NEW NATIONAL SALTWATER RECREATIONAL FISHERIES POLICY EMPHASIZES ECONOMIC ISSUES

On April 13, 2026 the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued a press release announcing its newest version of the National Saltwater Recreational Fisheries Policy (Policy), which stated that “The purpose of this policy is to provide guidance for NOAA Fisheries’ consideration in its deliberations pertaining to development and maintenance of enduring and sustainable high quality saltwater recreational fisheries.”

The release further stated that “The policy identifies goals and guiding principles to be integrated into NOAA Fisheries’ planning, budgeting, decision-making, and activities regarding saltwater recreational fishing and includes examples of implementation concepts and strategies supported by NOAA Fisheries.”

The Policy replaces NOAA Fisheries’ original National Saltwater Recreational Fisheries Policy, which was adopted in 2015. Although the Policy remains, in principle, substantially similar to the 2015 version, it places more emphasis on the economic aspects of recreational saltwater fishing. The Policy is also somewhat more detailed than the policy that it replaces, and it addresses some issues for the first time.

Thus, while the original policy simply stated that “It is the policy of [NOAA Fisheries] to foster, support, and enhance a broadly accessible and diverse array of sustainable saltwater recreational fisheries for the benefit and enjoyment of the nation,” and described the scope of the policy by saying, “The policy pertains to non-commercial activities of fishermen who fish for sport or pleasure, as set out in the Magnuson-Stevens Act definition of recreational fishing. That could be retaining (e.g., consuming, sharing) or releasing their catches, as well as the businesses and industries (e.g., the for-hire fleets, bait and tackle businesses, tournaments) which support them,” the current Policy places more focus on the business aspects of recreational fishing.

While the first sentence of the current Policy is not meaningfully different from that of the original policy, additional provisions have been added which recognize “new and emerging priorities,” and specifically state NOAA Fisheries’ interest in “protecting the vibrant tourism and recreation industries that depend on healthy coastal ecosystems.” The language setting out the scope of the Policy has also been expanded, by stating the agency’s commitment to promoting and growing sustainable saltwater recreational fisheries.

The Policy’s focus on enhanced sustainability is encouraging, and is further reflected in a lengthened list of “strategic goals.” While the original policy listed only three such goals, including the support and maintenance of sustainable fisheries resources, including healthy marine habitats; promoting recreational fishing “for the social, cultural, and economic benefit of the nation;” and enabling long-term participation “through science-based conservation and management,” the Policy has expanded that list.

The Policy now recognizes five strategic goals. It retains, in substance, the three included in the original 2015 policy, although it now seeks to promote recreational fishing not to preserve its social and cultural virtues, but instead to do it in a way that “maximizes economic growth and supports coastal communities, tourism, and marine recreational industries.”

That change could, if truly integrated into NOAA Fisheries’ decision-making, move managers away from managing fisheries for abundance (described, in one Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission document, as “put[ting] the interest of the species before the fishery”), so that anglers might encounter more fish, including some large fish, when they venture out on the water, and toward a fishery managed largely for yield, with a higher fishing mortality rate and a population composed primarily of smaller fish, that is intended to appeal to tourists and other anglers more interested in taking fish home for dinner than in fishing for sport. Managers would place less emphasis on the preferences expressed by individual anglers and more on the preferences of the for-hire fishery and the rest of the recreational fishing industry.

The two new goals are far more benign. One would have NOAA Fisheries “Improve the responsiveness of fisheries management to current and future ocean conditions,” which is about as close to an acknowledgement of climate change and a warming ocean as one is likely to see from the agency, given the current atmosphere in Washington, as well as a reason to hope that NOAA Fisheries might finally confront the issue of shifting fish stocks. The other seeks to “Cultivate active stakeholder engagement in the stewardship of recreational fisheries,” something that could only improve the fishery management process.

Just how all of the goals might be achieved is outlined in the Policy’s final section, “Guiding Principles for the Saltwater Recreational Fisheries Policy.” Such principles, largely carried forward from the earlier policy, include “Foster Stewardship,” “Improve Access,” “Promote Participation,” “Increase Engagement,” “Strengthen Partnerships,” and “Advance Innovative Solutions.” All, on their face, are worthy of support although, as always, the devil is in the details, and in this case, some of the details are worthy of a little extra attention.

For example, in the “Foster Stewardship” section, one proposed strategy is to “Support cost-effective community-based restoration, conservation, and enhancement of essential fish habitats. [emphasis added]” While that all sounds fine at first reading, the qualifications of “cost-effective” and “community-based” restoration and conservation could well get in the way of essential habitat projects. That is particularly true of one of the most effective habitat improvement projects of all, dam removal.

On both the Atlantic coast, in places such as Maine’s Penobscot River, and on Pacific waters such as the Yakima River, the removal of dams that had long prevented anadromous fish from reaching their historical spawning grounds has resulted in immediate benefits to a plethora of fish species. However, dam removal can be both costly and controversial, and requiring it not be both “cost effective” and “community-based” could create severe obstacles to any significant dam removal projects.

The next principle, “Improve Access,” is also problematic, as it immediately leads to the question, “What, precisely, does “access” mean?”

“Improve Access” could mean removing physical barriers that separate anglers from the fish they seek, by providing funding to support working waterfronts, maintaining navigable waterways, or perhaps eschewing the creation of marine protected areas where angling is not allowed. Unfortunately, in recent years, we have also seen the recreational fishing industry use the word “access” as a euphemism for killing fish at rates that exceed the mortality levels recommended by fisheries managers. South Atlantic red snapper provide a recent example.

While removing barriers that keep anglers from their quarry is always a good thing, using “angler access” as an excuse to sidestep science-based fisheries management most definitely is not.

Another potential pitfall can be found under the “Increase Engagement” heading, where one strategy would “Develop and ensure meaningful pathways exist for community knowledge and needs to enter the science and management process. [emphasis added]”

There are potentially two problems here.

