MAKING SENSE OF MENHADEN MANAGEMENT

 

Menhaden management has been a hot issue in fisheries management over the past couple of years, and that’s probably not unexpected, as it’s hard to recall a time when some sort of menhaden controversy wasn’t on the table.

Back in the early 1970s, when I was just out of high school and fishing in the western end of Long Island Sound, the presence of the “bunker boats”—purse seiners from various operations that were eventually consolidated into the company that became Omega Protein—was outraging anglers because “they’re taking all the bait” and destroying lobster traps and other fixed gear, leading some folks to do things like sink engine blocks chained to grapnels, in the hope that they’d tangle and destroy any seines that got to close to the bottom of the Sound.

When I got involved in fisheries management at the national level, about 30 years ago, menhaden was still a hot issue.  Back then, it was all about transforming the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Atlantic Menhaden Management Board and related bodies, which were then completely controlled by the menhaden industry, into independent scientific and management panels similar to those used for all of the other ASMFC-managed species.  Conservation and recreational fisheries groups joined together, put in a lot of work, and eventually achieved their goal in 2001, with the adoption of Amendment 1 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Menhaden.

Since then, menhaden debates were largely about how many fish could be safely removed from the population without causing harm.

In 2006, as a purely precautionary measure, the Management Board adopted Addendum II to Amendment 1 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Menhaden, which capped the amount of menhaden that might be removed from the Chesapeake Bay.  The intent was to prevent localized depletion of the menhaden resource, even though localized depletion has never been formally documented in the Bay or anywhere else.  That so-called “Bay Cap” has been reduced in later management actions, the most recent being a reduction to 51,000 metric tons—less than half the original cap—in 2017, with the adoption of Amendment 3 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Menhaden.

Such reductions were made even though localized depletion had still not been convincingly documented.

Amendment 3 also set the stage for the use of ecological reference points, which would allow menhaden managers to consider the species’ role as a forage fish, and manage it to accord with the needs of predators, particularly the striped bass, and not merely for single-species sustainability.

As one might suspect, all of those years of controversy and debate resulted in a lot of people getting emotionally invested in the menhaden issue, something that only got worse after 2008, when author H. Bruce Franklin wrote The Most Important Fish in the Sea, a well-written but perhaps not entirely accurate book about Atlantic menhaden, its ecological role, and the impacts of the menhaden fishery.  That volume captured the imagination of a surprising number of people, turning them into advocates for more restrictive menhaden management.

And the investment wasn’t merely emotional.  A lot of the big foundations that provide grants to various conservation groups were concerned about maintaining intact marine ecosystems, and part of that concern involved maintaining populations of forage fish, including menhaden, that were large enough to supply predators’ needs.  Those foundations were willing to fund menhaden advocacy initiatives, and the promise of at least semi-reliable funding inspired many conservation groups to keep menhaden management at the top of their agendas.  That, in turn, funded more than a few consultants who, over the course of a couple of decades, were able to pay their mortgages and feed their families, in large part from the money they generated from menhaden-related work.

Menhaden became what I call a “political fish,” which results in the management debates being largelyn driven by emotion and ideology rather than by dispassionate scientific analysis, a situation that makes any intelligent discussion of the issues more difficult to conduct.

Thirty years after I first got involved in the menhaden debate, some things—particularly, the fishery management plan—have changed, but some things remain very much the same.

People are still claiming that the menhaden reduction fleet is catching up all the baitfish.  Menhaden advocates still tend to sensationalize, and distort, the facts.  The reduction fishery continues to be demonized.  There are still debates over the size of the Chesapeake Bay cap.  And emotional, ideological arguments are still getting in the way of rational management action.

There is also one very big change, that just occurred over the past year.

The most recent menhaden stock assessment found that menhaden fecundity—the number of eggs produced, which is used as a proxy for spawning stock biomass—is substantially less than previously believed, and that the fishing mortality rate is substantially higher.  

Anecdotal evidence coming from fishermen all along the coast suggest that most of the menhaden they’re seeing are unusually small, perhaps one- or two-year-old fish.  Such truncation of the age/size structure is often a symptom of too many fish being removed from the population.

While the stock is neither overfished nor experiencing overfishing—yet—landings need to be substantially cut to get them back to the target level.

On the afternoon of August 5, the Atlantic Menhaden Management Board will meet for its summer meeting.  It’s not going to discuss a cut in menhaden landings—it’s saving that debate for October.  Instead, it is going to spend almost all of the meeting debating, perfecting, and hopefully approving a new Draft Addendum II to Amendment 3 of the Atlantic Menhaden Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Public Comment.

Draft Addendum II is all about managing the menhaden reduction fishery in Virginia’s section of the Chesapeake Bay, which are possibly the only inland waters on the Atlantic Coast where the reduction boats are still allowed to operate.

The proposed “Statement of the Problem” in the Draft Addendum provides a good idea of what the document hopes to address.

“The availability of menhaden in Chesapeake Bay may be affected by changes in total abundance, size distribution of the population, and timing of spatial distribution in the Bay, which can be caused by fishing pressure, environmental conditions, habitat sustainability and/or changing predator pressures on a limited spatial and temporal scale.  Such changes in menhaden availability may affect the species’ ability to fulfill its ecological and/or economic functions.  Recent observations of below average commercial fisheries landings and concerning population trends in several species that use menhaden as prey within Chesapeake Bay suggest that availability of menhaden in Chesapeake Bay may be changing due to one or more of the above drivers…  [emphasis added]”

So we know that there seem to be problems in the Chesapeake Bay, with respect to menhaden abundance and distribution, commercial menhaden landings, and perhaps menhaden availability to predators, but we also know that there is a lot of uncertainty surrounding the existence and the causes of those issues.  Thus, the above statement uses a lot of hedging language—“may” appears three times and “can” appears once over the course of just three long sentences—without a single statement that uses words like “does,” “causes,” and “will”, which would clearly allege a relationship between menhaden and any of the problematic conditions.

The information just isn’t there.

Thus, the Draft Addendum also notes that

“there are currently not sufficient scientific data available to comprehensively characterize the abundance and distribution of menhaden throughout Chesapeake Bay and the influence of fishing pressure on menhaden.”

That puts the Management Board in a bind, because many members are reluctant to impose more restrictive management measures on the menhaden fishery when there isn’t clear scientific evidence suggesting that those measures are needed.

The Commonwealth of Virginia has recently agreed to fund a menhaden study that ought to provide some of the badly needed answers, but good research doesn’t happen overnight.  A very experienced fisheries manager, with an intimate knowledge of the Chesapeake Bay, recently told me that results of the research might not be published for five years or so.

Meanwhile, managers are effectively flying blind with respect to Bay-specific menhaden issues.

 

That being the case, an argument can certainly be made that managers should match high levels of uncertainty with high levels of precaution when adopting management measures.  It is far too easy to overlook a threat to the stock when the information on hand is ambiguous—if the relevant information exists at all.

The current 51,000 metric ton cap on the reduction fishery in the Chesapeake Bay is the prime example of the Management Board adopting a precautionary management measure in the face of uncertain and/or nonexistent data.

The Draft Addendum would perpetuate such precautionary approach, while addressing three intertwined issues.

The first of those is how to deal with the Bay Cap.  Currently, the Cap is arbitrarily set at 51,000 metric tons, and is not directly related to the overall annual catch limit; when the ACL was reduced by 20% last fall, the Bay Cap didn’t change.

Intuitively, that seems wrong. 

