On
August 8, 2019, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s (ASMFC)
Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board (Management Board) met to consider the
future of the striped bass fishery.
A benchmark stock assessment released
in May 2019 (2018 Assessment) had determined that the striped bass stock was
both overfished and experiencing overfishing. Clear language in Amendment 6 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic
Striped Bass (Amendment 6), which the ASMFC adopted in 2003,
requires the Management Board to end overfishing and reduce the fishing
mortality rate to or below the target level within one year, and also requires
the Management Board to rebuild the overfished striped bass stock to the
biomass target within ten years.
If striped bass were a federally-managed species, subject to the
terms of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery
Conservation and Management Act (Magnuson-Stevens), the
Management Board’s next actions would be very clear. However, the ASMFC’s
actions are not governed by Magnuson-Stevens, so the Management Board is not
legally obligated to take any action at all.
The good news is that it seems to be taking its obligation to
end overfishing very seriously. It has drafted a new addendum, Draft Addendum VI to Amendment
6 to the Interstate Fisheries Management Plan for Atlantic Striped Bass (Addendum
VI), which has now been released for public comment.
Addendum VI proposes a number of possible management measures that are expected
to achieve the 18% reduction needed to reduce fishing mortality to the target
level. Such measures include a possible 35-inch minimum recreational size limit
on the coast or, as an alternative, three different slot limits (28-35 inches,
30-38 inches and 32-40 inches) intended to protect both immature bass and the
largest and most fecund spawning females.
Size limits in Chesapeake Bay
would either decrease to 18 inches, if the bag limit was also decreased to one
fish, or increase to 22 inches if the current two-fish bag was retained, or
alternative slot limits of either 18-23 or 20-24 inches.
All states’ commercial quotas
would be cut by 18%, although Amendment VI also contains an alternative
proposal that would only require a 1.8% reduction in commercial quotas, while
increasing the coastal size limit to 36 inches and making corresponding adjustments
to the slot limits and minimum size in Chesapeake Bay.
In addition, Addendum VI
proposes the mandatory use of circle hooks when bait fishing for striped bass,
in order to reduce the number of fish that are hooked in the gills, gullet or
gut and die after being released.
If Addendum VI doesn’t meet
with overwhelming public opposition, which is very unlikely, it is expected to
be approved by the Management Board, and adopted by the ASMFC, at the ASMFC’s
October meeting.
But what Addendum VI doesn’t
do is rebuild the stock within ten years, even though such rebuilding is
required by Amendment 6. It’s possible that the Management Board will choose to
address such rebuilding in a new amendment to the management plan, which it
might initiate at its May meeting. On the other hand, it’s also possible that
such amendment, if initiated, will change the reference points, which are the
standards used to evaluate the health of the stock, in a way that permits a
larger annual harvest, but at the cost of permanently decreased abundance and
greater long-term risk to the spawning stock.
Unlike federal fishery
managers, the ASMFC isn’t legally required to rebuild overfished stocks, nor is
it required to follow the dictates of the best available science. That makes it
more difficult to predict how any management issue will finally be resolved.
Fishery management at the state and ASMFC level has far fewer constraints than
do their federal counterparts, so state- and ASMFC-level management actions
also have more uncertain outcomes.
It’s interesting to speculate
how striped bass management might have been different, and how the striped bass
stock might have fared, had the ASMFC been governed by laws similar to those
that govern federal fisheries managers.
On balance, it’s likely that
the striped bass would have been in a much better place.
One of the biggest reasons
for that is a provision in Magnuson-Stevens that requires the regional federal
fishery management councils to “develop annual catch limits for each of its
managed fisheries that may not exceed the fishing level recommendations of its
scientific and statistical committee or the peer review process.” Such
science-based annual catch limits serve as a safeguard against overfishing, and
help to end overfishing quickly when it does occur.
The ASMFC does use such
annual catch limits to manage the commercial striped bass fishery, but it
manages the recreational fishery with a “soft” fishing mortality target;
regulations usually remain unchanged for many years at a time, regardless of
the changing size of the striped bass stock or the actual fishing mortality
rate attributable to the recreational sector.