One is the concept of “community knowledge.” It is true that people who work on and around the water come to understand, through years and even generations of observation, the relationship between the fish that they catch and other natural phenomena. But recognizing that a relationship exists is very different from understanding why it occurs, and anecdotal observations are not the factual equivalent of data-based scientific conclusions. I once had the deckhand on a trawler insist that some birds, like mayflies, only lived for a single day, a conclusion he reached after fishing during the autumn migration and finding the bodies of scores of warblers and other birds, which died of exhaustion after overrunning Long Island during the night, littering the vessel’s decks in the morning.

Local knowledge can be a starting point for scientific research. Many years ago, commercial fishermen argued that the mandatory escape vents in black sea bass pots were too large. The size of the vents, which were intended to allow undersized black sea bass to escape, were based on fish measured at the surface; the fishermen claimed that water pressure at the bottom compressed fish’s bodies and allowed legal-sized fish to escape. Subsequent research demonstrated that the fishermen’s claims were true.

At the same time, anyone who has attended many fisheries hearings, in particular hearings on regulations intended to reduce catch, knows that fishermen will invariably rise to claim that “the science is wrong,” “there are plenty of fish out there,” and “we’re on the water every day and know what’s really going on.” Such comments are frequently made by for-hire vessel operators and other members of the recreational fishing community. While such comments are often made in good faith, they also typically reflect a certain level of confirmation bias, which develops when fishermen focus on good catches made at certain times in certain places and, ignoring other days when fishing is poor, convince themselves that fish populations are healthy and regulations aren’t needed.

The “science…process” should be driven by hard data, and nothing else.

The notion that “community…needs” should “enter the science and management process” is equally dangerous, for biology is objective, while “need” is a very subjective concept. Biology is also non-negotiable. If scientists determine that a certain, specified level of fishing mortality will cause a fish stock to decline, the fact that the fishing industry, or a fishing community, supposedly “needs” to harvest more fish to remain viable will not change the fact that, if that threshold level is exceeded, abundance will decline, and fishermen will end up catching less, not more, in the long term.

Sticking to the science, and only to the science, is critical to a sustainable management process.

Finally, under the “Advance Innovative Solutions” heading, there is the strategy to “Develop and apply aquaculture tools and technologies that support recreational fisheries and coastal ecosystems.” Stripped of its formal wording and reduced to the language of the everyday angler, that means “Build more fish hatcheries,” and some recreational fishermen will have no problem with that, as hatcheries allow jurisdictions to dump a multitude of artificially propagated fish into coastal ecosystems, so that anglers can take more fish home.

Texas, which has long employed hatcheries to produce red drum, spotted seatrout, and other coastal species, readily admits that hatcheries “are a tool used…to ensure that harvest levels are sustained.” Hatcheries free fisheries managers from the need to maintain fish populations that are capable of sustaining themselves through natural reproduction, and from the restrictive regulations that are often needed to do so. Instead, hatcheries allow anglers to chronically overfish popular species, and remove fish from coastal waters at rates that could never be supported by natural reproduction.

Yet, once marine fisheries managers and recreational fishermen become dependent on hatcheries, it is very difficult to end that dependence, even though hatcheries do little to restore natural fish populations. The first hatcheries for Pacific salmon were built in the late 1800s, and many others have been built since. Yet, despite nearly 150 years of hatchery production, 28 runs of Pacific salmon and the closely-related steelhead trout are currently listed as “endangered” or “threatened” under the federal Endangered Species Act, while no run that was previously “enhanced” with hatchery fish has ever been restored to the point that it could sustain itself solely through natural reproduction. The story is the same for other species, including red drum, spotted seatrout, southern flounder, Florida pompano, and white seabass; hatcheries may provide anglers with more fish to take home, but at least in saltwater, they have never led to a self-sustaining, naturally reproducing population of any recreationally important species.

It could thus be argued that hatcheries are the antithesis of effective fisheries management, and not a strategy that the Policy ought to contemplate.

The bottom line is that the Policy isn’t perfect. It contains some clearly problematic provisions. Yet it remains a valuable document that built on its 2015 predecessor and, if followed by NOAA Fisheries, should provide real benefits to both recreational fishermen and the fishes that they pursue.

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

MAGICAL THINKING: SOUTH ATLANTIC RED SNAPPER EFPS

 

Managing the red snapper fishery, and particularly the recreational red snapper fishery, in the South Atlantic has proved to be one of the most intransigent challenges for East Coast fisheries managers.

It’s not because the fish are scarce.

While that was a problem once, with the stock declining to just three percent of its spawning potential in 2009, subsequent efforts have rebuilt it to the point where it is no longer overfished, and no longer experiencing overfishing. 

But that didn’t solve the biggest problem facing red snapper managers.  Red snapper have become abundant enough that a lot of them are being caught by anglers fishing for other varieties of bottom fish when the red snapper season is closed, and those snapper are being caught in waters deep enough to make barotrauma a real problem.  As a result, scientists believe that many of the red snapper that are caught during the closed season and returned to the water by anglers die after being released.

To compensate, the recreational red snapper fishery in the South Atlantic has been burdened with a very short open season, which has ranged from just one to ninc days, with recent seasons at the shortest end of that spectrum.  Even that hasn’t been enough to fully constrain anglers to their annual catch limit.  As a result, a group of commercial fishermen have sued, asking a court to compel the National Marine Fisheries Service to get the recreational kill under control.  In late 2024 NMFS, recognizing the merit of the commercial fishermen’s arguments, entered into a settlement agreement to adopt regulations that would end recreational overfishing by June 6, 2025.

On January 14, 2025, NMFS came up with a proposed regulation, Amendment 59 to the Fishery Management Plan for the Snapper-Grouper Fishery in the South Atlantic, that would not only have gotten overfishing under control, but would also, because of decreased dead discards, have nearly triple recreational and commercial red snapper landings.  However, it would also have required a section of ocean off northern Florida to be closed to all bottom fishing, from December 1 through the end of February.

The recreational fishing community found the proposal completely unacceptable.  They wanted to be able to land more red snapper, but didn’t want to reduce their high dead discard rate, if that meant closing the bottom fishing season off northern Florida for three months during the winter.

That might sound selfish, irresponsible, and wasteful; the sort of thing that you might expect from a spoiled child rather than a group of supposedly rational adults.  Yet, as it turned out, the recreational representatives were able to make their arguments to the only people who might think that such a juvenile response made sense—the incoming administration in Washington.

