HOUSE BACKS DOWN ON EEZ STRIPER BILL

Last December, I wrote about H.R. 3070, a poorly-drafted and even more poorly conceived piece of legislation introduced by Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY), which would have opened up some federal waters surrounding Block Island to striped bass harvest, and turned such waters over to the states’ jurisdiction with respect to all fisheries matters.

The bill’s primary, and perhaps only substantial support, came from party and charter boat operators on the East End of Long Island, who wanted to target striped bass in areas that, for the last quarter-century or so, have been off-limits to striped bass fishing.  When the House Natural Resources Committee held a field hearing on New York on December 7, 2015, only one out of the seven witnesses who testified, Capt. Joe McBride of the Montauk Boatmen’s and Captains’ Association, spoke in favor of the bill.

On the other hand, the legislation ran into substantial opposition from recreational and commercial fishermen in the region.  The strongest opposition came from the State of Connecticut, where both state officials and its Congressional delegation went on record in opposition to the bill, largely because of its potential effects on Connecticut commercial fishermen who fish in federal waters that would be affected by the bill.

Recreational fishermen all along the coast also took up arms against Zeldin’s legislation.  Stripers Forever, a national organization that advocates for healthy striped bass populations, issued an alert that stated, in part

“Stripers Forever regards this bill as a danger to the health and recovery of wild Atlantic striped bass.  Not only will it increase pressure on striped bass stocks, but it sets a bad precedent by ceding federal waters to state control.  The water that would be opened to state management—and thus commercial fishing—is well known for attracting large female stripers, the very fish on which the future of the species depends…”

The New Jersey Outdoor Alliance carried an article on its Facebook feed, in opposition to Zeldin’s bill, which began

“Bill HR 3070, sponsored by Representative Zeldin of New York would allow fishing for striped bass in a portion of the EEZ off Montauk and out toward Block Island and Rhode Island.  We all know that opening of the EEZ for striped bass would result in more stripers being killed at a time that we are supposed to be conserving them.”

Up in Rhode Island, one of the most directly affected states, the Rhode Island Saltwater Anglers’ Association published an editorial entitled “Keep the EEZ closed to striper fishing.” It noted that

“Currently all waters beyond three miles of the shoreline is considered ‘federal waters’ and the EEZ (Exclusive Economic Zone).  In 1990 a federal moratorium was created prohibiting fishing for striped bass in the EEZ to protect them from overfishing (especially in the south).

“An attempt to reverse this was tried in 2006, but after receiving over 8,000 public comments supporting the continued closure, NOAA [decided] to keep the closure in place.

“So now another attempt is made to create a special open zone here in our backyard.  Bill H.R. 3070 was introduced by Rep. Lee Zeldin from New York and referred to the House Natural Resource Committee…

“What would happen if H.R. 3070 passed?  The SW Ledge [off Block Island] would not only be inundated with Rhode Island anglers, but an armada of fishing boats from New York would flood Block Island waters.  

“In an article on this subject, John McMurray, an New York Charter Captain who always sides ‘for the fish’ said, ‘The Montauk charter/party boat fleet is arguing that such a regional opening would provide economic benefits’

“’Perhaps it might,’ continued McMurray, ‘But the larger question is whether such potential economic benefits, for what appears to be a narrow special interest, trump the long term health of a public resource.’”

As I said before, the majority of the striped bass angling community was not pleased with the introduction of Rep. Zeldin’s bill...

Thus, there was some dismay in striped bass angling circles when news came out that the House Natural Resources Committee gave its unanimous approval to H.R. 3070.

Speaking personally, I was dismayed, but not surprised, as the current majority of that Committee is usually in favor of anything that provides an economic boon to narrow groups of special interests, while impairing the greater public interest in conserving America’s natural resources.  Approving H.R. 3070 would have been just another step taken along the same ill-advised path.

However, things were not as simple as they originally seemed.

It turns out that the only similarity between the legislation debated at last December’s hearing and the one reported out of Committee last week was the bill number.  Even the name had changed.

The original version of H.R. 3070 was entitled the “EEZ Clarification Act,” and began by stating that

“For purposes of all Federal laws governing marine fisheries management—

(1)     the landward boundary of the exclusive economic zone between the area south of Montauk, New York, and the area south of Point Judith, Rhode Island, shall be considered to be a continuous line running…”

And the boundaries were set forth from there.

The new version of H.R. 3070 was provided not by Rep. Lee Zeldin, but by Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ).  It is entitled “EEZ Transit Zone Clarification and Access Act,” and begins

“IN GENERAL—The Secretary of Commerce, in consultation with the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, may issue regulations to permit and regulate recreational Atlantic striped bass fishing in the Block Island Sound Transit Zone…  [emphasis added]”

In other words, the bill has changed from one which threatened to open the EEZ off Block Island to striped bass fishing, and handed all fishery management responsibilities within the proposed boundaries over to the states, into one that does nothing at all.

