THE ASMFC MOVES FORWARD--SLOWLY--TO REBUILD STRIPED BASS

 

By any objective measure, the coastal migratory population of Atlantic striped bass has fallen on hard times.

In Maryland, the juvenile abundance index (JAI), which has gauged the success of each year’s spawn since 1957, was 2.0 in 2024, far below its long-term average of 11.0. It was the sixth consecutive year of spawning failure in the Maryland portion of the Chesapeake Bay, while the average JAI for the six years between 2019 and 2024 was the lowest average for any six-year period in the 67-year history of the Maryland juvenile abundance survey.

Things were no better on the Virginia side of the Chesapeake Bay, where the preliminary 2024 JAI was 3.43, and marked the fourth consecutive year when the JAI fell below the 25th percentile (a JAI of 8.22) of the Virginia survey’s time series; previously, the Virginia survey yielded JAIs of 6.3 in 2021, 7.95 in 2022, and 4.26 in 2023.

A stock assessment update, released in October 2024, suggested that, under current management measures, the still-overfished striped bass stock was unlikely to fully rebuild by the 2029 deadline established by the management plan, but there was so much uncertainty in the underlying data that, depending upon the assumptions that biologists made, the landings reductions needed to achieve a 50 percent probability of timely rebuilding might be anywhere between 4 and 46 percent.

Thus, when the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s (ASMFC) Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board (Management Board) met on October 23, 2024, most of its members seemed to realize that they had to do something to restore the striped bass stock, but just what they had to do was a bit of a mystery.

Uncertainty Reigns

The biggest problem they faced was that Addendum II to Amendment 7 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Striped Bass (Addendum II) had just been adopted in January 2024, and its provisions—a one-fish bag limit for recreational fishermen, paired with a 28- to 31-inch slot limit for the ocean fishery and a 19- to 24-inch slot in the Chesapeake Bay, along with a seven percent reduction in the commercial quota—had been in place for less than a year, making it impossible for the scientists on the Atlantic Striped Bass Technical Committee (Technical Committee) to know how Addendum II’s provisions impacted the striped bass fishery.

If the Technical Committee assumed that Addendum II had little effect, and that 2024 landings would approximate those of 2023, no less than a 46 percent reduction would be needed to rebuild the stock by 2029. However, that level of landings appeared unlikely, as recreational striped bass landings for March through June of 2024 were substantially lower than landings in the corresponding months of 2023; if landings for the rest of the year matched those four months’ pace, 2025 landings would only have to be reduced by four percent to make rebuilding probable.

But that latter scenario was also unlikely.

By 2024, the big 2015 striped bass year class had mostly grown out of the coastal slot size limit, while the next, slightly above average year class, the 2018s, was just below the slot size. In 2025, the 2018s would enter the slot, and be vulnerable to recreational harvest. If past patterns held true, that would increase recreational landings for 2025, but those landings would probably decrease in 2026, as the 2018 year class grew out of the slot.

But how much landings would increase in 2025, or decrease in 2026, is difficult to calculate, as there is too little information available to predict angler behavior or the availability of fish to the fishermen who pursue them. The Technical Committee believed that, in the most likely scenario of a landings increase in 2025, followed by a return to 2024 landings levels thereafter, a 14.5 percent reduction would be needed to rebuild the stock by 2029.

Clinging to the Status Quo

The data seemed to call for some sort of management response, but not everybody attending the meeting agreed. Three Maryland charter boat captains called on the Management Board to maintain the current recreational regulations, with the speakers claiming that their business was down between 30 and 80 percent, and that customers were cancelling Maryland charters and going elsewhere to fish.

On the Management Board itself, two primary opponents of new conservation measures emerged. One was Adam Nowalsky, the Legislative Proxy from New Jersey, who attempted to discredit the data that suggested additional restrictions were needed.

He asked:

Could you explain to me why the juvenile abundance indices graph shape does not match the Year 1 shapes as we see them for Maryland and New York? My expectation would be that the Age 1 would have a similar shape just lagging by a year, but what I see for Maryland is a higher period of juvenile abundance followed by a lower period followed by what appears to be a steadily declining period of juvenile abundance, whereas the Age 1 appears to be something somewhat steady with a few spikes in it. New York [Year 1 recruitment], on the other hand, looks like something with just a high degree of variability bouncing up and down around some midpoint, while more recently it seems to be a downward trending bell curve. So could you provide some insight why the Age 1 charts don’t match the juvenile abundance indices?

His intent was clearly to cast doubt on the relationship between juvenile abundance and the recruitment of Year 1 fish into the population, and so minimize the impact of recent low JAIs on the health of the stock.

However, Technical Committee members quickly reaffirmed that there was a clear correlation between JAI and Year 1 recruitment. Dr. Gary Nelson of the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries dismissed much of the difference in the graphs’ shapes as the result of mere “noise” in the data, attributable to the much smaller number of Year 1 fish encountered when compared to the number of juveniles, although he also noted that the juvenile bass could occasionally experience a mortality event that reduced survival during their first year. Dr. Katie Drew, an ASMFC stock assessment scientist, offered an even simpler explanation, saying that one very large Year 1 recruitment event early in the time series could have distorted the shape of the recruitment graph, and so concealed the actual degree of year-to-year variation.

Unable to discredit the data with his first line of attack, Mr. Nowalsky then tried to impeach just the Year 1 recruitment information, asking the Technical Committee whether they could ignore the strongest year classes, which helped sustain the spawning stock biomass through periods of low recruitment, in order to make overall recruitment in the past appear weaker, and less of a contrast to the low recruitment that the stock is experiencing today.

Mr. Nowalsky made no secret of his motives and admitted:

What I was just looking for is some other way to possibly interpret this information that would indicate that there is perhaps more stability in the fishery with regard to recruitment…I see a recruitment chart there that sees some periods of very high recruitment but in fact, if you didn’t have some of these super-high years, that recruitment mean would be lower and maybe you would have a different interpretation of recruitment. When I look at the juvenile index, abundance index graphs and the Year 1s, juveniles, Year 0s, are not spawning. Year 1s are not spawning, but you have to have Year 1s to have spawning fish. So when I see particularly the Maryland Age 1s somewhat having a more static line, it just gives me pause to think about what we are really seeing here…If I took out some of these outliers of recruitment, is recruitment necessarily on the precipice of disaster?

Dr. Nelson then explained the statistical approach that the Technical Committee used to analyze the recruitment data, and how such application of what he referred to as “Change Point Analysis” indicated that striped bass recruitment experienced something that might be termed “regime change” around 2008, when recruitment dropped below earlier norms.

Thus, Mr. Nowalsky’s efforts to skew the data, and de-emphasize the recent sharp drop in recruitment, failed to gain traction.

