but not the conclusion.

Amendment 2 set “interim” biological reference points that are, for practical purposes, based on the spawning potential of the stock.  But those reference points were derived from a stock assessment that seemed to have its share of problems, and everyone recognized that, with the interim reference points in place, it was time to produce a new benchmark stock assessment that would better guide menhaden management in the future.

That assessment process is now nearing completion. An Atlantic Menhaden Benchmark Stock Assessment has been completed, and has passed through the peer review process with only slight revisions.  As a result, it looks as if menhaden management is going to change once again.

Some folks might wonder why so much fuss is being made over a fish that nobody eats (at least intentionally), tends to die by the thousands in summer and stink up the shorelines where wealthy folks live and, to be honest, doesn’t smell all that good even when it’s still alive.

Bruce Franklin tried to answer that question in his book, The Most Important Fish in the Sea.  While his title is a bit of an overreach—the sea is pretty big, and in some of its corners, herring, pilchards, sardines, anchovies or other such critters might contend for the title—menhaden are certainly the most important fish along the U.S. East Coast, for the simple reason that, at some point in their lives, just about everything eats it.

When I was a kid—six or seven years old—I recall the flash of diminutive “snappers”, which are young of the year bluefish, tearing through schools of “peanut bunker”, which are young-of-the-year menhaden.  And just this past summer, I saw great humpback whales off western Long Island, swimming in as little as 40 feet of water to come up under big schools of menhaden with vast jaws agape.

And that pretty well tells us where menhaden management should be headed next.

The benchmark assessment suggests that the stock is in much better shape than we previously thought.  

But the next big step isn’t just to rebuild menhaden to securely sustainable levels.  We’re already about there now, with the stock assessment declaring that

“The menhaden stock is unlikely to experience unsustainable harvest rates or drop to depleted biomass levels in the short term under the current management plan.”

Larger, older fish are becoming a bigger part of the population, and the fishing mortality rate is the lowest in sixty years.

Yet menhaden management isn’t just about limiting harvest.  It’s also about providing an abundance of menhaden in the nearshore ocean, so that the whales, the sharks and the seals, along with fish of all kinds and a host of fish-eating birds, have a rich and dependable forage base.

Managers aren’t quite sure how to guarantee menhaden abundance—the link between stock size and recruitment is deemed “weak at best.”

Even so, the next great frontier for menhaden management is the development of “ecological based reference points” that don’t merely consider the size of the stock and the limits on harvest needed to provide a sustainable fishery, but rather the size of the stock needed to fulfill the menhaden’s most important role as forage fish of first resort.

Under such a management plan, the primary concern of fisheries managers won’t be how many menhaden may be safely netted, reduced into fish meal and shipped off to China, but rather how many menhaden will be needed to sustain a striped bass stock restored to target levels, with enough left over for the bluefish and the seals.

And yes, that sort of thinking is needed, because at October’s Striped Bass Management Board meeting, one of the arguments used by conservation’s opponents was that there was not enough forage in Chesapeake Bay—home of the last remaining menhaden reduction plant on the East Coast—to support a bigger striped bass population.  (Yet, curiously, those same watermen and their enablers who raised such objections were remarkably silent when a Pennsylvania commissioner asked whether they’d be willing to kill fewer menhaden to provide forage for bass.)

We have already learned how to restore fish stocks one at a time, although some folks—particularly up in New England and down in the Gulf of Mexico—seem dysfunctionally slow in absorbing those lessons.  Now, we need to learn how to use that knowledge to heal entire ecosystems, and make them function in ways that haven’t been seen in decades, or perhaps for close to a century.

We are getting our first taste of what such a healed system would look like off the coast of Long Island, as striped bass follow the menhaden schools and the slashing tails of thresher sharks churn the surface to foam less than a mile from the Fire Island Inlet sea buoy.

As we enter the new world of ecosystem management, menhaden are one of the fish that have the real potential to show us the way.

If they indeed fulfill that role, we will have maybe the best reason of all to call them, “the most important fish in the sea.”