The key is in the word “may,” which means that the Secretary of Commerce is allowed to amend current regulations to permit striped bass fishing in the so-called “transit zone” between Block Island and the mainland, but only if the Secretary should choose to do so.

And that has always been the case.

The current prohibition on striped bass fishing in the EEZ was imposed by regulation, not by legislation.  The National Marine Fisheries Service, a branch of the Commerce Department, considered reopening the EEZ to striped bass fishing in 2006, but ultimately decided that it was the wrong thing to do.  Commerce could reopen the question at any time, should it decide to do so.

So all that the current H.R. 3070 does is reaffirm the status quo.  The Secretary of Commerce still has the power to open the EEZ to striped bass fishing, and the power to keep the EEZ closed.

Hopefully, the closure will continue, and H.R. 3070 will soon be lost in the mists of obscurity, a fate that it most certainly deserves.

WHAT FISHERMEN CHOOSE TO BELIEVE

Recently, a team of researchers from the National Marine Fisheries Service, collaborating with the University of Massachusetts’ Large Pelagics Research Center, claimed to have discovered a new spawning ground for bluefin tuna.

On its face, the research seems fairly convincing.  Five- and six-day-old bluefin tuna larvae have been found in an area known as the “Slope Sea,” a piece of water that lies between the Gulf Stream and the edge of the continental shelf in the Mid-Atlantic Bight. 

Prior to the announcement, the only known North American spawning ground for Atlantic bluefin was located in the Gulf of Mexico.  The NMFS research team asserts that ocean currents could not have carried larval bluefin from the Gulf all the way to the Slope Sea in five days, meaning that such larvae must have been spawned somewhere else.

They also point to tagging data that shows smaller, 100- to 500-pound bluefin lingering in the Slope Sea region during certain times of the year.  A previous study, conducted by researchers at the UMass Center, suggested that western stock bluefin tuna mature significantly earlier than previously believed.  The two findings, taken together, could have a meaningful impact on the fishery for western stock bluefin.

Based on the two studies, it would not be unreasonable for people to argue that if western-stock bluefin actually mature while relatively young, and have more than one spawning ground, they can be sustain larger harvests than they could if they only matured after a decade or more and only spawned in one, vulnerable piece of the ocean.

However, a number of scientists specializing in bluefin tuna research remain properly skeptical of the team’s findings.  “Properly” skeptical, because the purpose of science is to discover the truth, not to make headlines or to tell people the things that they want to hear.  The NMFS team’s findings may well be correct, but it is the duty of the scientific community to try to poke holes in their paper and conduct further research to prove that they are wrong.

If, after the skeptics take their best shots at the data, the team's conclusions remain largely intact, then—and only then—it will be time to announce that bluefin do, indeed, spawn in the Slope Sea.

Many fishermen, however, are already celebrating, in anticipation of relaxed harvest regulations.  Sport Fishing Magazine, which targets recreational anglers, addressed the study by saying

“A bombshell in the world of fisheries management fell on March 7.  That’s when a report revealed new evidence that Atlantic bluefin tuna spawn off the northeastern United States…

“This finding transcends pure scientific discovery, as the study states, it possibly ‘leads to lower estimates of the vulnerability of this species to exploitation…’

“Put more simply, there are already suggestions being heard from various interests that bluefin that bluefin populations may be more resilient than we had thought, that stocks may be in better shape, and that more generous fishing quotas may be called for.”

Sport Fishing did express one cautionary note, pointing out that some members of the scientific community deemed the study to be preliminary, and feel that it would be premature to change the bluefin management paradigm.  However, it ended the announcement by saying

“…there is little doubt that this research will ultimately have implications for how we manage the ocean’s most valuable apex predator.  It will be interesting to see how this knowledge and more to come (as a search for more undocumented spawning grounds continues) will shape those implications.”

Over all, it was an exceptionally upbeat article, expressing none of the skepticism that should accompany news of new scientific discoveries.  In short, it was typical of how fishermen react when they hear news that might cause quotas to rise.

We saw the same sort of thing occur a few years ago in the Gulf of Maine cod fishery.

In 2008, NMFS produced a stock assessment that was the most optimistic in years.  Although it indicated that overfishing was still occurring, it also showed that the stock was making a strong recovery and was no longer overfished; estimated spawning stock biomass was 33,877 metric tons in 2007, seemingly well on its way toward reaching the SSB target of 58,248 mt.

When the results of the 2008 assessment were released, fishermen had no problems in accepting its conclusions, even though it seemed to be based on some somewhat suspect data—the supposed strength of the 2005 year class of cod, upon which most of the rosy analysis depended, was based on just one or two tows of the research vessel’s net, which captured very high numbers of fish.  No other tows were anywhere near as productive.

Still, despite this obvious warning sign, the fishermen didn’t question the data at all.  It said that the stock’s health was rapidly improving, which meant that they’d soon be able to harvest larger numbers of fish.

That was all that they wanted to know.

