Summer
flounder, more commonly known as “fluke” at the northern end of their range,
were at the center of fisheries debates throughout the first eight or ten years
of this century.
It was the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council’s (MAFMC) failure to take the conservation and
rebuilding provisions of theMagnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (Magnuson-Stevens) seriously that led
to the landmark court decision in Natural Resources Defense Council v. Daley, which found
that federal fishery management plans must have at least a 50% chance of
preventing overfishing and timely rebuilding overfished stocks.
The National Marine
Fisheries Service (NMFS) application of that rule to various fisheries, not the
least of which was summer flounder, led to the rebuilding of at least 39 once-overfished stocks.
The harvest reductions
needed to rebuild such stocks also led to some fishermen’s calls for “flexibility” in fisheries management, and led
politicians to introduce bills such as the current “Strengthening Fishing Communities and Increasing Flexibility in
Fisheries Management Act” (H.R.
1335) which would allow federal managers to permit overfishing to continue for
an extended time, and delay the rebuilding of overfished populations.
Once the summer flounder
stock was rebuilt to near-target levels, the fishery fell out of the spotlight
as the management of other species, elsewhere on the coast, became far more
controversial. Now, it appears that summer flounder will be back in the spotlight,
forthe stock is declining again.
This time, the primary cause is not overfishing, but rather six
consecutive years of below-average spawning success.
No one is sure why fewer fluke are recruiting into the
population, but as the size of the population shrinks, managers must reduce
annual catch limits, to avoid running afoul of Magnuson-Stevens’ mandate
against overfishing.
In 2015, biologists
initially told the MAFMC that it would have to reduce the 2016 annual catch limit by 43% in order to avoid a further decline in
the stock. The MAFMC’s Science and Statistics Committee (SSC) later decided
that, because the available data was good, a 29% reduction was enough to avoid
any harm.
Unfortunately, that turned
out to be untrue, so in August 2016 the MAFMC reduced the 2017 annual catch limit by an additional 30% in an attempt to stabilize the stock.
The additional reduction will undoubtedly cause controversy, particularly at,
and after, the December joint meeting of the MAFMC and the Atlantic States Marine
Fisheries Commission’s (ASMFC) Summer Flounder, Scup and Black Sea Bass
Management Board, when the recreational specifications for the 2017 summer
flounder fishery will be set.
Despite inevitable
objections, there is no doubt that the reduction will take place, for the MAFMC’s Science and Statistics Committee (SSC) has determined that “the stock biomass is dangerously
close to being overfished, which could happen as early as next year if
increased efforts to curb fishing mortality are not undertaken.”
Should the summer flounder stock ever become overfished,
Magnuson-Stevens requires that “action be taken to end overfishing in the
fishery and to implement conservation and management measures to rebuild” the
stock within a time period that does not exceed ten years.
Such rebuilding measures would probably be much more restrictive
than those needed to keep the stock from becoming overfished in the first
place, so both fishermen and managers have an incentive to halt the stock’s
decline now.
Both harvest restrictions and rebuilding plans are anathema to
critics of Magnuson-Stevens, who generally support H.R. 1335. They argue that
fish stocks should be managed “flexibly,” in a manner that tolerates some
overfishing and delays the rebuilding of overfished stocks, in order to
minimize short-term economic harm to fishermen.
But when fisheries managers adopt a “flexible” approach, stocks
are rarely, if ever, completely rebuilt.
The current debate over striped bass management at ASMFC clearly
illustrates the problem.
In 2013, ASMFC’s Striped
Bass Management Board received a benchmark stock assessment (Benchmark
Assessment), which indicated that the stock was declining steadily, had
experienced overfishing for most of the past decade, and would probably become
overfished by 2015. If ASMFC was governed by Magnuson-Stevens, that would have
been enough to require a rebuilding plan.
But ASMFC is not governed by Magnuson-Stevens, and was guided
solely by its striped bass management plan.
