Is that a good thing?
Right now, it’s hard to say.
NMFS provided a number of reasons why it was ceding control
of the cobia fishery. The first on the
list was
“The majority of Atlantic cobia are caught in state waters.”
That would seem to make ASMFC management a no-brainer.
The Magnuson-Stevens
Fishery Conservation and Management Act, which governs all fishing in
federal waters, generally doesn’t apply in state waters, so it would make more
sense to concentrate management responsibilities in an organization such as
ASMFC, that may legally exert its authority over all of the catch. The Atlantic cobia fishery was recently
thrown into some chaos precisely because federal managers couldn’t prevent
overfishing in inshore waters, a situation which undoubtedly led to the South
Atlantic Fishery Management Council, and ultimately NMFS, wanting to wash their
hands of that stock.
So it’s probably best to take a look at some of the unfortunate
events that occurred over the past few years, before deciding whether abandoning cobia was the right thing for the South Atlantic Council to do.
The problems that plague cobia management can probably be traced back to 2012, when a
benchmark cobia stock assessment was completed.
That benchmark assessment included genetic sampling, which showed that
there were actually two different stocks of cobia being caught on the Atlantic
coast, with the fish off Florida being genetically different from those farther north. The Florida/Georgia line
was set as a practical boundary between the two stocks.
Based on that finding, an annual catch limit
was set for the Atlantic (Georgia to New York) stock.
For a few years, all was fine. But in 2015, anglers blew through their
630,000 pound Atlantic cobia catch limit, landing more than 1,500,000 pounds of fish. In 2016, the same thing happened, with
anglers landing over 1,300,000 pounds of cobia, more than twice their 620,000 pound
quota.
Anglers, who are allocated 92% of
all cobia harvest, were seriously overfishing the stock, as the total annual
catch limit in 2016, for both recreational and commercial fishermen, was only
670,000 pounds.
As a result of such overharvest, accountability measures kicked
in. The
federal waters season for 2017 only ran for a few weeks in January, from the 1st
through the 23rd. After
that, no recreational fisherman was allowed to keep an Atlantic cobia in
federal waters until the start of 2018.
That sounds like a drastic measure, but it didn’t accomplish
too much, because most of the
landings, and most of the overage, was attrubutable to harvest within state waters. A large part of that harvest came from Virginia. North Carolina had substantial cobia catches
too, but Georgia had very low landings,
because most of its cobia were caught offshore.
And in South Carolina, anglers couldn’t keep any cobia at all, because that state's laws require state landings to cease when the federal season is closed.
Thus, vesting management authority in federal hands didn’t
work, because the states were ignoring the federal rules, and allowed their anglers to overfish. The resulting situation wasn’t
only bad for the fish, it was bad for fishermen, too, because while anglers in
Virginia and North Carolina took cobia home, those in Georgia and South
Carolina were, as a practical matter, locked out of the fishery.
Shifting management authority to ASMFC seemed to be a better
option, as ASMFC, unlike NMFS, had the power to enforce the terms of its
management plan within state waters. Pursuant to the Atlantic Coastal Fisheries
Cooperative Management Act, ASMFC could seek to shut down a state’s cobia fishery
should such state refuse to abide by the cobia management plan.
ASMFC
adopted its first cobia management plan in 2017. With respect to recreational fishermen, that plan provides that
“All states must establish a 1 fish bag limit, 38 inch [fork
length] minimum size limits (or equivalent [total length] measurement, and a
maximum vessel limit [not to exceed 6 fish] by April 1, 2018. A coastwide recreational harvest limit will
be allocated to non-de minimis states
as state-specific recreational harvest targets. States will establish season and vessel
limits to restrict harvest to the harvest target, and adherence to harvest
targets will be evaluated as average annual harvest over a 3-year timeframe. [emphasis added]”
The plan goes on to explain
“State-defined seasons must adhere to soft state-by-state
recreational quota shares (harvest targets) of the coastwide [recreational
harvest limit]. [emphasis added]”
Such shares are based on historical landings, with 39.8% of
the landings (9,589 fish) going to Virginia, 38.5% (9,273 fish) to North
Carolina, 12.2% (2.935 fish) to South Carolina, and 9.5% (2,298 fish) to
Georgia.
The plan also provides that
“A state or jurisdiction will be determined out of compliance
with the provision of this fishery management plan…if:
·
Its regulatory and management programs to
implement [the required management measures] have not been approved by the
South Atlantic State-Federal Fisheries Management Board; or
·
It fails to meet any schedule required by [the
compliance schedule], or any addendum prepared under adaptive management…; or
·
It has failed to implement a change to its
program when determined necessary by the South Atlantic State-Federal Fisheries
Management Board; or
·
It makes a change to its regulations required
under [the provisions of the plan] or any addendum prepared under adaptive
management, without prior approval of the South Atlantic State-Federal
Fisheries Management Board.”