An initial, gut reaction would probably suggest that if the overall annual catch limit is cut, the Bay Cap should be cut by a similar percentage.  If fewer menhaden need to be removed from the ocean, it seems sensible to also remove fewer menhaden from the Chesapeake Bay.  The Draft Addendum reflects such concerns with a pair of options, saying,

“Therefore, this draft addendum considers a one-time reduction in the Bay Cap in consideration of recent or upcoming changes to the TAC and setting the Bay Cap as a proportion of the TAC so that it changes automatically with future changes to the TAC.  [emphasis added]”

To make ingsit clear, because the language is a little ambiguous, the Draft Addendum offers two different options.  One of those options would be a one-time change to the Cap, which would fall into a range somewhere between status quo and a 50% reduction. 

That doesn’t seem unreasonable.  If the Total Allowable Catch is reduced, because too many fish are being landed, it seems reasonable to reduce the Bay Cap, too, so too much of the overall harvest doesn’t take place in the relatively restricted waters of the Chesapeake Bay.

The problem with that sort of one-time reduction is that, if the Bay Cap needs to be reduced again, it will require at least another addendum, and close to a year of time, to get the job done.

To get around that problem, a second option would automatically tie changes in the Bay Cap to changes to the Total Allowable Catch.  The option isn’t as simple as just changing the TAC and the Cap by the same percentage, and there are a couple of permutations to the way the Bay Cap reduction might be achieved.  One, designated Sub-Option C1a-e, would link the change in the Bay Cap to a defined percentage of the overall TAC, within a limited range defined by a high of 27.3%, which represents the current relationship between the TAC and the Bay Cap, and a low value of 13.6%, which represents a 50% reduction in the proportion of overall menhaden landings that might come from the Chesapeake Bay.

While it might seem attractive to have a smaller percentage of the overall catch taken from the Chesapeake Bay, it’s important to note that this option addresses a change to the Bay Cap, not merely a reduction.  Unlike the one-time reduction described earlier, which can only cut the total amount of menhaden removed from the Bay by the reduction fishery, tying the Bay Cap to the TAC means that if the TAC is increased, the Bay Cap will increase, too.  If the TAC is increased enough, the Bay Cap could even exceed its current 51,000 metric tons.

The problem is that, until we know whether local environmental conditions require menhaden in the Chesapeake to be managed differently, and perhaps more conservatively, than the coastwide menhaden stock, matching coastwide increases with increases to the Bay Cap might prove counterproductive.

Sub-Option C2 a-e addresses that issue by discarding the percent-of-overall-TAC approach in favor of upper and lower limits on the Bay Cap.  Options range from the most conservative, which doesn’t allow the Cap to exceed the current 51,000 mt, with no lower limit to what the Bay Cap might be, to the least conservative, which would allow the Cap to increase to 87,216 metric tons, and wouldn’t allow it to decrease below 25,500 mt.

I suspect that all three of those broad options will remain in the Draft Addendum, so that the public can express their preferences, although the Management Board might winnow out a few of the possible choices to make the document a little easier for the public to understand.

In the end, when it comes time for the Management Board to pick one for the final version of Addendum II, I think that, for now, the one-time reduction is the right way to go.  In principle, I heartily agree with something recently published by the American Saltwater Guides Association:

“The Chesapeake Bay is not a scaled-down version of the ocean.  It is a distinct ecological system with its own patterns of localized depletion, its own forage demands from predators, and a long record of concentrated industrial harvest.  Tying the Bay Cap to the ocean quota removes the Board’s ability to manage the Bay independently and on its own scientific merits.  It treats a critical nursery and feeding area as just another line on a spreadsheet.”

Maybe in five years, when the research is done and conclusions are reached, we’ll find that the Chesapeake really is a “scaled-down version of the ocean,” that localized depletion still can’t be proven, and that, no special management measures are needed for the menhaden within the Chesapeake Bay..

Maybe we’ll find just the opposite, and learn that the Bay-specific measures are clearly required.

But until managers have clear scientific guidance on those issues, giving the Board the discretion to manage the Bay as an independent ecosystem will be the right way to go.

A separate option, designated Option 3.3, would, if adopted, require the Management Board to revisit the Bay Cap every three years, to ensure that it remains at an appropriate level.  That seems to make sense, and hopefully, the Management Board will keep it in the Draft Addendum and, eventually, in the final version of Addendum II.

Finally, the Draft Addendum asks whether the reduction fishery should be free to catch the entire Bay Cap in a relatively short period, should the fish be available, or whether the season should be broken down into three separate periods, each with its own quota.  The latter option is proposed, because the Management Board perceived a

“potential for a concentration of reduction fishery landings in a short time period, as seen in 2023 and 2024, when over 50% of the Bay reduction fishery landings were taken in a 6-week period in mid-summer.  When this occurs, it is possible that these higher-than-normal catch rates could affect the availability of menhaden to other fisheries or predators, which is what the Bay Cap was intended to prevent.  [emphasis added]”

Once again, because of a lack of hard information, the Draft Addendum has to use speculative language, because no one really knows whether concentrating menhaden landings in a relatively short period of time is doing any harm at all.  And once again, because of a lack of good data, a precautionary approach is probably justified.

It could be argued that the Plan Development Team made the seasonal quota options a little more complicated than it needed to, for along with simply dividing the season into trimesters, with each trimester quota amounting to one-third of the Cap, they also provided an option described as “Even Length and Uneven Harvest,” which kept the relatively uniform trimesters, but allocated 50% of the potential landings to the last third of the season, and another option described as “Uneven Length and Even Harvest,” which broke up the season into three periods, of 11 weeks, six weeks, and 11 weeks and five days, respectively, with one-third of the Bay Cap allocated to each one.

Those who would like to reduce the overall landings from the Chesapeake Bay might see some real virtue in Option B2, Even Length and Uneven Harvest, as limiting landings during each of the first two trimesters to 25% of the Bay Cap would probably force the reduction fleet into the ocean and out of the Bay earlier than would the other two options, and at least open up the possibility that the fleet would land something close to its overall TAC while participating in the ocean fishery, making it unnecessary to land the full 50% of the Bay Cap at the tail end of the season, when reduction fishing activity is typically at its lowest point of the year.

While that outcome may be wishful thinking, it still might make Option B2 the frontrunner once the public comment period begins.

On the other hand, there seems to be little virtue in Option B3, Uneven Length and Even Harvest, as one of the seeming motivations for proposing seasonal quotas was the fact that “over 50% of the Bay reduction fishery landings were taken in a 6-week period in mid-summer” in 2023 and 2024, and one of the things that Option B3 does is create a 6-week-long mid-summer season when 33% of the landings would be concentrated.  While 33% is still smaller than “over 50%,” concentrating one-third of the landings in a short 6-week season, and allowing for the real possibility of quota overages if the fish are readily available, Option B3 seems to risk perpetuating a problem the seasonal quotas were supposed to solve.

And as I noted, quota overages are always a real possibility, particularly in large-scale fisheries that can sometimes encounter a lot of menhaden in a relatively short time, and landings reports lag what’s actually happening on the water.

Thus, the Draft Addendum needs to address the issue of quota overages and underages, and the issue of paybacks, for as it observes,

“Without any overage payback provision, there would be little incentive for industry to abide by their in-year quota periods.”

But the Draft Addendum also observes that,

“Without any underage rollover provision, the quota periods may inhibit industry’s ability to harvest the Bay Cap.”

That makes it seem as if paybacks and rollovers are just two different sides of the same coin.  I tend to disagree about that, because a quota—or a Bay Capt—is just what its name suggests, a hard cap that may not be exceeded without consequences.  It is an absolute cap on harvest, not a target that must be achieved. 

