STRIPED BASS: IS THIS THE ASMFC'S LAST CHANCE TO GET IT RIGHT

When the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission announced, in 1995, that they had managed to fully restore the once-collapsed striped bass population, that announcement marked one of the most significant fisheries management victories that ever occurred, not only on the East Coast or in the United States, but arguably in the world.

In just ten years, the ASMFC managed to bring back a collapsed stock that had fallen to such lows that people  sought to have it listed under the federal Endangered Species Act, and achieved a full and vibrant recovery.

But after that, the ASMFC’s striped bass management program fell into decline.  Instead of defending its singular victory, and standing ready to challenge any and all threats to the striped bass population, the ASMFC’s Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board fell into a sort of lassitude, where it cared more about regulatory stability and not rocking the boat than it did about maintaining a healthy striped bass population.

It could get away with that at first, as a healthy striped bass stock produced outstanding year classes in 1993, 1996, 2001 and 2003, and a host of fish of various sizes filled the coastal sea.  At that point, the Management Board’s toughest job was to fight off efforts to push landings up to clearly unsustainable levels.  Except for that debate, which culminated in the adoption of Amendment 6 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Striped Bass in 2003, the Management Board didn’t have to do much more than bask in the reflected glow of its earlier success.

The situation changed soon after that, as a string of average to below-average spawns caused recruitment to decline .  

Female spawning stock biomass peaked in 2003, and thene entered upon a long-term decline.  The stock waned for a few years before fishermen and fisheries managers took notice, since even with the population decreasing, bass remained relatively abundant.

The first quasi-official warning that there might be problems with the stock came at the October 2008meeting of the Management Board, when New Hampshire’s Legislative Appointee, RepresentativeDennis Abbott, objected to proposed state management measures that weren’t instrict compliance with the management plan, saying

“To me what is going on is, as I would term it, is  we’re dealing with striped bass management as becoming death by thousand cuts…

“…When we adopted a coast-wide size limit of 28 inches and 18 inches for producer areas, that is what we said but we keep on weakening that.  I just think that it’s the wrong way to go because in a lot of circles people think that striped bass fishing is not as good as it was, and continuing as a management board to do these things is not going in the right direction.  [emphasis added]”

But the Management Board took no heed of Rep. Abbott’s warning, continued to approve state regulations that allowed the capture of sub-28-inch striped bass, and blindly stuck to their chosen path despite the steady stream of reports, mostly from northern New England, that suggested that the stock had fallen into decline.

Such reports were held in such disregard that, in early 2009, the Management Board seriously considered increasing commercial landings by as much as 25 percent, although they eventually abandoned that effort.

Management Board members continued to express concern about the health of the stock.  Those concerns were fully justified in 2011, when a stock assessment update advised that

“Abundance and exploitable biomass of age 8+ are expected to decline regardless of the recruitment scenario.  Female [spawning stock biomass] will fall slightly below the threshold by 2017 [meaning that the stock will become overfished] under both recruitment scenarios.”

Thus, for the first time, the Management Board had a clear warning from the Striped Bass Stock Assessment Subcommittee that there was trouble ahead.  

At first, the Management Board responded appropriately, initiating an addendum to the management plan that could have reduced fishing mortality by as much as 40 percent.  But at the November 2011 Management Board meeting, work on that addendum was halted.

It was the first in a series of bad management decisions that culminated in the striped bass stock becoming overfished.

In just about every case, such decisions share a common thread—a sort of perverted precautionary principle that led managers to avoid placing any restrictions on harvest if there was a chance that such measures might be unnecessary.  Time after time, they demonstrated a willingness to put the future health of the stock at risk, rather than take the chance that landings levels were cut without absolute and uncontrovertable evidence that such cuts were necessary.

In short, on multiple occasions, the Management Board demonstrated that it would rather take the chance that there would be fewer live fish in the ocean than risk putting fewer dead bass on the dock.

