MOVING THE GOALPOSTS

The National Marine Fisheries Service released its latest report on the state of America’s fisheries, and the news was good.  Thanks to the effective management measures imposed by the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, the number of overfished stocks has been whittled down to just 35, while the number of stocks subject to overfishing is now only 30.

Six stocks were removed from the “overfishing” list, and six from the “overfished” list.  Only one stock, Georges Bank winter flounder, was removed from both, meaning that eleven separate stocks showed real improvement in their status over the course of the past year.

That sounds pretty good, and it’s even almost true.  But the fact of the matter is that while eight federally-managed stocks really did improve their status, in the case of three others, the improvement was due less to biology, meaning a real increase in abundance or decrease in fishing mortality, and more to bureaucracy and the way NMFS determines stock status.

Witch flounder provide the clearest example.  The stock is unquestionably overfished, and managers previously determined that overfishing was occurring.  However, a 2017 update to the witch flounder stock assessment found that

“stock status is overfished and overfishing is unknown due to a lack of biological reference points…  [emphasis added]”

In other words, witch flounder were not taken off the “overfishing” list because overfishing had ended, but because biologists lack enough information to determine whether the stock is suffering from overfishing or not.

The situation with Western Atlantic bluefin tuna is similar, if a bit more complicated by debates over age at maturity, a possible decline in the stock’s recruitment potential and the rate if mixing between the Western Atlantic and Eastern Atlantic stocks.  Still, the Western Atlantic bluefin’s removal from the “overfished” list can be attributed primarily to a 2017 bluefin tuna stock assessment conducted by the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, which determined that there was insufficient information available to determine the current status of that stock.

Thus, the removal of both witch flounder and Western Atlantic Bluefin tuna from the “overfishing” and “overfished” stocks, respectively, merely represent NMFS’ recognition of the fact that there is insufficient information available to make a determination as to stock status.  Such removal represents admirable intellectual honesty, although listing both stocks among others that have truly shown signs of improvement, in a generally upbeat press release, is a sort of bureaucratic red herring and agency puffery that suggests that the progress made in conserving fish stocks was somewhat greater than it actually was.

Even such semi-kind words can’t be said about the removal of Gulf of Mexico red snapper and gray triggerfish from the “overfished” list, which was more a feat of political legerdemain than of any sort of management prowess.

That bit of slight-of-hand was achieved through a document known as Amendment 44 to the Fishery Management Plan for the Reef Fish Resources of the Gulf of Mexico, also titled Minimum Stock Size Threshold (MSST) Revision for Reef Fish Stocks with Existing Status Determination Criteria.

For many years, Gulf red snapper and gray triggerfish, along with five other species, were managed using a minimum stock size threshold—that is, the threshold used to determine when a stock was overfished—that was calculated using each stock’s natural mortality rate and the biomass needed to produce maximum sustainable yield.  Both the red snapper and gray triggerfish stocks were deemed to be overfished pursuant to such criteria.

That caused a problem in the recreational red snapper fishery, where anglers chronically exceeded their annual catch limit, since the fishery management plan required that such overages be deducted from the following years’ quota so long as the stock remained overfished.  

Anglers were unhappy about such paybacks for many years, but the issue gained particular urgenc in 2017, after the Secretary of Commerce reopened the private-boat recreational red snapper season in the Gulf, knowing as he did so that such reopening would cause private-boat anglers to “substantially exceed” their annual catch limit, “which was designed to prevent overfishing,” and that the resultant overfishing could delay the ultimate recovery of the stock by as much as six years.

In the end, it appears that Gulf private-boat anglers caught about 212% of their annual catch limit, setting up a payback that could have wiped out the entire 2018 red snapper season.  Thus, militant anglers and anglers’ rights organizations, who praise the opportunity for recreational overharvest (which they euphemistically call “improve[d] recreational access,” in an effort to hide and deny its essentially malign nature) needed to do something if they wanted to keep killing fish.

