NOTES FROM THE EXTINCTION TOUR

The fish was only 3 ½ or 4 inches long, but it was perfect.  In some ways, it looked like what a talented sixth-grade student would draw if told to draw a fish; streamlined body, sharply forked tail and a single dorsal fin, with the tip of a longish pectoral sticking out down below.

It was clearly a herring.  Without a field guide, you might not know just what kind, but no one could fault you if you guessed “alewife” or “Atlantic herring” or maybe even “juvenile menhaden.”

But all those guesses would be wrong, because the fish belonged to the genus Knightia, and last swam though its home waters about 50 million years ago.

Yet, although so many years have passed, it was remarkably familiar.  It was already built to the basic herring blueprint, and like today’s menhaden, it often schooled up in the shallows, where too much hot weather could turn the water hypoxic, and kill the fish by the untold thousands.

And that’s how Knightia and I crossed paths. 

For the past nine days, my wife, Theresa, and I were wandering around southern Wyoming and northern Utah, visiting places such as Fossil Butte and Dinosaur National Monuments, immersing ourselves in deep time and getting a feel for what came before.

In Wyoming, we found a lost world that was, in many ways, remarkably similar to the one we know today.   The limestone of Fossil Lake—a huge body of water that once spread over much of the region—holds a number of species very similar to those we all know. 

We visited a fossil quarry a few miles outside of Kemmerer, where we spent half a day splitting stone and finding the remains of fish—mostly Knightia—that last saw the sun 50 million years ago.  Each time one of us split a slab and disclosed a new fossil, we laid eyes on something that had never before been seen by man, but was present on Earth about 250 times longer than Homo sapiens sapiens has walked on this planet.  

It was humbling, yet familiar.  Knightia acted so much like menhaden, and filled such a similar forage role, that it was hard not to see one emerging from the rock and think “I’ve got another ‘bunker.”  Then there were Priscacara, a fish that we’d probably call a “panfish” if it still swam today, for it filled the same ecological role as a crappie or bluegill, and was roughly the same size and shape.

And, although their remains are far rarer and we never saw them, creatures such as sturgeon, bowfin, gar and pike also swam in the Fossil Lake waters, and would be clearly recognizable to today’s freshwater anglers.

After we left Kemmerer, we drove down to Jensen, Utah.  

There, we sampled some of the 200,000 acres of Dinosaur National Monument, where 23 exposed strata of rock tell a story of Earth dating back over one billion years.  It is a story of change over eons, as conditions on Earth gradually altered, and life itself altered and adapted to new conditions.

Again, it was humbling to look at a stone in the Morrison Formation, and realize that a dinosaur leg bone was sitting an arms-length away, still half-buried in the stone of a Utah mountainside.

And yet it was comforting, since over those billion-plus years, life endured, despite the great warming at the end of the Permian that killed off 90% of the creatures on Earth, the asteroid strike that closed the Cretaceous and sent every last non-avian dinosaur to their eternal doom and other, similar extinction events that, in the end, merely reset the clock and brought new and wonderful forms of life into being.

Which brings us, of course, to today, and the health of the fish stocks that we have all known so well during the course of our own lives.

None, at the species level, is nearing extinction; at least that’s true here in the Northeast and along the mid-Atlantic shore.  But at the same time, we can look at our coastal ecosystems, and the holes that we have torn in the web of life, and realize that they are no longer as healthy and complete as Fossil Lake was 50 million years ago, even though we probably only know about a fraction of the life that once swam there.

We can look at the slow changes that took place through the ages, and the gradual extinction and replacement of species, and wonder whether we are contributing to extinction today, and leaving nothing behind to fill the niches that we alone have emptied.

Consider the rock coast of southern New England, perhaps along the western Connecticut shore where I first learned to fish.  When I was a boy, tautog—we called them “blackfish”—bit from May through November; in the spring, just casting from shore, it was possible to land a few dozen good fish on a single tide.  The only problem you faced when trying to fill a feed bag were pesky bergalls—more properly, “cunner”—who picked and nipped at your baits remorselessly, and were generally considered a “trash fish” because they were too small and bony to be prized for food.

Tautog were tied to the rocks, the wrecks and the mussel beds; with square crushing teeth that looked surprisingly human, they scraped barnacles from the sides of boulders and crushed whatever mussels and crabs they could find.  Bergalls, their distant relative, were too small to tackle large shellfish, but had the same sort of dentition and cruised the same habitat seeking appropriately smaller fare.

However, in the past thirty or so years, a new market for live tautog and cunner has led to unprecedented commercial harvest—both legal and illegal—which has driven down the numbers of both species.  Tautog, once lavishly abundant in both spring and fall, have grown scarce, and harvest is strictly—if ineffectively—regulated.  Where cunner once swarmed in such numbers that anglers cursed them as a nuisance, they are now notable for their absence. 

No superior competitor has driven down the tautog’s numbers; it has not succumbed to the relentless rules of natural selection.

Instead, it was yanked out of its niche by an unnatural desire for profit, often illegally gained, and no one walking the Earth today seems responsible enough to say that such devastation is wrong.