Thus, under the new administration, the final version of Amendment 59 did not include the three-month bottom fishing closure; but it did revise the definition of overfishing, the definition of an overfished stock, the acceptable biological catch, and the annual catch limits (including sector catch limits) for South Atlantic red snapper, which allowed it to declare that overfishing was no longer occurring.  As if someone waved a magical wand, NMFS’ concerns about recreational overfishing just seemed to disappear.

The commercial folks apparently didn’t believe in magic, though, because they’re suing NMFS again, arguing that Amendment 59 will allow recreational overfishing to continue, and harm commercial fishermen as a result. 

But even with those changes, the recreational fishermen weren’t all that satisfied with Amendment 59.  While it let them keep pouring out dead, discarded red snapper during the closed snapper season, it didn’t let them kill more fish to take home.  So like a child who wheedles another piece of cake out of Grandma after their parents say “No,” organizations affiliated with the recreational fishing industry pushed to have state agencies manage red snapper, knowing that the states would allow anglers to land the snapper denied them by both good science and federal law.

And so, just a few days ago, NMFS announced that

“NOAA Fisheries Issues Exempted fishing Permits Authorizing State Management of Recreational Harvested [sic] Red Snapper in the South Atlantic in 2026.”

Apparently, state management of the South Atlantic red snapper stock, under the recently approved exempted fishing permits, is going to bring us another magical moment.  For if you recall, under federal fisheries management, the 2025 recreational red snapper season in the South Atlantic lasted only two days, and at that was twice as long as the season set for 2024.

Yet, now that state fisheries managers have been allowed to wave their sorcerers’ wands, Florida anglers will be able to enjoy a 39-day season, broken up into 30 days in May/June and three three-day periods in October, while Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina anglers will be allowed to fish for 62 consecutive days in July and August.

It’s nothing short of miraculous that just switching over from federal to state management will lead to seasons that are 20 to 30 times as long as those previously permitted by NMFS, presumably all without overfishing or doing any harm to the stock at all.

But, as was the case with Amendment 59, there are some people out there who just don’t believe in magic. 

The Ocean Conservancy deemed the exempted fishing permits and the move to state management

"An end run around sustainable management,"

while observing that

“Just last year, NOAA’s own analysis showed that a two-day recreational fishing season was needed to prevent overfishing.  There is no doubt that these exemptions to allow months-long fishing seasons will lead to overfishing, while new, unproven data collection measures mean we likely won’t even realize the fish are declining until the damage is done.”

The organization’s press release goes on to say,

“Ocean Conservancy has used available data to estimate the amount of fish that could be caught with exempted permits.  The annual catch limit for the recreational sector is 22,797 fish.  A recent two-day red snapper fishing season in Florida alone resulted in 24,885 landed fish, which exceeds that limit.  A simple expansion using this Florida landings rate, and ignoring the contribution from other states which will have even longer fishing seasons, suggests that as many as 485,000 fish could be landed in a 39-day season.  This is over 20 times the annual catch limit—a clear violation of the Magnuson-Stevens Act.”

The Environmental Defense Fund expressed similar sentiments, while also noting that

“Recreational fishing is an American pastime, and responsible innovation is critical to managing fisheries for the future.  But NOAA’s decision allows states to sidestep core federal safeguards that exist to prevent overfishing at a time when South Atlantic red snapper remains overfished [sic] and under a rebuilding plan.  These permits go well beyond the limited, pilot-scale purpose of exempted fishing permits and instead function as an alternative system without enforceable catch limits or accountability measures required by law.”

So how did we get to this point, where someone within NMFS or its parent, the Department of Commerce, seems to have contradicted NMFS’ findings from a year ago, and has suddenly decided that a season 20 times as long as last year’s won’t lead to overfishing—even though last year’s two-day season did?

We might find part of the answer in the cover letter that Roger Young, the Executive Director of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, sent to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on January 23, 2026, along with Florida’s state management proposal.  After two introductory paragraphs, Mr. Young got down to business:

“First, we want to reinforce our appreciation for your unwavering commitment to rein in bureaucracy and return the power of fisheries management and conservation to the states where it belongs.  Unfortunately, based on an initial review of the commentary and questions within NOAA’s response letter, it appears that NOAA intends to delay the success of our shared goals.  To ensure that this is not the case, we determined that directly responding to you, rather than through NOAA, was crucial to our shared success.  To that end, to mutually maintain the momentum that our teams have built over the past year, it is abundantly clear that direct involvement from our offices is crucial.  If not, based on precedent, career NOAA staff will inevitably create a bureaucratic blockade at the behest of status-quo defending adversarial interests to prevent Florida’s EFP from going into effect in May 2026.  Given the social, economic, and cultural importance of recreational fishing in Florida, we greatly appreciate your leadership in seeing Florida’s application through to approval so Floridians can enjoy their God-given rights to recreate, and enjoy, our natural resources.

“Under President Trump’s leadership in 2017, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross blazed a trail in the Gulf of America to state management in recreational Red Snapper fishing.  Bureaucratic intransigence and inertia at NOAA were guiding anglers to the dead end of federal regulators’ overreach.  By 2018, all five states in the Gulf of America were firmly in control of their destiny and managing this public fishery for the benefit of the public.  The number of days of fishing proposed Gulf of America-wide by NOAA Fisheries in 2017: three days.  The number of fishing days announced by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in 2025: 127 days.

“Based on Florida’s experience in seeking assignment of state management authority in the Gulf of America, much of NOAA’s response appears to potentially delay action under the guise of ‘data’ collection—the same tactics that led Congress to force NOAA to accept and approve state EFP’s [sic] in the Gulf of America given the weaponization of NOAA under President Obama…  [emphasis in original]”

The letter provided a master class in ass-kissing, emphasizing everything—“rein in bureaucracy,” “bureaucratic blockade,” “status-quo defending,” favorable mention of Trump’s first term, and even “weaponization” of a federal agency by “President Obama” (although “Barak Hussein Obama” might have been worth a few extra points)—that was likely to hit administration hot buttons.