Moreover, while there is only one reason why a quota might be exceeded—the industry killed too many fish—there can be many reasons why an underage occurred, including bad weather, environmental conditions keeping menhaden out of the Bay and, most importantly, lowered overall abundance.  And if the latter case proves to be true, allowing the industry to roll over underages into another period, so it can take more fish from a declining biomass, is probably the worst thing to do.

All things considered, the proposal deemed Option A, “No payback for quota period overages with rollover of unused quota within a fishing year,” seems like a particularly bad idea.  The Draft Addendum provides the following rationale:

“There would be no payback for exceeding the allocation of a quota period unless it causes the Bay Cap to be exceeded.  An overage of the total Bay Cap would be deducted from the following year’s Bay Cap before it is allocated into the quota periods.  Any underage of Quota Period 1 or 2 can be used in any subsequent quota period within the year.”

Adopting that option would be perfectly pointless, as it would do nothing to solve the problem that the seasonal quotas were supposed to solve.  Without paybacks for exceeding the seasonal quotas, there would be nothing to stop the industry from catching the majority of the Bay Cap within a 6-week—or shorter—period, and creating exactly those problems that the seasonal quotas were intended to prevent.

I suspect that Option A is intended to be the status quo option for the paybacks issue, even if it is not listed as such, and so will be retained in the Draft Addendum.  But it is nonetheless a very bad idea, and it would be unfortunate if it ended up being the option chosen for the final version of Addendum II.

Unfortunately, underage rollovers seem to be baked into all of the other options, which fortunately also require paybacks of any seasonal overages.  While the underages, unlike paybacks, never roll over into the next fishing year, they could lead to intense fishing effort, during the last one or two trimesters, on what might prove to be an unexpectedly low concentration of fish. 

That’s not the best outcome, but it certainly isn’t a deal-killer.  On balance, Draft Addendum II, as it currently stands, contains reasonable and worthwhile provisions that would promote the sort of precautionary management approach that is appropriate until such time as the research is done and more data-based solutions can be considered.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that the Draft Addendum will be approved for public comment next month.

It should be approved, and I believe that the odds favor approval, probably in a form not too different from the current draft.  But I have been involved in menhaden management for far too long, and won’t be surprised if something else happens.

It’s probably predictable that the menhaden reduction industry will object to at least some of the Draft Addendum’s provisions, arguing that the Bay Cap has no scientific support, that reducing the Cap is thus inappropriate and punitive, etc.  Depending on how the various jurisdictions line up—and these days, when the federal agencies are taking a hard stance against conservation measures, that lineup has changed from what it has traditionally been—it is far from impossible that some coalition will unexpectedly form and send the Draft Addendum back to the Plan Development Team for further review.

And it’s probably also predictable that the folks who hang out at the other end of the menhaden circus—the die-hard “most important fish in the sea” crowd, known for their emotional diatribes in all forms of media—are going to say that the Draft Addendum doesn’t go far enough, and might start even claiming, as they have before, that

“THE US FISHERIES CRISIS IS REAL,”

whining about supposedly

“COLLAPSING OCEAN FOOD SYSTEMS”

and

“DEVASTATING COASTAL ECONOMIES,

as they do their best to convince other Management Board members to send the Draft Addendum back to the Plan Development Team, hoping to add additional restrictions on the reduction fleet.

It would be more than a little ironic if the efforts of the menhaden reduction fleet and those vehemently opposed to the menhaden reduction fishery inadvertently combined to stall the progress of the Draft Addendum, but given how ephemeral the alliances have been on the Management Board, such an outcome is not at all unlikely.

But hopefully, it will not happen.

Hopefully, the Draft Addendum will be released for public comment, and provide an opportunity for additional precautionary measures being applied to the menhaden fishery in the Chesapeake Bay.

But even if things work out that way, folks ought to understand that Amendment II is only a sideshow in the bigger picture of menhaden management.

While it would be nice to see a precautionary management approach prevail in the Chesapeake Bay, the real fight will come in October, when the Management Board sets the Total Allowable Catch for the 2027, 2028, and 2029 fishing seasons.  For if the Management Board fails to make meaningful cuts to menhaden harvest, hopefully constraining menhaden landings to or below target levels by 2029, the sustainability of the Atlantic menhaden stock, including the fish that might sojourn in Chesapeake Bay, will be placed in substantial peril.

And that’s something that Draft Addendum II just can’t fix on its own.

 

 

 

 

SPORT FISHING: THE MORE THINGS CHANGE...

 

I recently saw an article in the New York Post (hardly a stellar reference, but it came up in a Google alert) which was headlined “Wall Street finance bros have found their newest flex—but it’s dividing one of the Hampton’s oldest communities.”  As I read it, I was forced to think back on the history and trajectory of offshore sport fishing, and on how much things change, while remaining, in some ways, the same.

The article opened with the words,

“A 300-pound tuna fish doesn’t care how much your house costs.  And on the ocean, there are no VIP tables or name-dropping.

“As the offshore tuna season reaches its peak at Montauk, Long Island, a wave of Wall Street thrill-seekers, million-dollar sportfishing boats and first-time charter anglers are pouring into one of the East Coast’s oldest fishing communities.

“For generations, the only people who fished tuna were the ones whose lives revolved around the water.

“Now these veteran anglers are begrudgingly sharing the beloved recreational sport of deep-water fishing for hard-fighting, giant and prized tuna fish with city slickers who only recently learned about the big game pursuit thanks to social media and TV.”

There are a lot of things wrong with that paragraph, beginning with the notion that Montauk is “one of the East Coast’s oldest fishing communities.”  While some fishing always took place there, the Montauk/Easthampton area was dominated by agriculture, particularly cattle ranches, through much of its early history.  It’s remote location made it difficult to transport fish to market until 1895, when a new branch of the Long Island Rail Road connected the village to New York City, and its coastline provided dubious shelter for vessels until 1926, when real estate developer Carl G. Fisher, who had purchased 10,000 acres of Montauk land, blasted through the thin strip of coastline that separated what was then freshwater Lake Montauk from Block Island Sound, and created the harbor that now shelters Montauk’s fishing fleet.

Compared to ports in New England—the Massachusetts Bay Colony, for example, was exporting fish to Europe and the West Indies well before the Revolutionary War—that makes Montauk a relative newcomer as far as fishing communities go.

But where the New York Post piece really goes off the rails is when it says that “for generations, the only people who fished tuna were those whose lives revolved around the water,” and its suggestion that “the beloved recreational sport of deep-water fishing for hard-fighting, giant and prized tuna fish” being enjoyed by “city slickers” is something new.

In fact, offshore sport fishing has always been the pursuit of well-heeled individuals who could afford the price of ocean-capable boats, hired captains and crews, and the travel needed to get where the fish are.  It has only been in relatively recent times—say, the last 50 years or so—that offshore fishing became readily accessible to people of more modest means, as advances in boat and engine technology allowed manufacturers to build less expensive, outboard-powered boats that were nonetheless capable of carrying fishermen to productive deep waters.

A recent article in Marlin magazine, which described the role United States anglers played in developing the sport of big-game fishing, observed that

“The roots of modern big-game fishing run straight back to Catalina Island [California] in the early 1900s…

“Rod and reel designs improved rapidly.  Captains learned how to handle their boats around a hooked fish.  Anglers figured out through hard experience what worked and what didn’t—and crucially, they wrote it down.  Catches were weighed, measured, photographed, and documented.  What could have been forgotten became the foundation for something lasting.  Catalina Island is home to the Avalon Tuna Club, one of the oldest and most influential institutions in the sport.