However, things turned around quickly just three short years later, after another stock assessment, released in 2011, said that the cod stock was in some real trouble.  The new assessment determined that the size of the spawning stock biomass was a mere 11,868 metric tons, roughly 1/3 of the 2008 estimate.  It employed a different mathematical model than the 2008 assessment, considered more sets of data, and was generally considered a more reliable estimate of the stock’s true size.

Paul Rago, chief of NMFS’ Northeast Fisheries Science Center, endorsed the new model, saying

“The modeling approach used in this assessment represents a quantum leap, in terms of the ability to handle the underlying data and also its uncertainty.  There was far more rigorous treatment of the discard information and its consequence, and also the treatment of the landings and the survey data.”

But that’s a fishery scientist’s view.  Fishermen’s views were very different.

David Goethel, a commercial groundfisherman who sits on the New England Fishery Management Council,complained

“…why should it be accepted that the current data and model provide the best available science?

“…I think we need to have a thorough reexamination of everything here.  We need to examine cod, period.  We need new reference points, we need new [Stock Assessment Review Committee] boundaries.  We need all this done, and then we can address the underlying problems, if they still exist.  I’m not prepared to shut down the Gulf of Maine, or to put out a [limit on catch levels] that would shut down the Gulf of Maine until we address these issues.”

And that last sentence, of course, says it all.

Goethel had no problem with the 2008 cod stock assessment, because it had the potential to increase his catch.  But once the 2011 assessment came out, declared the 2008 assessment to be inaccurate and threatened to sharply decrease fishermen’s landings, it was time to condemn the science, call for additional research, reset all of the existing parameters and start over again.

For while many fishermen are willing to accept science that leads to increased harvest as unquestionably right, they are even more inclined to declare any science that leads to decreased landings as completely and irreparably wrong.

It's a problem that managers have had to live with for years, and it's not likely to go away at any time soon.  But it makes it very clear why, when setting annual catch limits, scientists, and not fishermen, must have the last word.

UNITY IS NOT ALWAYS USEFUL

Back in 1982, the junta that ran Argentina ran into a bit of a problem.  Citizens were getting tired of its authoritarian ways, and starting to ask questions when people disappeared in the dark of the night, or showed up as corpses at sunrise. 

The junta wasn't used to public unrest.  The last thing that they wanted were too many people asking too many questions.  Folks who paid too much attention and thought a little too hard ended up making trouble.

The junta needed a way to divert their attention, so it started a war with England.

Argentine leadership dressed the thing up in patriotic trappings.  It called for a united national effort to oppose perfidious Albion and retake the Falkland Islands—what Argentina calls the Islas Malvinas—which Britain supposedly stole from the Argentines in 1833.

In the end, the junta’s plan failed, largely because they lost the war.  Even so, diverting the Argentine public’s attention from the junta by conjuring a threat from “outside” followed a tried-and-true political formula that has been used throughout the ages, one that created tragedy in the mid-20^th Century, and is raising its head again today in America’s presidential politics.

It's used in fisheries politics, too.

I was reminded of that recently as I thumbed through the March/April issue of Tide magazine, the house publication of the Coastal Conservation Association, and came across an article by Ted Venker, entitled “Unity at a time of adversity.”

As far as I know, the piece is not available on-line.  There’s no reason that it should be, as it targeted CCA members, using the same old strategy of focusing attention on another supposed outside threat, in this case commercial fishermen in the Gulf of Mexico.

The article lays it on clearly, throughout its text.

“Group defense is the best way to ensure survival and eventual success.

“Swim in strength together or die alone—such is life in the ocean, and, unfortunately, in the federal fisheries management process, too, it seems…

“In this system, a solitary recreational angler has no chance.  Commercial operators of all stripes have a clear financial motivation to do whatever it takes to work the system inside and out to take advantage of the situation and secure a personal windfall…

“The need has never been greater for the recreational community to swim together and we are fortunate to have an entity like the Center for Coastal Conservation to draw all facets of the vast recreational angling community together to face this challenge…”

So who is this “Center for Coastal Conservation”?  Ted Venker tells us that it is

“an all-star team of industry players including the American Sportfishing Association [representing fishing tackle manufacturers and dealers], the National Marine Manufacturers Association, CCA, Yamaha, Shimano, Maverick Boats, the International Game Fish Association, Costa del Mar, AFTCO, Brunswick and many others.  It is an  compilation of the recreational angling community, and it stands unified against interests that stand only for their pocketbooks. [emphasis added]”

For the purposes of this essay, we can think of them as recreational fishing’s equivalent to the Argentine junta. 

Where the Argentine junta tried to maintain their power and influence by riling up the citizens and urging them to unify against the British “enemy”; the recreational anglers’ junta seeks to achieve its goals by playing on anglers’ dislike and distrust of their supposed “enemy,” the commercial fishery.