That’s what happened in 2011 when, despite the warning that the stock would become overfished, a number of Management Board members declared that striped bass represented a “green light” fishery, and that no precautionary measures were needed.  Comments made by Tom Fote, the Governor’s Appointee from New Jersey, pretty well summed up the prevailing attitude:

“I also look at the fact that we’re dealing with a species that is not being overfished and overfishing is not taking place, and the targets [in the management plan that supposedly would require management action] are not on line…

“…how can I be a hypocrite and go out to my public in New Jersey and basically say, oh, by the way, we’ve been doing so great with striped bass and there really is no—we haven’t hit any of the triggers and now I’m going to reduce your catch by 40 percent.”

In other words, it’s better to wait until the striped bass are facing a certain crisis than trying to prevent that crisis from ever occurring.  It’s like racing down a road, seeing a sign that says “BRIDGE OUT AHEAD” and not easing up on the throttle, because, after all, you haven’t reached the river bank yet.

At the least, you ought to slow down…

In 2013, a new benchmark stock assessment finally threw downthe caution flag, when it warned that, while the striped bass stock was not yetoverfished, and not yet subject to overfishing, it had been above the fishingmortality target, and below the spawning stock biomass target, for a number of years.  Those findings tripped two triggers in the management plan.

One trigger required the Management Board to reduce fishing mortality to the target level within one year.  The Management Board made a good-faith effort to do that by adopting Addendum IV to Amendment 6 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan forAtlantic Striped Bass, which required a 25% reduction in fishing mortality on the coast, and a 20.5% reduction in Chesapeake Bay.

However, the Management Board it totally ignored a second requirement to rebuild the spawning stock biomass to its target level within three years.  Surprisingly, that failure was due, at least in part, to a comment by Michael Wayne, then the Fishery Management Plan Coordinator for striped bass, who told the Management Board

“Management Trigger 2 [Author’s comment 1:  it was actually Management Trigger 4] in Amendment 6 says that you need to rebuild the [spawning stock biomass] back to its target over a specified timeframe that should not exceed ten years.  I think there is sort of a combination of things happening.  The board is acting to reduce [fishing mortality].  Through that action we see the projection showing that [spawning stock biomass] will start increasing toward its target [Author’s comment 2:  In the real world, that increase never occurred] but we’re uncomfortable projecting out far enough to tell you when it will reach its target because the further on the projection we go the more uncertainty that is involved.  Therefore, I think the trend is to get back towards the target, but we can’t tell you how quickly that will happen.”

It was strange advice, first because it advised the Management Board to ignore an explicit provision of the management plan, and second because, yes, uncertainty increases as projections go out in time, but ten-year rebuilding plans are the default in all federally-managed fisheries, and if federal managers can make 10-year projections, it’s difficult to understand why ASMFC’s managers can’t do the same.

But, strange or not, it was advice that the Management Board could hang on to, if it wanted to avoid the harvest reductions associated with a 10-year rebuilding plan.  So no rebuilding plan was adopted.

That decision greased the skids on a declining stock that was already speeding on its path downhill.

If a rebuilding plan was put in place and properly monitored, the Management Board would have been able to track the stock’s trajectory, and hopefully make adjustments if it was growing too slowly to recover within the 10-year deadline.  But without such monitoring, the stock continued to slide downward, and nobody noticed.

The benchmark assessment released in 2018 revealed that the spawning stock biomass was already overfished in 2014, but as it relied on information unavailable four years earlier, it’s not reasonable to hold the Management Board responsible for information that it couldn’t yet know.  On the other hand, actions that the Management Board took—or didn’t take—pursuant to Addendum IV just made that bad situation worse.

And that, it could have prevented.

Instead, it made two more bad decisions that led to a further decline.

Addendum IV required the Chesapeake Bay states to reduce their fishing mortality by 20.5 percent, compared to what it was in 2012.  That was an easy thing to do in the commercial fishery, which could be shut down once landings reached the new, reduced cap.  In the recreational fishery, it was a lot harder, as anglers’ catch isn’t governed by a hard quota, but rather by a “soft” fishing mortality target.  

That means that state fishery managers and ASFC’s Atlantic Striped Bass Technical Committee had to make some assumptions—you can call them “guesses” if you like—about angling effort in the face of both more restrictive regulations and a big 2011 year class that was just entering the fishery.

Everyone did their best, but it turned out that recreational fishing mortality in Chesapeake Bay not only failed to achieve the required 20.5 percent reduction, but actually increased by more than 50 percent.  