“Zane Gray [a California dentist who made his fortune writing pulp novels about the American West], an active member of the Avalon Tuna Club and once served as vice president, was the person who related that foundation to a wider audience.  His vivid account of bluefin battles reached readers throughout the country who had never been near salt water, and they made the sport feel worth aspiring to.  Grey didn’t just write about catching fish; he captured the physicality of it, the hourslong battles against powerful animals, the exhaustion, the exhilaration.  He made anglers look like athletes, which, honestly, they were.”

 At the birth of the offshore sport, wealthy anglers, inspired by writing in the print media of the day, became interested in fishing for tuna and other offshore species.  No, they weren’t necessarily “finance bros,” although some probably did have Wall Street connections, and they learned about fishing for bluefin by reading about it, rather than by viewing “social media and TV”.  But, more than a century ago, there were already “city slickers” entering the fishery; the new anglers described in the Post article were merely new pilgrims following a trail first laid down many decades ago.

Offshore fishing came to Montauk soon after Montauk Lake was opened up to the sea, with the Montauk Yacht Club being built soon after.  Even before the Second World War, wealthy angler-authors such as S. Kip Farrington, who entered his family’s stock brokerage firm at the age of 16, and Van Campen Heilner, born into a family made wealthy by coal mines, fished Montauk waters.

The “finance bros” have been catching tuna at Montauk for a very long time.

But what they did with those tuna—and the other fish that they caught—wasn’t completely clear.

Some of them might have ended up in the Yacht Club’s kitchen, although giant bluefin weren’t considered good eating back then, and might just as well have ended up in a landfill or dumped out at sea after being weighed and taken down from the scales.  It’s also quite likely that a lot of fish ended up with the boats’ crews, who could have kept them for personal consumption, or sold them for whatever the market might pay.  The historical record isn’t too clear about that.

But one thing that was pretty clear was that the anglers didn’t feel the need to sell fish for their own account; they were already quite wealthy, and certainly didn’t have to sell fish for whatever pennies they might bring.

That has changed since the old days, for today, even the folks in the “million-dollar sportfishing boats” mentioned by the Post will take fish to market, for whatever value they might bring.  That was mentioned in the Post article, when it noted that

“’A lot of these guys are millionaires, and they come out and catch fish,” Montauk-based commercial fish dealer Bryan Gosman, 53, told The Post.

“Among longtime commercial fishermen, Gosman said there’s an unspoken understanding: the new sportfishing boom has changed the culture.

“’Commercial guys get irritated because it does affect the market of fish.  They think sportfishing guys don’t take good care of the fish; it becomes performative,’ he added.  ‘The picture is more important.’

“’They’re multi-millionaires.  The $4,000 check they get for a fish doesn’t even matter.’

“The New York fishing market as a whole is valued at around $42 million, and a single top-quality 1,000 pound tuna can fetch fishermen up to $10,000.  An influx of new era banker fishermen who aren’t interested in quality or profit could significant [sic] dent longtime family businesses, for whom this is their only income stream.”

Such blurring of the lines between commercial and recreational fishermen just wasn’t something that happened in the early days of offshore sport fishing.

Another big difference is that, as offshore game fishing became more popular, the pioneers tried to make it into a legitimate sport, in which anglers competed on a more-or-less even basis.  As the Marlin article noted,

“As the sport grew, so did the ambition—and the chaos.  Without standardized rules, the concept of a fishing record became increasingly meaningless.  Anglers were using heavier lines and bigger reels, and making claims that couldn’t be verified or fairly compared.  The achievements were real, but the framework to verify them didn’t exist yet.

“That changed in 1939 when Michael Lerner founded the International Game Fish Association (IGFA).  His goal wasn’t to control the sport; it was to protect what achievement in the sport actually meant…If the rules were the same everywhere, then the only variable that mattered was the skill of the angler.

“What the IGFA gave fishermen was something more valuable than a record book.  When you held an IGFA record, you knew exactly what it took to earn it, and so did everyone else.  Over time, the IGFA evolved far beyond a regulatory body.  It became the global conscience of sport fishing, a persistent reminder that how you catch a fish is just as important as having caught it at all.  [emphasis added]”

Under IGFA rules, an angler must fight the fish from the hookup until it is leadered alongside the boat; a catch isn’t deemed legitimate if someone hooks the fish and then hands off the rod, and no one may touch the rod, reel, or line at any time during the fight.  If the rod is resting in a rod holder when a fish hits, it must be immediately removed; fighting a fish with the rod still in the holder is considered taboo.  Fish may not be harpooned, or shot, or mutilated by sharks or the boat’s propellers and still be deemed a legitimate catch.  And electric reels may not be employed.

There are other rules, too, all designed to make the battle between man and fish something approaching a fair fight, and making it easier to gauge anglers’ achievements.

That, too, is something that makes this modern era different from what went before.  While the IGFA’s rules still govern world records, and are used as the standard of conduct in many, probably most, major fishing tournaments, they are more and more ignored by the new generation of offshore anglers.

In the bluefin tuna fishery, fighting a big fish from a rod still stuck in a holder—effectively making the fish fight the boat, not the angler, which was something formerly done only by commercial fishermen—has become standard operating procedure for many anglers.  One charter boat captain even has a video describing the process.

“…I constantly wanna [sic] be pulling that fish towards the boat because we don’t take the rod out of the rod holder so that’s why I’m gonna keep the [boat in] gear and you guys shouldn’t either because you’re gonna be using at least 130 130 [sic] pounds Spectra or braided line if you will.  You guys are gonna be using at least that much because there’s no reason to fish ‘em any less.  Then, if you decide that you need to hold the pole cuz [sic] it’s gonna make you a better person, good luck with that.  I hope that everything works out fine because you’re gonna be using thirty to forty pounds of drag and you’re gonna be holding the pole.  Use your boat it’s way easier.  It’s all about holding the fish up by the tail.  It’s not about the battle.  Nobody cares that it took you 3 hours and but if you’re a he man and you need to get in there and battle with the fish so you’re sore for the rest of the week.  Go right ahead and put a harness on and fight that sucker.  The way we do it, we keep the rod in the gunnel…  [emphasis added]”

Basically, that captain is doing is doing his best to take the “sport” out of sportfishing, taking a sport that, at it’s core, is all “about the battle” and turning it into an exercise in which the only thing that matters is having a dead fish in the cockpit and holding up the tail for what will presumably be photos to be shared across social media platforms.  It’s kind of equivalent to starting a marathon, then after joggoing for 50 yards or a little more, taking a cab to the finish line before declaring that you “ran” the race.

Such thinking makes a mockery out of Ernest Hemingway’s famous words, describing a fight with a bluefin tuna:

“It is a back-sickening, sinew-straining, man-sized job even with a rod that looks like a hoe handle.  But if you land a big tuna after a six-hour fight, fight him man against fish until your muscles are nauseated with the unending strain, and finally bring him up alongside the boat, green-blue and silver in the lazy ocean, you will be purified and able to enter unabashed into the presence of the very elder gods, and they will make you welcome.”

It’s hard to see how letting the boat fight the fish and just holding it up by the tail for photos might seem rewarding.

And, by the way, using “thirty to forty pounds of drag” while fighting a fish is not a big deal, despite that captain’s comments.  I turn 72 in a couple of weeks, and I still use 27 pounds of drag on my 80-pound standups, and sincerely hope that when I head out tomorrow morning, I’ll find a big thresher shark—maybe something in the 300-400 pound range—that will drag me around the cockpit for a couple of hours while I’m harnessed to the rod getting some of my favorite kind of exercise.  (It’s not impossible that I might even find a nice bluefin, though that’s a lot less likely.)

