WESTERN ATLANTIC REGULATIONS MAY THE THE KEY TO HEALTHY BLUEFIN TUNA STOCKS

 

We’ve known for a long time that Atlantic bluefin tuna migrations are complex, with fish spawned into the Mediterranean Sea traveling into North American waters, while fish spawned off North America were thought to cross the ocean to swim off European shores.  Now, thanks to a recent paper published by a team of scientists led by Dr. Barbara A. Block of Stanford University’s Department of Biology and Department of Oceans, we also know that the bluefins’ sojourns to the western Atlantic may be particularly important to tuna stocks’ health.

“Ensuring the future of Atlantic bluefin tuna,” which appeared in the April 20, 2026 volume of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reviews three decades of archival, satellite, and acoustic tagging data, and advises

“that exploitation of Med-spawning fish, particularly on the spawning grounds, may impact all fisheries in the North Atlantic basin through their extensive distributional range,”

and also that

“Shifting selectivity to older year classes releases juvenile bluefin from the Med to the higher productivity of the North Atlantic, where they experience multiple years of growth and lower fishing mortality before returning to their spawning grounds.”

The National Marine Fisheries Service issued a press release heralding the research, in which Eugenio Pineiro Soler, NOAA’s Assistant Administrator for Fisheries, was quoted as saying,

“Management of this internationally shared resource requires high quality scientific information—and this work provides one example of that.  This research addresses one of the primary sources of uncertainty surrounding the amount of mixing and movement occurring between these two stocks.  This is a critical piece of information needed to inform sustainable yield advice.”

The cross-ocean movements of Atlantic bluefin have long been an issue for not only scientists and fisheries managers, but anglers and commercial fishermen as well; there has always been the questions of whether restrictive regulations constraining harvest of the western stock might be frustrated when tuna cross into the eastern Atlantic, where more permissive management measures prevail, and whether the relatively small United States quota makes sense in the face of the far higher quotas awarded to nations that fish in the Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic.

The new paper answers those questions, noting that

“electronic tagging results for adolescent and mature fish indicate that the Med stock subsidizes the North American fisheries and, importantly, exploitation of Med spawning fish, particularly on the Med spawning grounds, impacts all [Atlantic bluefin tuna] fisheries in the North Atlantic.”

As NMFS explains,

“The results show that many bluefin tuna move from eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean waters to the western Atlantic to forage and grow.  These fish often remain in the west for several years before returning to the Mediterranean Sea or spawning in the Slope Sea.  Tagging also demonstrated that adult fish tagged in the U.S. and Canadian waters move back to the Mediterranean to spawn and often return the following year to the western Atlantic to forage along the U.S. eastern seaboard.  Importantly, bluefin tuna that originated in the western Atlantic, however, tend to stay west of the 45^oW management line.”

The reason that eastern stock bluefin often migrate into western Atlantic waters appears to be food, with NMFS suggesting that

“Tuna are likely heading west to find and feed on vital prey such as Atlantic mackerel, Atlantic herring, and menhaden, which are abundant in U.S. and Canadian waters.”

But regardless of why many of the eastern stock bluefin move west, the movements of the eastern and western stocks make it clear that management measures intended to protect the western stock bluefin are not compromised by significant numbers of those fish traveling to eastern Atlantic water.  However, the many eastern stock bluefin that enter the western Atlantic also receive such measures’ protection, to the benefit of both North American fishermen and the bluefin themselves.

The paper notes that the eastern stock is thought to be about 10 times as large as the western stock, although there is substantial uncertainty surrounding that number, and that the total allowable catch for the eastern stock is 40,570 metric tons, compared to just 2,726 metric tons for the western stock.  Fishing activity in the eastern Atlantic was and is also much more intense, with the paper stating that

“From 1990 to the mid-2000s, estimated fishing mortality F was, adjusting for underreporting, typically 0.15 to 0.20 [or, very approximately, 15% of the population removed each year] for eastern juveniles (ages 2 to 5) and 0.3 to 0.4 [roughly 25 to 35 percent annual removals] for large individuals 9age 10+), concentrated primarily in the Med.  This period of heightened catch did not occur in the west…or north…, meaning that migrating to the West or North Atlantic provided eastern [Atlantic bluefin tuna] with relative safety from fishing mortality for almost 20 [years].  [citations omitted]”

It thus advised that

“In the Med, shifting selectivity of fishing to older ages in recent years and reducing [total allowable catch] not only controlled overfishing but created, in effect, an escapement management regime…that allowed migrating eastern [Atlantic bluefin tuna] juveniles and subadults to enjoy a longer, safer, and more productive juvenile growth period than those remaining in the Med.  Effectively, an unknown number of Med juveniles were able to ‘escape’ selection at an early age, forage, and reach maturity in the North Atlantic.  We hypothesize that this led to higher spawning contribution per recruit, higher overall abundance, and greater fishery yields, with the lower exploitation rates of North American fisheries providing a release from fishing mortality…  [citations omitted]”

But it wasn’t only the eastern stock that benefited.

“[F]or the western stock, as the supply of eastern [Atlantic bluefin tuna] increased the relatively static western area [total allowable catch] exerted decreasing mortality upon the western stock.  After years of relative stasis, the western-only larval and [longline fishery] catch indices in the Gulf [of Mexico] now show substantial increases indicating that growth of the western stock may have only responded due to managing fishing mortality of the eastern stock…  [citations omitted]”

The management measures adopted for the western stock three decades ago proved to be a conservation success story for the entire Atlantic bluefin tuna population.  As NMFS observed,

“The major conservation and management measures taken by ICCAT, combined with shifting catches to larger fish, resulted in a dramatic turnaround of the stock.  Reducing fishing mortality to sustainable levels allowed several year classes of fish to survive, grow, and leave the Mediterranean to seek the productive feeding grounds of the North Atlantic.  This escapement from Mediterranean spawning areas to wider Atlantic waters with stricter harvest measures allows bluefin tuna to live longer, grow larger, and contribute more offspring to the population.  This emphasizes the importance of managing fishing mortality in areas of high vulnerability such as spawning aggregations…

“Whether the current Atlantic bluefin fishery total allowable catch remains sustainable in the face of a rapidly changing ocean and increasing human demand remains uncertain.  What is certain is the return on investment for state-of-the-art science.