We can see the same thing in the bays of Long Island (and elsewhere), where winter flounder numbers are falling ever lower, and may—we can’t know ‘til it happens—be approaching some point of no return.

Again, extinction at the species level is not an issue, for another stock on the banks of New England still thrives.  However, for some “distinct population segments”—that’s a term from the federal Endangered Species Act, intended to cover just this situation—the possibility of extinction looms large.

The best known example is in Shinnecock Bay, where researchers from Stony Brook University, deploying acoustic tags, determined that the bay is apparently home to two different populations of flounder that spawn at different times and have different life histories.  One population spawns in the bay during the winter but travels offshore during the summer, while the other population remains in the bay year-round. 

Overfishing and other factors have badly depleted both populations—depleted them so badly that they are now threatened by inbreeding—but the State of New York is now considering regulations that would allow anglers to target the flounder all summer (current regulations give the fish a respite from May 30 through March 31).  Such additional angling pressure may well be enough to drive the unique population that summers in the bay beyond the brink of extinction, and there is no reason to believe that similar populations, living in other Long Island bays, won’t be destroyed as well.

If that occurs, through the irrational actions of man rather than the irresistible forces of evolution, yet another niche will be left unnaturally empty, and our world will be further impoverished.

So I return from my recent vacation—which, because of its focus on fossils, I’ve dubbed “The Extinction Tour,” with markedly mixed emotions.

On one hand, I am again awed, fascinated and inspired by the pageant of life across the ages, and the distant familiarity of places such as Fossil Lake and even the landscapes of the Mesozoic, where creatures never seen by human eyes lived out their time on Earth until other creatures, more suited to changing conditions, stepped in to fill their niche.

On the other hand, I am again angered, embarrassed and disgusted by the pageant of uncaring greed that has destroyed coastal habitats, impoverished marine ecosystems and left near-empty niches in biotic communities up and down America’s coasts.  For while evolution and extinction are constants that lead to new and wonderful life, the irresponsible depletion of our native waters—and regulators’ unwillingness to step up to the plate to fix the problems—is an aberration that is neither natural nor rational.

Viewed against the great pageant of life that Theresa and I sampled on our recent trip, it is nothing less than an offense against life itself, against nature and against whatever creative force each of us may choose to believe in.

And thus it is deeply, and morally, wrong.

THE "GRASSROOTS" FIGHT FOR OUR FISHERIES

Lately, there’s been a small but somewhat interesting argument going on in the fisheries management community over the nature of “grassroots” organizations.

From what I can tell, it started when Nils Stolpe, a public relations flak for the commercial fishing industry, questioned the legitimacy of supposed grassroots organizations that have been successfully advocating for adequate protection of the forage fish that lie near the bottom of the ocean’s food web.  In Stolpe’s view,

“Such seeming grassroots organizations [as the Herring Alliance] might well be termed ‘Astroturf roots’…”

as a result of environmental groups’ financial and logistical support.

Stolpe’s argument rested, in part, on a report issued by the minority members of the United State’s Senate’s Committee on the Environment and Public Works entitled The Chain of Environmental Command:  How a Club of Billionaires and Their Foundations Control the Environmental Movement and Obama’s EPA.  

The report itself is the usual sort of black helicopters stuff that posits a

“’Billionaire’s Club, who directs and controls the far-left environmental movement”

comprised of various large trusts that fund environmental and conservation organizations that, according to the report, prefer to operate out of the public eye.  

The minority members of the Committee state that

“The scheme to keep their efforts hidden and far removed from the political state is deliberate, meticulous, and intended to mislead the public…these individuals and foundations go to tremendous lengths to avoid public associations with the far-left environmental movement they so generously fund.”

 It’s just the sort of over-the-top report that one could expect from a bunch of folks who never saw an oil well, strip mine or dam they didn’t like (click on each of their names and check out their stance on such issues), and who apparently believe that anyone who wants to swim in—or drink—clean water or breathe clean air is card-carrying member of the Comintern.

It makes a big fuss about a number of foundations funding environmental efforts, but apparently other sorts of funding didn’t bother them anywhere near as much.  For example, there was no companion report entitled “The Chain of Political Command:  How a Club of Oil, Coal, Lumber, Mining and Agriculture Interests Financed Our Campaigns and Made Us Write and Say Foolish Things…”

But Stolpe does raise an interesting issue:  Just what is a “grassroots organization” in the fisheries context?

And to follow up just a bit, in the end, does it matter?

The Herring Alliance, the particular target of Stolpe’s “Astroturf” claims, certainly believes that it does.  In a sharp response to Stolpe’s comments which called such comments “unfair and misinformed,” it said

“The piece, written by seafood industry consultant Nils Stolpe, argues that Herring Alliance member groups don't meet his definition of "grass roots." In doing so, Stolpe relies on outdated information about the Herring Alliance from seven years ago, and acts as if the Alliance has only ten members.

“Had Stolpe simply clicked on the Herring Alliance "members" page he would have seen that the Alliance has grown to more than 90 member organizations stretching from North Carolina to the Canadian line. They represent a mix of community-level volunteer groups, regional watershed associations, and national conservation organizations.”

