Fisheries
management is a complicated endeavor.
Before issuing regulations
that will prevent overfishing and maintain healthy fish populations, managers need to consider multiple factors.
They must estimate the size of fish populations, and decide
whether such populations must be rebuilt. They must determine how many fish are
lost to predation and other natural causes each year, and how many new fish,
from the most recent spawns, are being recruited into the population. And they
must determine how many fish are removed from the population by commercial and
recreational fishermen each year.
Other considerations also come into play. Is abundance increasing
or decreasing at current levels of harvest? Are environmental conditions, such
as warming water temperatures, having an impact on the stock? Is fishing
pressure constant, or are fishermen shifting effort away from one species and
onto others?
Stock assessments can be extremely complex and based on data
obtained from multiple surveys conducted at the state and federal level. Some
surveys will be “fishery-dependent,” meaning that they are surveys based on
fishermen’s effort and catches, while other will be “fishery-independent,” when
conducted solely for research and management purposes.
Managers know from the
outset that, even under the best conditions, there will be some uncertainty in their assessments, and
therefore in the regulations that result. However, they do their best to
identify the sources of possible error, and to make allowances for both
“scientific uncertainty” and “management uncertainty” when setting each year’s
rules.
For most sources of uncertainty, that works out pretty well.
However, there is one sort of uncertainty that fisheries managers can’t control
and can’t account for in their assessments no matter how hard they try.
That’s the uncertainty that results when politicians get
involved in the management process.
Unlike scientific or management uncertainty, political
uncertainty isn’t related to any sort of data at all. It is not subject to
quantification, and it is unpredictable. Political uncertainty arises not out
of surveys, biology or any sort of fact, but out of some combination of emotion
abetted by legislators who are so eager to help their constituents that they
sometimes do not stop to think about whether it’s the right thing to do.
Such legislators sponsor bills that replace well-considered,
data-driven fisheries management with arbitrary measures that, in just about
every case, conflict with biologists’ advice and threaten the long-term health
of the fisheries that they address.
Two recent bills introduced into the House of Representatives by
congressmen from the mid-Atlantic region illustrate that principle all too
well.
The first of those bills is H.R. 1195, the so-called “Local Fishing Access Act,”
introduced by Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY).
H.R. 1195 would permit the
Secretary of Commerce to open certain federal waters north and west of Block
Island, Rhode Island to striped bass fishing. The bill is substantially similar
to H.R. 3070, legislation, which Rep. Zeldin introduced in 2015.
However, while H.R. 3070 addressed only recreational striped bass fishing in
federal waters, H.R. 1195 contains no such restriction, and so would presumably
allow commercial striped bass fishing in federal waters as well.
That presents a problem
because, on October 20, 2007, President George W. Bush issued an executive order that outlawed commercial fishing for
striped bass and red drum in federal waters (the exclusive economic zone, or
EEZ). Thus, unless H.R. 1195 contained language specifically overriding such
executive order, even if the Secretary opened up all or part of the EEZ to
striped bass fishing, commercial striped bass fishing in the EEZ would
remain illegal.
That’s a clear oversight, but one that provides a good example
of why fisheries management should be left up to professionals who are
intimately familiar with the details of the process, and not to legislators
who, at best, have a more limited knowledge of the issues and can sometimes be
too quick to crank out bills merely to please a vocal constituency.
In the end, Rep. Zeldin’s
legislation is relatively harmless. The Secretary of Commerce already has power to allow, or to continue to prohibit,
recreational striped bass harvest in the EEZ. A bill such as H.R. 1195, which
merely provides that “The Secretary of Commerce, in consultation with the
Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, may issue regulations to permit
and regulate Atlantic striped bass fishing” in the EEZ doesn’t change the legal
status quo at all.
That’s not the case with another recent proposal.
On February 23,
Representatives Frank Pallone (D-NJ) and Frank LoBiondo (R-NJ) announced plans to introduce legislation that would prevent the National Marine
Fisheries Service (NMFS) from implementing its planned 30% reduction in
the annual catch limit for summer flounder.
Such reduction is necessary
because summer flounder recruitment—the number of new fish entering the
population—has been below average for six consecutive years, causing the biomass
to drop to just 58% of the level needed to produce the largest sustainable
harvest. The Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council’s Science and Statistics
Committee has warned 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 [emphasis in original].”
Yet Rep. Pallone appears to
be focused solely on short-term economic concerns, saying, “These
cuts are a body blow to the recreational fishing industry in New Jersey and
that is why Congress has to take action. The recreational fishing industry
contributes over $1 billion to our state’s economy and directly supports 20,000
jobs…”
Rep. Pallone appears to give no thought to what will happen to
the recreational fishing industry in the event that NMFS is right, which
appears very likely. In such case the proposed legislation would cause the
stock to shrink further, making summer flounder harder to catch, something
which would hardly be good for New Jersey’s fishing industry.
He also made the curious
statement that “The cuts for New Jersey are greater than what NOAA had required
for the region,” which is patently untrue. The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries
Commission (ASMFC) ultimately adopted an option that
would reduce 2017 recreational harvest by 28 to 32 percent, when
compared to 2016. That is a significantly lesser reduction than the 41 percent regional
reduction that NMFS had called for.
Rep. LoBiondo also made a number of questionable statements when he referred to “draconian cuts to
New Jersey fishermen which allow neighboring states to freely pillage our
waters at more favorable limits,” and complained that “the use of questionable
methodologies and outdated science by NOAA bureaucrats will cut our fishing
industry off at the knees.”
The option selected by
ASMFC will include New Jersey in a region that also includes Connecticut and New
York, which has been the case since 2014. All states in the region will have
the same 3-fish bag and 19-inch minimum size. All will share the same season
length. And the region that includes Delaware, New Jersey’s southern neighbor,
will adopt regulations that are less restrictive than New Jersey’s. Thus, Rep.
LoBiondo’s statement about “cuts…which allow neighboring states to freely
pillage [New Jersey] waters at more favorable limits” is just plain wrong.
His claims of “questionable methodologies” and “outdated
science” are equally dubious.
The methodologies that were
used to prepare the 2013 benchmark summer flounder stock assessment was peer-reviewed by a panel of
internationally-recognized fisheries scientists, none of whom found
such methodologies “questionable.” And even though the benchmark assessment was
completed in 2013, it has been updated annually, with the last update completed in June 2016. That hardly qualifies
as “outdated science.”
Thus, any legislation that the two congressmen might propose to
block NMFS’ summer flounder management efforts would be based on a host of
false premises and a clear desire to override science-based management
measures. While such legislation might bring short-term economic relief, the
science indicates that it would do so at the expense of the summer flounder
stock and, ultimately, at the expense of businesses which depend on a healthy
summer flounder stock for their very survival.
Legislators can be many good things. Sometimes they are
lawmakers; at other times they are advisers, who help constituents navigate an
often-confusing federal bureaucracy. Over the course of their careers, they may
at times be orators, philosophers, dealmakers or even, when at their best, the
conscience of the entire nation.
But they are not trained fisheries managers. When they try to
be, and replace the scientists’ reasoned analysis with their own political
passions, they enter waters that they are not trained to navigate. Mishap is
the likely result.
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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/
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