The anglers’ junta must keep that dislike strong and alive, because if anglers started looking at the Center too hard, they might start believing that outfits such as the American Sportfishing Association, the National Marine Manufacturers Association, Yamaha, Shimano, Maverick Boats, Costa del Mar, AFTCO, Brunswick and many others might just be in it “for their pocketbooks”, too, and wondering what they really want…

All of those institutions are for-profit companies, and filling “their pocketbooks,” or more precisely, their investors’ pocketbooks, is the sole reason that they exist.  

Let’s not be naïve about this—corporations do what is in their corporate interest; unless they can get some favorable publicity out of appearing concerned, they don’t care about your interests at all.

And no, however, that sounds, I’m not some left-wing ex-hippie.  When I’m not fishing or hunting or writing this blog, or taking part in the fisheries management process, I’m doing my job as in-house counsel for an international investment bank.  I’ve been a Wall Street lawyer for most of my professional life, even working for Lehman Brothers for a year and a half before that firm’s demise.  So I know how business folks think.

And what business folks think about most is the next earnings announcement—the next fiscal quarter, the next fiscal year.  That’s particularly true if a company is publicly owned, for if earnings come in below analysts’ expectations, even by just a few cents, the stock price is likely to fall; falling stock prices make investors unhappy and tend to reduce top executives’ net worth.  Good short-term earnings, on the other hand, can make stock prices rise, and increase executive pay.

Just as an example, in 2014, the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Brunswick was given stock awards worth $5,248,048 and non-stock “incentive plan compensation” worth $1,853,000, based on that company’s short-term performance.

Over $7 million in all.  Some might call that a “personal windfall…”

So it’s natural that the executives who run America’s businesses focus on the short term.  Tackle businesses and boat-building businesses aren’t any different.

Anglers, however, are different.

Most anglers, if you catch them in a moment of honesty, will tell you that they want to bring home a few fish today, but not at the expense of their kids or grandkids.  They’ll take the truly long view, thinking in generations, not in fiscal quarters.

So while they’ll grumble and complain about regulations, they’ll usually do the right thing once they understand why they should.

However, that grumbling and complaining presents an opening for the corporate folks; times of unrest are when juntas take power.  They’ll do their best to revive old hostilities between the recreational and commercial sectors, blaming the commercial fishery for all of the anglers’ woes, whether they deserve such blame or not.  They need to keep anglers distracted, and get their support to achieve corporate ambitions.

And their primary corporate ambition is weakening the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act. 

That is made clear in the Center-supported report “A Vision for Managing America’s Salt Water Recreational Fisheries,” which was issued by the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership.  The report supports weakening the portions of Magnuson-Stevens that require fish stocks to be rebuilt promptly, and within a set time.  It wants that done so fishery managers may allow populations

“to recover gradually while diminishing socioeconomic impacts.”

Such ambition is reinforced in corporate press releases such as the one put out by Yamaha, which declared that

“Yamaha Marine Group Applauds Passage of H.R. 1335.”

H.R. 1335, you may recall, is the latest iteration of the “Empty Oceans Act,” which was passed by the House of Representatives last May.  Purporting to add more “flexibility” to the fishery management process, it would substantially weaken the conservation and stock rebuilding provisions of Magnuson-Stevens, providing many loopholes that would perpetuate the overfishing of some stocks and prevent others from ever being rebuilt.

H.R. 1335 is not only supported by the recreational anglers’ junta but also, ironically, by many of the same commercial fishermen that, they claim, anglers must oppose.  That should tell us a lot about folks' true motives.

They all like the bill for about the same reason; it would let more fish be killed, and more money made, before everything fell apart.

If you’re only focused on the short term, it’s a pretty sweet deal; for anglers, and for the fish, it’s a long-term disaster.

Which really says it all about juntas.  They may speak about “unity,” but in the end, they only take care of their own.

MARINE ECOSYSTEM MANAGEMENT REQUIRES "INTELLIGENT TINKERING"

For too many years, biologists tried to manage fish in a vacuum. They focused on the impacts that harvest had on each species; they paid little heed to how the same harvest affected the greater marine ecosystem.

That is slowly beginning to change. The Pacific Fishery Management Council adopted a pioneering amendment to its fisheries management plans, which will protect currently unfished and unmanaged forage fish species. The Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council is following suit. Both are important steps that acknowledge that fish are part of a web of life that extends from single-celled plants out to the great whales.

The shift to such an “ecosystem management” approach will be the next big step forward in fisheries management. Researchers are already trying to produce population models that consider the interrelationships between various species.

When they eventually succeed, the management process will become more complicated, but it also should become more successful, as environmental factors that impact fish stocks are incorporated into the management equation.

Unfortunately, some people either misunderstand, or intentionally misinterpret, the ecosystem management concept, and use it as justification to overexploit relatively abundant populations or kill off undesired species.

A few years ago, a friend and I were fishing aboard a Florida Keys party boat. At one point, my friend’s bait sunk closer to the bottom, where it was quickly taken by a bright blue parrotfish. He unhooked the fish and was about to drop it back over the side when the mate took it out of his hands, saying “Those fish are no good. They eat the reef.”