The other aggressive opponent of new conservation measures, Delaware fishery manager John Clark, then rose to set forth his opposition to additional management measures, using language that some might find surprising, coming from an experienced fisheries professional:

We’ve been cutting now, this is the 10th anniversary of when we started cutting back, that was that 25% cut, followed by an 18% cut, followed by what, another 15? I mean, it’s just been a bunch of cuts, and one thing that you see when you look at the [spawning stock biomass], that it seems to be following a natural population cycle going up and down. I’m just curious, I mean we have this arbitrary goal of keeping it at a certain level, yet the boom in the population began when the population was what? Maybe a quarter of what it is now? No, I mean, we can’t guarantee anything by just keeping the spawning population at a very high level, because we’re still not sure of all the factors that lead to big year classes, correct? I mean, it just seems like management has to weigh both sides of this. Of course, we want to be cautious, but there is a point when we might be foregoing fish that could be caught in the pursuit of trying to keep the stock at a level that you think is necessary. But in the meantime, as you’ve heard, people are going out of business and we’re seeing a lot of people I know that are hurting, and I know we hear it from our commercial guys all the time, they’ve taken since 2014, this quota has been cut almost in half, and you know that comes out of their pockets, and the question that I have is do we have any sense of whether the stock will recover if indeed it did, [spawning stock biomass] went down even further than it is now? I mean, it seems like it’s still very possible that, based on these cycles, that it could be coming back, right?

Mr. Clark seemed to have no concerns about allowing an already overfished stock, which is experiencing spawning failure in multiple nursery areas and has experienced consecutive years of low recruitment, to fall to even lower levels of abundance, in the expectation, or at least the hope, that some undefined “cycle” will eventually allow it to return to health on its own.

To Rebuild the Bass Stock

But that was not the majority opinion. That opinion might have best been expressed by Dennis Abbott, New Hampshire’s Legislative Proxy, a long-time member of the Management Board who called the last six years of poor recruitment “the gorilla in the room,” opined that “We’re in one of the most difficult positions we’ve been in with striped bass,” and proclaimed that “My job first is to protect the resource, and if we protect the resource, we’ll protect the fishermen.”

Mr. Nowalsky, perhaps not liking the direction that the debate was taking, soon asked, “As we sit here today, does the rebuilding plan mandate a reduction for 2025, as we sit here today and, if the answer is yes, what would that reduction be?”

He was promptly informed that no, the rebuilding plan didn’t mandate a reduction, and that any decision about making a reduction was within the discretion of the Management Board, but he was also reminded that the rebuilding plan did mandate that the stock be rebuilt by 2029, so that failure to take action in 2025 might very well mean that more restrictive management measures would have to be taken in later years.

Roy Miller, the Governor’s Appointee from Delaware, then put the rebuilding issue in a historical perspective:

In the 1980s, there were concerns like we heard from our fishing audience today, over contaminants in the nursery areas. There were concerns over too much rainfall or not enough rainfall, colder than normal temperatures or warmer than normal temperatures; all these things which were beyond our control in the 1980s. So what could we control? We finally settled on fishing mortality, so that we could maximize the number of eggs laid in our ecosystems so that when conditions were favorable, a dominant year class would eventually be produced. And that’s exactly what happened…When you look at those years from ’85 to ’89, that’s when we provided maximum protection…By providing protection for those eggs laid in the system, making sure there were enough spawners to lay those eggs, conditions were eventually favorable and the ’89 year class was the result. I see us entering a similar sort of situation now, when we have poor reproduction for six years…I do think there are enough parallels with what happened in the 1980s, that we need to keep that in mind and keep our focus on maximizing the number of eggs laid in our estuary systems, so we can again support some larger than average year classes.

The rub was that, even if the Management Board wanted to take action that might spur rebuilding, it wasn’t sure what action would be needed, as the Technical Committee had not yet informed them of what sort of changes to size limits, seasons, or any other management measures, would be needed. That wasn’t the Management Board’s fault; before it could propose a suite of possible management measures, it needed to know which specific scenario—the one requiring a 4 percent reduction, or a 46 percent reduction, or something in-between—the Management Board felt was most likely. Once the magnitude of the reduction was decided, the Technical Committee could calculate the measures needed to attain it.

Thus, Nichola Meserve of the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries rose to move the process forward. Declaring that, “The only error I see is doing nothing…some type of action is necessary,” she placed a motion on the table: “Move to schedule a special Striped Bass Management Board meeting in December 2024 to consider Board Action in response to the 2024 Stock Assessment Update. The Board will consider action to revise the 2025 recreational seasons or size limits and 2025 commercial quotas to achieve a 50% probability of rebuilding by 2029 under the ‘low 2024 removals with F increase in 2025 only’ projection.”

The motion was seconded by Martin Gary, the Director of the New York Department of Environmental Conservation’s Marine Division.

Mr. Clark immediately spoke in opposition, arguing that:

The reference points are exceptionally high, and even though we don’t have…on the current projections, it seems, we have a 43 percent chance of hitting the target, the target is 125% of the 1995 rebuilt [spawning stock biomass]. But it has a very good chance of hitting the threshold. I know that isn’t what we said in the plan, but it’s still a bigger stock than we have now. In the meantime, we’re talking about some…we’re just further regulating, making things more difficult. I think…a basic concept in finance is net present value, and I would transfer that to a fishery, and that a fish today is worth more than a fish four years from now. We already heard the hardships, that what we have currently done is putting on our recreational fishermen [sic] industry—the for-hires, that is—and our commercial fishermen, and I think this is just, you know, another almost gratuitous cut at this point, because it is something else that is going to make life more difficult for them…You know, we cut the quotas on weakfish back, we did everything we could, they haven’t come back…

It was another remarkable speech from a professional fisheries manager, who was calling for the Management Board to ignore the explicit terms of the striped bass management plan, because even without fully rebuilding the stock, the stock would, in a few years still be “a bigger stock than we have now;” who was willing to risk the future health of the striped bass stock in return for catching more fish today because “a fish today is worth more than a fish four years from now;” and who questioned the worth of trying to rebuild striped bass, because managers haven’t had much success rebuilding weakfish.

But it was also the last concerted effort to derail the rebuilding effort. While the meeting had a long way to go, everything else constituted unsuccessful attempts to just cause delay.