But forty pounds of drag, for an angler fighting a bluefin from a chair, with a good footrest and a bucket harness, is just no big deal.

Yet recent years have seen many anglers enter a degraded “sport” where rods never leave their holders, fish are harpooned, and anglers think nothing of handing off the rod when they get a little tired, well before their back has been sickened, their sinews strained, or their muscles nauseated by what should be the sheer joy of the fight.

When the only point of the exercise is putting a dead fish in the boat, and putting photos up on the Internet, the essence of sport fishing is lost, as the fish becomes not a respected, if unwilling, opponent, but merely an object in a self-promotion campaign.

Yet some people still feel the sport’s original attraction.  As the Post reported,

“’Tuna fishing is oddly addicting,’ one Hampton Bays-based fisherman told The Post.  That’s why some of those Wall Street guys get a taste for it, and they’re like, ‘This is so awesome.’’

“’You get out there for like a banker guy who works in New York City, and you get offshore, and you see 40 whales feeding with their mouths open, it’s like National Geographic.’”

“’I’ve seen guys get hooked on this sport in one trip,  They caught their first 150 pound tuna, and they were all in, even so far as going to buy a boat,’ veteran offshore angler Nick Carro told The Post.”

Some things do remain the same.

Bluefin tuna still swim off Montauk’s shores, and the possibility of fishing for, and perhaps even catching, one of those great fish is still being communicated to the public, even if electronic media has largely replaced the traditional paper and ink.  Although the fish are now more accessible to the public than they were when Montauk Inlet was new, and the fishery is no longer the exclusive province of millionaires, offshore fishing is still the kind of expensive pastime that has always attracted a disproportionate number of wealthy adherents; “finance bros” have been in the fishery since its very first days.

And when an angler hooks up, whether that angler is a carpenter, a lawyer, or a hedge fund manager, those bluefin will still pull hard, and provide the same mental and physical challenges that they did a century ago.

Assuming, of course, that the angler is willing to accept the challenge of fighting a big fish one-on-one, with the rod out of the holder and no harpoon on board.

The fact that many of today’s anglers are not is, perhaps, the biggest difference between then and now.

And the most unfortunate.

Because if an angler seeks sport, how you catch a fish is just as important as having caught it at all.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A NEW, LOOMING THREAT TO MID-ATLANTIC FISHERIES

 

Mid-Atlantic fisheries have long faced the same sort of threats that faced fisheries elsewhere on the coast.

The possibility of overfishing is always there.  A warming ocean forces fish stocks farther north.  Forage fish might become less available.  Dams deny diadromous fish populations access to critical upstream habitat.  Managers fail to rebuild depleted stocks.

But while all of those threats are real, scientists already understand their impacts, and all are, at least in theory, subject to remediation by properly focused regulations or, at worst, accommodation, by recognizing the reality of things like shifting stocks, and adapting fisheries to best suit the new normal.

Yet there is a potential new threat looming off the Virginia coast that could cause large-scale disruption to the ocean floor, with yet-unknown impacts on the wide variety of fish species that inhabit the bottom, and perhaps the entire water column, between the state-federal border and the edge of the continental shelf.

On November 7, 2025, a company called Odyssey Marine Exploration filed a Lease Sale Request with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.  According to the company’s website,

“The proposed [lease] area, located within the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) off the Mid-Atlantic coast, is prospective for heavy mineral sands containing titanium, zirconium, and rare earth elements, with beneficial sand co-products that can support beach replenishment and coastal resilience projects…

“If future environmental reviews, regulatory approvals, and project evaluations support commercial recovery, operations could utilize shallow-water dredging techniques that are already widely used for navigation, beach nourishment, and coastal resilience projects.”

What the company website didn’t point out is that the potential scale of the proposed mining project would dwarf a mere channel dredging or beach replenishment operation.

The Request for Information and Interest published by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management describes the potential lease area as

“located between three and 63.5 miles offshore of the Delmarva Peninsula seaward of Accomack and Northampton counties in the Commonwealth of Virginia and lies entirely on the [Outer Continental Shelf] of the United States.  This area is comprised of approximately 1,769,196 acres (2,764 square miles) with an approximate water depth of 30-410 feet (8-125 meters).”

That’s a lot of fish habitat that could be impacted, and while the company tries to assure the public that

“The design of project work plans will prioritize environmental responsibility and, if a lease is granted, would align with BOEM’s review framework, which is conducted in accordance with applicable federal laws—including the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the National Historic Preservation Act—and places environmental stewardship and cultural preservation at the forefront of the process,”

one must remember that, just about a year ago, the Trump administration began taking action to gut key provisions of the National Environmental Policy Act, and earlier this month changed a key interpretation of the Endangered Species Act, so that damaging critical habitat for an endangered species is no longer considered doing “harm” to the species in question.

Thus, Odyssey’s assurances in that regard offer little real comfort.

And one of the big problems with the proposed operation is that no one is quite sure what sort of harm might ensue.

Becca Loomis, a staff attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, observed that

“It’s essentially a brand new industry globally, so it’s unproven.  We don’t entirely understand what the risks are, and that makes it more concerning.”

She added,

“Heavy mineral sand mining involves dredging huge amounts of sand from the seafloor, and then processing that sand to extract the minerals.  Essentially, you’re pulling up huge, huge amounts of seafloor sediments.”

Megan Huynh, who leads the Southern Environmental Law Center’s Wetlands and Coast Program, stated that shallow seabed mining

“directly destroys all the physical habitat on the seafloor,”

and will also stir up huge clouds of sediment that could also lead to ecosystem disruptions.

And that can be problematic, because there is a lot of life living in, on, and above the proposed leasing site.

The National Marine Fisheries Service tells us that

“Summer flounder spawn in the fall and early winter when they migrate offshore,”

a migration that would take them right through the proposed lease area.  In addition,

“Spawning peaks in October and November when water temperatures change and autumn plankton is most productive.  The combination of these elements improve the chance of survival for larval summer flounder.”

How will vast sediment clouds impact the spawn, larval survival, and the presence of plankton that the larvae need to survive?

NMFS also tells us that

“Black sea bass…migrate offshore and south in the fall, returning inshore to coastal areas and bays in the spring,”

presumably crossing through, and wintering in, the proposed lease area off Virginia.  And those sea bass

“eat whatever prey is available, but they especially like crabs, shrimp, worms, small fish, and clams,”

prey that might become hard to find when a dredge “destroys all the physical habitat on the seafloor.”

And it’s not only bottom fish that could be affected.

Female bluefish realease their eggs in the open ocean; larvae develop into juveniles over the continental shelf—again, in the proposed lease area—before the juveniles move inshore and spend their first spring in coastal bays, estuaries, and sounds.  In the case of one of their preferred prey species, Atlantic menhaden, there are

“major spawning areas from New Jersey to the Carolinas.  The majority of spawning primarily occurs offshore (20-30 miles) during winter.  Buoyant eggs hatch at sea, and are carried into estuarine nursery areas by ocean currents,”

meaning that menhaden spawning will take place in the proposed lease area as well.  How either the bluefish or menhaden spawns might be affected by the dredging activity, and the huge sediment plumes that it would produce, is impossible to know.

And then there are striped bass.  The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission tells us that

“Important wintering grounds for the mixed stocks are located from offshore New Jersey to North Carolina.”

The 2018 benchmark striped bass stock assessment noted that

“Fishery-independent data collected by North Carolina DMF, ASMFC, and USFWS…suggest striped bass distribution on their overwintering grounds during December through February has changed significantly since the mid-2000s.  The migratory portion of the stocks has been well offshore in the EEZ (>3 miles), requiring travel as far as 25 [nautical miles] offshore of Chesapeake Bay to find fish to tag.”