One could argue that, in his efforts to protect the reef, the mate was practicing ecosystem management on a small scale. Unfortunately, by killing parrotfish, he was really doing harm. An abundance of parrotfish is actually critical to the health of the reef, as they spend most of their time cleaning harmful algae off living coral.

So anyone planning to practice ecosystem management should first get the relationships right.

That was recently illustrated on a much broader scale, in the mid-Atlantic region, where some scientists believed that, after overfishing depleted the population of large coastal sharks, a trophic cascade echoed through the food web.

They hypothesized that, because large coastal sharks are one of the few predators of cownose rays, the decline in the shark population allowed the rays to proliferate and the resultant overabundance of rays then decimated oyster and bay scallop beds.

It was a classic tale of an ecosystem gone awry.

In response, the State of Virginia tried to reduce the number of cownose rays in Chesapeake Bay, and promoted the rays as seafood. The slogan “Save the bay, eat a ray” was coined, and articles on cooking rays began appearing on food-oriented websites. Virginia Sea Grant, in conjunction with the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, conducted a study on harvesting rays for use as food, and possibly also for bait, pet food, pharmaceuticals and leather clothing.

The purported “need” to kill rays also spurred the growth of a bowfishing industry, in which archers either chartered boats or ventured out in their own vessels to shoot cownose rays, which were, as often as not, discarded. Bowfishing tournaments targeted pregnant rays entering the bay to reproduce. Such tournaments have been criticized by both conservationists and animal-rights groups, but remain legal; watermen deem them necessary to maintain shellfish stocks.

However, a recent paper entitled “Critical assessment and ramifications of a purported marine trophic cascade” questions whether a trophic cascade ever occurred. It argues that large coastal abundance actually increased at the same time that rays grew more numerous, and that the depletion of the shellfish beds occurred years before the supposed trophic cascade took place.

Furthermore, cownose rays reproduce very slowly; they are biologically incapable of quickly increasing their population. Moreover, any significant increase in the ray population probably couldn’t be attributed to an absence of sharks, which, it turns out, eat very few cownose rays. And cownose rays don’t eat that many oysters and scallops. Their jaws aren’t powerful enough to crush the shells of large bivalves; instead, most of their diet is made up of smaller mollusks that aren’t commercially fished, plus worms, echinoderms and crustaceans.

It turns out that “Save the bay, eat a ray” was pretty bad advice.

That shouldn’t come as a surprise, for as pioneer ecologist Aldo Leopold noted

“The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant ‘What good is it?’ If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.”

Thus, managers should avoid any actions that would in any way reduce the richness and diversity of a marine ecosystem.

Unfortunately, fishermen still often argue that the best way to protect one species of fish is to reduce the abundance of another.

When the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Striped Bass Management Board (Board) discussed a cut in the striped bass harvest, Russell Dize, a Board member from Maryland, opposed such action, claiming that

“We’ve got so many striped bass that it’s affected our crab-catching industry. We are probably down to a low ebb last summer on crabs.”

Mr. Dize apparently never considered that the “crab-catching industry,” and not the bass, might have contributed to the blue crab’s decline.

Marc Hoffman, a member of the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council’s Summer Flounder, Scup and Black Sea Bass Advisory Panel made similar comments last summer, when he blamed the black sea bass for the demise of the southern New England stock of American lobster, saying

“The biomass for sea bass is so much higher than what we have recorded. They’re wiping out other species. If we don’t act soon you’re going to lose the lobster fishery throughout the northeast. We need an emergency opening of both the commercial and recreational black sea bass fishery…”

In fact, the black sea bass biomass is just about on target, and a recent benchmark stock assessment of American lobster does not implicate sea bass predation in the southern New England stock’s collapse.

There are still far too many people who would rather shrink healthy fish populations, to supposedly reduce their predation of depleted stocks, rather than accept the harvest reductions needed to rebuild depleted stocks to healthy levels.

Such an approach is a perversion of ecosystem management that can only lead to an emptier ocean.

While an empty ocean would exhibit its own kind of balance, it would not serve anyone well.

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This essay first appeared in "From the Waterfront", the blog of the Marine Fish Conservation Network, which may be found at http://www.conservefish.org/blog/

REVISITING ANGLERS' 2015 STRIPED BASS HARVEST

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a blog entitled “2015 Striped Bass Harvest:  How Did We Do?”.  It was intended to be a rough-and-ready look at the preliminary 2015 recreational landings data, and made a first guess as to whether the regulations put in place last season were effective in reducing our landings by 25%.

The estimates were based on the poundage of fish caught, as that is how both the recent benchmark assessment and Addendum IV to Amendment 6 of the Atlantic Striped Bass Interstate Management Plan addressed recreational landings.  The blog compared all 2015 landings to those of 2013.