Attempts at Delay

The first attempt to stall needed management measures came from Maryland fisheries manager Michael Luisi, who called the provision in Addendum II, which allowed the Management Board to adopt rebuilding measures on their own, without first drafting a new addendum and taking it out for public hearings, “an experiment” that could not, as a practical matter, be carried out in what was left of 2024. He said that he was “concerned about the longevity and the durability of the actions that we take,” and wanted to see consistent rules, that would not be changed after a short time, put in place. Thus, proposed a substitute motion that would replace the original motion made by Ms. Meserve, which read:

Move to substitute and initiate an addendum to address reducing total removals (harvest and discard mortality/recreational and commercial) in the coastwide striped bass fishery using the technical committee’s most likely projection scenario (F2024-Low Removals, F increases in 2025 Only and Returns to 2024 Low Levels) and a 50% probability of achieving the spawning stock biomass (SSB) target level by 2029. The intent of this addendum is to provide the Board with coastwide and regional alternatives for the regional and commercial fishery for implementation on January 1, 2026.

Not surprisingly, the motion was seconded by Mr. Clark.

Mr. Luisi argued that “we owe it to the public to be heavily involved in the addendum process,” implying that the public would prefer to see the longer addendum process used to adopt management measures, rather than fast-tracking such measures through Management Board action even though, when the public had a chance to comment on the question during the development of Addendum II, 2,150 out of the 2,240 comments received—96 percent—favored the fast-track process to get needed catch restrictions in place.

There was substantial opposition to Mr. Luisi’s substitute motion, which would have left the 2018 year class vulnerable to harvest as they entered the coastal recreational slot limit in 2025.

Chris Batsavage, a North Carolina fisheries manager, noted that the Management Board was running out of time to rebuild the striped bass stock, and that it needed to move faster with respect to protecting the 2018 year class from harvest in 2018. He noted that North Carolina no longer has an ocean striped bass fishery, in part because, “There aren’t a lot of fish out there.”

David Sikorski, Maryland’s Legislative Proxy, opined that “It’s more responsible to act more quickly,” noting that past management efforts often failed because the Management Board did not impose the full reductions recommended by the Technical Committee. He said that it was time to “stop playing games” with the management process and do what was needed to rebuild the stock.

Mr. Abbott said that the Management Board shouldn’t “sacrifice” the 2018s, and said that adoption of the substitute motion would amount to “a dereliction of our duty to protect the 2018 year class,” while David Borden, the Governor’s Appointee from Rhode Island, observed that “We’re in a unique position…If we allow the 2018 year class to be fished down, we’ve lost an opportunity and painted ourselves into a corner.”

Yet other Management Board members supported the motion for various reasons. Max Appelman, representing NOAA Fisheries, feeling that fast-tracking management measures provided no opportunity for “robust public comment,” supported the substitute motion. Pat Geer, a Virginia fisheries manager, also supported the substitute, largely for administrative reasons; the process of getting bass tags out to Virginia’s commercial fishermen begins in August, and so was already underway when the October meeting was held. It could not be interrupted to accommodate any management measures that were put into place for the 2025 season.

Thus, after Mr. Luisi’s substitute motion failed on a vote of 6 in favor, 9 opposed, with a single abstention, Mr. Geer made his own motion to substitute and delay the implementation of needed harvest cuts. His motion read, “Move to substitute to schedule a special Striped Bass Management Board meeting in December 2024 to consider Board Action in response to the Stock Assessment Update. The Board MAY consider action to revise the 2025 recreational seasons and/or size limits and 2026 commercial measures with an addendum for 2026 and beyond to achieve a 50% probability of rebuilding by 2029 under the low 2024 removals with F increase in 2025 only projection.”

Once again, Mr. Clark seconded the motion, which sought to delay the implementation of commercial management measures.

There were comments supporting and opposing the motion, although the most notable came from Ms. Meserve, who had grown exasperated with the repeated attempts at delay, and declared that “I remain disappointed and frustrated that the states with writing on the wall,” meaning the Chesapeake Bay states where JAIs had plummeted, were trying to stall needed management measures. Mr. Batsavage admitted that he was “sharing Nichola’s frustration” and, with respect to Mr. Geer’s administrative problems, that “we shouldn’t let process get in the way of conservation of striped bass.”

Still, Mr. Geer’s motion nearly passed, failing on the narrow vote of 7 in favor, 7 opposed, and 2 abstentions.

At that point, Mr. Clark moved to amend Ms. Meserve’s original motion, seeking to substitute the phrase “commercial quotas” with “commercial measures,” in order to allow the consideration of other commercial management measures, most particularly a requirement that bass must be tagged at the point of capture rather than the point of sale to a wholesale buyer, in addition to or in lieu of a quota reduction.

Mr. Sikorski seconded the motion only so that it might be discussed, but the resulting discussion was short. Ms. Meserve voiced her opposition to the amendment, saying that it would add additional, unnecessary issues to the proposed December meeting, when the Technical Committee would already be challenged to calculate the needed size and season alternatives. She also noted that a 10-year review of commercial bass tagging measures had already been scheduled, and that there was no need to address the issue in December.

Mr. Gary felt that Mr. Clark’s motion could be seen as a way to avoid a commercial quota reduction, at a time when recreational catch would be subject to additional cuts, and said, “I think we’re at a point with this stock when no one is getting a pass. We’re all in this together. All the sectors have to work together with what we have left, in the absence of reproductive success.”

With those words said, the vote was taken and the motion failed, on a close vote of 8 in favor and 8 opposed.

Resolved to Move Forward

And with no further discussion, Ms. Meserve’s original motion passed easily, with 14 votes in favor, and only New Jersey opposed. With Mr. Clark and Mr. Miller unable to agree, Delaware cast a “null vote,” which had no impact on the outcome.

With that done, the Management Board still had to decide what management measures they would consider at the December meeting, and what work the Technical Committee would have to do. They eventually agreed that they wanted the Technical Committee to update the 2024 landings projection with recreational data from July and August, which had just become available, and use that in calculating recreational management options. They also agreed that the Technical Committee should provide options for no-harvest season closures, and also provide information on closed seasons when even catch-and-release fishing was prohibited. And they agreed that the Technical Committee should look into the benefits of setting a new slot limit that did not allow fish over 28 inches to be landed, in order to protect the 2018 year class.

It’s not entirely clear that the Technical Committee will be able to get all of that done before the December Management Board meeting, and it’s certainly not clear what management measures will be in place for 2025. However, it does seem pretty certain that the Management Board will do something to protect the 2018 year class and make it more likely that the stock will rebuild by 2029.

Whatever that something is, we can only hope that it will be enough.

-----

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

 

DAM REMOVAL: THE PROMISE VS THE POLITICS

 

A little over a month ago, a cofferdam on California’s Klamath River was taken down.  Its removal marked the last step in a long process that gave Pacific salmon and steelhead (sea-run rainbow) trout access to hundreds of miles of historic habitat, spawning grounds, and nursery areas, access that had been denied to them for more than a century.