“U.S. anglers have been frustrated in recent years by strict harvest measures for bluefin, but the science confirms that these measures are effective.  Our conservation efforts are having huge impacts—not just for the United States, but across the Atlantic.  Anecdotal evidence supports this, with anglers along the U.S. East Coast catching more and larger bluefin than in the past 30 years.  The stock recovery is such that ICCAT adopted higher total allowable catch for the western stock…”

Yet, among all of those positive comments and unqualified support for good fisheries science lurks a substantial amount of irony. 

For more than a year, the current administration has repeatedly sought to cut the funding and the personnel needed to perform fisheries science at NMFS, whether that science be “state-of-the-art” or the sort of routine surveys and data collection needed to perform basic management tasks for a wide array of species.

And, specific to Atlantic bluefin tuna, it has made the groundless claim that the United States need not count recreationally-caught bluefin tuna against its annual quota, although there appears nothing in any ICCAT recommendation that would support that position.

Nor is it completely clear where the notion came from, although a recent article that appeared in The Fisherman magazine might make one suspect that it arose somewhere within the recreational fishing industry.  That article read, in part,

“There is no doubt that there is a booming recreational and for-hire fishery in the Mediterranean and Eastern Atlantic waters with little catch data being submitted for too many years now.  Earlier this year the [European Union] implemented new mandatory, daily electronic data reporting requirements for marine recreational fisheries targeting certain species, including bluefin.  However, other nations that are not part of the EU but are part of European and African continents are reporting little if any recreational catch, despite landings occurring.  There is still a glaring disconnect.”

The article fails to mention that the only two non-EU countries in the Eastern Atlantic are Norway, which has a national recreational quota of a whopping 10 metric tons—fewer bluefin than anglers killed off the southeastern United States during the first two weeks of 2026—and the United Kingdom, where the recreational quota is a still-tiny 20 mt.  There are more non-EU nations bordering on the Mediterranean Sea, but they include states such as Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, and Montenegro, none of which are known as recreational fishing powerhouses, and none of which have any recreational quota at all.

So, the argument that the United States is justified in not counting its recreational landings against its quota because some non-EU nations might be doing the same thing falls pretty flat.

Yet the article goes on.

“The ICCAT Eastern Atlantic/Mediterranean management requires that recreational catch be reported and assigned to one’s quota.  The U.S. has argued that a parallel requirement does not exist for the Western Atlantic contracting parties in Western bluefin management Recommendation 22-10.  As a result—and because of the lack of recreational catch recreational catch reporting for many years now by the Eastern Atlantic/Mediterranean contracting parties—the U.S. notified ICCAT in January 2026 that it is exploring continuing to meet its requirement to report our recreational catch but not count it against the US quota…

“Not surprisingly, this proposal has been heavily criticized by our friends across the pond.  It should be noted that our recreational quota is negligible in comparison to the Western and Eastern Atlantic/Mediterranean bluefin quotas that are dominated by commercial quota allocations.”

Once again, we see arguments of dubious merit.

Recommendation 25-05—which superseded Recommendation 22-10 at last November’s ICCAT meeting—clearly states,

“An annual [total allowable catch], inclusive of dead discards, of 3,081.6 [metric tons] is established for 2026, 2027, and 2028…If the total catch in the western area exceeds 3,081.6 t in any year, it shall constitute an exceptional circumstance…  [emphasis added]”

To argue that “total catch” included dead discards, but excluded recreational landings, would be ludicrous.

In addition, Recommendation 25-05 is generally sector neutral; while it mentions recreational fisheries twice, it only mentions commercial fisheries once.  The natural counter to the argument that the Recommendation doesn’t explicitly require including recreational landings in the quota is that it doesn’t explicitly require including commercial landings, either.  The only explicit references are to “total catch” and “dead discards.”  Yet the mandatory counting of commercial landings against the quota is assumed.

But the ultimate argument for counting recreational landings against the U.S. quota is that it would be in the long-term interests of United States fishermen to do so.  As the new research indicates, the restrictive management measures in place in the western Atlantic benefited both the eastern and western bluefin stocks.  Placing greater fishing pressure on fish in the western Atlantic now, by omitting recreational landings from the United State’ quota and so increasing the western kill, could only risk reversing three decades of progress.

In the end, “Ensuring the future of Atlantic bluefin tuna” is a very valuable bit of research.  NMFS was completely justified in calling it “state-of-the-art science.”

But the thing about state-of-the-art science is that, while it is a good thing in and of itself, it is far more valuable if it is actually put to use.  NMFS shouldn’t just issue press releases hailing the paper.  It should put the paper’s findings to practical use, and continue to cooperate with the ICCAT management scheme that made the western Atlantic a valuable sanctuary for bluefin tuna for the past 30 or more years.

 

STRIPED BASS DEJA VU: MANAGERS CONSIDER REVISED REFERENCE POINTS

 

About a quarter-century ago, after striped bass had recovered from their stock collapse, and both fishery managers and stakeholders were debating what that stock ought to look like in the future, some individuals, mostly representing the commercial fleet and the recreational fishing industry, supported a management approach that would truncate the age and size structure of the stock, in order to maximize harvest.

There were others, mostly recreational fishermen who spent most of their spare time on the water targeting striped bass, who argued that the best thing for both the fish and the fishermen was to keep fishing mortality low enough to allow a well-stratified age and size structure to develop, which featured a substantial number of older, larger, and more fecund females, in order to better insulate the stock against periods of low recruitment and to create what the anglers called a “quality” striped bass fishery.  They came together under the mantra of

“The job’s not done until we bring back the big bass.”

Things got heated, particularly as the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission began holding hearings on what would eventually become Amendment 6 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Striped Bass.