Before we can address the question of whether the Herring Alliance really is a “grassroots organization”, it’s  probably necessary to figure out what a “grassroots organization” is.  

Stolpe begins with a definition from Wikipedia, which reads

"a grassroots movement (often referenced in the context of a political movement) is driven by a community's politics. The term implies that the creation of the movement and the group supporting it are natural and spontaneous, highlighting the differences between this and a movement that is orchestrated by traditional power structures."

But he doesn’t stop with that relatively clear and concise definition.  Instead, he goes on to provide two examples of “grassroots” from the real world of fisheries politics, and ends up confusing the issue.

The first illustration involved a handful of drift gillnetters in California who joined together to successfully fight anti-gillnet legislation.  Stolpe argues for their grassroots status, saying that

“There was no formal organization, no outside (and undisclosed) financial support, and no "piling on" by other organizations with undisclosed relationships of an Astroturf nature; just threatened businessmen and an interested observer with the facts on their side and a roomful of California Legislators who were willing to listen to them.”

In some ways, that would seem to mesh with the Wikipedia definition, although calling a handful of businessmen who share common interests a “community” might be stretching the point a bit.  “Grassroots” implies a somewhat larger number of interested parties, the term itself conjuring up images of a broad swath of lawn, in which each blade of grass shares common needs with all others.

If we used that analogy, Stolpe’s group of gillnetters might better be compared to a small patch of dandelions.

Stolpe’s other example was “Fishermen’s Energy,” a corporation designed to give fishermen a chance to influence coastal energy development.  Fishermen’s Energy was organized by Atlantic Capes Fisheries, a very large and well-financed commercial fishing operation, and as Stolpe notes, it operates “at the highly structured and well-financed corporate level.” 

Although commercial fishermen throughout New England and the mid-Atlantic participate in Fishermen’s Energy, if we apply the Wikipedia definition, it is hardly a “grassroots organization.”  Its creation was hardly “natural and spontaneous;”  it was the creation of a big fishing business that is very much a part of the “traditional power structure,” and it attracted other commercial fishermen who are active players in the politics of fisheries management. 

The folks who belong to Fishermen’s Energy include some of the same people who regularly seek higher quotas from fishery management councils, lobby Congress to weaken the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act and, perhaps most relevant to this discussion, oppose the Herring Alliance’s efforts to protect forage fish from excessive harvest.

Stolpe tries to keep Fishermen’s Energy within the “grassroots” community by arguing that it was

“started and carried out primarily by people who are dependent on sustainably harvesting our rich coastal and offshore waters. That's important, and they can rightfully claim that they represent working fishermen.

“There's a world of difference between them and fishermen in organizations which are dependent on ENGOs and/or huge foundations who claim to be representing fishermen but are in actuality pushing the agenda of the people who are supplying the dollars.”

That’s a pretty dubious argument. 

It assumes that “working fishermen” supporting groups such as the Herring Alliance don’t share the same conservation agenda as the environmental groups and foundations. 

Stolpe appears to argue that preserving the drift gillnet fishery, with all of its alleged bycatch problems, is an endeavor worthy of “working fishermen,” while trying to preserve the forage base that supports populations  of cod, haddock and tuna is somewhat questionable conduct.

And while the Herring Alliance does contain some big players that are as much a part of the “traditional power structure” as Fishermen’s Energy’s Atlantic Capes Fisheries, it also includes such organizations as the “Buckeye Brook Coalition” in Rhode Island, the “Spruill Farm Conservation Project” in North Carolina and “Operation SPLASH” in New York, which are about as small and grassroots as one is likely to get.

In fact, except for their goals and the names of the players, Fishermen’s Energy and the Herring Alliance look much the same, except that some members of the former group pay Nils Stolpe, directly or indirectly, to throw stones at the latter…

So is the Herring Alliance a “grassroots” organization?

In answering that question, I am going to focus on the words “natural and spontaneous” in the Wikipedia definition.   

Those words suggest that, for an organization to truly deserve the grassroots banner, the membership must drive the actions of the organization.  It assumes some sort of management by consensus, a minimum of bureaucracy and, probably, a focus on a single issue or issues. 

True “grassroots” organizations are, by their very nature, ephemeral.  People come together spontaneously for a particular purpose, and when that purpose is achieved, the organization withers away as certainly as a lawn in November.

For if the organization lasts any longer, the basic relationship between the members and the organization begins to change.  Anything resembling permanence requires some form of bureaucracy and governing structure.  

And once you have those, instead of the members shaping the organization and its policies, the organization begins to shape the members’ opinions, with slanted messages sent out in publications, press releases and the electronic media.

By that standard, the Herring Alliance is not a true grassroots organization, although many of its members are.  

However, it can still be, and I believe is, an effective and valuable member of the traditional power structure.

What does a true real “grassroots” organization in the fisheries arena look like? 

One of the best examples is the group that calls itself the 1@32” Pledge. 

1@32” was brought to life by a single person, a New York striped bass angler who was concerned that the striped bass stock was declining, and wanted to do something about it.