Based on those calculations, the bass made out pretty well.  

The overall reduction in poundage landed was about 42%, comfortably below the 25% reduction that, biologists estimated, would reduce fishing mortality to the target level.  

However, the reductions were very uneven, with some coastal states experiencing very deep cuts in landings and some achieving no material reductions at all.  In Chesapeake Bay, the states not only failed to achieve their modest 20.5% reduction, they actually increased their kill.

It turns out, though, that ASMFC looks at things a little differently.

Last week, I received an e-mail from Max Appelman, who is ASMFC’s Fishery Management Plan Coordinator for Atlantic Striped Bass.  He had read my blog, and pointed out that the way I calculated the harvest reductions wasn’t the way that ASMFC will do so when it prepares the 2016 update to the stock assessment.  He noted

“Addendum IV required states to reduce fishing mortality to a level at or below the new target (0.18). To achieve this, coastal fisheries implemented a 25% harvest reduction, and Chesapeake Bay fisheries implemented a 20.5% harvest reduction. For the commercial sectors, harvest reductions were made in terms of pounds of fish; Amendment 6 quota allocations were reduced by 25% for coastal states, and Chesapeake Bay quotas were reduced by 20.5%. For the recreational sectors, harvest reductions were made in terms of number of fish, not pounds. To further complicate matters, since Chesapeake Bay fisheries had taken a 14% reduction in 2013, Addendum IV required its reduction be applied to 2012 levels. Again, for the Bay's commercial fisheries, this was a 20.5% reduction from the 2012 quota (pounds), and for the Bay's recreational fisheries the reduction was applied to 2012 removals (number of fish). Therefore, an accurate evaluation of the performance of the 2015 state regulations would require a separate evaluation of each sector (i.e., coastal commercial, coastal recreational, Chesapeake Bay commercial, and Chesapeake Bay recreational) according to their respective base periods and metrics. In June, following the release of final harvest estimates, the Striped Bass Plan Review Team will evaluate all 2015 state measures to verify whether or not they meet the requirements of Addendum IV.”

So clearly, the simple calculation that I did missed a few points, and I couldn’t let that slide by without letting readers know and correcting my original post.  Using ASMFC’s approach to the calculation, I also reran the numbers to see whether anglers achieved the required reductions of 25% on the coast and 20.5% in Chesapeake Bay (the National Marine Fisheries Service has not yet published the commercial landings figures on its website, so I can’t include those, although the fact that Addendum IV calculated the reduction based on the full quota, rather than on actual landings, suggests that, in the real world, commercial landings reductions may be less than the full 25%/20.5%). 

Obviously, I’m not trying to provide a statistically rigorous estimate of landings—it’s going to take a team of fishery professionals something like six months to do that—but just provide a ballpark notion of whether the 25%/20.5% reductions were achieved for the states’ recreational fisheries’, using more-or-less the same approach that ASMFC would use to decide whether your state exceeded its black sea bass or fluke quotas last year numbers.

When I calculated striped bass removals in numbers of fish and using 2012 rather than 2013 for the base year in Chesapeake Bay, the figures change a little bit, but all of the trends from the original calculations remain.  

The striped bass still made out pretty well—even better than when poundage is used to measure state landings.  New Jersey, with its adoption of conservation equivalency, still experienced a reduction that was proportionately less, by a substantial amount, than that borne by the rest of the coast, and the Chesapeake Bay’s performance was even worse than previously calculated.

The overall reduction in coastal landings, when measured in numbers of fish, was 57%, versus a 42% reduction in poundage.  All of the states, other than New Jersey, achieved at least a 25% reduction; New Hampshire still experienced the biggest landings cut, at 92%, while of all the states that met their obligations under Addendum IV, Massachusetts’ 46% reduction remained the smallest.  

New Jersey, with a 22% reduction in landings, came much closer to meeting Addendum IV’s mandate than it did when landings were measured in pounds, but still fell short. 

On the coast, reductions appear larger when expressed in number of fish rather than pounds, probably because of recent poor spawning success and the result lack of small fish available to anglers.  

There is an 8-year gap between the big 2003 year class, members of which now average at least 25 pounds, and the very good 2011 year class, which has yet to recruit into the fishery.  As a result, in most states, the weight of the average fish caught on the coast in 2015 was from 2 to 5 pounds larger than it was in 2013.

Basically, we’re chasing fewer, but bigger, striped bass.

The Chesapeake Bay states failed miserably in their efforts to achieve a 20.5% reduction in recreational harvest, even when 2015 landings are measured in numbers of fish and compared to those of 2012, rather than measured in pounds and compared to 2013, as I had done before.  

Viewed in that, more proper light, Chesapeake Bay anglers enjoyed a 46% increase in striped bass landings, rather than taking the 20.5% reduction mandated by Addendum IV.  Thus, all of the cries of distress coming from members of the Bay’s recreational fishing industry, who claim that they were hurt by harvest reductions, are clearly gross fabrications. 