Of course, Roger Young’s letter missed a couple of important points.  When he argued that

“there is nothing in [the] Magnuson-Stevens [Fishery Conservation and Management] Act (MSA) that dictates an EFP’s harvest be included in annual catch limits,”

he not only ignored National Standard 1, which states that

“Conservation and management measures shall prevent overfishing…”

but seemingly implied that it was acceptable for an annual recreational catch limit of 22,797 fish to be overfished roughly twentyfold—by more than 450,000 fish, if the Ocean Conservancy’s calculations are correct (which they may not be, as in the real world, such an extreme leve of removals would probably lower abundance and catchability to the point that the 2025 fishing mortality rate, achieved over a 2-day season, could not be maintained for the full duration of the 39- or 62-day seasons planned for 2026)—so long as that overfishing occurred pursuant to an exempted fishing permit.

The letter was also quick to criticize the 3-day federal waters red snapper season in the Gulf of Mexico in 2017, while failing to mention that such short season was adopted in order to offset the excessively long state waters seasons allowed by state fisheries managers in that year.

But given Roger Young’s intended audience, it is highly unlikely that such omissions were ever noted or, even if someone had noticed them, that they would have had any influence on the outcome.  The entire purpose of his letter was to move the decision making on the exempted fishing permits away from the scientists and subject matter experts at NMFS, and put it in the hands of people who couldn’t tell a red snapper from a red herring on their best day.

Thus, the South Atlantic states’ exempted fishing permit requests received an enthusiastic response; on May 1, 2026, President Donald Trump himself declared, in a social media post,

“WE JUST DELIVERED A HUGE WIN for our Great Fishermen and Anglers in FLORIDA, GEORGIA, SOUTH CAROLINA, and NORTH CAROLINA!  We have just officially approved ALL STATE PERMITS for the 2026 Red Snapper recreational season.  For years, our GREAT FISHERMEN have been punished with VERY short Federal fishing seasons despite RECORD HIGH fish populations and the States begging to oversee these permits.  The incompetent Biden Administration tried to SHUT DOWN THE OCEANS to our Fishermen, entirely.  We love and respect our Fishermen and, unlike the Democrats, will only do good for them.  To all those who fish ‘Red Snapper’—TRUMP and NOAA are delivering for you.   ENJOY!!  President DONAND J. TRUMP.”

And there you have it.

In 2025, anglers in the four South Atlantic states managed to harvest an estimated 38,048 red snapper—15,251 fish over the annual catch limit—even though the federal red snapper season only lasted for two days.  In 2026, that catch limit will remain unchanged, but even with state management extending the red snapper season to 39 days in Florida and 62 days in the three other South Atlantic states, South Atlantic red snapper landings are expected to remain at sustainable levels.

Maybe those folks who believe that there is something magical about state-level fisheries management are onto something.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

REGIONAL FISHERY MANAGEMENT COUNCILS: "A FAIR AND BALANCED APPORTIONMENT"

 

The Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act states that

“it is therefore declared to be the purposes of the Congress in this Act…to establish Regional Fishery Management Councils to exercise sound judgment in the stewardship of fishery resources through the stewardship of fishery resources through the preparation, monitoring, and revision of [fishery management] plans under circumstances (A) which will enable the States, the fishing industry, consumer and environmental organizations, and other interested persons to participate in, and advise on, the establishment and administration of such plans, and (B) which take into account the social and economic needs of the States.  [formatting omitted]”

To help achieve that purpose, Magnuson-Stevens further provides,

“The Secretary [of Commerce], in making appointments [to the regional fishery management councils], shall, to the extent practicable, ensure a fair and balanced apportionment, on a rotating or other basis, of the active participants (or their representatives) in the commercial and recreational fisheries under the jurisdiction of the Council…[T]he Secretary shall submit to the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation of the Senate and the Committee on Merchant Marine and Fisheries of the House of Representatives [an annual] report on the actions taken by the Secretary to ensure that such fair and balanced apportionment is achieved.  The report shall (i) list the fisheries under the jurisdiction of each Council, outlining for each fishery the type and quantity of fish harvested, fishing and processing methods employed, the number of participants, the duration and range of the fishery, and other distinguishing characteristics; (ii) assess the membership of each Council in terms of the apportionment of the active participants in each fishery; and (iii) state the Secretary’s plans and schedule for actions to achieve a fair and balanced apportionment on the Council for the active participants in any such fishery.  [emphasis added, formatting omitted]”

It is a requirement that often seems to be honored more in the breach than in practice.  Few regional fishery management councils have a truly “fair and balanced apportionment” of council seats among the various subsectors of the commercial and recreational fisheries, although the nature of the imbalance is different on different councils.

Thus, in the House of Representatives, Congressman Nick Begich (R-AK) recently introduced H.R. 8598, the “North Pacific Fishery Management Council Representation Enhancement Act of 2026.”  He explained,

“The North Pacific Fishery Management Council was established to advance policies in the interest of all user groups across our fisheries.  In Alaska, many different user groups rely on the same resource, and we need to make sure every one of them has a seat at the table.  Ensuring balanced representation is critical to addressing broader challenges facing Alaskan fisheries, including declining abundance.  This bill is about restoring balance, strengthening accountability, and making sure fisheries management works for all Alaskans.”

 A press release announcing the legislation’s introduction stated that

“The bill amends…Magnuson-Stevens…to require that Alaska’s appointments to the North Pacific Fishery Management Council (NPFMC) include representation from recreational fishing, small-scale commercial fishing, and subsistence user groups.

“The NPFMC plays a central role in managing fisheries in the Bering Sea, Aleutian Islands, and Gulf of Alaska.  However, concerns have grown that current council composition does not adequately reflect the full scale of Alaska’s fishing communities, including subsistence users, small boat fishermen, and recreational stakeholders…

“The bill directs the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration…to develop guidelines to verify representation and implement the changes, with new requirements taking effect for future council appointments.”

The motivation for the new bill was undoubtedly the ongoing debate over the bycatch and resultant dead discards of salmon, halibut, various crabs, and other living marine resources by large factory trawlers that target walleye pollock in a high-volume but low-value (per pound) fishery that is the largest commercial fishery in the nation.  As reported by National Fishermen in a 2023 article,

“Amid widespread consternation about the incidental numbers of halibut, crab, salmon, and other species that trawlers haul up in the Bering Sea, state and federal management regimes have come under increasing fire.