It didn’t take long before a biologist for the Stae of Oregon spotted what was the first chinook salmon to enter the river and ascend beyond the former site of the cofferdam, where the far larger Iron Gate Dam had also once stood, as it swam toward the place where it would hopefully mate, spawn the next generation of salmon and, its life’s purpose completed, die.  In death, it will pay its debt forward, enriching the waters where its offspring would live for a brief time before they head towards the sea.

It was the first salmon to ascend the Klamath since 1912, when the river was first dammed.

Restoring salmon and steelhead runs in the Klamath necessitated the largest dam removal project in the history of the United States.  It cost $500 million, funded largely by PacifiCorp, a California utility, and various local water boards, and involved the removal of four separate dams.  Native American communities provided the impetus for the action, which was supported by PacifiCorp, the states of California and Oregon, and various angling and conservation organizations.

According to an article in the National Fisherman, members of the Yurok and Karok tribes began calling for the dams’ removal over two decades ago, after low, stagnant water and high water temperatures, resulting from the dams interrupting the Klamath’s natural flow, led to a gill rot disease that spread through the river’s spawning salmon, killing 70,000 adult fish, in 2002.

Scientists believe that it will be years before salmon and steelhead fully repopulate the Klamath watershed.  Removing the dams is a first step, but a watershed is more than just a river; it encompasses the entire basin, from the uplands that catch winter snows and funnel snowmelt and rain into the waterway to the vegetated banks that hold back the silt and keep it from suffocating the pebbled spawning beds or impairing the aquatic invertebrates on which the juvenile salmon will feed.

The Klamath River basin suffered significant damage during the century and more when the dams were in place; it will now be necessary to restore the native plants needed to fully restore the watershed.  That will take an immense amount of work to complete, but that work has already begun.

Still, the return of the first salmon was a major milestone.  Roberta Frost, secretary of the Klamath Tribes, observed that

“The return of our relatives the c’iyaal’s is overwhelming for our tribe.  This is what our members worked for and believed in for so many decades.  I want to honor that work and thank them for their persistence in the face of what felt like an unmovable obstacle.  The salmon are just like our tribal people, and they know where home is and returned as soon as they were able.”

There is reason to hope that the Klamath River’s salmon will eventually thrive.  The story of the Elwha River, on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, is similar to that of the Klamath, although of a somewhat smaller scale.  After decades of advocacy spearheaded by the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe and its supporters, Congress passed a bill that authorized the removal of two hydroelectric dams on the river.  The work, completed in 2014, opened up 70 miles of high-quality habitat that had been denied to the salmon for over a century.

The National Marine Fisheries Service, which has been actively studying the impacts of the Elwha dams’ removal, reported that

“With the barriers removed, aquatic organisms regained access to the entire river.  Anadromous fish such as salmon returned to areas that have been void of such species for a century.

“The free passage has also prompted a rapid increase in salmon life history diversity.  One example is the ‘re-awakening’ of summer steelhead, which is likely originating from up-river resident O. mykiss [rainbow trout] populations.  Species such as Pacific lamprey are also increasing following dam removal…”

So dam removal has been demonstrably beneficial for rivers and their runs of anadromous fish.

While big rivers and Pacific salmon have been getting most of the publicity, the impacts have also been beneficial on smaller East Coast streams.  One of the best examples may be the removal of the Edwards Dam on Maine’s Kennebec River in 1999, which marked the first time that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission refused to renew the license of a hydroelectric dam that its owners wished to continue operating.

The removal of the Edwards Dam opened up an additional 17 miles of the Kennebec River to striped bass, alewives, and American eels, and led to the removal of the Fort Halifax Dam at the mouth of the Sebasticook River, which is the largest tributary of the Kennebec, opening that waterway to anadromous species for the first time in over a century.

In New York, in Maryland, in Massachusetts, and elsewhere along the Atlantic seaboard, the removal of smaller dams has allowed alewives, blueback herring, eels, and other anadromous species access to freshwater habitats and spawning grounds that they have long been denied, sometimes for more than two centuries.

Now, conservationists, anglers, and other advocates for diadromous fish are calling for what would be the biggest dam removal project yet, the removal of the lower four dams on the Snake River.  The National Wildlife Federation argues that

“Removing the four lower Snake River dams would reconnect endangered salmon and steelhead to 5,000 miles of pristine, high-elevation habitat—increasing the Columbia River Basin’s resiliency in the face of a warming climate, and providing salmon and steelhead with a real chance to recover to healthy and abundant populations.”

Trout Unlimited asserts that

“The fact is that salmon and steelhead returns [to their spawning grounds] in the Snake River Basin over the past 5 years have been among the lowest ever recorded.  In 2022, some salmon and steelhead returning to the Snake River have shown some signs of improvement—but only when lumping wild and hatchery fish counts together, and only when compared to terrible recent seasons…

“It is abundantly clear that the lower four Snake River dams are the primary cause of declines to wild salmon in the Snake River basin.  The Snake River basin is the largest, most climate resilient area of salmon habitat left in the lower 48 and contains over 40 percent of all coldwater habitat for Pacific salmon in the entire contiguous United States.  Salmon are resilient creatures, surviving ice ages and a geologically active landscape.  If we give them access to the most significant habitat left in the lower 48, then salmon can once again thrive.”

The Biden Administration seems to have agreed.  In September 2023, it issued a Presidential “Memorandum on Restoring Healthy and Abundant Salmon, Steelhead, and Other Native Fish Populations in the Columbia River Basin,” which acknowledged that

“Actions since 1855, including the Federal Government’s construction and operation of dams in the Basin, have severely depleted fish populations,”

and declared a policy

“…to carry out the requirement of the Pacific Northwest Electric Power Planning and Conservation Act, (Public Law 96-501) to operate, manage, and regulate the [Columbia River System] to adequately protect, mitigate, and enhance fish and wildlife affected by the Federal dams in the Basin in a manner that provides equitable treatment for fish and wildlife with the other purposes for which the Federal dams are managed and operated.”

The Biden Administration seemed to adhere to that policy, as on December 14, 2023, it announced an agreement that,

“when combined with other funding that the Administration is anticipated to deliver to the region, will bring more than $1 billion in new Federal investments to wild fish restoration over the next decade and enable an unprecedented 10-year break from decades-long litigation against the Federal government’s operation of its dams in the Pacific Northwest.”

The agreement was filed in the Federal District Court for the District of Oregon, and will be implemented through a memorandum of understanding between the Federal government, the states of Washington and Oregon, four Native American tribes, and various environmental organizations.  It appeared to set the stage for the possible removal of the Snake River dams.

However, this November’s election has changed the political landscape, ushering in a new administration that is far more friendly to dams and water projects, and far less friendly to salmon and free-flowing rivers, than the administration currently in power.  The election also appears to have handed both houses of Congress to a party that is generally more hostile to dam removal.