Both the unexpectedly low landings levels on the coast and the inexcusably high landing levels in Chesapeake Bay seem to be driven by angler effort, which in turn is driven by a number of factors, including weather, the availability of striped bass and, for some anglers, more restrictive regulations.  On the coast, three states with traditionally large striped bass harvests, Massachusetts, New York and New Jersey, saw trips primarily targeting striped bass drop by 28%, 7% and 54%, respectively. 

On the other hand, in Chesapeake Bay, where the abundant 2011 year class is now vulnerable to angling, effort increased 59% in Maryland and 38% in Virginia, when compared to 2012 figures.  Such sharp increases make it clear that angling-related businesses in the region did not suffer from effort reductions, either.

So what does all of this mean?

With respect just to striped bass, it means that at least on my part, the time for back-of-the-envelope calculations is over.  It appears that the coastal recreational fishery did its job, and more than met Addendum IV mandates to reduce landings.  Whether that successful effort, once coupled with very large recreational overages in Chesapeake Bay and whatever the commercial harvest turns out to be, will be enough to constrain harvest at or below F=0.18 won’t be known until autumn, when ASMFC’s Striped Bass Technical Committee releases its 2016 update to the stock assessment.

More broadly, the figures again highlight recurring problems at ASMFC, that affect all managed species. 

Management boards continue to be far too willing to permit the use of “conservation equivalency”; while it is a valuable tool to address inequities caused by structural aspects of a particular state’s fishery, it is harmful as it is most often used--to allow states such as New Jersey to game the management system and craft regulations that allow them to avoid some of the burdens of management and shift them onto their neighbors.  

Worse, there continues to be no accountability imposed on states that fail to meet their obligations under a fishery management plan, whether that occurs as a result of conservation equivalency or otherwise.

In the case of striped bass, the Chesapeake Bay jurisdictions wheedled a reduction in their mandated harvest cut, from the original 25% to just 20.5%, claiming that they had already made a reduction in 2013, and would be unreasonably burdened if forced to accept another 25% cut in 2015.  

However, in the real world, those jurisdictions ultimately experienced no harvest reduction at all, and instead increased their recreational landings by nearly 50%. 

Even so, they will neither have to repay that overage with reduced landings in future years, nor amend their 2016 regulations to assure that the overage does not recur this season.

As striped bass fishermen, we can only hope that Addendum IV will successfully constrain striped bass harvest to or below target levels, and that above-average year classes in 2011 and 2015—and hopefully in the near future—will eventually allow the stock to rebuild to the biomass target as well.

However, we have to view that hope against the hard fact that ASMFC has not managed to rebuild a single stock in the past 20 years, largely because management boards have failed to make the restoration and maintenance of healthy fish stocks their paramount priority; instead, as occurred with striped bass, they continue to get bogged down and led astray by parochial concerns and short-term economic considerations.

Until that changes, if it ever does, the long-term fate of striped bass, and all ASMFC-managed stocks, will always remain in doubt.

ABANDONING SUCCESS

There’s still a long way to go before America’s fish stocks are all restored to health, but on every coast, we’re making real progress.

Here in the northeast, the most striking example of that is scup, the small, silver panfish better known on Long Island as “porgies.”

Scup range along the Atlantic coast from somewhere south of Chesapeake Bay up into New England, but something like 95% of the recreational landings come from the four states between New York and Massachusetts.

Traditionally, scup were a party boat favorite.  Anglers from as far away as the Carolinas would drive up to Massachusetts in May, when the fish swarmed that state’s inshore waters, and return home with their cars loaded down with the making of family fish fries.  In the fall, action would shift a little bit south, where party boats from Montauk and the North Fork of Long Island, loaded with passengers, would fill up with scup before the fish moved out to winter in deeper waters.

Back in the 1970s, they caught so many fish that some of the boats would loan their passengers wheelbarrows to help them get the scup back to their cars.

The party eventually came to an end, as orgies of excess usually do.  However, while overfishing played a role in the scup’s decline, far more of the blame can probably be attributed to trawlers, seeking squid and whiting, pulling small-mesh nets in areas where young-of-the year scup spent their first winter.  The bycatch of small scup was immense, and had a real impact on adult scup abundance.

The Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council acknowledged the problem and, in 2000, established two “gear restricted areas” where small-mesh nets were excluded.  One was located more-or-less south of Block Island; the other followed the continental shelf off the New Jersey shore.  Their shape has been altered somewhat over the years, but the protection that they offered remained in place.

As a result, the population of scup not only recovered, it boomed.  Today, biologists estimate that scup biomass is more than twice the target level, and even though such an embarrassment of riches is likely to decline a bit over time, the stock is in extremely good health, and should remain healthy throughout the foreseeable future.  Anglers are finding more and bigger scup on all of the traditional grounds; scup are giving for-hire passengers something to fish for when striped bass are scarce and fluke can’t be found.

