NAVIGATING THE FOG IN THE STRIPED BASS DEBATE

People make striped bass management a lot harder than it needs to be.

Bass are considered a data-rich stock.  There are well-developed juvenile indices for the three major spawning areas, data sets that extend back to the mid-1900s and a time-tested assessment model that, in its various iterations, has survived multiple peer reviews.  Striped bass are one of the most commonly-encountered recreational species on the upper East Coast, which renders estimates of anglers’ coastwide catch and landings particularly reliable.  It is also an important commercial species, so commercial landings provide another good source of fishery-dependent information.  In addition, a number of fishery-independent surveys give biologists more information that they can use in the management process.

That being the case, a peer-reviewed striped bass stock assessment comes very close to being state-of-the art when it comes to fisheries science.  Thus, when the most recent benchmark stock assessment found that the striped bass stock was both overfished and experiencing overfishing, managers’ next steps might seem obvious—they ought to reduce landings to levels that end overfishing and promptly rebuild the population.

The fact that the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s current management plan requires just such actions would further suggest that’s what they must do.

But that’s too easy an answer.  As I said at the start, people make this stuff hard.

Any time that a stock has problems, there are always some dockside blowhards who fight remedial measures.  They’re often scientifically illiterate, but challenge the science anyway. Just as often, they’re likely aware of the problems, but unwilling to make the short-term sacrifices that creating long-term abundance requires.  So they rail that the science is bad, talk of mysterious hordes of fish that school just out of the scientists’ ken, or otherwise try to fog up the process enough to halt forward progress.

I wrote of such people last week.

They’re an obstacle to good striped bass management, but perhaps not as big an obstacle as they may seem, because managers—and just about everyone else involved with the process—have seen their act so many times, and with respect to so many species, that everyone pretty much knows what they’ll say even before they utter a word. 

After all, the first time someone comes to a fishery meeting and say that any additional regulations will put them out of business, managers might be inclined to listen.  But after fifteen or twenty years have passed, and managers see the same people not only saying the same thing every time new restrictions are mentioned, but also see them buying a new boat or two along the way, their credibility will, inevitably, decline.

So while such folks do help to obscure the management horizon, they don’t contribute too much more than a heavy haze that diligent managers can easily navigate through. 

The thick fog, that makes it more difficult for both management and the public to visualize their surroundings, originates elsewhere.  Often, it comes from people who have only a tangential connection to the issues, but a significant public presence, who uncritically accept the uninformed comments of others and project them into the public debate.

An example, which I’ve cited before in the past week, was aparticularly inaccurate press release by Congressman Lee Zeldin (R-NY, 1CD), whichalleged that

“Rather than rooting [striped bass management] decisions in local stock assessments, the ASMFC used flawed data that measures the Atlantic Striped Bass stock based on the entire eastern seaboard, yet failed to account for Atlantic Striped Bass outside of the 3-mile fishing area, assuming fish abide by arbitrary bureaucratic boundaries.  Alternative data that shows the Striped Bass stock is in a better place outside the 3-mile limit was not only thrown out by the Commission, but the Commission also moved to no longer perform data collection in those waters, virtually ensuring that any future decision regarding the Striped Bass fishery will be based on flawed data in perpetuity.”

Talk about generating fog!  Those two sentences resulted in more pea soup than a southeast wind sweeping across Great South Bay.  Just hitting the high points, I can find at least six separate statements that, if accepted as truth, would send the public and managers off course.  Taking them in order we find:

1.       The assertion that striped bass should be assessed on a local rather than a coastwide basis.  That would be a ludicrous approach to take with a migratory fish that regularly transits hundreds of miles of ocean over the course of a year.  Given that Chesapeake Bay makes the largest contribution to the coastal migratory striped bass stock, and that most of the migratory population, including those spawned in New York’s Hudson River, winter off the Virginia and North Carolina coast, local abundance figures would be meaningless.  At any time during the year, there will be places that are centers of striped bass abundance, and places where the fish are completely absent.  Trying to evaluate the health of the stock from purely local numbers would be like trying to estimate the size of the United States population by only sampling in Manhattan, or in Nome, Alaska; in either case, any semblance to the nation’s actual population would be, at best, accidental.

2.       The assertion that the striped bass stock assessment was based on “flawed data.”  The stock assessment was peer reviewed by a panel of independent fishery scientists, who had no prior connection with the assessment.  One of their tasks was to determine whether the assessment investigated all relevant data sets, and adequately discussed the strengths and weaknesses of the data sources.  The panel of independent experts made no suggestion that the data used was flawed.

3.       The assertion that the stock assessment failed to consider striped bass in federal waters.  As I wrote in last Thursday’s essay, there is no evidence that there is a separate population of striped bass that remains offshore, where it would escape the notice of the scientists who performed the stock assessment; there is substantial evidence that any striped bass which venture offshore soon return to inshore waters, where they would be picked up in both fishery-dependent and fishery-independent surveys.  However, given that the assessment specifically addresses striped bass found in federal waters, it’s probably not necessary to even go that far.  The assertion has no factual support.