That may have doomed the dam removal effort on the Snake River, because such removal requires the approval of Congress.  Even before the recent election, the hydropower industry and its legislative allies spoke out against removing the dams, with Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-WA) claiming that

“This final package, which would make our region’s dams effectively defunct, confirms what we’ve all known for years.  The Biden Administration is catering to the wishes of extreme environmental activists that do not understand both the importance of the dams to our region, and the consequences of their proposed actions.”

Newhouse and other legislators introduced a package of nine bills that would prohibit removal of the Snake River dams.  At the same time, a representative of the affected tribes spoke out in favor of the dams’ removal and in support of the agreement.  Shannon F. Wheeler, Chairman of the Nez Perce Tribe, observed that

“The Federal dams on the lower Snake and mainstream Columbia rivers have had—and continue to have—devastating impacts on the salmon and our people, burdening our Treaty partnership.  So today, as Six Sovereigns joining together with the United States to advance salmon restoration throughout the Basin—including preparation for the breach of the four lower Snake River dams—we are also witnessing the restoration of Tribal Treaties to their rightful place under the rule of law.”

Thus, the table is set for continued conflict.

The bills introduced in the House, which would prevent the removal of the Snake River dams, were never passed and signed into law.  The Federal government seems to have entered into a legally binding agreement to protect the salmon, and if it steps away from that agreement, perhaps by refusing to remove the dams, it may well be subject to further litigation and perhaps an adverse court ruling.

At the same time, with Republicans now controlling the Senate, there is a very good chance that legislation to prevent the removal of the Snake River dams would pass both houses of Congress should it be reintroduced, and there is little doubt that it would be signed into law.  After all, in the previous Trump administration, the Environmental Protection Agency took the remarkable position that

“One option for addressing the conflict created by the inability to achieve applicable water quality criteria at all times and in all places is for the States to make changes to their applicable designated uses.  The federal regulation…provides requirements for establishing, modifying and removing designated uses.  A state may designate a use or remove a use that is not an existing use, if the state conducts a ‘use attainability analysis’ that demonstrates that attaining the use is not feasible…”

What Trump’s EPA was effectively suggesting was that if dams rendered rivers such as the Snake unable to support salmon spawns, the answer was not to remove the dams, but simply to remove “salmon spawning” from the list of designated uses of the river. 

While that might lead to the salmon’s disappearance from the river, it would make it far easier to leave the dams in place.

We could expect the same sort of logic from the incoming administration, given a president who once spoke of rivers’ waters being

“diverted into the Pacific Ocean,  [emphasis added]”

as if rivers didn’t naturally flow to the sea, and who last appointed a Secretary of the Interior who favored diverting waters away from their natural course, even though their flows were critical to the survival of Pacific salmon runs and endangered fish species, for the benefit of the agricultural industry.

The president who might decide whether to remove the Snake River dams recently—while not president—expressed so little understanding of how rivers flow that he said,

“You have millions of gallons of water pouring down from the north with the snow caps and Canada, and all pouring down and they have essentially a very large faucet.  You turn the faucet and it takes one day to turn it, and it’s massive, it’s as big as the wall of that building right there behind you.  You turn that, and all of that water aimlessly goes into the Pacific, and if they turned it back, all of that water would come down here and right into Los Angeles.”

It’s not completely clear what Trump was talking about, as there is no river system that can be simply diverted either to Los Angeles or into the Pacific Ocean—the badly overtaxed Colorado River probably comes closest to his description, although its usually dry delta opens not on the Pacific, but on the Gulf of California—but it is pretty clear that someone with his unique understanding of rivers is probably not going to do much to protect anadromous fish from the impacts of dams.

And that’s unfortunate, because the effort to remove dams for the benefit of anadromous fish has gained real momentum in recent years.  Many fish stocks, on both coasts, have benefitted from dam removals, and it will be sad to see removal efforts are abandoned.

However, given the current political environment, it is likely that the last, best chance to save declining runs of Pacific salmon, as well as other diadromous species, may well expire in just two more months.

FULL CIRCLE?

 

I caught my first fish in 1956, when I was barely two years old and walking on two legs was still something of a novelty.  It was a bergall—more properly, a cunner—and I use the word “caught” advisedly, because while I did have one hand on the rod, and was told that I did manage to laboriously crank the little wrasse to the surface, my father kept a firm grip on the whole assemblage to make sure that my grasp on the rod didn’t fail and let everything fall overboard.

In the years between then and now, as my size and strength steadily increased, I caught quite a few fish, all but the first handful without the same degree of parental assistance.  They were mostly eels, winter flounder, and snapper blues at first, but quickly progressed to other things like striped bass, tautog, adult bluefish and cod, various critters that swam under a Florida bridge, and eventually bigger stuff like mako sharks, sailfish, and bluefin.

I’ve seen stocks of fish wax and wane, sometimes to wax abundant once more, sometimes to just disappear.  I’ve seen new species invade my old fishing grounds, and old, familiar targets retreat to other waters.

During those years, Congress passed the Fishery Conservation and Management Act of 1976 (now, the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act), the Atlantic Striped Bass Conservation Act of 1984, the Atlantic Coastal Fisheries Cooperative Management Act of 1993, the Sustainable Fisheries Act of 1996, the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Reauthorization Act of 2006, and the Modernizing Recreational Fisheries Management Act of 2018.

During those years, the striped bass stock thrived, became overfished, collapsed, rebuilt, increased, declined, became overfished, and might be on the way to collapsing again.  Cod collapsed, the southern stock of winter flounder collapsed, smelt and tomcod disappeared from most waters south of Maine, and the North Atlantic stock of shortfin mako shark dropped low enough that all harvest, throughout the North Atlantic Basin, has been outlawed; it has a 50% chance of rebuilding over the next 50 years.

At the same time, once-overfished stocks of black sea bass and scup were fully rebuilt, than soared to more than twice their target abundance.  The bluefin tuna population, facing unsustainable commercial fishing pressure, dropped sharply throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s, but seems to be rebuilding nicely; as I write this during the second week of November, triple-digit bluefin are still being caught within sight of Long Island’s shore.  Bluefish, once so abundant as to be a pest, became overfished, but a rebuilding plan seems to be working, and the stock may be rebuilt within three or four years.  Even weakfish, which had fallen to just 3 percent of their spawning potential a few years ago, now seem to be showing signs of revival; whether it will last, or the stock will decline again, is yet to be seen.

Looking back on over 60 years on and around salt water, it might be time to try to figure out whether people—anglers, commercial fishermen, fishery managers, and anyone and everyone else who might be in a position to influence fisheries policy—seem to have learned any lessons in the years since the Soviet Union launched Sputnik and Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected to his second term as President of the United States.

I’m really not sure that they have.