Here in New York, there was a weekly saltwater angling publication that was handed out free at tackle shops, marinas, and similar places, which also maintained a popular website.  As New York’s Amendment 6 hearing drew near, the publication’s owner posted a poll on the website, asking whether readers would prefer to see striped bass managed primarily for harvest, with a population consisting mainly of small fish, and very few large ones, or whether they would prefer to see a population managed for larger fish, and a quality fishery, which necessarily meant lower landings.

His readers, by far, preferred managing for larger fish rather than for larger harvest, and he dutifully reported that preference at the hearing.

Immediately, New York’s recreational fishing industry retaliated, with tackle shops, for-hire boats, and at least some marinas cancelling their advertisements and threatening the publication’s survival, thus forcing the owner to recant and print editorials supporting industry positions.

Amendment 6 emerged somewhat better, adopting as its goal

“To perpetuate, through cooperative interstate fisheries management, migratory stocks of striped bass; to allow commercial and recreational fisheries consistent with the long-term maintenance of a broad age structure, a self-sustaining spawning stock; and also to provide for the restoration and maintenance of their essential habitat.  [emphasis added]”

Amendment 6 also included seven objectives intended to help achieve its stated goal, including

“Manage fishing mortality to maintain an age structure that provides adequate spawning potential to sustain long-term abundance of striped bass populations,”

and

“Establish a fishing mortality target that will result in a net increase in the abundance (pounds) of age 15 and older striped bass in the population, relative to the 2000 estimate.”

Unfortunately, the fishing mortality target finally adopted in the amendment represented a compromise between the harvest-oriented stakeholders and those more concerned with the age and size structure of the stock.  Amendment 6’s combination of generous commercial quotas and coastal recreational regulations that included a 2-fish bag limit, 28-inch minimum size and no closed season proved inadequate to constrain landings to anything close to the fishing mortality target.

The 2018 benchmark stock assessment found that, under the harvest regime established in the amendment, by 2017 the striped bass stock had already become overfished and was experiencing overfishing, while a presentation made at the February 2019 meeting of the ASMFC’s Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board revealed that overfishing had clearly taken place in 11 of the 15 years between 2003, when Amendment 6 was adopted, and 2017, while in two more years, the fishing mortality rate was just about equal to the threshold that defined an overfished stock.  Only two years out of the 15—2007 and 2009—saw a fishing mortality rate clearly below threshold, although even in those years, it appeared to be above Amendment 6’s fishing mortality target.

Yet even before the benchmark assessment was released, there were those on the Management Board who argued that, instead of reducing overfishing, the reference points that guided management actions—the target and threshold levels of female spawning stock biomass and fishing mortality—should instead be changed to accommodate what had long been deemed excessive harvest.

At the May 2018 Management Board meeting, in preparation for the next benchmark assessment, there was a long discussion of whether the reference points ought to be coastwide, or whether each spawning stock should have their own set of reference points.  There was also the question of whether the reference points should be “biological” reference points, derived from the stock assessment model, or whether the Management Board should continue to use “empirical” reference points based on observations and not the model itself.

In the end, biologists decided that the biological reference points derived from the model were “unrealistic,” and that empirical reference points based on the size of the female spawning stock biomass in 1995, the year that the formerly collapsed stock was declared fully rebuilt, would continue to be used.

But that didn’t end the reference point discussion.  At the May 2019 Management Board meeting, which focused on the then-anticipated Amendment 7 to the management plan, Maryland fisheries manager Michael Luisi again raised the question of moving the goalposts—that is, changing the reference points—in a way that reduced the spawning stock biomass target and made larger annual harvests possible, saying that

“We’ve had concerns over the reference points for quite some time.  In our mind they’re a bit too high.  I think they provide for an unrealistic expectation to the public that we’re going to achieve that level.

“You know, currently the threshold reference point is 91,000 metric tons and 125 percent of that puts us at a target value, and when you look at the estimates of spawning stock biomass that came out of the benchmark.  We have never achieved the target in all of that time as we’re evaluating that.”

Of course, Luisi was wrong about never achieving the biomass target, although he couldn’t know it at the time.  The 2022 stock assessment update made it quite clear that female spawning stock biomass was above the target level between 2002 and 2005, and just below the target in 2008, 2009, and 2010, a not unlikely result when fishing mortality remained below threshold for all but one of the years between 1982 and 2002.  The stock only began to decline after fishing mortality exceeded the threshold and the stock began to experience chronic overfishing.

And during those years when the stock exceeded the biomass target, the recreational fishery, which is responsible for most striped bass removals, was still allowed to harvest two fish per angler, with a 28-inch minimum size.

We can only speculate whether, had anglers already been constrained by the sort of regulations adopted in Addendum VI to Amendment 6 to the Atlantic Striped Bass Interstate Fishery Management Plan, with its one-fish bag and 28- to 35-inch slot size limit (without Addendum VI’s provision for conservation equivalency, which allowed states like New Jersey to legally skirt the rules), the spawning stock biomass might have climbed even higher, and might not have become overfished by 2013—or whether it ever would have become overfished at all.

As it happened, going into the debate over the Public Information Document for Amendment 7, options to change the reference points and the goals and objectives of the management plan were presented for public comment.  The public overwhelmingly rejected both suggestions, with 1,719 out of 1,747 comments addressing the issue—98.4%--opposing any change to the goals and objectives of the management plan, while 2,746 out of 2,764 comments—fully 99.4%--opposed changing the reference points to something that would, presumably, sacrifice the size and structure of the stock for a larger harvest.

Faced with that level of opposition, the Management Board wisely chose to remove any options to change the reference point or the goals and objectives from the draft of Amendment 7 that was finally sent out for public comment.

Yet, here we go again.

The ASMFC’s Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board will hold its next meeting at 1:15 in the afternoon of May 4.  One of the topics on its agenda is

“Discuss 2027 Benchmark Stock Assessment…

“Provide Guidance to Stock Assessment Subcommittee on Biological Reference Points and Spatial Management.”

The discussion will probably address two items that were highlighted in a January 26 memo from the Atlantic Striped Bass Stock Assessment Subcommittee to the Management Board, which was included with the meeting agenda.  The relevant item for this discussion is

“How does the Board want to balance preserving SSB and allowing fishing?”