Amendment 6 to the
Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Striped Bass (Amendment 6) requires ASMFC to adopt
measures to end overfishing within one year, at any time that the fishing
mortality rate (F) exceeds the mortality target for two consecutive years and
the female spawning stock biomass (SSB) falls below the SSB target in at least
one of those years.
Amendment 6 also requires ASMFC to draft a plan to rebuild the
striped bass stock within 10 years should the SSB fall below its target in any
two consecutive years and F exceed its target in at least one of those years.
The Benchmark Assessment demonstrated that both of those
triggers had been tripped.
After a full year of
debate, ASMFC adopted Addendum IV to Amendment 6 (Addendum
IV), which had slightly less than a 50-50 chance of reducing F to target within
one year. Addendum IV was adopted only after a number of jurisdictions
bordering Chesapeake Bayunsuccessfully argued that the harvest reduction should be phased-in over a three-year period, despite the
clear language of Amendment 6.
And despite the clear language of Amendment 6, no rebuilding
plan was drafted at all.
Because ASMFC is not
subject to Magnuson-Stevens, and because an appellate court decision effectively
insulated ASMFC actions from judicial review, its failure to follow its own
stock rebuilding rules was not subject to legal challenge.
Things headed downhill from there.
When ASMFC’s Striped Bass
Management Board met in November 2015, representatives from the Chesapeake Bay
jurisdictions tried to weaken the measures adopted in Addendum IV, even
though the SSB was nowhere near the SSB target.
Michael Luisi,
representing the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, argued that there
was a bias in the stock assessment. Due to such bias, which could produce
overestimates of mortality and underestimates of the size of the SSB, he said
that the SSB was somewhat higher than believed, and harvest could be increased.
He maintained that position even after Charlton Godwin, the
Chair of ASMFC’s Striped Bass Technical Committee, clearly stated that “there
is no way to accurately predict what that bias is going to be and then to
account for it…there is still no guarantee as to whether the direction is going
to be the same or the magnitude.”
In other words, while there was a recognized bias in the
assessment, such bias could either overestimate or underestimate F and SSB, and
do so by differing amounts each year.
Mr. Luisi asserted that Amendment IV’s harvest reductions caused
real harm to Maryland, saying “we’ve made the argument before we felt that
these reductions were extreme. I’ve heard the word ‘crisis’ from my stakeholders.
The charter, the recreational and the commercial industry are suffering greatly
as a result of the reductions that we’ve taken.”
A few months later, despite Mr. Luisi’s claims of “crisis” and
“suffering,” NMFS’ recreational landings estimates showed that anglers in
Chesapeake Bay hadn’t taken any real-world reductions at all. In fact, both
Maryland and Virginia anglers landed about 150% more striped bass in 2015 than
they had in the base year of 2012….
Even so, Mr. Luisi made a motion to “initiate an addendum to
reconsider the reduction options in Addendum IV for the 2016 fishing season in
the Chesapeake Bay based on the results of the 2015 assessment update and
retrospective projections.”
That motion never came to a vote. However, ASMFC’s Striped Bass
Technical Committee was asked to prepare another update to the stock
assessment, which would be presented at the October 2016 Striped Bass
Management Board meeting.
Should that update show an increase in the SSB, there will
undoubtedly be another effort to increase the harvest, even though the SSB was
nowhere near its target level. Such effort could be successful.
And that, in a nutshell, is why fisheries need cast-in-stone
limits, and fisheries managers need hard-and-fast rules, not “flexibility.”
Under a “flexible” management system, managers are faced with
too many temptations, and too much pressure from their constituencies, to see a
recovery through to its end, and to fully enforce the provisions of a fishery
management plan.
As a result, flexibly-managed stocks are seldom, if ever, fully
restored. Instead, they languish in a perilous netherworld, never completely
healthy and vital, and always just one or two poor year classes—or one or two
excessive harvests—away from the brink of collapse.
That’s not a good place for fish stocks to be, and explains why
such stocks should be managed like summer flounder, harvest cuts and all, and
not like the striped bass, which faces a far more uncertain future.
-----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/
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