“To some, inaction by the North Pacific Fishery Management Council to impose trawl bycatch caps on salmon and crab demands an overhaul of the 11-member panel that votes on management strategies submitted to the Department of Commerce…

“David Bayes, a charter boat operator out of Homer [Alaska] and the Facebook administrator of STOP Trawling Now, says that it wasn’t the original plan of the council’s founders to stack the panel with members whose conflicts of interest could undermine other facets of fisheries management.  But he adds that it evolved quickly as various sectors in the industry scrambled for representation and votes in key fisheries issues.

“’If one looks back at the verbiage and intent when the regional councils were formed through the Magnuson-Stevens Act, once sees that the lawmakers at the time had the forward thinking to realize that in order for dynamic and ever-changing fisheries to be regulated, they would need to be regulated by the fishermen themselves.’

“Bayes adds that conflict of interest was acceptable at the time the councils were founded, ‘because that was the only way to have fishermen regulating fishermen.’

“But competition for representation among Alaska, Washington, and Oregon, and conflicts among gear types quickly changed who was placed in the seats and left the fishermen behind.

“’They’re bringing the heaviest hitters they can find, which are often government officials, CEOs, lobbyists, lawyers, ex-political staff, etcetera,’ says Bayes.”

Similar appointment and representation problems exist on every state, although the precise form that they take can differ.

In New England, for example, the appointed members of the New England Fishery Management Council include seven who are either commercial fishermen or closely allied with the commercial fishing industry, three charter boat operators, and two members of the marine conservation community.  There are no private anglers (that is, anglers who fish solely for recreation and/or personal use, and have no business connection to the fishery) at all.  Commercial fishermen, provided that they have the support of just half of the state and federal government seats, can dictate the outcome of any vote.

Along the Gulf of Mexico, the eleven appointed members of the Gulf Fishery Management Council have a very different look.  There, six members are recreational fishermen or closely tied to the recreational fishing industry (including one legislative affairs specialist who serves as a consultant for the Center for Sportfishing Policy and an academic who sits on the Coastal Conservation Association’s Board of Directors), just two are commercial fishermen, two are academics (one of whom describes himself as a “lifelong recreational fisherman” while the other is “an avid recreational fisherman, licensed captain, and co-owner of a seafood market), and one member is both a recreational for-hire captain and a commercial fishermen.

It’s thus probably not surprising that most votes at the Gulf Council tend to favor the recreational sector.

Here in New York, we have a very active recreational fishery, with four important recreational species—bluefish, summer flounder, scup, and black sea bass—managed by the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council, acting cooperatively with the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission.  Over the past five years—2021 through 2025—New York anglers have actively pursued all four species, taking an estimated total of 6,398,348 trips primarily targeting bluefish, 13,495,821 targeting summer flounder, 6,696,384 targeting scup, and 2,108,877 targeting black sea bass.  The fishery has been dominated by private anglers, fishing either from shore or from their own vessels, who were responsible for 99.8% of all bluefish trips, 96.8% of all trips primarily targeting summer flounder, 96.3% of all trips targeting scup, and 92.9% of all trips targeting black sea bass.

Yet, since I stepped down from my at-large seat on the Mid-Atlantic Council in 2005, New York has not had a single private angler hold a Council seat.  In over two decades, the recreational seats have been held either by for-hire operators or by individuals closely allied with the for-hire industry or, in one instance, by a former state fisheries manager.

While I can’t say that New York’s private anglers—who unquestionably dominate its recreational fishery—have been completely unrepresented on the Mid-Atlantic Council, as the state’s fisheries managers have always done a reasonably good job of representing everyone’s interests, the lack of private anglers on the Mid-Atlantic Council representing New York, or any other Mid-Atlantic state, hardly represents the kind of “fair and balanced apportionment” of seats, either from New York or on the Mid-Atlantic Council as a whole, contemplated by Magnuson-Stevens.

When the people holding the recreational seats from any given state, or on the Council as a whole, only represent those making—to be very generous—5% of the recreational trips for Council-managed species, something is definitely very, very wrong.

And we should never pretend that the interests and the objectives of the private anglers and the for-hire fleet is the same. 

In the Mid-Atlantic, we only need to look at the current efforts to draft a “Recreational Sector Separation Amendment, that

“may consider managing for-hire recreational fisheries separately from other recreational fishing modes.”

That’s carefully worded language that doesn’t assume any particular outcome should the proposed amendment be adopted, but anyone following the process knows that the for-hire operators are looking for special privileges for their customers, that will allow them to take more and/or smaller fish, perhaps during a longer season, than those allowed to the private anglers that make up most of the fishery.

Since there is only a single recreational allocation, and both private and for-hire anglers take their fish out of the same allotted pool—at various meetings, the for-hire members sitting on the Council have made it abundantly clear that they don’t want a fixed quota for their sector alone— if the for-hire fleet is gifted with regulations that allow their customers to take more fish home, everyone else in the fishery are going to have to get a little less, for fishery management is, in the end, a zero-sum game; when someone wins, by getting more fish, someone else must lose and give up some part of their share.

But when private anglers have no effective representation on the Council, there’s nobody to object when they end up on the losing end.

In the Gulf of Mexico, we see something happening that is the mirror image of what’s going on in the Mid-Atlantic.

Sector separation already exists in the Gulf red snapper fishery.  It was adopted a number of years ago in response to chronic overfishing by private red snapper anglers, who exerted enough political pressure on their states to extend state-waters red snapper seasons, and so reduce the federal waters season to just three days—remember, it is a zero-sum game—which would be the kiss of death for the federally permitted for-hire fleet.  In order to protect the for-hires from the excesses of the private boats, the Gulf Fisheries Management Council (then called the Gulf of Mexico Fisheries Management Council, although that name has since been changed for political reasons) established a separate sub-quota for the for-hire industry.