So he reached out to folks who were also concerned with where the striped bass stock was heading, and created an informal network that eventually spanned much of the striper coast.  Members of the network reached out to other people, and each time they did so, the network grew.  Some individuals contributed their knowledge of the fisheries management system.  Others took time to man booths at fishing shows, where the message could reach even more people.

Right now, as we near the October meeting of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Striped Bass Management Board, 1@32” can rightly take credit for turning anglers out at many state hearings and providing them with a coherent set of proposals to present to ASMFC.  Up and down the coast, those proposals to reduce fishing mortality and rebuild the stock are being repeated to each state’s ASMFC commissioners. 

All of that was created without an organizational structure, without dues, without any committee empowered to decide management policy.  It was all the outgrowth of a “natural and spontaneous” community effort to protect a valued resource.

Hopefully, 1@32” will succeed in achieving its goal.  But whether it succeeds or not, the organization will probably not survive much past the October meeting.

For that is the nature of true grassroots groups.  They are the “minutemen” of the political process, capable of firing “the shot heard ‘round the world” and winning individual battles.

But they lack what is needed to win a protracted war.

For that, as the American revolutionaries learned as they were being forced back toward their desperate winter quarters at Valley Forge, you need an army that’s led by professionals.

And a powerful ally or two doesn’t hurt.

So just as the minutemen started a revolution, but needed the Continental Army and a good deal of help from the French to get the job done, so do the grassroots advocates for good fisheries management need professional guidance and some help from well-heeled foundations.

Without it, they can’t ultimately triumph against an opposition that has money and manpower, and political allies, to spare.

The alliance described in the Senate Committee’s minority report is, when you think about it, the most American thing in the world.

Which is something that folks who like to talk about “patriotism” and “American values” should know from the start, without being told.

BLUEFIN TUNA CATCH A BREAK

There’s no question that bluefin rank among my favorite gamefish.  I caught my first nearly forty years ago.  Ever since, I’ve been entranced by their size and their strength, and extremely pleased by the fact that they frequently pass through my home waters south of Fire Island, New York.

Over the years, I’ve caught my share; in the days when I ran tournament boats, I put my anglers on bluefin that put them, in turn, atop events’ leader boards.

But I stopped fishing for them a few years ago.

It just felt like the right thing to do.  The population was heading downhill too quickly, and I’d been fishing too long to tell myself otherwise. 

I could recall the days out of Pt. Judith, Rhode Island when bluefin the size of small cars crashed bait on the surface and left 50 square yards of fpam in their wake.

I could remember my first time in a fighting chair, looking over the top of the Penn 16/0, when the captain checked the fit of my harness by hanging onto the tip of the rod and lifting his feet off the deck.

And so, some years later, when I looked out across my angry green ocean, where the big fish now seldom swam, I knew just how much we had lost.

For a while, I hung on to fishing for bluefin, replacing the old gaff-and-gut days with nothing but catch and release.  That worked for a while, but back in ’06, a fish came up behind a Green Machine bar and took the trailer all the way down. 

Letting it go was out of the question; the blood flowed red from its gills.  It was of legal size, and wouldn’t be wasted, but something still felt much too wrong.

Logically, I knew that killing just one school bluefin every few years would have no impact at all on the stock; the fish would go on—or not—regardless of what I might do.  But as I tore the gills of the dying tuna, as its blood flowed over my wrists and stained the sleeves of my shirt, as its heart beat in its last fading pulses, spilling what remained of its life onto the ice in the fishbox, I felt the need to make an ethical call.

For now, this would be my last bluefin.  Until fisheries managers finally did the right thing, and took real action to preserve and rebuild the small, fragile western stock, I’d leave them alone.

Now, for the first time, I’m happy to write words of hope.

Last week, after more than two years of draft amendments, public comment, deliberation, debate and delay, the National Marine Fisheries Service finally issued Final Amendment 7 to the 2006 Consolidated Highly Migratory Species Fishery Management Plan.

It was worth waiting for.

Biologists break the Atlantic bluefin tuna population into two separate stocks.  One, the eastern stock, spawns in the Mediterranean Sea.  The other, western stock spawns in the Gulf of Mexico.  Biologists can tell them apart by measuring the amount of one oxygen isotope—oxygen 16—present in each tuna’s otoliths (“ear bones” found in the fish’s head). 

It turns out that the two stocks never mix on the spawning grounds, but frequently cross the ocean and share common feeding areas.  When both stocks are at the same level of health, the eastern stock is roughly ten times the size of the western stock, and tagging studies suggest that perhaps 10% of the eastern stock crosses over to North American shores.   Thus, at any given time, at least half of the bluefin caught by American fishermen may have been spawned in the Mediterranean.

Western stock fish are hit hard when they cross over to Europe.  Eastern fish begin spawning at around 50 pounds, while western bluefin don’t reach maturity until over 200—perhaps close to 300—pounds.  Thus European commercial fishermen freely harvest juvenile western stock fish that are off-limits to the commercial fishery off North America.

However, western stock bluefin are also hit hard over here.  There is a substantial, and arguably sustainable, directed fishery.  However, about 68 metric tons of western stock bluefin are also taken as bycatch, and discarded dead, in the American pelagic longline fishery.  