Congress passed the Fishery Conservation and Management Act of 1976 because the nation’s fish stocks were in serious decline, in large part because big factory trawlers belonging to a host of European and Asian nations were sweeping the life off the continental shelf.  So legislators pushed the foreigners 200 miles offshore but then, apparently thinking that overfishing by the United States fleet was somehow less malign than overfishing by boats from other nations, provided cheap loans to U.S. fishermen so that they could buy bigger boats and more efficient gear, and begin where the foreign fleets left off, killing more fish than the stocks could sustain and driving the abundance of just about all of the important commercial species—many of which were also important recreational targets—low enough that the stocks were deemed overfished.

At the time, the law required that stocks be managed for “optimum yield,” just as it does today, but back then, “optimum” was defined as

“with respect to the yield from a fishery…the amount of fish which will provide the greatest overall benefit to the Nation, with particular reference to food production and recreational opportunities; and which is prescribed as such on the basis of the maximum sustainable yield from such fishery, as modified by any relevant economic, social, or ecological factor.  [emphasis added, internal formatting omitted]”

In theory, fishing mortality should never exceed maximum sustainable yield, but since fishermen could always make more money if they brought more fish back to the dock, at least in the short term, yields were regularly “modified” upward, well above maximum sustainable yield, for economic reasons, and so fish stocks continued to decline.

Things got bad enough that, by the early 1990s, a lot of boats were staying tied up at the docks because fish were so scarce that it was no longer economically viable to go out and try to catch them.  In response, Congress chose to amend federal fisheries law by passing the Sustainable Fisheries Act of 1996, which among other things prohibited overfishing, required overfished stocks to be rebuilt within a time certain, generally not more than 10 years, and changed the definition of “optimum” yield by deleting the word “modified” and replacing it with “reduced,” so that annual quotas that exceeded maximum sustainable yield would no longer be entertained.

But fishermen are a creative bunch, and found ways to get around the Sustainable Fisheries Act’s restrictions.  One of the easiest ways to do that was to forego annual quotas altogether, and instead adopt so-called “input controls” such as limiting a boat’s days at sea, or limiting the size or horsepower of any new vessel that was replacing an old one on a fishing permit.

While such measures worked in theory, and so technically complied with the law, they failed in practice.  Stocks of Atlantic cod, winter flounder, and other species were still chronically overfished, and steadily approached the brink of stock collapse.  In order to close the loophole, Congress acted again, passing the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Reauthorization Act of 2006 which, among other things, required that all fishery management plans

“establish a mechanism for specifying annual catch limits in the plan (including a multiyear plan), implementing regulations, or annual specifications at a level such that overfishing does not occur in the fishery, including measures to ensure accountability.”

The law further requires that when preparing such plans, regulations, or specifications, a regional fishery management council must

“develop annual catch limits for each of its managed fisheries that may not exceed the fishing level recommended by its scientific and statistical committee or the peer review process established [elsewhere in the law].”

That pretty well stopped fishermen sitting on the regional fishery management councils from finding ways around annual quotas, and helped to prevent overfishing, but it created another problem.  Fishermen—and, in particular, recreational fishermen—wanted to kill and take home more fish than the new regulations allowed.  Because there are so many recreational fishermen, and because their harvest, unlike that of commercial fishermen, can’t be counted and managed in near real-time, they often exceeded their recreational harvest limit, and so faced more restrictive regulations, intended to constrain their landings to or below the science-based limit, in the following year.

Restricting anglers to a science-based harvest limit was good for the fish, but it meant that for-hire vessels—party and charter boats—carried fewer passengers, and that the fishing tackle industry sold less product, reducing the profits of both.  Thus, the recreational industry, along with “anglers’ rights” groups such as the Coastal Conservation Association and the philosophically similar, but now-defunct Recreational Fishing Alliance, began to rail against the federal fishery management system.  The result was the Modernizing Recreational Fishery Management Act of 2018, the so-called “Modern Fish Act,” which was intended to create management paths that would let anglers escape their obligation to keep landings within an annual catch limit, and so put more fish in their coolers while putting more cash in the recreational fishing industry’s coffers.

Empowered by the Modern Fish Act, the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council, along with the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (which is not bound by the terms of Magnuson-Stevens), set about finding a way to let anglers regularly exceed their annual catch limit of four popular species, bluefish, summer flounder and, in particular, scup and black sea bass, as the spawning stock biomass of the latter two species has risen to more then twice the biomass target in recent years.

The result was something that was called both the “Harvest Control Rule” (which, strictly speaking, it wasn’t) and the “Percent Change Approach,” which established a methodology for setting a so-called “recreational harvest target” that could be well above the Recreational Harvest Limit or the recreational sector’s Annual Catch Limit, and that, when combined with the commercial sector’s Annual Catch Limit, could lead to landings exceeding the overall Annual Catch Limit, the Acceptable Biological Catch, or even the Overfishing Limit.

The Harvest Control Rule/Percent Change Approach was not warmly embraced by the Mid-Atlantic Council’s Scientific and Statistical Committee and was ultimately rejected by Mid-Atlantic Council staff.  However, it was enthusiastically embraced by the National Marine Fisheries Service’s Greater Atlantic Regional Fisheries Office, which went to extraordinary lengths to convince the Mid-Atlantic Council to adopt it.

The approach has now been used to set black sea bass recreational management measures for 2023 and 2024, and will again be used to set 2025 measures.  After that, it will sunset, although it is virtually certain that the Mid-Atlantic Council will either approve its future use or, more likely, replace it with a modified approach that will also allow the recreational sector to exceed the Recreational Harvest Limit with absolute impunity.

In early 2023, the Natural Resources Defense Council sought judicial review of the Harvest Control Rule/Percent Change Approach, but the court ultimately sided with NMFS, finding that the Annual Catch Limit was not ultimately a hard limit on catch, and that optimum yield could even allow maximum sustainable yield to be exceeded for a year or so, provided that spawning stock biomass remained above target, based on relevant social and economic factors.

A month or so before the court decision was handed down, the Mid-Atlantic Council and ASMFC’s Summer Flounder, Scup, and Black Sea Bass Management Board were presented with a new Management Track Stock Assessment for Black Sea Bass.  The stock assessment found, among other things, that black sea bass biomass was about 20 percent lower than previously believed, and that both the biomass target and the maximum sustainable yield of the stock were more than 20 percent lower, too.  Based on that stock assessment, the Mid-Atlantic Council’s Scientific and Statistical Committee recommended that black sea bass landings be reduced by 20 percent, which seemed a logical finding.

However, the Management Board disagreed, choosing to ignore both the findings of the stock assessment and the advice of the scientists on the committee, and instead carried the 2024 black sea bass specifications over into 2025—even though, by doing so, the combined annual catch limits for the commercial and recreational sectors would exceed the stock assessment’s calculation of the Overfishing Limit.  The Mid-Atlantic Council, bound by the provisions of Magnuson-Stevens, accepted the scientists’ advice.