Since then, the Council adopted Amendment 50 to the Fishery Management Plan for the Reef Fish Resources of the Gulf of Mexico, which allows states limited flexibility to set regulations for their private boat recreational red snapper fishery, so long as those regulations constrain each state to its federally-established recreational quota.  But the for-hire red snapper fishery remained the exclusive domain of federal fisheries managers.

Now, the private angler-dominated Gulf Council is considering a new Amendment 64:  Delegation of the Federal For-Hire Management Authority for Red Snapper to the Gulf States, which would allocate the for-hire red snapper quota among the states, and allow states the same sort of limited regulatory flexibility that they currently have in the private boat fishery.

While that might seem benign on its face, for-hire operators are concerned that it will both allow some states to take advantage of others, stealing a portion of their for-hire quota, and possibly even provide a means for states to give some of what are now for-hire fish to private boat anglers.  As explained by long-time for-hire operator Gary Jarvis, of Destin, Florida,

“It became abundantly clear that this was about a fish grab.  The draft document provided alternatives for how the allocation would disseminate to each state’s for-hire fleet, and was determined on EACH STATE’S OWN REPORTED LANDINGS.

“The state of Louisiana was not satisfied with this breakdown, so they proposed a new methodology.  The new methodology would move fish from the eastern gulf into the western gulf.  It would reduce Florida’s fleet percentage from over 48% of the federal for-hire allocation to over 38%.  This literally shows they want to control the federal for-hire fleet but it would not be enough fish for what they want out of the document or…they did not report the correct amount of fish in the first place.  That is the reality of this document…

“When it came to public testimony, to call it anything less than ass whipping would be an understatement.  Federally permitted for-hire fishermen and women from Florida (Ft. Myers, Tampa, Big Bend, Panama City, and Destin), Alabama, Mississippi, and Texas all gave public comment stating they wanted nothing to do with state management of the Gulf federally permitted fleet.  The only person who gave testimony in favor of it was the executive director of the Louisiana Charter Boat Association.

“This association is funded by the State of Louisiana, through a percentage of every fishing license sale in the state, via a department which is tremendously influenced by CCA.  The executive director could not get a single one of their members to give testimony in favor of this, despite never having fished professionally or in control of any federal permits…”

Given the antipathy the for-hire fleet seems to have for the proposed amendment, it’s pretty clear that the amendment is being shoved down their throats by representatives of the private boat fishery.

So, while the precise details differ from council to council, the underlying theme remains the same—Magnuson-Stevens’ requirement for “fair and balanced apportionment” of council seats is being ignored just about everywhere when appointments to the regional fishery management councils.

Although there might be a handful of exceptions, council seats are typically awarded to those who are supported by organizations that have the right political connections and make the right contributions to the right parties and elected officials at the right time.  Experience in and knowledge of the fishery means far less than experience in and knowledge of how to bend the political process to a sector’s or subsector’s advantage.  Depending on the council involved, small-boat commercial fishermen, recreational fishermen, for-hire operators, subsistence fishermen, conservation interests, and others who lack the needed political clout in a particular region might all find themselves marginalized and their concerns ignored by representatives of more powerful special interests.

Whether one is dealing with the North Pacific, New England, Mid-Atlantic, Gulf, or any other regional fisheries management council, the situation remains the same..

Thus, Congressmen Begich’s bill makes a lot of sense.  But assuring fair and balanced apportionment shouldn’t be limited to Alaska and the North Pacific Council.

What we really need is legislation that will make it a reality on every coast of the United States.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MAGNUSON-STEVENS AT 50: CAN IT STILL DO ITS JOB?

 

The Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act turned 50 years old on April 13.  At the time, when foreign factory trawlers could still fish just 12 miles of the United States’ shores, putting multiple fish stocks in peril, the law, as it was amended from time to time over the intervening years, represented a revolutionary step forward in the annals of fisheries management. 

Since its passage, and particularly since it was amended by the Sustainable Fisheries Act of 1996 and the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Reauthorization Act of 2006, the law has resulted in science-based, legally-enforceable fishery management plans for over 450 separate fish stocks.  Since 2000, thanks to Magnuson-Stevens, 52 once overfished stocks have been completely rebuilt.

Still, no law is perfect.  Problems remain.  As someone who has participated in the recreational New England groundfish fishery for virtually all of my life, I am all too sadly aware of the collapse of the southern New England stocks of winter flounder and Atlantic cod, collapses that the various provisions of Magnuson-Stevens, no matter how well conceived, were unable to prevent.  I remember the vast spring runs of Atlantic mackerel that no longer occur off my local shores; remember January days spent on a pier, enjoying runs of Atlantic herring that have since disappeared, and lament the loss of the inshore fishery for whiting (more properly, silver hake) that used to fill the New York Bight with life every winter.

Magnuson-Stevens faces challenges that were never contemplated back in 1976, a warming ocean, and resultant shifting stocks, probably first among them.

Thus, it may be time to consider how Magnuson-Stevens, and the regulations promulgated thereunder, must adapt, if the statute is to remain the most expansive and effective fisheries management law in place anywhere in the world.

Recently, the Ocean Conservancy has done just that, issuing a report titled “Drifting Off Course:  Challenges in U.S. Fisheries Management and Charting a Path Forward.”  The report’s introduction notes

“In many ways, the [Magnuson-Stevens Act] has been a success story, having rebuilt over 50 fish stocks and driven overfishing down to historic lows.

“However, a lot has changed for the ocean in the last 50 years, and new challenges are developing that will push our fisheries to their limits.  From marine heatwaves to degraded habitats, the fish and ecosystems that millions of Americans rely on are under stress.  At the same time, management shortcomings, economic vulnerabilities, food insecurity, lower investment in research, and technology advancements are colliding with long-standing conservation and management challenges like bycatch and continued overfishing.

“It’s clear that business as usual is not enough to guarantee abundant fish populations that can support coastal communities and fisheries.  The future of fisheries—and the health of our ocean—for the next five decades will depend on tackling the challenges we face today.”

The Ocean Conservancy report is 28 pages long, far too long to analyze in a single blog post.  I couldn’t even do it justice if I tried to provide a summary; you ought to just click on the link that I provided above and read the whole thing for yourself. 

Right now, I’ll just hit some of the high points.