On the spawning grounds of the Gulf of Mexico, far too many big bluefin have been killed by longliners seeking other pelagic species.  In the warm waters of the Gulf, successfully releasing such bluefin alive is close to impossible.

And that’s where Amendment 7 comes in.

Pursuant to that new regulation, which was widely and actively supported by both the marine conservation community and some angling groups, NMFS has created large gear restricted areas, where pelagic longlining will be prohibited during the two months when spawning bluefin are most likely to be in such places. 

The news gets even better, because the gear-restricted areas are about 30% larger than originally proposed, and include an area in the eastern Gulf that, in the beginning, seemed unlikely to be created.

And, because the only bluefin that manage to spawn are those that survive through the rest of the year, NMFS also maintained all existing seasonal closures in areas where longline bycatch of bluefin is notably high, and created a new gear restricted area off North Carolina.  The North Carolina area closure is only partial, as vessels that haven’t had much bluefin bycatch will be allowed in.  It is also a little smaller than hoped.  However, it includes most of the “hot spots” east of Cape Hatteras, and will prevent a lot of big tuna from being incidentally killed.

Longliners are also being made more accountable for their catch.

New rules, supported by real-time electronic monitoring of the decks of longline vessels, will require longliners to report all bluefin as they are landed and retain all legal-sized bluefin that are dead when brought to the boat.  Each boat will be assigned an individual bluefin quota, and when that quota is filled, the boat’s longline season will end.  In addition, the longline season for all boats will end when the Longline Category’s overall bluefin quota is landed.

Those provisions should go a long way toward helping the western stock bluefin.  But that doesn’t mean that Amendment 7 is completely wart-free.

Its biggest flaw is that it gives undue protection to the pelagic longline fishery by transferring quota from the Purse Seine Category, which normally underfishes its quota, into a reserve that can be used to cover excessive bycatch. 

Rewarding a dirty fishery with extra quota to cover its bycatch is bad fisheries policy, and sets an undesirable precedent.

But overall, Amendment 7 serves the bluefin tuna well.

And that’s a good thing. 

Because if the fish respond to Amendment 7 they way that I hope that they will, in a couple of years, I may well go out and bother them again.  I still have some bluefin tags on the boat, and it would be nice to be able to use them.

YES, FISH EAT OTHER FISH (AND HAVE, SINCE THE ORDOVICIAN)

I was reading through the Draft Addendum IV to Amendment 6 to the Atlantic Striped Bass Interstate Fishery Management Plan when a somewhat strange passage caught my eye.

It came in Section 2.2.3 of the Draft Addendum, which is entitled “Ecosystem Considerations,” and it said

“When fishery management changes are being contemplated, food web relationships should be considered…Striped bass are predators of other Commission managed species, including weakfish and shad and river herring.  As the striped bass population grows the demand on prey species also increases.  The increased demand on prey species may have impacts on those species undergoing rebuilding plans.  The current addendum’s goal of reducing fishing mortality to target levels may impact predation on other ASMFC-managed species.”

I don’t have any problems with the premise that striped bass eat fish—that’s certainly true—but I do have concerns about the overall tone of the section.

Because the best that I can tell, fish have been eating other fish since the Ordovician Period, about 450 million years ago; at least that’s when the first remains of presumably jawed and piscivorous sharks appear in the fossil record.  

Bony fish (as opposed to the cartilaginous sharks) started eating other fish about ten million years later, when the long-extinct Acanthodians appeared on the scene in the early Silurian.

In his book Discovering Fossil Fishes, Dr. John G. Maisey of the American Museum of Natural History noted that

“The developmental and anatomical complexity attained by gnathostomes [i.e., jawed animals] has been relatively stable at least since the Silurian.  We can view the rise of the gnathostomes as a second punctuated event, followed by more than 400 million years of relative stasis.

“It is quite remarkable that the basic diversity of jawed craniates became fixed so early in their evolution.  Sharks, ray-finned fishes and lobe-finned fishes all appeared about 400 million years ago and have survived to the present day.  Conservatism of design is striking…”

In other words, fish have been eating each other on a regular basis for a very long time.  Yet somehow, they survived—in fact, thrived and radiated out into an ever-changing plethora of species—for hundreds of millions of years, even though for all but a tiniest fraction of that time, predators existed at far higher levels than they did today—at 100% of their spawning potential, the level of an unfished stock.

There were no people around to control predators’ “demand on prey species.”  And there was no worry about predators affecting stock rebuilding plans, because with no people around to overfish forage fish stocks, there were no such plans and no need for rebuilding in the first place.

So let’s put the blame where the blame belongs, and stop blaming striped bass—or any other species—for fisheries problems.

If we’re talking about a lack of weakfish, let’s talk about ASMFC’s refusal to accept scientific advice to put a moratorium in place to assist in their rebuilding.

After being told by ASMFC’s Weakfish Technical Committee that

 “The main discussion was a moratorium is more than likely the best way to go at this time…”

and public comment supported such moratorium by a two-to-one margin, ASMFC’s Weakfish Management Board heard comments such as those of Tom Fote, the current governor’s appointee from New Jersey, who said

“…I’m looking at a situation that doesn’t basically shut down a complete fishery and basically allow the person, if he catches a weakfish of a lifetime or something like that or the kid on a beach actually catches a weakfish on that rare occasion, they can go home with one weakfish.