The National Marine Fisheries Service, apparently taking the position that only the regional fishery management councils, and not NMFS itself, are legally required to set annual catch limits at or below the scientists’ recommended level, rejected the Mid-Atlantic Council’s recommendation and instead emulated the Management Board’s actions, carrying over 2024 specifications into 2025.  NMFS thus adopted an Annual Catch Limit for the combined sectors that is about 20 percent above the Overfishing Limit set in the stock assessment.

Thus, federal fishery managers now appear to have come full circle.

They began in the late 1970s, allowing regional fishery management councils to set annual harvest levels above maximum sustainable yield, in order to provide greater short-term economic benefits to the fishing fleet.

That didn’t work out too well, so federal managers found themselves bound by a new law that prohibited overfishing.  And as managers worked within that law, they began to end the overfishing of many stocks, and once-overfished stocks began to rebuild.  Yet some regional fishery management councils, particularly the New England Fishery Management Council, tried to find ways around the new law’s strict requirements.  Thus, they came under additional strictures, that required them to adopt management plans containing science-based annual catch limits, which had the effect of further limiting overfishing, and helped more stocks to rebuild.

But the recreational fishing industry convinced Congress to give federal managers more leeway to manage fish stocks, so in the Mid-Atlantic region, they approved management measures that again allowed the regional fishery management Council to adopt annual recreational catch limits that, when combined with the commercial limits, exceeded the scientific recommendations and could at times exceed maximum sustainable yield, all to accommodate certain social and economic factors.

And now, we find the Greater Atlantic Regional Fisheries Office going a step further and, again yielding to economic considerations, setting annual specifications for black sea bass that not only exceed the recommendations of the Mid-Atlantic Council’s Scientific and Statistical Committee, but also ignore the best scientific information available, the most recent Management Track Stock Assessment.

No one seems to be exercising any caution.  Economic factors are driving management decisions even though, this time, it's probably not permitted by law.

It’s almost like we’re in the 1970s all over again.

Of course, the black sea bass stock is supposedly still at 219 percent of the biomass target, and not overfished.  But the stock assessment’s projections still show abundance declining over in the next few years.  Reports from the 2024 season indicate that anglers in the northeast caught fewer and smaller sea bass than they did in 2023, making those projections more credible.

At the same time, ocean bottom temperatures in the northeast were reportedly cooler than normal in 2024.  Since black sea bass recruitment is dependent on warm, saline water at the edge of the continental shelf, where the Year 0 sea bass spend their first winter, we might easily see poor recruitment this year.

So at a time when we seem to have an abundant, but declining, stock largely made up of just a few, relatively young year classes and dependent on good annual recruitment to maintain its size, facing cold water conditions this winter that may significantly hamper the recruitment of Year 1 fish in 2025, we also have federal fishery managers who, instead of following the advice of the stock assessment and the Mid-Atlantic’s Scientific and Statistical Committee, have adopted specifications that make it likely that the stock will be overfished in 2025.

That would seem to be a recipe for failure.

Just about everyone is familiar with George Santayana’s quote,

“Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it,”

although when we look at the way Mid-Atlantic fisheries managers, after shaking off their earlier problems and finding some real success, are now seemingly coming full circle, repeating the mistakes of the past as they move into the future, Karl Marx’s comment that history will repeat itself

“the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce”

may be more apropos.

 

GRADUALLY AND THEN SUDDENLY--HOW FISH STOCKS COLLAPSE

 

When Ernest Hemingway wrote The Sun Also Rises nearly a century ago, he created the bankrupt character Mike Campbell who, when asked how he fell into bankruptcy, responded

“Gradually and then suddenly.”

The phrase has been used so often that it’s become a cliché, but it does provide a pretty good description of how fish stocks collapse.

That was certainly how it seemed when the striped bass stock crashed in the late 1970s and early 1980s.  I was bass fishing pretty intensively back then, going out before work just about every morning and after work many nights.  In retrospect, we could see the collapse coming, but it came gradually enough, and disguised itself well enough, that most anglers and, seemingly, most fisheries managers were nonetheless surprised when the fish were suddenly gone.

We’d been spoiled for a few years by the big 1970 year class, the largest ever recorded up to that time, which first showed up in Long Island Sound as two-year-old, 14-inch-long fish that seemed to swim in every creek, along every sod bank, and around every tide-washed rock along the Connecticut shore.  The small fish were joined by older, larger bass spawned during the 1950s and ‘60s, giving us a chance to fish on what might have been the most age- and size-diverse population of striped bass that I have ever seen.  While the small fish were everywhere, there were also significant numbers of 40s and 50s, and even a couple of 60s, in the mix.

We watched, and caught, the 1970 year class as its fish grew larger, producing a vibrant fishery for school-sized striped bass.  But sometime in the latter half of the ‘70s, we started noticing something else—the really small bass, the nuisance 14- and 16-inchers that, for a few years, had been an annoyance as they attacked and got themselves hooked on lures meant for larger fish, had grown scarce.  By 1978 or so, we weren’t seeing much under three or four pounds, and a year after that, nothing under four or five.

And the bigger school fish—those from the ’70 year class—weren’t as abundant as they should have been.

But the absence of school fish was largely ignored because of to the sheer numbers of big bass that shadowed the menhaden schools and were being caught by anyone with the minimal skills needed to snag one of the menhaden and let it swim around the boat.  I worked in a tackle shop during the summer in ‘78, and just about every day, one or more of our customers, many of whom barely know how to tie a hook to the end of their line, would drag big bass up to the shop’s door, wanting to get them weighed in and photographed.

A few people, most notably Bob Pond, the creator of the Atom line of striped bass lures, were aware of the declining number of smaller fish, and tried to convince anglers and fishery managers that they were facing a serious problem.  But the number of large bass that were being caught blinded just about everyone to the coming crash, and the plain truth was that, in the short term, encouraging anglers to kill more striped bass was good for business.  The owner of the shop where I worked used to get enraged when I spoke to customers about striped bass conservation.

So the stock collapse gradually evolved, with fewer and fewer small bass in the water as more and more big bass were being removed from the spawning stock.  Commercial netters were still seining truckloads of bass from New York beaches, while down in North Carolina, one group of fishermen—a crew of baymen from New York’s Long Island—dragged so many bass onto the beach that they flooded the markets, were unable to sell their entire catch, and so ended up burying tens of thousands of pounds of big female striped bass in the Outer Banks sand.

But no one was all that concerned because there were plenty of big striped bass in the ocean until, suddenly, they weren’t there anymore.