As the memo explains,

“There is a trade-off between preserving SSB and allowing fishing, and determining the best balance between these two parameters requires management input.  If the Board wanted to establish a lower SSB target and threshold—for example, setting the target to the 1995 estimate of SSB and the threshold to some lower percentage of that value—then the F target and F threshold values could increase, depending on the assumptions about future recruitment.  Or the Board could set higher F target and threshold values based on a stable period in the fishery and calculate the SSB target and threshold values associated with those F rates in the long term, which would be lower than current values.”

In either case, striped bass abundance would decline.  As the memo noted,

“A lower SSB would mean lower availability of larger fish.  Even if the F target is increased, that may not translate into a higher harvest or yield, since that F rate is applied to a smaller population.  In addition, lower availability of larger fish means lower encounter rates overall, particularly in the ocean region.”

So, it would seem that a higher fishing mortality rate would be bad for the recreational fishery all around, as it would not only result in a smaller striped bass population made up largely of smaller fish, but it wouldn’t necessarily put ,pore fish in anglers’ coolers while lowering the encounter rate, and thus the overall quality of the fishery.

Nor would it seem to do the commercial fishery much good, since removing a greater proportion of fish from a smaller population probably wouldn’t result in significantly higher commercial landings.

And when the scientists on the Stock Assessment Subcommittee start saying things like

“If the Board is interested in considering options for a set of [biological reference points] with a higher F and lower SSB targets and thresholds, it would be helpful to receive inputs on things like…acceptable level of risk when it comes to preventing stock collapse…”

it might be past time to accept that making such changes to the reference points is a bad idea, given that we’re already worried that current levels of harvest and recruitment might be creating a risk of stock collapse that is higher than we’re comfortable with.

Yet it’s likely that there are some members of the Management Board—probably including most, if not all, of the delegations from Maryland, New Jersey, and Delaware, very possibly jointed by New York’s Governor’s Appointee—who will nonetheless want to include such possible changes in the 2027 benchmark assessment. 

That is not a good thing, but it is probably inevitable.  We will just have to deal with such proposed changes once the assessment is completed, just as they were dealt with in the runup to Amendment 7.

However, there are also changes to the reference points that might—and in some cases almost certainly will—emerge from the benchmark assessment itself.

At this point, I don’t know whether anyone is certain what model will be used to perform the benchmark assessment.  The biologists doing the work might utilize the same model that they used the last time around, but it is more likely that they will consider making some changes—examining the appropriateness of the model is, after all, one of the things that a benchmark assessment is for—in an effort to find a more accurate model, or at least one that is a better fit for the available data.

In the course of selecting the model, it is possible that they will select one that will generate biological reference points that aren’t deemed “unrealistic,” but instead provide useful guidance for the spawning stock biomass target, based on the productivity of the stock.  If that is the case, and managers can replace the current empirical reference points with a new set rooted firmly in striped bass biology, it will be a step forward, regardless of what the SSB target turns out to be.

We can only speculate about whether that might happen, but one thing is virtually certain:  If the benchmark assessment sticks with empirical reference points, and some version of the current model, the spawning stock biomass target and threshold will be reduced.  That’s not because of conniving, or any effort to increase striped bass landings, but rather because the current model uses recreational landings as one of its inputs and—perhaps counterintuitively—higher recreational landings generally lead to a higher estimate of SSB.

We saw that in the last benchmark, when the use of Marine Recreational Information Program landings estimates, which were significantly higher than those provided by the obsolete Marine Recreational Fishing Statistical Survey, led to a substantially higher estimate of spawning stock biomass.  But now, the National Marine Fisheries Service has determined that MRIP overestimated the number of recreational fishing trips, and thus recreational catch, releases, and landings.  Since 2023, NMFS has been working to correct flaws in the survey and revise the data accordingly, a process that is expected to be completed later this year.  The revised data, which will include lower estimates of recreational landings, will be available in time for the benchmark assessment and, unless a new model dictates otherwise, will result in the estimate of spawning stock biomass being revised downward as well.

The spawning stock target will be revised accordingly, as will the fishing mortality reference points.

And that will be good, as it will bring the reference points into alignment with the best available science.

As to any other proposed change to the reference points?  We’ll just have to wait and see.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NMFS CUTS THREATEN MID-ATLANTIC ANGLERS, FOR-HIRE FLEET

 

It was just 15 months ago when the so-called Department of Government Efficiency was created by executive order, and unleashed Elon Musk and his army of tech bros on the nation’s administrative agencies, in an effort supposedly intended to eliminate “waste, fraud, and abuse” by improving government technology, increasing government productivity, reducing federal regulations, and so reducing government spending. 

As a result, certain government contracts were terminated, at the same time that agencies were forced to engage in massive layoffs and staff reductions.

Somewhere amid all of the excitement of reducing government payrolls, the people responsible for all the cuts never considered—or never cared—that they needed to leave enough people behind to do the agencies’ work, and provide necessary services for the folks living and working in the United States.

One of those services is managing the nation’s living marine resources.  I’ve written before about how cuts to the National Marine Fisheries Service’s budget and personnel have hampered effective fisheries management.  But today, in the Mid-Atlantic region, we are facing a situation where a shortage of NMFS’ personnel—in particular those who draft and review fisheries regulations—is threatening to cause real harm to the region’s recreational anglers and to its for-hire fleet.

To understand what’s happening now, we have to go back to June 2022, when the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council and the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Interstate Fishery Management Plan Policy Board agreed to adopt the so-called “Percent Change Approach” for managing bluefish, summer flounder, scup, and black sea bass, an approach which abandoned the traditional approach of trying to constrain recreational harvest to the recreational harvest limit, but instead created a more flexible process that considered multiple factors when setting recreational landings limits.

Although the Percent Change Approach had strong support among both Council members and the Policy Board, it found critics among both the members of the Council’s Scientific and Statistical Committee and the fisheries conservation community (I freely admit that I was one of them).  To make the new approach more palatable to those critics, and also to allow for modifications once managers had gained some real-world experience with its workings, the motion adopted by the Council and Policy Board provided that the Percent Change Approach would sunset on December 31, 2025, unless it was extended by both management bodies.

