THE THING ABOUT "GAMEFISH" LEGISLATION...

This week, the Gloucester Daily Times reported that the Massachusetts legislature is again considering bills that would restrict or completely outlaw commercial striped bass fishing.

One of the bills wouldn’t shut the commercial fishery down, but would limit commercial harvest to those who can prove that they caught and sold at least 1,000 pounds of striped bass in each of the last five years.  Such legislation wouldn’t reduce the amount of striped bass that could be legally caught and sold in Massachusetts, as thestate’s quota, established by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, would merely be divided up among a smaller number of professional fishermen.

That in itself would be a big step, as Massachusetts is one of the minority of states that has retained an “open-access” commercial striped bass fishery.  Anyone who is willing to pay a nominal fee for the required license may participate in the fishery on an equal basis with everyone else, although a “control date” has been established, which allows the state to give different treatment to those who acquired their commercial bass permit after September 8, 2013.

Such open-access commercial fishery has been strongly criticized as a hotbed of illegal and unethical activity.  Angler/author Ted Williams, a Massachusetts resident, has reported on the fishery.  In one of his pieces, he quotes Brad Burns, founder of the group Stripers Forever, which seeks to abolish commercial striped bass fishing.  Burns said

“The ‘commercial fishery’ for stripers in Massachusetts is a farce.  Why would 74 percent of all commercial license holders have no reported landings?  Those fishermen may simply have wanted a license in case they decided to sell a fish or two.  But we believe that many of the 3,435 fishermen with zero reported landings are fish hogs who either want to use their license fraudulently to circumvent the bag limits that apply to everyone else, or make transportation of these fish legal until they can sell them—unreported, of course—for cash under the table.  Which is worse?  One is illegal, the other is simply reprehensible…As many as 98.98 percent of Massachusetts commercial striped bass permit holders are simply paying for their fishing fun by selling their catch—legally or illegally—or filling their freezers under the guise of providing for the public.”

It seems like an outrageous claim, but was substantially verified by Paul Deodati, then the director of the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, who noted that

“The commercial fishery has also changed by attracting thousands of non-traditional participants who are lured by thoughts of subsidizing an expensive hobby.”

Adding a 1,000-pound harvest qualification would certainly go a long way toward cleaning up that messy situation.

A second bill would phase out all commercial fishing for striped bass by 2025, and make Massachusetts a so-called “gamefish” state for the species—a state where no commercial harvest is allowed.

And that is a very different matter, and opens up a very different debate.

Mike Spinney, a Stripers Forever board member, reportedly told the Massachusetts Legislature’s Committee on the Environment, Natural Resources and Agriculture that such measure was needed, because

“The lax commercial regulations and lack of enforcement is why so many people feel at liberty to break the law by selling to unscrupulous dealers, markets and restaurants.  In one case, a refrigerated truck was driving up and down the Cape Cod Canal, taking striped bass from a network of poachers for sale, presumably to the black market.”

The assumption is that the Massachusetts commercial striped bass fishery is just too corrupt to maintain in any form.

On the other hand, unscrupulous dealers, markets and restaurants don’t go away just because the commercial fishery is legally abolished.  I grew up in Connecticut, which was one of the first states to outlaw commercial striped bass harvest.  However, the harvest went on; it was an open secret that just about all of the fish that the “sharpies” weighed in at local tackle shops—and plenty more besides—were also soon weighed in at local restaurants and seafood shops, where cash was exchanged.  One restaurant just a couple minutes from the docks in Cos Cob was notorious for the line of anglers that always formed at its back door when bass were running well.

The problem is that striped bass migrate through the waters of many states, and commercially-caught striped bass often travel through many states as well, as they make their way from the ocean to someone’s plate.  Thus, for any state’s gamefish law to be truly effective, the commercial moratorium could not merely be local; sale must be illegal coastwide.

That’s just what Stripers Forever wants.  Its mission statement clearly announces that

“Stripers Forever, a non-profit, internet based conservation organization, seeks game fish status for wild striped bass on the Atlantic Coast in order to significantly reduce striper mortality, to provide optimum  and sustainable public fishing opportunities for anglers from Maine to North Carolina, and to secure the greatest socio-economic value possible from the fishery.”

Efforts to secure gamefish status for striped bass met with some success in the 1950s and 1960s, arguably the “Golden Age” of saltwater fishing in the U.S., and again during the late 1970s and early 1980s, when strict regulations intended to reverse a collapse of the striped bass stock, coupled with the discovery of high levels of toxic PCBs in the flesh of many stripers, dealt a hard blow to the commercial fishery.  Since then, the effort has languished, with no new gamefish states coming on board.

But just suppose that the Massachusetts legislation is the harbinger of a new wave of striped bass protection, and that gamefish advocates get their way and abolish the commercial fishery.  Would that usher in a new era of striped bass conservation?

As George Gershwin wrote in Porgy and Bess, “It Ain’t Necessarily So.”