It’s a resounding success story and so, predictably, folks want to fool with it.  The Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council is now considering significant changes to the boundaries of the restricted areas. 

The science shows that the areas should actually be expanded, into abutting, unrestricted regions that now produce most of the bycatch of immature scup.  However, the trawlers don't like that idea.

Instead, the Council’s Summer Flounder, Scup and Black Sea Bass and Mackerel, Squid and Butterfish advisory panels have adopted the typical “If it ain’t broke, it’s time to break it” mentality that has long plagued fisheries management.  

Willing to risk undoing a decade and a half of success they are trying to convince the Council to reduce the size of the southern restricted area by as much as 61%, in order to provide better access to squid. 

Unfortunately, such attitudes aren’t limited to trawlers.  As I’ve reported in previous essays, a group of Montauk charter and party boat owners have long waged a campaign to open some federal waters to striped bass fishing. 

The current moratorium on striped bass fishing in federal waters was adopted in the late 1980s, in response to the collapse of the stock.  Even after the stock was declared recovered in 1995, it served as an effective measure to limit striped bass landings, which are not constrained by hard poundage-based quota and could easily skyrocket if anglers had access to additional areas that held concentrations of bass.

Over the years, there have been efforts to effect such openings, originating primarily in Montauk, Massachusetts and Virginia.  Shortly after the turn of this century, one progressed far enough to lead to a proposed rulemaking by the National Marine Fisheries Service, but broad angler opposition kept the federal sea closed.

Now, at a time when the striped bass population is at or near its lowest point in twenty years, and the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission lists the fish as a species of “concern,” Congressman Lee Zeldin (R-NY) has introduced a bill in the House of Representatives that would permit anglers to exploit concentrations of striped bass that historically occur in federal waters between Montauk Point and Block Island.

Such exploitation could only increase striped bass mortality at a time that managers are trying to rebuild a stock that has been in decline for more than a decade.  Worse, should Zeldin’s bill gain any real traction, and should Montauk boats gain access to federal waters, we can be sure that boats in Massachusetts, Virginia and elsewhere will seek similar deals, which can only hurt the stock’s prospects for recovery.

For about thirty years, the federal waters closure has helped to keep striped bass stocks at reasonable population levels; it would be very unwise to end such closure now.

But wisdom is often absent when fisheries' health is debated, and nothing shows that more clearly than the current red snapper debate in the Gulf of Mexico.  

If one looks in from the outside, current management clearly seems to be working.  Although the stock has only been rebuilt to a little more than half of its biomass target, the overall catch limit has already jumped from 5 million pounds in 2009 to  about 14 million pounds today.  Anglers are allocated about half of that.

But that’s not enough to keep the anglers happy.

Federal fisheries managers, and federal fisheries management law, can be thanked for the red snapper’s steady recovery.  But as usually happens when a fish stock recovers, red snapper are becoming a lot easier to catch; anglers interpret their greater success as a sign that the stock has recovered, and want to kill more fish than managers believe that they should.

As a result, instead of praising the managers and the law responsible for bringing back the red snapper stock, Gulf anglers are actually damning them for not letting them harvest more fish than the stock can sustain.  They’re actually going so far as to try to take management authority away from the National Marine Fisheries Service, and hand it over to the states which seem far more sympathetic to the anglers’ desires.

Overfishing the red snapper stock clearly won’t do it any good.  As Brad Kenyon, a Florida angler and boat dealer, noted in the Tampa Bay Times,

“Under federal fisheries management, red snapper populations in the Gulf of Mexico are recovering, and the boating and fishing industries have grown.  But…a U.S. Senate committee will hear a proposal that could gut a decade of recovery and growth for both.  The idea floated by Sen. David Vitter, R-La, would…loosen some of the stronger tenets of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act—like science-based rebuilding timelines and annual catch limits…

“His argument is based on a flawed narrative by fishery rights groups that claim short federal-water red snapper seasons are hurting industry growth and that the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council is broken.  But here is what is really going on:  These groups are part of a growing national move by the states to take public natural resources from federal stewardship and pass them on to the states.  Think of the fiasco of the armed occupation of the Oregon Malheur National Wildlife Refuge—but in flip-flops and sunglasses…

“Vitter’s proposal is an attack on public federal national resources and threatens Florida’s economic health and Florida gulf anglers.  But more frightening for me,  the senator’s proposal carries the very real threat to inject an undue level of chaos into a stable fishery management system…”

Everything that Kenyon wrote is true, but it won't stop some people from continuing their efforts to overthrow the very system that’s successfully restoring the red snapper stock.

A newfound abundance of fish, whether red snapper, scup, striped bass or anything else, seems to be a strange intoxicant that makes too many otherwise rational people want to abandon successful fisheries management strategies, and replace them with the same failed approaches that drove populations down in the first place. 

We must always resist the impulse to do so.

For stocks are hard enough to rebuild once.  Only a fool would allow them to collapse again, and have to begin the rebuilding anew.

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