“…at least they’ll have, you know, one fish to take home…

“You know, we also talk about we’re supposed to build a sustainable fishery for a sustainable industry.  If you start closing down both those industries, it takes a long time for that industry to recover…”

and seemed to consider such argument reasonable.  The Management Board rejected both the Technical Committee’s comments and their endorsement by the public, and left both the recreational and commercial fisheries open, although at much reduced harvest levels.

They didn’t seem to consider the possibility that, if you keep taking fish out of an already badly depleted weakfish stock, the stock will take at least as long to recover as the fishing industry—which, in the end, at least has many viable alternatives to harvesting weakfish.

Weakfish, on the other hand, have no alternatives if they get caught and die.

And now, a lot of the same folks who sat on that management board apparently want to blame the striped bass for the weakfish’s problems…

In the case of American shad, Amendment 1 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Shad & River Herring noted, as early as 1998, that

“Historically, American shad (Alosa sapidissima), hickory shad (Alosa mediocris), alewife (Alosa pseudoharengus) and blueback herring (Alosa aestivalis) (collectively termed alosines) were extremely important resource species and supported very large commercial fisheries along the east coast of both the United States and Canada…large declines in commercial landings were perceived as an indication that management action would be required to restore alosine stocks to their former levels of abundance…”

However, as is so often true with ASMFC plans, managers did not take decisive steps to reduce harvest, and declines continued.  ASMFC allowed many of the river-specific stocks to decline so badly that, in the case of shad in New York’s Hudson River, the latest stock assessment found that

“Over the last 20 years, the Hudson River stock of American shad has shown consistent signs of excessive mortality on mature fish…high adult mortality was caused by fishing and that this excessive fishing has now affected recruitment.

“…Results of this fishing pressure has left the stock in a historically depressed condition with high uncertainty regarding its recovery.  Few year-classes currently remain at high enough abundance to rebuild the spawning stock.”

Twelve years passed, while “high adult mortality caused by fishing” continued to drive down the stocks in the Hudson and elsewhere, before ASMFC finally decided to adopt more effective measures in 2010.  Unfortunately, by then things had gotten so bad that, at least in the Hudson, there is now “high uncertainty” regarding the stock’s recovery.

Yet ASMFC has the temerity to suggest that striped bass are to blame…

In the case of the alewife and blueback herring—the “river herring” referred to in the shad and river herring management plan—ASMFC decided merely to monitor the stocks—effectively, to just watch them decline—in 1989.  

It took them two full decades, after runs in many rivers had all but disappeared and the Natural Resources Defense Council had filed an ultimately unsuccessful petition to have river herring listed under the Endangered Species Act, to finally require states to take regulatory action in Amendment 2 to the Interstate Management Plan for Shad and River Herring.

But, once again, ASMFC wants to blame striped bass for river herring problems…

Yes, striped bass eat some weakfish, American shad and river herring.  They’re opportunistic feeders, which means that they eat most of the species that ASMFC manages—and a lot that it doesn’t—at some point in their travels along the coast.  But they’ve been doing that for millenia before Henry Hudson sailed up his eponymous river, where so many big stripers still breed.

Yet there is no indication that the bass posed mortal threat to weakfish, herring or shad before the first waves of colonists came over from Europe and began to “save” such fish from striped bass (and to save other prey from every other predator that, with a bit of work, could be converted into food, funds or fertilizer).

Somehow, before Europeans arrived to catch the ravenous striped bass (and everything else) with their nets, hooks and lines, “unprotected” weakfish, shad and herring still managed to thrive.  Before the otter trawl, haul seines, purse seines, pound nets, gill nets, fykes and baited lines, striped bass, river herring, weakfish and shad managed to live in a sort of harmony that allowed them all to exist at or near 100% of their spawning potential (although the oldest residents of the east coast, who walked there all the way here from Siberia, did kill a few).

And it wasn’t because the striped bass had been vegetarians before the white man arrived on this coast.

We are far more effective predators than the striped bass could ever hope to be, and we compete with them for every forage species.  Yet when forage declines, it’s always the striper’s fault.

It’s not a pattern unique to striped bass.  On every coast, we hear the same arguments.

In Chesapeake Bay, and down in North Carolina, the talk is all about blue crabs being killed by red drum, with one fish wholesaler saying

“If they don’t do something about this fish population and restoration of this habitat, I don’t see where crabs are going to have a chance.”

Down in the Gulf of Mexico, you hear folks talking about red snapper eating everything else on the reef.

Perhaps the best story came from a former executive director of the Coastal Conservation Association’s Florida chapter, who related a story about being at a shrimp bycatch hearing in Panama City when a woman wandered up to the microphone and said

“You all are trying to stop bycatch, but I’ll tell you that bycatch is good.  Back in the old days, we didn’t worry about bycatch.  We caught jacks and mackerel and things, and there was plenty of mullet and bait and everything was fine.  But now you’re stopping the bycatch, and the fish are eating everything so that there’s no bait around, and the pelicans are starving.