Start with the fact that the recreational striped bass kill is a lot higher than the commercial harvest. 

For the years 2014, 2015 and 2016, recreational fishermen killed an estimated 23.6 million, 16.9 million and 19.9 million pounds of striped bass, respectively, for a three-year aggregate harvest of 60,345,729 pounds of fish.  For the same three years, commercial harvest was 6.5 million, 5 million and 5 million pounds, or aggregate landings of 16,523,013 pounds—about 27% of the recreational total.  So if someone wanted to rein in the biggest source of striped bass mortality, the commercial fishery wouldn’t be the most logical target.

And then there’s the question of just what would happen if the commercial fishermen did go away.  Would the striped bass formerly caught by commercial fishermen just be allowed to remain, unmolested, in the ocean, to contribute to the spawning stock, making gamefish laws a real conservation measure?

Although it’s impossible to say for sure, there are good reasons to believe that would not be the case.

Striped bass are managed according a “control rule” that establishes a fishing mortality target of F=0.18, and a threshold of F=0.219; exceed the latter, and overfishing will be deemed to occur.  The control rule also includes a female spawning stock biomass target of 72,032 metric tons, and a female spawning stock biomass threshold of 57,626 metric tons; if female SSB drops below the threshold, the stock would be considered overfished.  

If commercial fishing was abolished, the fishing mortality would initially drop, and more females would remain in the spawning stock biomass.

In some states where there is no commercial fishery, such lowered fishing mortality and available biomass has already attracted recreational attention.  In New Jersey, for example, there is a so-called “bonus program” that allows registered anglers to kill an immature bass—a fish between 24 and 28 inches in length—in addition to the fish allowed under the general recreational limit.  New Jersey justifies the additional kill by saying that it

“is allowed a commercial harvest quota of striped bass under the Striped Bass Interstate Fisheries Management Plan [sic] as administered by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission.  Since New Jersey does not allow netting or sale of striped bass, this quota was transferred to the recreational fishing sector…

“The current allocation from ASMFC is 215,912 pounds to be distributed between individual anglers and party/charter boats…

“The Division of Fish and Wildlife initiated the program in 1990 [even before the still-rebuilding striped bass stock had been declared recovered] to allow the harvest of additional striped bass for New Jersey recreational anglers…”

If striped bass became a gamefish, would New Jersey do away with its so-called “bonus program because its commercial allocation had dropped to zero?  Or would it insist that ASMFC allocate the former commercial quota to the recreational sector, so that anglers could kill more and smaller fish?

Once again, no one can say for sure, but this is the state that defied ASMFC, going out of compliance with the Commission’s summer flounder management plan, so that its anglers could kill smaller fluke.  Would striped bass be treated any differently?

Stripers Forever provides a good clue.

On a page of the Stripers Forever website titled “Why a Game Fish,” the organization wrote

“In states with coastal commercial fisheries, the minimum legal size for anglers is 28 inches, which puts a bass for dinner out of reach of the great majority of rod and reel fishermen…With these highly restrictive angling regulations in place from Maine to North Carolina, fishery managers have made room for a large commercial quota at the expense of millions of recreational anglers.”

That certainly sounds like Stripers Forever believes that any former commercial quota would be employed to let anglers kill more and smaller fish, rather than enhancing the spawning stock.  

It later tries to blunt the impact of that statement by saying

“While it is important that anglers be allowed to catch and eat their own striped bass rather than be forced to buy them at market, converting any part of the commercial quotas to increase recreational bag limits—or even maintaining the current recreational limits—should depend on the successful pursuit of the conservation goals outlined above.”

While that sounds good, remember how striped bass are managed.  If the commercial fishery isn’t causing the striped bass stock to become overfished or be subject to overfishing—if the conservation goals are being met—nothing in the above statement would prevent commercial landings, if the commercial fishery is outlawed, from being replaced with recreational landings, while fishing mortality remains the same and anglers claim that no harm is being done.

Thus, when trying to decide whether the new Massachusetts gamefish bill, or any similar legislation that appears in any other state, at any other time, is worthwhile, it must first be put into context.

The allocation of marine resources between the commercial and recreational sectors is, first and foremost, a policy issue.  So long as stocks aren’t overfished and not subject to overfishing, neither the recreational nor the commercial fishery provides a better conservation alternative. 

So if policymakers want to make striped bass—or any other species—a gamefish, they can outlaw the commercial fishery and reallocate all of the fish to the recreational sector.  And after they do so, they can call it good natural resources policy, or good economic policy, or good social policy if they want to, and maybe they can even pull together some numbers that makes it look as if they’re right.

But they can’t just reallocate the fish and call it conservation.

For that term to apply, something actually needs to be conserved, and not just killed by a different set of people.  

Although there are a few who try to hide that detail.

“They tell all you children,

The Devil’s a villain,

But it ain’t necessarily so…”