4.       The assertion that “alternative data” supports the belief that there is an abundance of striped bass swimming more than 3 miles offshore.  Alternative data, like “alternative facts,” are not a reflection of reality.  Returning to the comment made with respect to Point 2, above, the stock assessment was found to have addressed all relevant data sets.  There was no suggestion that it had not.  Thus, the most likely conclusion is that the “alternative data” wasn’t really data at all, but rather anecdotal comments made by individuals, and probably by individuals with an economic or other motive for challenging the stock assessment’s conclusions.

5.       The assertion that the ASMFC has “thrown out” striped bass abundance data from federal waters and will no longer collect striped bass abundance data more than three miles from shore.  The ASMFC does not perform, and never has performed, trawl surveys in federal waters, so it could not have “moved to no longer perform data collection in those waters.”  In the past, striped bass stock assessments had considered data derived from the National Marine Fisheries Service’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center Bottom Trawl Survey, but the latest assessment ceased using such data, in large part because of “the low proportion of positive tows;” that is, contrary to the assertions in Rep. Zeldin’s press release, it wasn’t finding many fish in federal waters.  The offshore component of the New Jersey Bottom Trawl Survey are also not included in the assessment, not for any arbitrary reason, but “due to low incidence of striped bass.”  The fish just aren’t out there on a regular basis.

6.       The assertion that data taken from the Northeast Fisheries Science Center and other offshore surveys will not be considered “in perpetuity.”  Each time a benchmark stock assessment is performed, the biologists doing the work have wide latitude to examine and include such data sets that they deem appropriate; subject only to the bounds of good science as determined in the peer review. In the most recent assessment, they chose not to include data from the offshore surveys.  Should a new assessment be completed in 2023, if they find sufficient reason, that data might be included again.  The comment that future striped bass decisions “will be based on flawed data in perpetuity” is nothing more than incendiary and very inaccurate rhetoric, that serves neither the striped bass nor striped bass fishermen.

However, such rhetoric can certainly obfuscate the truth in the striped bass debate.

Inaccurate comments, delivered by a trusted but fallible source, can easily obscure the facts of the issue.  I was reminded of that when reading a recent opinion piece in the Press of Atlantic City [NJ], which recognized that the striped bass stock was facing a challenge, but also said misleading things such as

“high minimum sizes for keeping fish have resulted in many striped bass being thrown back and many of those dying from injuries sustained while being caught.  The stock assessment suggested that 3.4 million bass died after being returned to the water in 2017.”

While nothing in those two sentences was technically wrong, there is clearly a strong suggestion that increasing the minimum size for striped bass would be a counterproductive management move, due to discard mortality.  Nowhere does the article note that only 9% of the striped bass released are thought to succumb to such mortality, nor that, assuming such 9% mortality rate, if 3.4 million bass died after being released, 37.8 million survived the experience.  

Thus, saying that “many” fish died after being released provides a poor picture of the real situation.

Yet that was probably the most venial of the article’s sins.

Far worse was the statement that

“The new decline is striped bass suggests commission biologists don’t fully understand the factors determining its population.”

The truth is, ASMFC’s biologists—its Atlantic Striped Bass Technical Committee—are professionals who understand those factors quite well.  That can be clearly demonstrated by the stock assessment update that they produced in 2011, which correctly predicted that the striped bass stock would be overfished by 2017.   Unfortunately, the biologists at ASMFC have no authority to resolve the issue; they can only work to assess the stock, and provide advice to the Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board, which makes the actual decisions.  Should the Management Board fail to heed that advice, as they did in late 2011 when they decided not to move forward with an addendum that might have prevented the further decline of the stock, it’s not the biologists’ fault.

Let that one be perfectly clear.  ASMFC’s striped bass biologists did their job well.  It was the Management Board who made the decision to abandon the field, instead of acting to maintain the stock.

So the Press got that one wrong, and was thus equally wrong when it concluded that

“Since the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission lacks a functional understanding of what determines even the population of a single fish species, it would risk damaging the coastal ecosystem if it tried to manage the Atlantic as a coastal fish farm for striped bass, however popular that fish may be.  The commissioners need to remember that many well-meaning human attempts to manipulate nature have proved disastrous, and to ensure they don’t participate in the next overreach.”

For the ASMFC has a good understanding of striped bass biology, as well as a good understanding of what’s wrong right now—we’re leaving too few in the water. 

No one is seeking to make the Atlantic a “fish farm,” but merely to restore the stock to a size that will produce a spawning stock with the age and size structure needed to support a sustainable harvest in the long term.  That's what the current management plan requires.

And the Press, in making its comments, probably should have considered the consequences of trying to “manipulate nature” in a way that promotes short-term harvest at the long-term expense of the stock, because that’s where we’re headed right now.

Hopefully, it got things wrong out of mere misunderstanding, and too meager an effort to winnow out facts.  But whatever its motives, its opinion piece disserved the public, by creating more fog.

The kind of fog that, if it doesn’t lift, could cause striped bass management to crash