That would place the center of winter striped bass abundance well within the proposed lease area, and raise questions about how those striped bass, as well as the baitfish they depend on to survive the winter and keep them in condition to spawn in the spring, would be affected by dredging activity, the resulting sediment plume, and the destruction of “all the physical habitat on the sea floor.”

Other species, ranging from weakfish to bluefin tuna, might also be affected by the dredging activities, yet the impacts on fish stocks do not seem to be a major administration concern.  Although the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management has issued a Request for Information and Interest, which can be found at https://www.regulations.gov/document/BOEM-2026-0100-0001 and is claims to be seeking

“information and comments from Federally Recognized Indian Tribes, Federal agencies, state and local governments, environmental and other public interest organizations, the marine mineral mining and dredging industries, other interested organizations and entities, and the public,”

through the comment deadline of July 23, it is virtually certain that the leasing process will move forward, even if it meets substantial public opposition.  While it is important for those opposed to the proposed leasing activities to build as strong an administrative record as possible in support of their position, the plain truth is that the Trump administration is dedicated to ocean floor mining, and is unlikely to be dissuaded by anything less than a court order.

On April 24, 2025, the president issued Executive Order 14285, “Unleashing America’s Offshore Critical Minerals and Resources,” which declared, among other things, that

“Our Nation must take immediate action to accelerate the responsible development of seabed mineral resources, quantify the Nation’s endowment of seabed minerals, reinvigorate American leadership in associated extraction and processing technologies, and ensure secure supply chains for our defense, infrastructure, and energy sectors.”

The executive order also expresses a policy of

“rapidly developing domestic capabilities for the exploration, characterization, collection, and processing of seabed mineral resources through streamlined permitting without compromising environmental and transparency standards,”

and directs the Secretary of the Interior to

“establish an expedited process for reviewing and approving permits for prospecting and granting leases for exploration, development, and production of seabed mineral resources within the United States Outer Continental Shelf…The expedited process, consistent with applicable law, should ensure efficiency, predictability, and competitiveness for American companies.”

So the fix is definitely in, and the odds stacked impossibly high against those who would advise a go-slow approach to shallow seabed mining, in order to better assess its risks to marine ecosystems.

Unless somehow slowed by the Commonwealth of Virginia, by Congress, or by the courts, it is highly likely that the leasing process will move forward and, assuming that minerals are present and sufficiently abundant to ensure profitable extraction, that the Trump administration will authorize mining operations—not only by Odyssey, but by any other company willing to bid on a lease—before it leaves office in January 2029.

Should seabed mining begin, those companies will reap the benefits.

Our fish, our fisheries, our fishermen, and the marine environment as a whole, will bear the costs.

VALUING MARINE RESOURCES: JUST WHAT IS AN ANIMAL WORTH?

 

Last Tuesday, I attended a meeting of New York’s Marine Resources Advisory Council.

The meeting wasn’t particularly notable.  A number of significant matters were discussed, but most fell outside of my primary areas of interest and expertise, and I think that the only time I might have spoken all afternoon was to make a minor correction to the minutes of the previous meeting.

But as the meeting began to wind down, and reached that part of the agenda where folks talk about things like upcoming meetings and pending regulations, an interesting exchange took place that deserves a little thought.

About a year and a half ago, after a couple of urban legislators tried to force New York to shut down its horseshoe crab fishery, and Governor Hochul vetoed the resulting legislation, the Department of Environmental Conservation lost its authority to manage not only horseshoe crabs (which aren’t really crabs, despite their name), but true crabs as well.  In response, the agency promulgated new regulations based on a theory of general authority, rather than a clear legislative grant, a somewhat iffy approach that might or might not have survived a court challenge.

The legislature and governor later reached a compromise, which would see the horseshoe crab fishery phased out over a few years, and again gave the DEC explicit management authority over anything that might be called a crab.  So, at the meeting, the DEC announced that new regulations were adopted, at which point one of the commercial fishermen on the MRAC panel asked whether the agency would continue to conduct horseshoe crab surveys and do other research because,

“It seems like a waste of money,”

given that the fishermen wouldn’t be allowed to harvest them in a few years.

The biologist’s response was that yes, the surveys would continue, in part because the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s horseshoe crab management plan requires the states to provide certain data to the Commission each year, but the fisherman still remained dubious.

That view of fisheries management—that management efforts should be expended on fish and other lifeforms that yield an economic return—is something that I’ve run across from time to time, and seems to suggest that economic value is the only value that matters.

But there are other views.

At last Tuesday’s meeting, Martin Gary, the Director of the DEC’s Marine Division, also addressed the room, and provided a very different perspective on the issue.

He described a night earlier that summer, when he, a team of DEC biologists, plus folks from academic institutions and environmental organizations, along with some people just interested in helping out, joined together under a full moon to survey and tag horseshoe crabs.

He described how the volunteers all helped to ease the DEC’s burden, and most of all, how some of the children that were there were completely enraptured by the activity, and asked good questions as they tried to learn more.  Some of the children, he noted, seemed so fascinated by the process that he wouldn’t be surprised if they became marine scientists somewhere down the road.

And that’s a value that we don’t think about often enough.

For while there’s no denying that some fish, crustacean, and mollusk stocks are economically important, and generate many millions of dollars—billions in some cases—through the commercial and recreational fisheries that they support, it’s also important to note that those “valuable” species aren’t in the ocean alone.

Close to three-quarters of a century ago, pioneer ecologist Aldo Leopold observed that

“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.”

While Leopold was describing a land ethic, it applies to the ocean just as well.

While New York may shut down its commercial horseshoe crab fishery in a few years, that doesn’t mean that the animals won’t play the same role in the ecosystem that they played before—roles that they and their ancestors have been playing in parts of the world’s oceans for at least the last quarter of a billion years.

Whan an animal sticks around that long, there’s a good chance that at least some of those ecosystem roles might be fairly important, and that we might be well-advised to keep the stock healthy, just in case that it’s demise might cause harm to a resource we value more.

So continuing horseshoe crab research might not be the “waste of money” that some have suggested.

But the deeper value may well be the one that Mr. Gary alluded to:  Its ability to draw people, particularly children, closer to the sea.

There is little question that children are spending far less time outdoors than they once did, as the allure of electronic devices, coupled with increasing pressure to participate in extracurricular activities at school, on sports teams, and in other activities that steal their free time, alienate them from the environment, and that alienation has some fairly dire implications for the future.  The University of Michigan has noted that

“What is less often studied is what impact the trend of children staying indoors might have on the environmental consciousness of future generations.  Environmentalists often point to youth as future stewards of the natural world.  What will happen to their sense of stewardship as our children become increasingly disconnected from nature?

“Researchers at Cornell University attempted to address this question by examining the relationship between the time spent in nature as a child and pro-environment attitudes and behaviors.  They found that those individuals who participated in activities such as camping, hunting, fishing, hiking, and playing in natural areas before the age of 11 were more likely to demonstrate pro-environment attitudes and behaviors as adults.”

So it may very well be that those humble, soon-to-be economically worthless horseshoe crabs, or perhaps some other, seemingly valueless member of the marine ecosystem, could inspire someone to take up a career in fisheries conservation and management, and help to ensure that the “important” fish stocks, and the fisheries that they support, will remain healthy and viable throughout the foreseeable future.

And there is a value in that that far outweighs the costs of a little research and monitoring.

Yet, so many times, I still come across people calling certain fish “worthless.”

