STRIPED BASS RECOVERY: EVERYONE MUST DO THEIR SHARE

The current, depleted state of the striped bass stock helps no one. 

Anglers are finding fewer fish, and their prime fishing times, once measured in months are, on most parts of the coast, measured in the few meager weeks in late spring and fall when bass pass through on their annual coastwise migrations.

Commercial fishermen see their landings cut in order to stem overfishing, while for-hire boats find it increasingly difficult to put their customers on fish.  

Shore-bound and private boat anglers often think that the for-hire boats are still wading in bass, but some hard numbers show just how far their landings have fallen over the past few years.  Here in New York, for example, landings have been steadily declining, from nearly 120,000 fish landed in 2014 to just under 14,000 last year.

Addendum IV to Amendment 6 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Striped Bass dropped the coastal bag limit from two fish to one, so the decline in landings between 2014 and 2015 was predictable just on that basis.  However, the drop from a little over 72,000 fish in 2015 to less than 14,000 three years later—an 80 percent decline—occurred at a time when the rules remained constant, and only a dearth of striped bass could reasonably be the cause.

So yes, the collapse in the bass population hurts the charter folks, too.

The other side of that coin is that a rebuilt striped bass population would benefit everyone.  There would be more bass available for commercial fishermen and for shore-based, private-boat and for-hire fishermen as well.  Thus, it only makes sense that all sectors of the fishing community accept an equal share of the burdens of rebuilding the stock, so that they can equally share in the benefits once abundance is restored.

But that isn’t what a lot of folks want to see happen.

When the Draft Addendum VI to Amendment 6 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Striped Bass was put together, elements of the commercial fishery argued that because anglers were responsible for 90 percent of all striped bass fishing mortality, anglers should bear most of the responsibility for ending overfishing and rebuilding the stock. 

Requiring both sectors to reduce landings by the same amount—18 percent, in the Draft Addendum VI—would place the onus of rebuilding on the recreational sector which, because it was responsible for 90 percent of the landings, would have to forego landing nine times as many fish as the commercial sector (to illustrate, if anglers originally caught 90 fish and commercials caught 10, applying an 18 percent reduction to both sectors would mean that anglers would have to catch 16.2 fewer fish to meet the reduction, while commercials would only have to reduce their landings by 1.8 bass—the fractional fish being theoretical, of course).

But, somehow, that wasn’t enough for some in the commercial fleet.  They felt that because they were responsible for only 10 percent of the fishing mortality, they should only be required to reduce landings by 10 percent of the 18 percent.  Under such a scenario, the recreational sector would have to cut their landings by 20 percent, while commercial fishermen would cut by a mere 1.8 percent (under this scenario, if anglers originally caught 90 bass and commercial fishermen 10, anglers would have to reduce their landings by 18 bass, while commercial fishermen would give up just 0.18 fish).

That would place 99 percent of the conservation burden on a sector that is responsible for only 90 percent of the mortality, which doesn’t seem right.

Some commercial fishermen try to justify such a disproportionate burden by arguing that their catch is constrained by a fixed quota, which they didn’t exceed, while anglers face no such firm constraints.  That argument might seem superficially appealing to some, but the fact remains that anglers overfished while remaining in compliance with regulations established under the striped bass management plan, and in that sense were no more at fault for the overfished stock than the commercials were (if the commercials want to argue that anglers, too, should be governed by a hard-poundage quota, they’ll get no fight from me, but that’s a discussion for another time).

But in the end, any discussion about “fault” is irrelevant.  We shouldn’t waste time placing blame.  Instead, we should be focused on revising the management plan to address the needs of the fish, because without a healthy bass population, we’ll all get hurt in the end.

The situation was summed up well in a recent opinion piece that appeared in the Cape Cod Times.  Written by the owner of an angling-related business on Martha’s Vineyard, it noted in part

“It is, however, glaringly apparent that there was a collective error in judgment in the late ‘90s shortly after the striped bass population rebounded when measures were taken over the preceding decade to rebuild stocks.  Regulations on commercial and recreational fishing started conservatively but got looser and looser, leading up to a point nearing 15 years ago when it became apparent that the number of fish was again dwindling.  Sadly, most state regulatory bodies and the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission neglected to act.

“There’s plenty of blame to go around.  Initially, many assumed that commercial fishing was the culprit.  New data has emerged in recent years that seems to indicate that recreational fishing is responsible for the lion’s share of striped bass mortality.  It doesn’t matter.  The Atlantic striped bass stock is now once again overfished, and something needs to be done about it.”

And if you fish, recreationally or commercially, from boat or from shore, guided or on your own, you’re a part of the problem, and thus must be part of the solution.  No one should be permitted to contribute less than their full share to the striper's recovery.

Yet people will still want to try.  

There are persistent whisperings that the for-hire fleet will try to convince regulators to give them at least a partial bye on the harvest reductions, because they make us such a small part of the recreational sector.  Yet, while relatively few striped bass anglers venture out on for-hire trips—for the years 2014-2018 combined, for-hire trips constituted well under 2 percent of all striped bass trips made—the for-hire sector accounts for nearly 11 percent of all striped bass harvested; it is responsible for about the same level of removals as the commercial sector.

So if you allow the commercial sector to do less than its share, you probably have to let the for-hires off the hook, too.

And at that point, you’re exempting fishermen responsible for about 20 percent of all removals from needed conservation measures.  And that’s a big piece of the overall fishery—too big a piece to ignore.

Not to mention the fact that, if you start exempting sectors, why not start exempting states?  After all, while recreational fishermen harvested over 2.9 million striped bass in 2017, anglers in six different states—Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Virginia—each accounted for well under 10 percent of overall landings.

Using the same logic being put forward by the commercials and some of the for-hires, is it fair to force anglers in Maine or Delaware, who landed about 22,000 and 28,000 striped bass, respectively—each less than 1 percent of overall landings—to cut back as much as anglers in Maryland, who harvested over 1,000,000 fish? 

If that argument was taken to its most absurd extreme, the burden of conserving the striped bass stock should be placed solely on the shoulders of surf and private boat anglers who fish in Maryland, Massachusetts, New York and New Jersey, while everyone else receives a reprieve.

Sounds pretty ridiculous, doesn’t it?

Yet, if it’s acceptable to exempt the commercial fleet, which is responsible for 10 percent of the mortality, or the for-hire fleet, which is responsible for about the same number of dead fish, why isn’t it just as acceptable to exempt other identifiable groups of fishermen who are responsible for less than 10 percent of the kill?

When you start asking questions like that, you begin to realize that it’s impossible to justify exempting anyone from the responsibilities inherent in conserving and managing the striped bass stock.

If they want to share in the benefits of an abundant striped bass population, they must share in the costs of nursing that stock back to health.