The first section of the report is

“Failure to Rebuild Many Overfished Stocks,”

although the section’s scope is broader than that; it makes the important point that managers shouldn’t just be focusing on recovering stocks that have already become overfished.  Instead, they ought to

“Act early before rebuilding is necessary.”

Or course, that’s easier said than done, because as soon as managers suggest any cuts in commercial or recreational landings to head off a stock decline, all of the industry spokesmen turn out, as well as the commercial fishermen, for-hire operators, and tackle shop owners, to declare that the stock isn’t overfished yet, and that managers shouldn’t reduce their incomes and put them out of business (“You’re going to put me out of business” is one of the most-repeated claims at fisheries hearings; I’ve attended such events for many decades now, and have heard the same individuals repeatedly make that very claim, sometimes over the course of twenty years or more), to the point that it’s often easier, and far more politically expedient, for fisheries managers to wait until a stock really does become overfished before taking meaningful action, and then blame the resulting harvest reductions on the provisions of Magnuson-Stevens.

As the Ocean Conservancy observes,

“Managers are required to manage stocks to avoid the need to rebuild in the first place but rarely take such actions.  When a stock begins to decline, taking action to halt that trend is important to avoid the complex management that rebuilding requires.”

That’s all true and sensible, but when the debates over “my right to earn a living” and “angler access” to fish begin, truth and common sense quickly vacate the room.  And that leads to another issue:  Even when action is taken, whether to rebuild an overfished stock or to prevent further stock decline, such action is often incremental, with only the minimum 50% probability of success, in an effort to minimize the economic and social harm to the fishing community.

Unfortunately, such minimal efforts often fail, and end up causing more harm in the end, as one reduction in landings doesn’t get the job done, so fishermen are forced to reduce repeated cuts to catch and income that are never quite enough to get rebuilding underway, but erode faith in and support for the management system.

The New England cod fishery may be the best example of that sort of ineffective management.

For, as the report notes,

“…42 stocks remain overfished.  Many of those stocks that need to rebuild are still experiencing overfishing despite legal requirements that management should end overfishing immediately.  In a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) analysis, 65% of stocks in rebuilding plans had flat or decreasing population estimates.  When rebuilding plans fail, stocks remain at reduced abundance, increasing the economic strain on communities.”

The answer to that is very simple in principle although, in practice, hard to implement due to commercial and recreational industry resistance:

“To get rebuilding back on track, managers must act more decisively, while accounting for climate change and human-caused impacts to stocks, to end overfishing through improved rebuilding plans.  Ultimately, rebuilt fish stocks must remain a central goal of fisheries management in order to maintain fishing opportunities for coastal communities.”

In that context, one big threat to rebuilding tends to fly under the radar, at least in the minds of the public at large, and is the subject of the report’s second section:

“High Demand from Recreational Fisheries.”

It’s not something that the public—or most recreational fishermen—spend much time thinking about. 

They picture a recreational fisherman as someone who ventures out on his or her local waters, often with family in tow, hoping to catch a few fish for dinner, while often catching nothing at all.  That image is in sharp contrast to their idea of commercial fishing, in which industrial-scale trawlers spend weeks out at sea, sweeping the ocean bottom with nets that engulf and kill anything that they encounter.  In their minds, recreational fisherman can never do the same harm to fish stocks that is caused by the commercial fleet.

And the funny thing about that is that those mental constructs are both completely accurate and very wrong, all at the same time.

Because it’s true that there are big commercial vessels out there, like the factory trawlers working off Alaska, that collectively catch not only three billion pounds of their target species, walleye pollock, each year, but also about of 140,000,000 pounds of unwanted bycatch, including valuable species such as halibut and salmon, which are discarded dead and wasted.  But much commercial fishing is conducted at a far smaller scale.  It’s also true that individual recreational fishermen don’t kill very many fish on any one trip, and often don’t kill any at all; however, those individual anglers took nearly 195,000,000 fishing trips last year, and even if they only took home, on average, two or three or four fish on every trip, the total number of fish that they killed can add up pretty fast.

Plus, recreational fishermen tend to focus on a relatively small number of species, which are often at relatively high trophic levels and thus naturally low levels of abundance.  While commercial fleets may target things like walleye pollock, witch flounder, yellowtail flounder, menhaden, squid, monkfish, and other species that are not frequently caught by anglers, recreational fishermen target species such as summer flounder, red snapper, Pacific halibut, bluefin tuna, etc., which are also commercially important.  In some fisheries, recreational landings far outweigh commercial removals.

Thus, recreational fishing can be a very substantial source of fishing mortality.  As the report notes,

“managing saltwater recreational fisheries can be uniquely challenging, especially as coastal populations have increased by 40% over the past 50 years.  The number of individual angler trips has increased over time, anglers are geographically distributed rather than consolidated in commercial fishing ports, and anglers’ catch heads home in coolers instead of into a fish house.  Despite the small-scale impact of each individual angler, the cumulative effect of recreational fishing on the health of fish stocks can be very large.  In the Southeast, recreational fisheries are allocated more than half of the catch for many popular stocks, such as greater amberjack (80%) and gag grouper (65%) in the Gulf [of Mexico], as well as red snapper (71.93%), red grouper (56%) and most of the porgy complex in the South Atlantic.

“As a result, managers struggle to sustainably manage recreational fisheries that are largely open access, constrained only by measures such as season length and limits on daily catch.  In some fisheries, the recreational sector routinely exceeds its annual catch limit.  Some anglers are dissatisfied with management and want more opportunities to fish, creating pressure to allow catch above sustainable limits.”

The latter problem has become particularly acute in recent years, as recreational fishing industry-aligned groups such as the Center for Sportfishing Policy, American Sportfishing Association, and Coastal Conservation Association have aggressively attacked the federal fisheries management system in an effort to increase recreational landings.

The Ocean Conservancy report recognizes the need for better recreational data collection, and better cooperation between management bodies.  It also recognizes that

“Managers must ensure that recreational fishing is managed consistently with requirements to prevent catch from exceeding annual sustainable limits, which means that greater consideration of precautionary management tools—such as buffers that account for the uncertainty inherent in managing open access fisheries—is necessary.”