When I sat on the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council a couple of decades ago, there was always debate about why it should manage spiny dogfish, instead of paying more attention to species that “were good for something.”

Even here in New York, which is generally considered an environmentally aware state, we have Section 13-0337 of the Environmental Conservation Law, which among other things states that

“Starfish, drills (Urosalpinx cineria), periwinkle (Litorina) and drum fish (Pogonias chromis) when taken shall not be returned alive to the waters of the state.”

That might make sense in the case of periwinkles, which are an invasive shellfish from Europe, but otherwise relegates components of the state’s marine ecosystem—starfish, oyster drills, and black drum—to being not only worthless, but things of negative worth, to be wantonly destroyed, merely because they feed on the same “valuable” shellfish that we do, and that bring dollars into the pockets of shellfishermen and aquaculturists alike.

It seems more than disgraceful, kind of like the old practice of killing off hawks because they killed the king’s grouse.  Yet in this place and time, such thinking persists, with no thought to whether such creatures may be critical cogs and wheels, essential parts of the overall mechanism that is the sea.

 

ADMINISTRATION SEEKS TO WEAKEN PROTECTIONS FOR FISH, SEA TURTLES, AND MARINE MAMMALS

On July 2, the National Marine Fisheries Service issued a press release which said, in part,

“The United States is a global leader in sustainable fisheries management.  Our participatory, science-based system under 50 years of the Magnuson-Stevens Act has shown that we know how to rebuild stocks and keep them healthy.”

The problem is, that science-based fisheries management, rebuilding stocks, and keeping stocks healthy tends to hold down short-term profits, even if it might maximize long-term economic returns.  Thus, the press release continued.

“But despite this foundation, our seafood sector has faced growing pressure from global competition and evolving market demands.  Americans want American seafood, but our landings have decreased since 2019.  We need to put U.S. seafood first.

“In fisheries, as in life, results are what matter.  That is why I am eager to share the regulatory actions we have prioritized in response to the President’s Executive Order on Restoring American Seafood Competitiveness.  We received input from 787 individuals and organizations, as well as detailed action plans from each of the regional fishery management councils.  I believe this volume of input underscores the urgency of our shared mission and I am grateful to everyone who contributed.

“After considering all input from councils, fishing industry, and the public, we have prioritized actions—many of which align with Council identified priorities—we believe will reduce burdens on domestic fishing, increase production, stabilize markets, improve access, and enhance economic profitability.”

In other words, all that science stuff—and the regulations that the science supported—was good for the fish, but now we’re going to set it aside, at least in part, so that we can do things that will be good for the fishermen (at least until 2028, after that, we don’t really care).

Appended to the press release was a list of 28 regulatory priorities, arranged by the relevant regional fishery management councils.  The priorities fell into basic groups: 

·       Allow fishing in currently closed areas (3)

·       Make it easier for fishermen to kill more and/or smaller fish (8)

·       Reduce industry monitoring requirements (2)

·       Reduce protections for endangered and/or protected species (5)

·       Increase commercial fishing efficiency (3)

·       Address shark and dolphin depredation (1)

·       Shift stocks to state management (3)

·       Better reflect multiple councils’ interest in fisheries (1)

·       Adjust individual fishing quotas requirements (1)

·       Minimize dead discards (1)

While the proposals aren’t all bad—it’s hard to quibble with an effort to extend the use of descending devices to combat barotrauma in the Gulf of Mexico recreational reef fish fishery, and arguments could probably be made to support moving management authority for queen conch and spiny lobster, two species generally encountered inshore, from federal to territorial authority—the general tenor of the proposals is to increase the risk to both targeted fish species and to species protected under laws such as the Endangered Species Act and Marine Mammals Protection Act—so that commercial fishermen can land more fish more efficiently, and thus more profitably, although there are a few priorities that would enrich the recreational fishing industry, too.

Not surprisingly, considering Friday’s announcement that destroying an endangered species nest or habitat would no longer be considered “harm” to such species, which will now allow farmers, ranchers, real estate developers, extractive industries, and other similar environmentally-damaging industries to damage, or even totally remove, the habitat an endangered species needs to survive, the proposed changes would fall most heavily on what NMFS deems “protected species” that is, species that are either listed under the Endangered Species Act or Marine Mammals Protection Act.

Of those, the proposed changes that will draw the most immediate attention are the suggestions that the New England and Mid-Atlantic fishery management councils

“Deprioritize advancing requirements for ropeless gear”

intended to prevent fatal gear entanglements with endangered northern right whales.

It’s a proposal that the councils are likely to quickly accept, as the fishermen sitting on those management bodies aren’t particularly eager to adopt regulations that will be costly to the industry.  Yet, a few years ago, the United States Marine Mammal Commission reported that

“To date, there is no evidence that…regulations have been effective…right whale deaths attributed to fishing gear have increased substantially since rulemaking efforts began in 1997.  Whereas there were two confirmed deaths linked to entanglements from 1990 through 1999, there were eight from 2000 through 2009, and eleven from 2010 through 2016.  How many additional deaths go unrecorded is unknown, but it could be half to two-thirds of all deaths.”   

Most of the deaths are associated with lobster trap and gill net buoy lines, so rules requiring ropeless gear, that would eliminate the buoy lines, would have a substantial and positive impact on right whale mortality.

And, while the Marine Mammal Commission report was nearly a decade old, it does not appear that the threat of buoy lines has abated.  A young right whale that washed ashore on Martha’s Vineyard in January 2024 was found to be a victim of entanglement with a Maine lobsterman’s gear.

Sean Hayen, Protected Species Branch Chief for the Northeast Fisheries Science Center, reportedly said, in 2023, that

“We have not documented a natural mortality in North American right whales in decades.”

Instead, all recorded mortality was due to either ship strikes or gear entanglement.  And with the National Marine Fisheries Service flatly stating that

“The North Atlantic right whale is one of the world’s most endangered large whale species,”

with a total population of about 380 animals, which includes only 70 reproductively active females, one would think that NMFS, and the regional fishery management councils, should be doing as much as they can to keep entanglement numbers down.

However, fishermen complain that the ropeless gear needed to reduce entanglements is

“too time consuming and expensive.”

One argued that

“if I spend a third of my day rigging these acoustic releases [on ropeless gear] that takes even more off the bottom line…Rigging 800 traps could cost more than half-a-million dollars.”

So it is hardly surprising that this administration, which seems to value natural resources only for the profits that they might generate, would seek to resolve the conflict by reducing the burden on fishermen selling their catch, rather than by protecting the right whale, which can neither be harvested nor sold, from a very real risk of extinction.

The administration seems to be expressing similar sentiments in the Pacific, where it seeks to lift protections from non-marketable leatherback turtles, proposing that the Western Pacific Fishery Management Council

“Remove shallow-set longline leatherback hard cap and strike two turtle trip limit.”

Currently, the shallow-set longline fishery off Hawaii is only allowed to kill 16 leatherback turtles each year; should the fleet reach that limit, it may not fish for the rest of the year.  Similarly, if a vessel catches two leatherback in a single trip, it must stop fishing, return to port, and may not return to fishing until it has met requirements making additional turtle bycatch less likely.

But turtles, like right whales, have no price on their heads, so the administration couldn’t care less whether they live or die, and wants to see the bycatch limits abolished.

Another troubling trend in the proposals would reduce monitoring of fishermen, whether at sea or shoreside, providing more opportunities to dump protected species offshore, fail to report bycatch of regulated species, and otherwise evade current conservation measures.

For example, in the administration directed the New England Fishery Management Council to

“Rescind Industry Funding Monitoring requirements.”