Their answer was Amendment 44, which replaced the science-based minimum stock size threshold with a politically pragmatic one, adopting a new threshold of 50% of the biomass needed to produce maximum sustainable yield for all seven species, most particularly including red snapper. 

It’s possible that any such effort would have failed in previous years, when the seats on the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council were relatively balanced between state fishery managers, commercial fishermen, for-hire boatmen and recreational interests.  But 2017 appointments to that council favored the recreational sector, which was proud to announce that, in making such council appointments, the

“Trump Administration Delivers for Recreational Anglers”

by appointing their favored candidates.  Such additional recreational appointees, when teamed with existing anglers already sitting on the council and state managers who often sided with the well-heeled and politically active anglers’ rights organizations, allowed the blatantly political measure to get a favorable vote.

It should be noted that for some species, including red snapper, the original science-based thresholds may have presented a practical problem; Amendment 44 notes that

“The need for the proposed action is to provide a wide enough buffer between spawning stock biomass at maximum sustainable yield (B_MSY) and [Minimum Spawning Stock Threshold], particularly for stocks with low natural mortality rates, to prevent stocks from frequently alternating between overfished and rebuilt conditions due to natural variation in recruitment and other environmental factor.”

That’s not an unreasonable concern, and could arguably justify a small reduction in the threshold to prevent frequent swings in the deemed state of certain stocks.  However, it should be noted that early drafts of Amendment 44 contained six possible alternatives, including thresholds equal to 75% and 85% of biomass at maximum sustainable yield.  At least one of those proposals should have provided buffers large enough to prevent frequent flip-flops between a stock being deemed “overfished” in one season, “rebuilt” a year or two later, and “overfished” a few years after that.

Instead, the recreationally-dominated Gulf Council elected to set the threshold at just 50% of biomass at maximum sustainable yield, which the environmental impact statement incorporated into the final version of Amendment 44 notes

“is the lowest [Minimum Stock Size Threshold] allowed under the National Standard 1 guidelines.  Relative to the other alternatives, this would result in the lowest likelihood of a stock being declared overfished, and would therefore be expected to have a greatest negative impact to the physical environment,”

and also

“the greatest negative impacts on the biological/ecological environment…”

On the other hand, the 50% threshold provided the only alternative that would take red snapper and gray triggerfish off the overfished list, and the only one that could prevent massive red snapper paybacks in subsequent seasons.

Thus, despite its potentially negative impacts on the physical, biological and ecological environments of the Gulf of Mexico, it was the alternative that the recreational representatives on the Gulf Council heartily endorsed.  (It should be noted that Amendment 44 was well underway before the 2017 red snapper season was reopened, and before the extremely high level of recreational overharvest in 2017 was confirmed.  However, the effort to increase Gulf recreational red snapper harvest, which culminated in the reopened season, had also been underway for a very long time, and it would thus be disingenuous to suggest that Amendment 44 wasn’t seen as a tool to avoid recreational paybacks being used as a means to hold anglers accountable for their continual excess overharvest.)

NMFS declaring any sort of victory because Gulf red snapper and Gulf gray triggerfish have been taken off the “overfished” list is akin to a football team claiming two touchdowns just because they had possession of the ball on the opposing team’s 45-yard line—you only need to look at some of the rhetoric of the anglers’ rights crowd to understand that they very much consider federal fishery managers to be the “opposing team”—and then managed to somehow have the goalposts moved from the end zone out to mid-field. 

Any so-called “success” wasn’t do to moving the ball forward—in the case of red snapper, the illegal 2017 season reopening probably moved the “ball” back a yard or two—but to moving the goal posts so far from where they belonged that such “touchdowns” required no effort at all.

Even with red snapper and triggerfish out of the picture, and considering the uncertainty that plagues witch flounder and bluefin tuna, 2017 represents a real victory for fisheries management and for the Magnuson-Stevens Act, as five stocks really were no longer subject to overfishing, and three were, from a biological standpoint, no longer overfished.

Still, in the future, we should be careful to assure that any claimed victories truly involve advancing the health and abundance of managed fish stocks, and not by merely allowing our goals to retreat to levels that no longer hold meaning.