Yet it is rare for managers to do so in the real world.  Even though the recreational fishing industry often complains about recreational fishing data, calling the Marine Recreational Information Program a “suspect data system,” and even though guidelines adopted by the National Marine Fisheries Service call for fisheries managers to account for such management uncertainty either when setting the annual sector catch limit or by adopting a lower annual catch target, the adoption of such buffers for management uncertainty is often eschewed as managers try to placate the recreational industry by setting catch limits as high as is legally permissible.

The result is often landings that exceed the recreational sector’s annual catch limit.

Few would disagree with the premise that the way to reduce both scientific and management uncertainty in fisheries management is to improve the level of fisheries science, and so provide better data relating to both the biology of fish stocks and the sources and magnitude of commercial and recreational fishing mortality.  Unfortunately, the trend has been in the opposite direction, with an administration that is actively crippling the data-gathering process.  Thus, another one of the problems cited in the report was the

“Lack of Investment in Science, Data and Traditional Knowledge.”

For, as the report observes,

“Since early 2025, NOAA Fisheries lost nearly 550 employees of the approximately 3,000 that were at the agency previously, and many of those were career scientists at the NOAA Fisheries Science Centers.”

It explains,

“The [Magnuson-Stevens Act] requires the best scientific information available to be used to set fishing limits, which has helped to reduce overfishing and rebuild stocks.  Conducting scientific research and data collection takes resources—people, time, equipment and facilities—and the science supporting fisheries management is underfunded and under-resourced.  Recent…cuts, along with long-standing gaps in support, mean that it is increasingly difficult to deliver the core information needed to manage fisheries.  This comes at a time when innovative approaches to modeling, data collection and forecasting are all available to be implemented but can’t get off the ground due to lack of investment.  As the marine environment continues to experience more rapid and less predictable changes, the need for investment in science and surveys to quickly identify and respond to ecological shifts is greater now than it has ever been.”

The problem is that the administration, and some members of Congress, prefer ignorance to paying the costs of good science.  Still, about eight weeks ago, I spent a few days on Capitol Hill, visiting various offices and advocating for adequate funding for fisheries management; many of those I spoke with provided a sympathetic hearing.

We can only hope that translates into a good appropriations bill.

But as long as we’re on the subject of political interference with good fisheries management, we probably ought to look at one more section of the report,

“Deregulation and Poor Governance,”

which is separate from, but closely tied to, the funding cuts.  As the report notes,

“instead of tackling the modern-day challenges, there is a concerning trend to turn away from the best practices that we know deliver sustainable fisheries.”

The problems stem from a couple of executive orders signed a little over a year ago.

One, Executive Order 14219, “Ensuring Lawful Governance and Implementing the President’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ Deregulatory Initiative,” was intended to

“commence the deconstruction of the overbearing and burdensome administrative state.”

Needless to say, such executive order was not particularly conservation-friendly, and did not make it any easier to adopt precautionary management measures or rebuild fish stocks.  However, the more direct threat to fisheries was probably posed by a second executive order, signed on April 17 of last year, “Restoring American Seafood Competitiveness,” which railed against

“Federal overregulation [that] has restricted fishermen from productively harvesting American seafood, including through restrictive catch limits, selling our fishing grounds to foreign offshore wind companies, inaccurate and outdated fisheries data, and delayed adoption of modern technology,”

and declared as policy to

“unburden our commercial fishermen from costly and inefficient regulation.”

The combination of deregulation and defunding pose an existential threat to good fisheries management and to fisheries that are sustainable in the long term.

The report states that

“NOAA Fisheries and some of the [regional fishery management] councils are now acting to remove stocks from federal management, citing time and resource constraints.  Stocks removed from management could be handed over to the states, removed from management protections altogether, or retained within the federal system as ‘ecosystem component species’ that have few or no management safeguards in place.

“Moving stocks to state management comes with risk.  Fish stocks that are solely managed by states have lower management intensity, more uncertainty as to the status of stock heath and weaker management requirements…And most [states] do not have best-practice requirements to end overfishing and rebuild stocks.”

The report goes on to note that

“Negative perceptions of regulation, combined with the inherent challenges of managing so many different types of fishing, have led to efforts to add ‘more flexibility’ to fishery management or to ‘deregulate’ fisheries…Rolling back important regulations risks the long-term health of economically important stocks.  Flexibility and deregulation also carry a high risk of unintended consequences…”

It also offers solutions for the deregulation problem, but we have to ask whether, in the current political climate, any such solutions would be given due consideration; it is very possible that the essential prerequisites for any meaningful solutions being adopted will come from the ballot box, first in the 2026 midterm elections, and then in the general election in ’28.

The Ocean Conservancy report also addresses other issues, including “Persistent Bycatch,” Habitat Loss and Ecosystem Degradation,” “Changing Ocean Conditions and More Frequent Disasters,” and “Economic Vulnerability of Fishing Communities,” which I chose not to address in this essay, primarily because, except for bycatch, they are symptoms of problems that extend far beyond the fisheries management arena; they are problems that Magnuson-Stevens alone cannot solve.

And bycatch, although within Magnuson-Stevens’ ambit, has proven to be a pernicious problem that can only be solved with the right combination of science, technology, and the political will to stand up to the people doing the harm, a political will that has been notably absent on most occasions.

I remember when Magnuson-Stevens, then merely called the Fishery Conservation and Management Act of 1976, was signed into law.  I was in my senior year of college, heading on to law school, and already developing an interest in fisheries management issues.  At the time, Magnuson-Stevens held substantial promise.

It has fulfilled that promise, and perhaps done a bit better than that, as later amendments strengthened its conservation measures.  Over the past 50 years, the law has served us well, and continues to form a firm framework to ensure healthy fisheries for a half-century more.

But Magnuson-Stevens can’t do it all by itself.  Provided that it isn’t further weakened by more special-interest amendments like the so-called Modern Fish Act, which serve to undercut the law’s clear requirements for science-driven fisheries management, the next challenges to the statute are more likely to be found not in the legislature, but in administrative agencies that make permissive interpretations of the statute, and issue regulations that fail to protect and restore the nation’s living marine resources.

As is happening now.