At the April 2025 Council meeting, the Council and Policy Board approved a modified version of the Percent Change Approach, that would be used to manage all four species.  Council staff then drafted a framework document embodying the modified management approach, and submitted it to NMFS for approval on August 1, 2025.

Later, at the December 2025 Council meeting, where the Council met jointly with the ASMFC’s Summer Flounder, Scup, and Black Sea Bass Management Board, both the Council and Management Board agreed to increase overall recreational black sea bass landings by 20%, set “non-preferred” coastwide recreational management measures for the species, and agreed that the states would be allowed to adopt management measures that differed from the non-preferred measures, provided that the ASMFC’s Summer Flounder, Scup, and Black Sea Bass Technical Committee found them to have conservation equivalence.

Allowing equivalent state measures to supplant the non-preferred management measures, even for anglers fishing in federal waters, had been accepted practice in recent years, so the states, acting through the ASMFC, quickly drew up new rules that took advantage of the black sea bass landings increase.

Unfortunately, due to severe understaffing at NMFS, proposed regulations implementing the modified Percent Change Approach have not yet been issued by the agency, and with black sea bass seasons in most states opening in May, it is clear that such regulations will not be issued before those seasons begin.

Thus, the federal management measures adopted at the December 2025 Council meeting, which assumed that regulations adopting the 2025 version of the Percent Change Approach would be in place before the black sea bass season opened, remain in limbo. 

While the states may go ahead and adopt regulations approved by the Council and Management Board in December for anglers fishing in state waters, anglers fishing for black sea bass in federal waters will have to comply with the federal non-preferred management option adopted at the December 2024 Council meeting.  Those regulations include a 5-fish bag limit, a 15-fish minimum size, and a season that runs from May 15 through September 8.

Party and charter boats holding a federal black sea bass permit will also have to abide by the non-preferred management measures, even when fishing in state waters.  Thus, each for-hire vessel owner will have to decide whether their interests are best served by retaining their federal permit, and being bound by federal rules, or surrendering that permit, and being limited to fishing only within state waters.

NMFS’ failure to act on the Council’s draft management measures will have a negative impact throughout the Mid-Atlantic, although that impact will differ from state to state. 

Here in New York, where the state has recently announced its intention to adopt black sea bass regulations that include a season that runs from May 16 through December 31, a 16-inch minimum size, and a bag limit of 3 fish through August 31, then 6 for the remainder of the year, falling back on the non-preferred federal rules won’t have any impact at all until September.  We can at least hope that NMFS will get its act together and issue the needed final regulation by then. 

However, if the agency fails to put the needed regulation in place, and the black sea bass season ends on September 8 rather than on December 31, it will be a major blow to the state’s party boat fishery, which relies heavily on black sea bass during the last months of the year.

In New Jersey, the impacts of NMFS’ failure to adopt the regulation implementing last year’s Council actions will be more immediate, and more severe.  There, the 2026 black sea bass regulations seem to favor the for-hire fleet over private boat anglers, with a 12 ½-inch size limit and a 10-fish bag limit from May 15-June 21, and again from September 23-October 31, after which it increases to 15 fish through the end of the year; during the summer season, from June 22-September 22, the black sea bass bag is only a single fish.  Increasing the size limit to 15 inches, a 2 ½-inch jump, while cutting the bag limit in half, for the first 38 days of the season, then shutting the season down completely after September 8, would undoubtedly slash New Jersey’s black sea bass landings, outrage party boat patrons, and cause substantial financial harm to the for-hire fleet.

Similar harm could be expected in the southern Mid-Atlantic, where black sea bass regulations have long been more liberal than they are in New York and southern New England, and the fishery is typically prosecuted in federal waters.  The contrast between the federal rules and Maryland’s 12 ½-inch size limit, 15-fish bag, and season that runs from May 1 through the end of the year is a case in point.

The irony of the situation is that NMFS has just issued it’s new National Saltwater Receational Fisheries Policy.  Three of the five “strategic goals” of that policy are to

“Promote sustainable recreational fishing that maximizes economic growth and supports coastal communities, tourism, and marine recreational industries,”

“Provide immediate, long-term, and accessible saltwater recreational fishing opportunities through science-based management,”

and

“Improve the responsiveness of fisheries management to current and future ocean conditions.”

Yet NMFS failure to issue final regulations approving a Council action that took place over a year ago, which was reflected in a draft management measure sent to the agency over eight months ago, will harm economic growth in the fishery, fails to support tourism or marine recreational industries, reduces recreational fishing opportunities, and is anything but responsive to a change in ocean conditions that led to an abundance of black sea bass.

It hardly adheres to the new Policy’s stated principles to “Improve Access” to and “Promote Participation” in the nation’s saltwater recreational fisheries.

The new Policy may consist of pretty words, laid out across six pages of pretty pictures and graphic art.  But if NMFS isn’t given adequate funding to do its job, that’s all that the policy is—pretty words and pictures that have little to do with reality.

It’s not NMFS’ fault, for given the agency’s very limited resources, it does the best that it can.

Yet, although the fault lies elsewhere, in more exalted if far less qualified hands, the impact on the angler and angler-related business is the same.

We deserve better, and ought not settle for less.

 

SPRING THOUGHTS ABOUT STRIPED BASS

 

New York’s striped bass season opened yesterday.

From what I heard, a few fish were caught, and some of those were of reasonable size, although anglers who had been fishing for and releasing their bass prior to the season opener—which is perfectly legal in New York’s marine waters—have been reporting less than stellar action in most places.

It’s difficult to say what this season will bring although, given the poor striped bass recruitment in recent years, it’s safe to say that, overall, this year’s striped bass fishing won’t be as good as last year’s, but will probably be better than anything that we’ll experience for the next decade or more.

Still, there will probably be times and places that provide some fast action, even when bass are generally scarce.  We saw that sort of thing happen in the depths of the last stock collapse during the early 1980s, when Block Island and parts of Cape Cod provided extremely good fishing for very large striped bass at a time when bass were somewhat scarcer than unicorns everywhere else.