Most of the large, spawning females had been removed from the spawning stock, and there were almost no smaller bass growing up to replace them.  At some point, the stock reached a sort of tipping point where there were no longer enough bass to support the recreational and commercial fisheries.  Charter boats went out of business, commercial fishermen lost a valuable product, and some fisheries managers—finally—began wondering what they might have to do to reverse the fish’s decline and perhaps nurse the stock back to health.

The response, when it finally came, completely shut down some states’ fisheries, and resulted in federal legislation, the Atlantic Striped Bass Conservation Act, which gave theAtlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission the authority to prepare a fisherymanagement plan for the entire coastal population, and to compel every statebetween Maine and North Carolina to put such plan in place.  The ASMFC ultimately decided to protect the1982 year class, which, while still below average, had been the largest inrecent years, and limit annual fishing mortality to no more than 5% of thespawning stock each year.

The management plan proved successful, and the striped bass eventually recovered from the crash, but it took over a decade to make it happen.

While the striped bass is arguably the glamor fish of the northeastern coast, we saw the same sort of pattern emerge with the southern New England/mid-Atlantic stock of winter flounder, a species that was once so abundant throughout the region that it was largely taken for granted.

When I was a boy, we started fishing for flounder sometime in March—St. Patrick’s Day was the unofficial start of the season—and stopped when the creeks where we fished off the docks got their first thin skim of ice in December.  The flounder were mostly small—most of the fish that folks kept started around eight inches long, and there weren’t very many that weighed as much as a pound—but there were a lot of them; we caught them off docks and from shore, from rowboats in the creeks and harbors, and from somewhat larger boats in the coves and open water.  After I moved to the South Shore of Long Island in ’83, and started flounder fishing in Great South Bay, I ran into more and bigger fish than I did off the Connecticut shore.

But what I didn’t know was that, by then, the flounder stock was already gradually declining, and that it would, like the striped bass, suddenly collapse in a few more years.  Although, in the case of the flounder, the decline may have begun before I was born.

We know that because, in 1961, a scientist who worked for the State of New York named John C. Poole published a comprehensive study of Great South Bay’s flounder, using tagging data that went back as far as 1937.  Today, there are biologists at New York’s Stony Brook University who are also doing a considerable amount of winter flounder research.  When I spoke to one of them about Poole’s work, he told me that the tag data Poole used suggested that, even before 1960, Great South Bay’s winter flounder were already experiencing overfishing, as the fishing mortality rate exceeded what would be considered a sustainable rate today.  And when the flounder fishery in the already heavily-fished Great South Bay was compared to the fisheries in the less pressured Moriches and Shinnecock bays, it was clear that the fish in the former bay were both smaller and less abundant.

The impacts of excessive harvest were already being felt.

But the flounder’s decline was gradual enough that the decline didn’t manifest itself for another quarter-century.  In 1984, there were still enough flounder in New York’s waters, and still enough angling effort focused on them, that the state’s recreational fishermen took home almost 14,500,000 fish that year.  But at that point, what had been a gradual decline accelerated.

In 1986, landings fell to barely 6,000,000 fish, less than half of what they had been just two years before.  By 1989, only five years after recreational winter flounder landings had peaked, they fell to less than 3,200,000 fish.

And the decline didn’t stop there.  Suddenly, the flounder stock was in free fall.  New York's annual landings dropped below 1 million fish for the first time in 1994, when they barely topped 667,000.  They sort-of stabilized there for a while, before dropping farther, hitting 410,000 fish a decade later, 115,000 in 2008, 15,500 in 2015, and then 36 in 2018, 126 in 2020, 128 in 2022, and a surprising 2,639 last spring, although since 2010, so few flounder have been landed, making the data so very uncertain, that NMFS advises that the Marine Recreational Information Program does not support the use of such inexact estimates.

To say that, at the end, the winter flounder stock collapsed “suddenly” would be understatement.

I mention those things because the striped bass seems to again be entering dire straits, with the stockoverfished and the past six years’ recruitment even worse than anything leadingup to the last stock collapse.  Yet there is still very good fishing for bigger fish in some times and places, and some people—mostly people in the fishing industry—are using that localized abundance to argue that the striped bass stock is in good shape.

But the last stock collapse has become part of the fishery’s lore, something that striped bass anglers who weren’t even alive at the time nonetheless talk about as if they'd been there.  Some even warn that the same sort of crash could be coming again.  But there are others, particularly within the management community, who respond that that “the stock is still a lot better off than it was in the ‘80s,” implying that the worries about a new stock collapse aren’t justified by the data.

And it’s true that, according to the last stock assessment update, female spawning stock biomass at the end of 2023 was estimated to be about 86,536 metric tons, compared to a spawning stock biomass of about 15,260 metric tons in 1983.  The SSB is nearly four times the size that it was during the depths of the last collapse.

However, we should never forget that biomass is measured in metric tons, and that the increasing size of the fish remaining in the population can partially mask a decline in numbers. 

Right now, a steadily increasing proportion of the striped bass population is more than eight years old.  As of 2023, spawning stock biomass was even increasing, a result of the remaining fish in the spawning stock growing larger while the last good year class, the slightly above-average 2018s, are growing into the SSB.  But the 2018s represent the last of the decent year classes; beginning with the 2019s, all of the subsequent year classes were very small.

Also, the current spawning stock does not exhibit a diversity of age and size classes; the 2011, 2014, 2015, and 2018 year classes provide much of the biomass, along with some very large bass from the big 2001 and 2003 spawns.  Although all but the 2018s will be outside the recreational slot next season, they’re not immune to release mortality, nor to commercial harvest in most ocean states, while natural mortality will continue to take its toll.  As older fish are removed from the spawning stock, there will be very few younger fish coming in to replace them.

That doesn’t mean that we’re looking at a looming stock collapse.  If nothing else, management is a lot better than it was in the early 1980s, when there was a coastal minimum size of 16 inches (fork length) for the commercial and recreational fisheries, a 10- or 12-inch minimum in the Chesapeake Bay, no recreational bag limits (except in New Jersey, where the limit was 10) and no commercial quotas.  Hopefully, managers will do the right thing and put in whatever measures are necessary to avert another collapse.

On the other hand, the Maryland juvenile abundance indices for the years 1975-1979 were 6.69, 4.91, 4.85, 8.45, and 4.24, while the Maryland JAIs for the years 2020-2024 were 2.48, 3.20, 3.62, 1.02, and 2.0, so while better management might let us keep a few more big fish in the population for a few extra years, we’re also producing significantly fewer young bass to replace what is lost.

Looking at the numbers, we might easily argue that if a stock collapse is approaching at all, it is doing so very, very gradually.

Yet if managers shirk in their duty, and don’t do what is needed to conserve the stock, we may suddenly find that the striped bass are gone.

After all, it happened that way before.