“And that’s why you’ll see the pelicans flying around and eating stray cats on the street in Panama City!”

It’s no less credible than the other tales, which are all aimed at convincing regulators to let fishermen do nature a “favor” and help drive down populations of striped bass, red drum or whatever the species in question might be, so that they can be as depleted as their forage and “balance” can be restored.

Of course, cutting back harvest and restoring the forage base is never a viable option…

That  sort of thinking is probably understandable when it comes from folks looking out for their wallets.

But when it comes from folks who are supposed to be looking out for our fisheries, it’s just not excusable.

IF ALDO LEOPOLD HAD BEEN A FISHERIES MANAGER

It’s a cliché, but nonetheless true:  There’s little new under the sun.

Fisheries managers, and folks who play in the managers’ arena, might try to dispute that.  They’ll describe their field as a pretty new science, with new population models being developed and new approaches to managing stocks being proposed every day.

But in the end, they’re all just variations on a very old theme, for fish are merely wildlife, and the tenets of wildlife management were devised long ago.  

You need good habitat that produces enough forage to support the stock.  

You need enough new individuals recruiting into the stock to replace the older ones removed by nature and by man.  

You can either manage for quantity, and a big kill of mostly young animals, or you can manage for “quality” by leaving the young ones alone and letting them grow big, but there is no magic formula that lets you do both at the same time.

Anyone who hunts ducks or elk or whitetail deer already knows that is true, so fisheries managers should know it as well.  Yet it seems that the fisheries folks keep trying to reinvent the wheel, making the same mistakes and reaching the same “new” conclusions that terrestrial wildlife managers did close to a century ago.

So maybe it’s time to look back, and view fisheries management through the lens of a terrestrial wildlife manager.  I’ll pick Aldo Leopold, because his name and his work are familiar to many, and because his book, A Sand County Almanac, first published in 1949, still stands as one of the best-known musings on the proper relationship between man and the rest of the world.

Today, we can know Leopold only through his writings.  So my intent is to take some of his better-known quotes, and apply them to the fisheries issues that we deal with today.

Figuring out the right thing to do in each case is likely a good place to start.

“Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and aesthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient.  A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community.  It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”

That quote certainly answers the question I posed last May, when I asked “Do Jolthead Porgies Really Matter?”

Because, of course, they do.  As does every other animal and plant that has evolved over millennia to fill a niche in the various marine ecosystems.  For an ecosystem is nothing more or less than a complex web of life that gains its strength from every interconnected strand.  Weaken too many of those strands, and the entire construct is prone to collapse.

That’s why managing complexes of fish stocks—New England groundfish, or reef fish in the South Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico, is so difficult.  Some folks, their eyes fixed solely on the handful of species deemed recreationally or economically valuable, argue that such complexes are too, well—complex.

They offer superficial solutions to management problems, arguing that less popular or less economically valuable species should be dropped from management plans.  They claim that managing—or, at least, attempting to manage—less common or less economically important species creates a risk that, if any such stock is deemed overfished, fishermen might be denied the ability to fish for, and profit from, healthy stocks in the same complex.  

Some make theoretical arguments that we can’t risk shutting down an economically important snapper/grouper fishery just because tomtate grow scarce.  Others, on the water today, don’t want to stop trawling for haddock because too many yellowtail flounder are killed.

It’s a quintessentially selfish position, which would allow fishermen to carelessly diminish the wonderful diversity that dwells off our coasts, merely to put a few more dead fish on the docks.  

They would deny future generations the opportunity to know the beauty and abundance of healthy marine  communities.  

As a fisheries management approach, it is aesthetically and ethically bankrupt.

For the reefs and the rocks and the kelp beds that lie off our shores have evolved over millennia, filling every niche with life.  Dismantling such wonderfully-wrought structures merely to bring a small bit of profit to a small number of men who will be dead and dust before half a whale’s lifetime is done  would certainly be a great wrong.  

Pioneer ocean explorer William Beebe understood this, saying “when the last individual of a race of living beings breathes no more, another heaven and another earth must pass before such a one can be again.“

I suspect that Leopold would have agreed…

But it’s not just a matter of aesthetics and ethics.  There is a practical side.

“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.”

A few years ago, my friend Mike Mucha and I were fishing the patch reefs off Islamorada.  We had been picking some snapper, but as the sun rose and warmed the air, the action began to cool off.  So we let our baits settle down through the chum cloud, hoping to draw a strike.  Mike hooked up right away, to something that acted differently from anything that we had hooked before.

It wasn’t long before a bright blue parrotfish emerged from the water.  When the mate grabbed it, I figured he’d unhook the fish and toss it back into the sea.  Instead, he flipped the nearly iridescent animal into the far corner of the fish box, answering our unspoken question with the reply “See that beak?  They eat the coral.  They’re bad for the reef.”  

Apparently, he was intent on “saving” the reef by killing whatever parrotfish he could.

Of course, research has shown that parrotfish are critically important to the continued health of the reef, as they eat algae that can cover and smother the corals and cause them to die.  By failing to understand the parrotfish’s ecological role, the mate ended up harming the very reef he was trying to save.