As a result, the ASMFC was
slow to take action when striped bass faced the situation described in Addendum
VI, where
"Female [spawning
stock biomass] peaked in 2003, and has been declining since then; [spawning
stock biomass] has been below the threshold level [meaning that the stock has
been overfished] since 2013. Total [fishing mortality] has been at or above the
threshold [meaning that the stock has been experiencing overfishing] in 13 of
the last 15 years of the assessment (2003-2017)…Striped bass experienced a
period of lower recruitment from 2005-2011 which contributed to the decline in
female [spawning stock biomass] that the stock has experienced since 2010."
To be completely fair, the
2018 Assessment included new data that was not available in earlier stock
assessments, so until that assessment came out, the ASMFC couldn’t know that
overfishing was occurring for most of the past 15 years, nor could it know that
the stock had become overfished in 2013.
However, the ASMFC did know
that the spawning stock biomass had begun to decline in 2003, and that
recruitment began to decline soon after that, yet it didn’t make a serious
effort to change the recreational regulations, and adjust them for the decline
in spawning stock biomass, until 2014.
One halting effort to stop the decline, initiated in 2011, was
eventually deemed to constitute “overmanaging,” and
abandoned later that year.
Such unchanging regulations
in the face of a declining stock couldn’t have been maintained under an annual
catch limit scenario, which would have required regulators to act every year to
assure that landings did not remove too great a portion of the remaining
population.
Annual catch limits would
have also set the stage for another important provision of Magnuson-Stevens
that is absent from the ASMFC process: The requirement that all fishermen,
including anglers, be held accountable when catch limits are exceeded.
Under the soft fishing
mortality targets used to manage the recreational striped bass fishery, anglers
face no penalty, not even the prospect of more restrictive regulations, when
the target is exceeded.
When the Management Board adopted Addendum IV to Amendment 6 to
the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Striped Bass in
2014, it required that fishermen in Chesapeake Bay reduce fishing mortality by
20.5%. While the Bay’s commercial fishermen adhered to that standard,
Chesapeake Bay anglers made no reduction at all, but instead increased their
landings by more than 50%.
While that increase was unexpected, overharvest of the same or even
greater magnitude continued through at least 2018, with no
effort made to amend regulations in order to reduce recreational landings or
hold Chesapeake Bay anglers accountable for such continued overages, even
though many of the fish being killed belonged to the large 2011 and, later,
2015 year classes that managers were depending on to increase the spawning
stock.
And, even up to today, the
ASMFC has exerted little effort to rebuild the spawning population. Even though
Amendment 6 contained a measure that required the Management Board to begin
drafting a 10-year rebuilding plan in 2014, such requirement was completely
ignored. Such inaction caused a stock that was already overfished (although the
ASMFC wasn’t aware of that at the time) to decline farther, and created a need
for even more restrictive regulations if such rebuilding is ever to be
achieved.
Yet it appears that, even
with the stock overfished, the ASMFC is in no hurry to begin stock rebuilding.
Addendum VI only addresses overfishing, and not the overfished state of the
stock, despite the clear rebuilding requirements in Amendment 6.
Neither of those failures to initiate a rebuilding plan would
have been likely under Magnuson-Stevens. The 2014 decision to ignore an
unambiguous rebuilding requirement included in Amendment 6 would almost
certainly have been deemed an “arbitrary and capricious” action and left the
ASMFC vulnerable to a court challenge; under existing law, ASMFC’s management
decisions are not subject to judicial review.
And the current failure to
address rebuilding the overfished stock could not have occurred under
Magnuson-Stevens which, independent of any language in Amendment 6, would have
required the stock to be rebuilt within ten years.
So yes, the ASMFC is taking
some meaningful steps to address the striped bass situation. But if the ASMFC
was governed by Magnuson-Stevens, managers might have been compelled to
intervene far earlier to halt the stock’s decline. In such case, the current
actions might not have been needed.
And if the stock had become
overfished, managers bound by Magnuson-Stevens couldn’t merely end overfishing;
they would have been legally compelled to initiate a 10-year rebuilding plan.
Thus, it appears likely that
the striped bass stock would, in fact, be more robust, and be facing a more
certain future, if the ASMFC had been subject to the provisions of
Magnuson-Stevens.
-----
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/
No comments:
Post a Comment