That was no one’s fault; predicting angler behavior is hard.

But, again, when faced with the fact that the Bay anglers overfished, the Management Board did nothing at all to correct the problem.  It did not require Maryland, which was by far the biggest offender, to revise their regulations in a way that would actually achieve the 20.5 percent reduction.

Instead, it allowed Maryland to overfish for at least another four years.

Part of the justification for that was a 2016 update to thestock assessment, which showed that, over all, anglers had actually underfishedtheir target; fishing mortality dropped to 0.16 in 2015, slightly belowthe mortality target of 0.18.

Still, it was a mistake to allow any sector to evade its responsibilities to reduce harvest, because there is never a guarantee that everyone else will underfish their quotas in the future.  And, as things turned out, they didn’t.

As early as the Management Board’s February 2017 meeting, there was strong evidence that the low 2015 landings were a one-time event, and that recreational fishing mortality was trending upward again a year later.  Yet, one again, the Management Board ignored the clear warning.  It decided to rely on the 2015 figures and 2016 update, and ignore the fact that recreational harvest in 2016 was 18 percent higher than it was the year before.  It did not want to consider the possibility that fishing mortality was again on the rise.

Given the Management Board’s inaction, it’s hardly surprising that the 2018 benchmark assessment found that the striped bass stock is both overfished and experiencing overfishing.

And it’s hardly surprising that, when that finding tripped two more triggers in Amendment 6 that required the Management Board to take action, the Board again opted to try to reduce fishing mortality, but has taken no action to rebuild the overfished stock within the required 10-year time period.

Thus, in a little more than eight years, the Management Board has had five separate opportunities to take meaningful action to either maintain or restore the health of the striped bass spawning stock.

And every time, it failed to take actions needed to protect the striped bass.

Now, it has one more chance.

But today, it can no longer afford to make a mistake.

This is no longer 2011, when determined intervention before the stock became overfished might have prevented the spawning stock biomass from sinking beneath the threshold.

This is no longer 2014, when the required rebuilding plan, which was never drafted, might have let managers know that the stock was in more trouble than they thought, and perhaps give them a chance to stem the continuing decline.

This is no longer 2016 nor 2017, when managers had a chance to intervene and reduce excessive landings, but sat on their hands instead.

And this isn’t even May 2019, when the Management Board was required to initiate a rebuilding plan, and chose to shirk that duty once again.

Now, as 2019 draws to a close, the striped bass stock is overfished, and overfishing continues.  The stakes have been raised, because a failure to take needed action today could have much more dire consequences than a mistake made eight years ago.

Yes, there is always the chance that a dominant year class, something the size of the year classes produced in 1993, 1996, or 2001—or perhaps even 2011—will again be produced in 2020, and if that happens, many will say that all of us who have called for more precautionary management are all just alarmists who see the sky falling every time a bird’s shadow passes over the ground.

If we are indeed wrong, the worst thing precaution might bring is more striped bass in the sea.

But if events justify our caution—if the striped bass experience below-average recruitment for a few years in a row, something like the low recruitment that occurred from 2004 through 2010, which led to our current problems—and the ASMFC doesn’t take strong enough action to cut landings, we will find ourselves in a very bad place.

If we start with a healthy stock, and the ASMFC fumbles, we know happens next.  We end up with the overfished stock that we have today.

But if we start with an overfished stock, and the ASMFC drops the ball, we could be staring at stock collapse.

Thus, when the Management Board meets on October 30, they must adopt measures that end overfishing and reduce fishing mortality to no more than the target level.  But that, in itself, is not enough.

Once work on the pending Addendum VI is done, the Management Board must reject any conservation equivalency proposals that might look good on paper, but are based on such tenuous data that their real-world worth is unknown.  We can’t let any state fail, once again, to make a real 18 percent cutback.

And in May, when the Management Board begins work on a new amendment to the management plan, it must finally take action to rebuild the spawning stock, so that the stock is not only abundant, but includes a wide range of ages and sizes, to buffer it against those times when recruitment is low.

Given the state of the stock, this may be the Management Board’s last chance to not only take action, but to get it right.

Because if they get it wrong this time, it might be many years before they have an opportunity to make things right once again.