Such uniformed action might be excused in a party boat mate; ignorance is far less excusable in a professional fisheries manager.  Yet when I sat on the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council, I heard a former state manager argue against restricting the harvest of spiny dogfish, claiming that the species had little value, and that fewer dogfish meant less competition for “more valuable” species.

And then there are the other creatures…

Once or twice each year, at meetings of New York’s Marine Resources Advisory Council, someone opposed to restrictions on harvest will get up to “inform” us that fishermen aren’t causing problems; instead, the stock (whichever stock is being discussed at the time) is really being decimated by cormorants, and that the solution for all fishery problems is to kill off those hungry black birds.

But up on Cape Cod, something interesting is happening.  

Grey seals, which were killed off on the Cape half a century ago, have returned with a vengeance.  Commercial fishermen claim that they eat all of the herring and cod, and serve as a host for “cod worms” (which, to be fair, appears to be true), while anglers complain that the seals steal just about every fish from their lines.

But, to use Leopold’s analogy, the seals appear to be a lost cog that, having been found, have helped get the local ecosystem up and running again.  

Behind the seals came some of the great predators of the sea—big, adult white sharks, along with some truly huge makos weighing over 1,000 pounds—that that returned to Cape waters to hunt their traditional pinniped prey.

The seals and the sharks have reminded us all that what is ethically and aesthetically right can be profitable, too.  They have spawned new businesses, as thousands of folks take sealwatching tours, and Cape tourist shops sell anything “shark”—coffee mugs, t-shirts, plush toys and more—to visitors enchanted by the wildness that cruises just a few yards offshore.

Even so, income isn’t the sole measure of good management.

“Cease being intimidated by the argument that a right action is impossible because it does not yield maximum profits, or that a wrong action is to be condoned because it pays.”

This is a hot issue in fisheries management right now, as the Magnuson-Stevens Fisheries Conservation and Management Act awaits reauthorization.

Washington Congressman Doc Hastings’ is using short-term economic benefits to justify a bill so bad that it has been dubbed the “Empty Oceans Act”, claiming “This debate today isn’t just about the use of a natural resource – it is about providing a sustainable source of protein as well as providing economic vitality to coastal communities.“.

And various anglers rights groups have teamed up with the recreational fishing industry to work for a weakened law that would permit overfishing and slower rebuilding of overfished stocks in the name of  “diminishing socioeconomic impacts“.

Here on the east coast, as the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission debates measures to stem the decline of the striped bass stock, a professional fisheries manager, Thomas O’Connell of Maryland, is trying to water down ASMFC’s striped bass management plan, to delay need harvest reductions.  Once again, “socioeconomic impacts” serve as an excuse.                                       “.

If we fall back into Leopold’s realm, the lands of America’s interior, it’s hard to conceive of professional managers allowing overharvest of mule deer or bighorn in order to provide greater “socioeconomic benefits” for a handful of guides and sporting goods stores.  But here in New York, where winter flounder are so scarce that they’re threatened by inbreeding, salt water fisheries managers keep the season open to mollify a handful of tackle shops and for-hire boats.

But I shouldn’t put all of the blame on their managers.  Too many anglers also find it hard to do the right thing.

“Ethical behavior is doing the right thing when no one else is watching, even when doing the wrong thing is legal.”

You hear it all the time on the waterfront.

Fish hogs often try to justify their excessive kills by telling critics that the law “entitles” them to a full limit of fish, and that it is their “right” to kill them.  And many fishing websites have adopted the same position, prohibiting criticism of posters who kill within the limits of the law.

The fact that the law is wrong, and needs changing, never enters the picture.

We saw a variation of that maybe here in New York maybe fifteen years ago, after striped bass fishermen failed to convince the state to leave conservative regulations in place.  Over the course of a couple of years, anglers who once argued passionately that keeping the minimum size at 36 inches was the “right” thing to do suddenly felt no shame in killing 28-inch “keepers”; today, as bass populations again decline, the same anglers are discovering that they were closer to right the first time, and are once more asking managers to impose tougher rules.

Because, in the end, they know that a problem exists.

“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.”

Leopold was a formally trained biologist and wildlife manager; most anglers, and most readers of this blog (not to mention its author) are not.  We are the “laymen” that Leopold speaks of.

And yet we are not.

For while we have no formal ecological training, there is no better place to learn of the interrelationships that govern all life than out in the world itself.  After spending half a century and more on the coast, living through collapse and recovery, abundance and loss, anyone with the sense to keep their mind open and their mouth shut for a while will figure out how it all works.

You can’t help but see the hurts, the gaping wound in our bays that the flounder once filled, the slow bleeding along the beach as the great runs of striped bass grow less every year. 

We each face a choice, then.  We can join in the rush to kill what is left before it is gone.  We can turn away and tell ourselves that death is inevitable.  Or we can be bearers of unwanted news, unwelcome wherever we go, trying to convince those who we meet that life can prevail, and health restored, if only we act wisely, and in time.

If Aldo Leopold had been a fisheries manager, I think I know what his choice would have been.

It would have been ethical.

It would have been difficult.

And it would have been "right."