Right now, Raritan Bay, which sits between New York and New Jersey, seems to be particularly hot.  In recent years, Raritan Bay has often provided good early-season action.  2021 was an especially good year, that saw anglers catch, and mostly release, a little over four million striped bass during March and April alone—49% of the coastwide striped bass catch during that period--over the course of about one million fishing trips, although things have slowed down since then.  Last year, New Jersey anglers only caught about 733,000 bass—42% of the coastwide total—during those two months, even though they took about 100,000 more trips in March and April than they did in 2021, a catch total that was more in line with historical norms.

The lower 2025 catch figure is significant, as it contributed to unexpectedly low striped bass catch totals in the first half of last year, which helped to convince the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board that no further restrictions on the striped bass fishery would be needed to fully rebuild the striped bass stock by the 2029 deadline set by the management plan.

Should the Raritan Bay fishery result in striped bass catch levels seen in the early 2020s—almost certainly not the big spike of 2021, but at least levels twice that of 2025—it is very possible that the Management Board has underestimated the 2026 fishing mortality rate, and perhaps the fishing mortality rate for 2027-2029 as well, and that striped bass rebuilding will, as a result, fall short of the biomass target.

And that’s not a good thing when we already know that seven years of very poor recruitment is going to lead to low striped bass abundance in the 2030s.

Now, the big question is whether we will only have seven years of poor recruitment before striped bass spawning success returns to something close to the historical average, or whether low recruitment—and the recruitment over the past seven years has been so poor, that it is well below the level contemplated in the management plan’s “low recruitment assumption—will continue into the indefinite future.  If such “very low recruitment” scenario continues, the spawning stock biomass, which has been increasing due to the growth of the fish already in the SSB, will begin to decline in 2030 or 2031, with the depth of that decline determined by how long the very low recruitment regime lasts.

For some years, we believed that the success of striped bass spawns was solely dependent on just two factors—a cold, wet winter and a cool, moist spring.  Now, we know that things aren’t quite that simple, but I still hear quite a few anglers say that, given how cold last winter was—and it really wasn’t particularly cold, if you compare it to winters thirty or more years ago, when New York clammers regularly ventured out on a frozen Great South Bay and cut holes in the sea ice to get at the clams—they expect a very good bass spawn this year.

I truly hope that they’re right, but I expect that they’ll be disappointed.

Even if we rely solely on the old cold, wet winter/cool, moist spring formulation, once we get past the cold winter, there are reasons to be concerned.  Almost all of Maryland is experiencing drought conditions, with the United States Drought Monitor showing most of the state, including most of the state where the spawning rivers are located, under “Moderate Drought” conditions, while the lower half of the state’s western shore of the Chesapeake Bay, which includes the important Patuxent and Potomac River spawning grounds, are experiencing “Severe Drought.”

That’s hardly the sign of a cool, moist spring.

Martin Gary is the current Director of the New York Department of Environmental Conservation’s Marine Resources Division, but before he came to New York, he spent decades, beginning in the early 1980s, as a fisheries manager in Maryland, where he became intimately familiar with the factors affecting Maryland’s striped bass spawn.  In recent years, he has analyzed those factors and published his annual analysis on Facebook, to provide some insights into how the striped bass spawn might turn out.

He lists five criteria—river flow rates, water temperature, the timing of the spawn, the coincidence of the striped bass spawn with the peak abundance of the zooplankton that the young bass feed on, and predation by the blue catfish—as the factors impacting striped bass spawning success, with river flows and water temperatures the “most critical” of the five.

His thoughts on 2026 spawning success aren’t particularly encouraging.

With respect to water flows, he noted that flows in mid-March were “close to the long-term median.”  Unfortunately, such near-normal flows didn’t continue.  Instead,

“the worst case scenario has played out, with very little precipitation and plummeting flow volumes in the tributaries.  A quick glance at the USGS watershed dashboard shows nearly every monitoring station in the upper bay drainage either maroon or crimson (all below the 25^th percentile).  It’s a pretty grim picture…”

With regard to water temperature, he says,

“This year…too warm, too soon,”

although he notes that

“one positive that has me curious is the severe oscillations in temperature that we often get (warming trend and then plunging temperatures from a cold front).  Have [sic] been absent, and perhaps if we are lucky, very little mortality will occur from thermal shock to larvae.”

Based on that hope, he scores this year’s water temperatures a little higher than water flows, although still only rates it a 3 out of a possible 10.

He also doesn’t hold out too much hope with respect to the spawn’s timing, observing that peak spawning activity once occurred in May, and that in the 1960s and 1970s, bass didn’t even show up on the spawning grounds until mid-April, while a 1997 publication set the peak of the spawn in late April and early May.  Still, he while he notes that bass are spawning much earlier today, he doesn’t insist that the earlier spawn forecloses the possibility of a strong year class. 

Instead, he suggests that the earlier spawn

“raises important questions on how a warming climate may be influencing timing of the spawn and reproductive success for Striped Bass.  Timing is different now than it was decades ago, and the trend has been to an earlier peak of spawn.  Does this mean strong year classes can still be produced in these earlier windows?  If they can adapt to this earlier window, perhaps they call pull of a decent spawn this year.  If those conditions are insurmountable, it may be a bust again.  And if we do get a successful spawn and production of larval fish, the next question is even more vexing…Do they have food to eat to survive those most critical days/weeks of life?..”

Which leads to the next question:  Will the peak abundance of the zooplankton occur at the same time that the bass need them in order to survive?

That’s a difficult question.  Research shows that cold, wet winters tend to lead to larger, later zooplankton blooms, but a recent paper also suggested that even when there is enough zooplankton available, a shortened spawning season, caused by water temperatures that rise too quickly to levels fatal to eggs and larvae, could still result in a poor year class.  Mr. Gary didn’t make any firm prediction on how a possible zooplankton match/mismatch might impact the 2026 spawn, but rather chose

“to suggest that the [latter] paper provides evidence that feeding MAY NOT be the sole or dominant driver, but also express concern that that [sic] feeding is perceived as unimportant overall.  There may still be a role mismatch plays in poor recruitment years.”