It all sounds good. And
just about anything is probably better than the former federal management
system, that was unable to constrain the gross overharvest taking place in state
waters.
But that doesn’t answer the one most important question.
Does it adequately protect the fish?
There’s a good chance that the answer to that question is “No.”
In explaining why all management authority was being handed
over to ASMFC, NMFS explained that most of the landings take place in state
waters. But NMFS also noted that
“NOAA Fisheries closed the 2016 and 2017 recreational fishing
seasons because the current recreational accountability measure requires NOAA
Fisheries to reduce the length of the fishing season in the year following an
annual catch limit overage by the amount needed to prevent a similar overage
from occurring.”
Sifting management responsibility from NMFS to ASMFC eliminated that issue, not because ASMFC will necessarily keep anglers from killing too many cobia in state waters—although hopefully, that will be the case—but because
ASMFC
doesn’t impose annual catch limits, and ASMFC doesn’t hold anglers
accountable at all. That’s why the
management plan refers to recreational harvest “targets” and “soft” state
recreational quotas. The limits that
ASMFC places on harvest are merely aspirational. They're goals that ASMFC would like to
achieve, but if they’re not met, there will be no meaningful consequences (to
the anglers) at all.
But that doesn’t mean that there might not be consequences
affecting the health of the cobia stock.
Under the current management plan, anglers can badly overfish
the cobia stock for three successive years, and the worst that will happen is
that regulations will tighten for the next three-year period--although there’s
no guarantee that they’ll tighten enough to prevent another three years of
overharvest.
Now, the ASMFC cobia plan now has one year under its
belt. How is it doing so far?
In all honesty, it’s tough to tell.
The plan was put together in 2017, about a year before NMFS
came out with recalculated recreational catch and effort figures, which
generally revealed higher recreational landings of all species—not just cobia—than
was previously believed, and will also affect the estimates of stock size and
acceptable harvest levels. Thus, the
state quotas included in the plans will not be in synch with the
landings reported on the NMFS website (although managers can convert the
figures into a sort of “common currency” that harmonizes the two data sets). The two sets of data won’t be reconciled until a new benchmark cobia stock assessment is released later this
year, and ASMFC has a chance to modify the cobia management plan in response.
But we can compare the relative size of states’ 2018 cobia
landings with the landings in previous years, and at least figure out whether
things are headed in the right direction.
When the landings of the four major cobia states—Virginia,
North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia—are put together, a pattern begins
to emerge.
Approximately 52,000 cobia were landed in 2014, when
overfishing did not occur. That number more than doubled to 108,000 fish in 2015, resulting in overfishing, then
dropped to a still-excessive 75,000 in 2016, before falling to 40,000 in 2017, the last year
without an ASMFC management plan.
After ASMFC's plan went into effect in 2018, landings more than doubled, to nearly 100,000
fish, the second-highest landings in the five-year time series. That strongly suggests that significant
overfishing again occurred.
Under the ASMFC plan, landings can continue at similar
levels for two more years.
So it seems that Atlantic cobia are in a damned under ASMFC's management, and damned under federal management, too.
Federal managers had annual catch limits, and could hold
anglers accountable for their overages, but couldn’t effectively manage the
stock because they couldn’t wield those tools to restrict landings in state
waters.
ASMFC has the authority to control state-waters landings
but, with ASMFC lacking the hard-poundage catch limits needed to constrain the catch and the will to hold anglers accountable for overfishing, such authority is, in many ways, just a paper
tiger.
The sad truth is, the South Atlantic Fishery Management
Council missed a real opportunity to improve cobia management, by ignoring the opportunity to jointly
manage the fishery with ASMFC. The Mid-Atlantic
Fishery Management Council provides an example of how well that sort of joint management can work.
When managing a number of popular recreational species, including
summer flounder, black sea bass, bluefish and scup, the Mid-Atlantic Council meets jointly with the relevant ASMFC management board, where the two management bodies agree on annual
harvest limits, along with model recreational bag limits, size limits and
seasons for each managed stock. The
Council and ASMFC have agreed that both bodies must approve proposed
measures; if a measure is approved by one of the parties and not by the other,
it is deemed to be void and adopted by neither.
Once both the Council and the management board agree on
management measures, ASMFC takes over, assigning state quotas, and considering alternative
state proposals that would have the same conservation benefits as the measures
adopted at the joint meeting.
Such an arrangement would have served cobia well. NMFS, through the South Atlantic Council,
would have been able to set firm annual catch limits, and would have been able
to hold anglers accountable if they overfished.
ASMFC, in turn, would have the authority to enforce the catch limits within
state waters by setting state allocations, and then requiring states to set
regulations that would keep recreational landings within each state's respective allocation.
That would have created a situation where everyone—including the cobia—had a
chance to win.
Unfortunately, with NMFS’ recent announcement, that chance has been lost.
The Atlantic cobia's chance to avoid years of overfishing may have been lost as well.
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