NMFS’ ability to require industry-funded monitoring became a hot issue, particularly for conservative “anti-administrative state” campaigners, a few years ago, when monitoring requirements imposed on the herring fleet led to the case of Loper-Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo making it all the way to the Supreme Court, where the Court overruled the so-called Chevron Doctrine, that had allowed agencies to interpret the law applicable to their area of expertise when its language was ambiguous.  

While that ruling, which left all statutory interpretation to the courts, was a big win for the anti-regulatory crowd, it was a pyrrhic victory for the plaintiffs, as the lower court looked at the law and came to the same conclusion that NMFS had:  The agency had the right to require industry-funded monitoring of the herring vessels.  That decision is currently being appealed.

The court’s decision made the administration very unhappy.  So on May 1, Eugenio Pineiro Solar, the NMFS chief, wrote a letter to Cate O’Keefe, the Executive Director of the New England Council, which said, in part,

“we note that the Council considered, but did not recommend, revisiting the industry-funded monitoring (IFM) program developed for the Atlantic herring fishery.  For the reasons provided below, we respectfully request that the Council reconsider this decision and agree to proceed with a Council action to revise and potentially withdraw the IFM provisions for the herring fishery.”

The letter then claimed that NMFS didn’t have the resources to support the herring monitors, and were unlikely to have the resources to support the monitoring in the future (because the administration and Congress failed to adequately fund NMFS science and survey programs, although the letter, very predictably, never mentioned that).  Thus, the program couldn’t achieve its goals, including obtaining

“accurate catch estimates for incidental species with catch caps (haddock and river herring/shad,”

which raises the old question of whether, if a herring trawler accidentally catches a bunch of regulated fish and then dumps them at sea, with no observer watching, did anything really die?

The administration apparently believes that the answer to that question is “No,” and they’re really unhappy about the New England Council’s stance, because

“herring fishery participants have expressed concerns about the potentially high level of costs of IFM in relation to the recent low level of biomass and the low productivity rate of Atlantic herring.”

Now, some might believe that observers become more important when a stock is overfished, both because of a more pressing need to accurately monitor herring landings, and because the extended hunt for herring might lead to the fleet generating more bycatch along the way, but the administration seemingly has no such fears.  Thus, it threatened the New England Council to take the matter out of its hands.

“If the Council is unable to initiate an action within a reasonable time, the Secretary is authorized to prepare an amendment to rescind these measures.”

Whether NMFS can actually carry out that threat depends on the interpretation of one provision of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, which allows the Secretary to prepare an amendment if

“the appropriate Council fails to develop and submit to the Secretary, after a reasonable period of time, a fishery management plan for such fishery, or any necessary amendment to such a plan, if such fishery requires conservation and management.  [emphasis added]”

There is supreme irony here.  The crux of the Loper-Bright case was the agency’s, and eventually the court’s, interpretation of another provision of Magnuson-Stevens, which allowed NMFS, through its fishery management plans, to adopt any non-specified provision that was “necessary” for the conservation and management of a fishery.

In that case, NMFS found that the industry funded monitoring in the Atlantic herring management plan was, in fact, “necessary” to manage the fishery, and has, so far, has successfully defended that decision in court.  But now, using a different provision of Magnuson-Stevens, the same agency is claiming that it is “necessary” to withdraw the same provision that it had previously deemed “necessary” to manage the fishery.

And at one time, maybe it could get away with doing that, interpreting the relevant provision in a way that favored its position.  But now that Loper-Bright took away the agency’s power of interpretation, it would be up to the courts to decide whether it is now “necessary” to repeal a “necessary” provision of the Atlantic herring management plan.  So, if the agency goes forward with the Secretarial amendment, and some environmental groups sues, who knows what a court might decide.

It’s all a bit of a circus, but again, we’re talking about the current administration’s fisheries policies, so that is no real surprise.  Common sense left the building a long time ago.

A more ambiguous set of proposals would increase the “fishing power” of the commercial fleet.  Right now, many fishery management plans created by the New England and Mid-Atlantic fishery management councils allow permit holders to only upgrade to slightly larger and more powerful vessels, restrictions that are intended to

“[maintain] fleet diversity and limiting capacity”

of the fleet to harvest fish.  Current restrictions limit upgrades to vessels just 10% longer, and with 20% greater horsepower, than the vessel that was originally issued the permit.

The administration proposal to the New England and Mid-Atlantic councils to

“Evaluate vessel baseline restrictions”

would upset the current equilibrium.

It wouldn’t necessarily lead to more fish being caught, so long as quotas and state trip limits remained in place, although it might make it easier for the commercial fleet to catch their entire quota in fisheries where that doesn’t always happen today.  What it would probably do is lead to quotas being filled earlier, and season closed sooner, something that would probably favor the larger boats that are capable of bringing more fish to market at one time than older, smaller vessels, and thus frustrating the original goal of “maintaining fleet diversity.”

But bringing more fish back to the dock on each trip isn’t necessarily a good thing for the commercial fleet, for while it would satisfy the administration goal of increasing commercial landings, as well as increasing efficiency, it probably would also depress fish prices.  As greater volumes of fish hit the market at the same time, the commercial fleet might well find itself in a position where it is catching more, but earning less.

And that’s probably enough talk about proposed commercial changes, although there are certainly more that could be discussed.  The few recreational proposals also need to get some attention.

Not surprisingly, the South Atlantic Fishery Management Council was directed to

“Support state agency-led exempted fishing permits for red snapper.”

I’ve already discussed such permits on multiple occasions, explaining why, as currently proposed, they are an incredibly bad idea, a conclusion that has also been reached by a federal judge who has temporarily enjoined NMFS from allowing any fishing subject to the EFPs that it had already issued.  It doesn’t seem to make sense to instruct the South Atlantic Council to support what has already been deemed an illegal act, but I suppose the hope is that the states will reapply to NMFS, which is already happening, and that NMFS will issue new exempted fishing permits that aren’t quite so obviously illegal, and might just stand up to judicial review if the case happens to be assigned to the right judge (which undoubtedly means one of the less capable and less independent jurists among those appointed by the current administration).

The South Atlantic Council was also directed to

“Address shark and dolphin depredation,”

which was kind of a strange proposal.

It’s not that depredation isn’t an issue; it’s one of the hottest issues in recreational fisheries management today, particularly in the South.

It’s just not clear what the South Atlantic Council can do about it, given that it doesn’t have clear management authority over either sharks or dolphin.

What the South Atlantic Council does have is management authority over the fish that are being depredated, but it’s not likely that they’re going to amend its Snapper Grouper Fishery Management Plan with a provision that says something like,

“Recreational fishing vessels engaged in angling for any species managed under this plan may keep a firearm on board, which may be used to shoot and kill any marine mammal that attempts to depredate an angler’s catch,”

or something similar relating to sharks and harpoons.

It’s equally unlikely that the Council would add a provision to the effect that

“Anglers experiencing shark depredation must immediately move their boat to another location at least one mile from the place where the depredation event occurred,”

as the first two suggestions would be patently illegal, while the third would have anglers up in arms.

Thus, directing the depredation proposal to the South Atlantic Council made no sense at all.

But then, I already observed that common sense has left the building.

Unfortunately, sensible or not, the new list of proposals is just one more step toward the current administration’s goal of dismantling a federal fishery management system that has served the nation well for at least the past quarter-decade, and arguably for a full 50 years.

And the sad thing is that, unless a control shift in Congress provides a counterbalance to the administration’s deregulatory ambitions, that federal management system that “has shown that we know how to rebuild stocks and keep them healthy” might not survive until common sense hopefully reenters the building sometime around January 16, 2029.