Finally, there is the great unknown—the impact of blue catfish predation.  There is little hard data to suggest what that impact might be, but in Mr. Gary’s words,

“I do not pretend to know what the possible impact could be, but I believe it is not zero.”

So, in the end, what is his prediction for the 2026 spawn, remembering that last year, he predicted a Maryland juvenile abundance index of 4.0, and was just about dead on target?

“Is it possible we have dominant year class?  Possibly, but not likely.  More likely is an average to slightly above average year class if the temperature profile that warmed quickly but without severe oscillations that might favor reproductions.  But my gut tells me conditions are conducive for a weak year class, and possibly a dismal one.”

Given Mr. Gary’s long experience with Maryland striped bass, and his rational analysis of the governing factors, I’m inclined to trust his gut, and not get my hopes up.

Bass have already been seen chasing menhaden in Long Island’s Great South Bay, so the best advice I can give at this point is to get out and catch (and hopefully release) a few fish now, while the opportunity is still there.

Next year, most of the 2018s will have grown out of the slot, with little coming in to replace them.  At that point, the chances for catch-and-keep striped bass fishing will become increasingly low.  Decent catch-and-release fishing for larger bass should go on for a few years after that, but by the mid-2030s, both fishing and natural mortality will have reduced the once-large 2011 and 2015 year classes to a handful of very large fish, with the 2018s holding on for a very few years longer.

After that, the real drought will set in.

I hate to say it, but if you’ve just started bass fishing over the past three or four years, get out now, fish as much as you can, and try to enjoy it.

Because, for fishermen who never experienced the abundance of years past, these are the good old days.

 

 

 

FISHERIES SCIENCE VERSUS SENTIMENTALITY--AGAIN

 

Just last Thursday, I wrote about a bill introduced in the New York State Legislature that would outlaw octopus farming, even though there are currently no octopus farms—neither in New York nor anywhere else—and there is no data suggesting that octopus farming would create more environmental issues than any other form of open-water aquaculture for free-swimming animals of any kind.

Instead, the primary motivation for the anti-octopus farming legislation seems to be a sentimental vision of the eight-legged cephalopods, largely driven by the much-watched, award-winning movie, My Octopus Teacher—along with a lot of pressure from the animal rights community.

It was a classic example of people’s emotions getting in the way of rational decision making.

When I finalized that piece, I was pretty certain that I wouldn’t write about octopuses again—or, at least, not for a very long time—and while that is hopefully true, it seems like the conflict between fisheries science and emotional, arbitrary decision making is going to be the subject of many essays to come.

The latest example appeared on the conservation website Mongabay, where an article appeared under the remarkable headline,

“At high seas treaty summit, a dispute over fisheries managers’ role in conservation.”

I found that statement remarkable, because it can be easily argued that a fisheries manager’s primary responsibility is the conservation of fisheries under his or her jurisdiction.

The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization seems to agree, as it published a Guidebook on fisheries management, which describes fisheries management as

“The integrated process of information gathering, analysis, planning, consultation, decision-making, the allocation of resources and formulation and implementation, with enforcement as necessary, of regulations or rules which govern fisheries activities in order to ensure the continued productivity of the resources and the accomplishment of other fisheries objectives.”

At the risk of stating the obvious, fisheries management is what a fisheries manager does.  And “ensur[ing] the continued productivity of the resources” sounds a lot like conservation to me.

After all, the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines “conservation” as

“a careful preservation and protection of something especially: planned management of a natural resource to prevent exploitation, destruction, or neglect  [formatting omitted],

while no less authoritative a source than the Oxford English Dictionary defines it as

“The preservation, protection, or restoration of the natural environment and of wildlife; the practice of seeking to prevent the wasteful use of a resource in order to ensure its continuing availability.  [emphasis added]”

The Food and Agriculture Organization’s description of fisheries management falls neatly within both of those definitions.  And it’s important to note that the latter definition contemplates the sustainable use of natural resources, and not merely closing them off from any sort of human access or harvest.  “Conservation” does not require complete and absolute protection.

The problem is that some people disagree, and don’t merely advocate for conservation; they want to see marine resources completely walled off from human utilization.  Their goal is not merely conservation and management—which is what United States law, in the form of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, provides—but complete protection as a goal in itself, whether or not there is any scientific evidence that such protection is needed.

The first two paragraphs of the Mongabay article describe that problem pretty well, in connection with a recent treaty intended to conserve worldwide marine resources:

“For conservationists, one of the major accomplishments of the high seas treaty [which was agreed to by many of the world’s nations in 2023] was that it created a means to establish marine protected areas (MPAs) in international waters.  High seas MPAs are viewed as essential to meeting the looming 2030 deadline to protect 30% of the Earth’s ocean, especially since countries have only just reached one-third of that goal.

“Now, the multilateral organizations that manage high-seas fishing, known as regional fisheries management organizations (RFMOs), are pushing to make sure that their own work is not duplicated or displaced.  Some conservationists see the RFMOs’ engagement as a way of inhibiting protection efforts, arguing that RFMOs are heavily influenced by fishing industry priorities.”

Once again, we see the insinuation that fisheries managers—or, at least, regional fishery management organizations—are not “conservationists.”  Some advocates/advocacy groups, the article tells us, claim that they “are heavily influenced by fishing industry priorities.”  But is that necessarily a bad thing, if one of those industry priorities are to keep fish stocks healthy, so that they may support sustainable—and profitable—fisheries into the foreseeable future?

Anyone who has followed the history of such RFMOs will have to admit that, at times, they fell short of taking the measures necessary to adequately conserve fish stocks, because of industry pressure.  But they will also have to admit that without them, management of highly migratory pelagic fish species would be effectively impossible, and that, in recent years, we have seen the RFMOs do some real good.  Here in the North Atlantic basin, for example, we have seen the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas preside over the rebuilding of once-depleted broadbill swordfish and bluefin tuna stocks, and recently impose a complete moratorium on landing shortfin mako sharks, in order to rebuild the population.

