Ever since the National MarineFisheries Service announced that the 2017 summer flounder catch limit had to bereduced by 30% compared to the year before, elements within the East Coast
angling community have been railing against the new rules, and demanding that
nothing change.
The folks who are arguing for the
status quo inevitably attack the quality of the science used to make the
determination that harvest cuts are needed.
“the problem as I see it is not with the
fish or the fishermen, but with our fisheries managers. They set a target of having 62,394 metric
tons in the spawning stock biomass (SSB) but that has never been achieved. In fact, this number seems so high that it may
be ecologically impossible to reach…”
“A few years ago [NMFS] declared the
fishery recovered since spawning stock biomass came within the target
range. But once we reached a spawning
biomass that large, recruitment began to decline. As you can see from the table [of recruitment
and spawning stock biomass published by NMFS], we had better recruitment when
the spawning stock biomass was much lower.
I have contended, and some scientists have agreed with me, that we have
reached the top of a bell-shaped curve which coincides with the highest levels
of spawning stock biomass ever recorded.
The fact that we have exceeded the carrying capacity may be one of the
reasons for the poor recruitment…“
“Basing harvest limits on outdated data
and models is destroying the New York fishing community. It is crucial that all federal decisions are
based upon the most accurate scientific data and models. Waiting another day for a new summer flounder
benchmark assessment is one day too many.”
Such sentiments have even led to a
petition asking regulators to maintain status quo summer flounder regulations
in 2017, pending the completion of a new benchmark assessment (which will
definitely not occur in 2017, and might not occur in 2018, either). Proponents of the petition argue that
“What NOAA Fisheries has failed to do is
update the stock assessment for summer flounder as the stock has expanded north
and east. Independent reviews found that
there are significant deficiencies of [sic] the summer flounder stock
assessment and that improvements should be made to the modeling approach. It is expected that those changes could eliminate
or lessen the need for quota reductions but NOAA Fisheries has no plans of
updating the assessment before approving the 2017 [acceptable biological
catch].
That sounds all very well and
good, but one thing isn’t being considered.
What if the current science is
right?
Right now, the
2016 update to the benchmark stock assessment (and yes, contrary to what
you read in some of the quotes above, the benchmark assessment is not “outdated
data” and NOAA Fisheries has not “failed to…update the stock assessment) tells
us that the stock is at just 58% of the target biomass, and that recruitment—the
number of young fish entering the population—has been below average for six
consecutive years, 2010-2015.
Scientists warn that
“the stock biomass is dangerously close to
being overfished, which could happen as early as [2017] if increased efforts to
curb fishing mortality are not undertaken.”
That warning was supported by the
Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council’s
Science and Statistical Committee, a panel of eighteen scientists, all
possessing doctoral degrees in relevant disciplines.
The
benchmark stock assessment itself, which the Mid-Atlantic Council relies
on, was peer-reviewed by a panel of independent fisheries scientists, including
Dr. Cynthia M. Jones of the Old Dominion University Center for Quantitative
Fisheries Ecology, Dr. Robin Cook of the MASTS Population Modeling Group at the
University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland, Dr. Henrik Sparholt, the Deputy
Head of the Advisory Department of the Secretariat of the International Council
for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES), and Mr. John Simmonds, the Vice Chair of
the ICES committee which provides fisheries advice.
That peer review panel analyzed
the data used to manage summer flounder, including the biomass target, the
stock/recruitment relationship and other relevant parameters, and found such
data appropriate for that purpose. That
represents a strong endorsement.
When we look at the folks
disputing the science, we find those quoted above—a retired police lieutenant,
a former Army officer and an ex-charterboat captain who now serves as
excecutive director of an “anglers’ rights” organization—along with a number of
other party and charter boat captains, fishing tackle dealers and magazine
writers, who may be very familiar with the recreational summer flounder
fishery, but have no claim to being called fisheries scientists.
Think about this for a minute.
If you were worried that you
might be facing colon cancer, you’d probably look for a qualified
gastroenterologist/oncologist. You
wouldn’t take the advice of a plumber, even if he claimed that the colon was
more or less the body’s sewer, and the same sort of thing flowed through both
kinds of “pipes.”
If you broke your leg, I suspect
that you’d want to get to a hospital emergency room posthaste, even if your
friend the carpenter lived nearby, and assured you that he could make everything
right by just tightening a couple of clamps on your calf and shin.
And if you or a member of your
family had the misfortune of being accused of a serious crime, the odds are
pretty high that you’d be looking to hire a lawyer, even though someone you
knew back in high school spent ten years in jail, assured you that he knew the
justice system from the inside out, and could tell you what to say to the judge
in your own defense.
In short, when something bad is
happening, you probably want the best professional advice you can find to
address the problem, and not just try to wing it with amateur help.
Put in the context of the fluke
fishery, the fact that the population could become overfished later this year, and
that hasn’t seen a good spawn since 2009, is bad. The fact that no one knows why recruitment
has been so poor for so long only makes things worse.
So the question is, should we
rely on a team of well-trained fisheries biologists to address and try to fix
the problem, or should we accept the assurances of a bunch of boat captains,
tackle dealers and various other untrained folks to tell us that things will be
OK?
If the amateurs are right, we can
maintain the status quo harvest of 5.42 million pounds, rather than dropping
down to a harvest of just 3.77 million pounds in 2017.
But if the scientists are right,
that 5.42 million pounds could well push the biomass below the overfishing
threshold, making fluke even harder to find and depleting the reservoir of
large, spawning-sized fish at a time that few young fish were entering the
population.
That seems like the wrong way to
go.
Anglers need to ask themselves whether
they would rather catch fluke, and not bring too many home because of more
restrictive regulations that are helping to rebuild the stock, or not catch
fluke, and so not bring too many home, because the population has been
depleted.
We worry about what feels like a
small, 3.77 million pound bag limit this year, enforced by a 19-inch size limit
that will force us to release a good part of our catch.
If the science is right, we
probably should be worrying about pushing the population back to where it was
in 1989, when the size limit was just 14 inches, but even without restrictive
bag limits, anglers could only catch about 3.1 million pounds of fluke, because
there just weren’t many fish to be found.
The bottom line is that if the
science is wrong, and we reduce recreational landings when we could have stayed
at status quo, we won’t take too many fish home, the fishing industry will have
a slower year (but will also benefit from a likely relaxing of black sea bass
rules and the 2011 year class of striped bass entering the fishery), and we’ll
catch more fish than we expected in 2018.
On the other hand, if the science
is right and we stay at status quo…
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