Those all seem like solid conservation measures to me.

On the other hand, while the various advocacy groups might throw stones at the RFMOs for being influenced by the fishing industry, they never mention how their own advocacy efforts shift focus at the whims of the big foundations that provide much of their funding.  Two decades ago, there were multiple environmental groups who were focused on Magnuson-Stevens, seeking to keep the law strong in the face of a congressional reauthorization, and when that was achieved, working hard to put conservation-oriented people on the regional fishery management councils.  Then the big funders decided that Magnuson-Stevens didn’t matter anymore, turned their back on domestic fisheries, and started putting their money into things like 30x30, while the advocacy community, which relied on the foundation money, followed right along, shrinking or eliminating their domestic fisheries staff to focus on international issues.

The regional fishery management organizations, on the other hand, stayed focused on their mission of managing regional fisheries.

That’s probably a good thing, for as the Mongabay article notes, the proper name of the treaty is the

“agreement on the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity of areas beyond national jurisdiction.  [emphasis added]”

And sustainable use is just what the regional fishery management organizations try to promote.

Perhaps that’s why, at a meeting called to draft the treaty’s rules, held in New York City between March 23 and April 2, the delegates present agreed to what Mongabay described as

“rules or procedure that would help enshrine [the RFMOs’] authority to be part of decision-making under the treaty.”

Those rules have yet to be confirmed in a final vote of the parties to the treaty, but the MPA advocates are already upset, even though the draft hardly gives the regional fishery management organizations control of the process, but merely states that

“interactions between the [treaty organization] and bodies such as RFMOs shall be guided by ‘the need to develop strategies to manage overlapping mandates and avoid duplication of efforts, including, where appropriate, by leveraging the expertise and best practices of relevant instruments, frameworks and bodies, and existing cooperation and coordination agreements and platforms.’”

That’s hardly unreasonable, yet the MPA advocates’ response was harsh.  Megan Randles, the global political lead for oceans for the environmental group Greenpeace, raged that

“The organizations that have presided over decades of destruction on the high seas have made a completely unacceptable power-grab which would dramatically weaken the [treaty’s] ability to protect the ocean.  They are attempting to re-write the Treaty in favour of fishing industry vested interests.”

Mongabay also quoted Ryan Orgera, the global director of the United States-based organization Accountability Fish, as saying that regional fishery management organizations

“are not equipped as bodies, philosophically nor logistically, to add value to MPA creation processes…Many of the actors internal to RFMO processes are publicly opposed to the creation of MPAs in their respective treaty-areas.  RFMOs fail in ecosystem protection—they don’t think of ecosystems in meaningful ways; they often treat individual fisheries as discrete entities.”

And perhaps, in that statement, we see the real roots of the conflict.

Regional fisheries management organizations, informed by science, seek to manage fisheries for sustainable harvest, while the organizations opposing RFMO involvement in the process are seeking to create marine protected areas, not because any specific research suggests that they are needed, but merely because of a philosophical belief that MPAs, which prevent any harvest in certain areas, are inherently good—and because they help attain certain arbitrary goals.

We should probably take another look at some of the language at the beginning of the Mongabay article, and really consider what it says:

“High seas MPAs are viewed as essential to meeting the looming 2030 deadline to protect 30% of the Earth’s ocean, especially since countries have only just reached one-third of that goal.”

“Essential to meeting the looming 2030 deadline.” 

High seas MPAs are not viewed as essential to maintain sustainable fisheries.  They are not viewed as essential to rebuild—or prevent the decline of—specific fish stocks.  They are only viewed as essential to meet what is, in fact, an arbitrary deadline of 2030 to protect an equally arbitrary 30% of the ocean from some sort of activity that has never been clearly and completely defined.

That doesn’t mean that high-seas marine protected areas cannot have value.  There might be cases where the best available science will suggest that the only way to adequately protect a population of fish is to close an area of ocean to all commercial fishing, or perhaps to all fishing of any kind.  But such circumstances are probably not common enough to justify closing 30% of the ocean just because it seems a nice thing to do.

Not long ago, MPA advocates were aggressively touting a paper titled “A global network of marine protected areas for food,” which appeared in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in October 2020 and argued that

“Strategically siting marine protected areas (MPAs) in overfished fisheries can have important conservation and food provisioning benefits.  We use distribution data for 1,338 commercially important fisheries stocks around the world to model how MPAs in different locations would affect catch.  We show that strategically expanding the existing global MPA network by just 5% could improve future catch by at least 20%.  Our work demonstrates that a global network of MPAs designed to improve fisheries productivity can substantially increase future catch, enabling synergistic conservation and food provisioning.”

However, that paper has since been retracted, something that only happens when the data underlying the paper, the analysis of that data, or some other aspect of the academic process leading to the paper’s production was seriously and fatally flawed.

So once again, we see an emotional appeal—in this case, the slogan 30x30, which embodies a clear, if unjustified concept, and can easily be used in public relations campaigns—supplanting, in at least some advocates’ minds, data-based management efforts.

Advocates for the arbitrary creation of marine protected areas, and the arbitrary protection of 30% of the ocean, rail against the input of regional fishery management organizations that proceed not on the basis of compelling public relations campaigns, but on the basis of compelling scientific information.

It is the sort of thing that we’ve seen before, when advocacy groups championed causes with public relations appeal, perhaps involving charismatic megafauna—sharks, bluefin tuna, or broadbill swordfish in the ocean, and elephants, lions, or grizzly bears on shore—while ignoring the decline of species such as winter flounder, ocean pout, or bobwhite quail because they aren’t big enough or photogenic enough catch the public imagination and inspire public support.

In the same way, “30x30” can capture the public imagination far better than technical measures intended to rebuild dusky shark populations, even though the need for the latter is far better supported by data.

Which is just another reason whey fisheries management should remain the realm of fisheries managers—people who have been trained, and have dedicated their lifetimes, to conserving fish stocks and maintaining sustainable fisheries—rather than a place where advocates, pushing their cause of the day, merely roil the waters and keep the truly important work from being done.