Addendum
VI, as originally contemplated by the Management Board, was already
inadequate to address the problems faced by the striped bass stock. A benchmark
striped bass stock assessment, presented to the Management Board earlier this
year, found that the striped bass stock is both overfished and experiencing
overfishing, findings that came as no surprise to serious striped bass
anglers.
Amendment 6 to the
Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Striped Bass clearly states that,
if the stock experiences overfishing, the Management Board must adopt measures
to return fishing mortality to the target level within one year, and that if
the stock becomes overfished, the Management Board must adopt measures to
rebuild the female spawning stock biomass to the target level within ten years.
The draft version of Addendum VI represented a reasonable
effort to address the overfishing problem, but completely ignored the
requirement to return the biomass to target within ten years. The
latter action will, supposedly, be addressed in another management action that
won’t be initiated until next May, and might or might not be adopted by the
Management Board at some point in the indefinite future.
But even the narrow focus of the draft Addendum VI didn’t
save it from Management Board members who were seeking to reduce its
effectiveness, at least with respect to their own states’ fisheries.
As written, the draft Addendum VI would have a 50 percent
probability of reducing fishing mortality by 18%. It proposed a number of different options,
each of which, if followed to the letter, should have been
sufficient to achieve that goal.
One
option would have required the commercial and recreational fisheries to each
reduce fishing mortality by 18%; the other would have placed most of the
conservation onus on the recreational fishery, requiring it to reduce its
fishing mortality by 20 percent, with only a 1.8 percent reduction imposed on
the commercial side. (There was also an
option to do nothing, but that received no serious attention; everyone
recognized that, given the state of the bass, they had to do something
to help rebuild the stock.)
Which way to go on those basic options was the first
decision that the Management Board had to make.
Pat Keliher, the fisheries director from Maine, moved to adopt Option 2,
which would require both sectors to reduce fishing mortality by 18%. Richard White, the Governor’s Appointee from
New Hampshire, seconded the motion.
So far, the new Addendum was on track. But soon after discussion on the motion began,
things went off the rails.
Before the debate had a chance to get underway, Adam
Nowalsky, the Legislative Proxy from New Jersey, broke in, questioning the
motion’s language about an “equal percentage reduction” and turned the discussion
from one about fishing mortality reduction to one about “conservation
equivalency.”
For those who are unfamiliar with the way things work at the
ASMFC, “conservation equivalency” is a management tool that allows states to
adopt regulations that are different from, but supposedly have the same conservation
effect as, the regulatory package adopted by the ASMFC in a management
plan. It’s a good idea in theory, but in
practice, it has shown quite a few warts, mainly because in the real world, it
often provides a path for states to kill more fish than they would have
otherwise been allowed to under measures spelled out in a management plan.
After Addendum
IV to Amendment 6 to the Interstate Management Plan for Atlantic Striped Bass was adopted in 2014, and established a 1 fish bag
limit and 28-inch minimum size for all coastal anglers, New
Jersey used conservation equivalency to finagle an extra striped bass for its
anglers, manipulating the catch data to show that a regulation allowing anglers
to kill one 28 to 40-inch bass, plus a second bass over 43
inches, was equivalent to the ASMFC’s proposed 1@28 inches rule.
Apparently, based on New Jersey’s 2013 landings, prohibiting
anglers from keeping a bass in the very narrow 40 to 43-inch slot entitled those
anglers to a whole second fish. You have
to wonder how many length combinations New Jersey had to run through their
models before they found the right one…
Given Nowalsky’s comments, it was pretty clear that he was setting
the scene for history to repeat itself.
Both he and his colleague, Tom Fote, the New Jersey Governor’s
Appointee, made repeated comments about how the management measures in Addendum
VI would impact some states more than others, and it eventually came out that
New Jersey would probably be impacted more than any other state—not surprising,
given that its anglers were allowed to kill two bass per day while anglers in
every other coastal state, except for little Delaware, could only kill one.
Because of their special, supposedly “conservation
equivalent” regulations, New
Jersey anglers took home about 625,000 striped bass in 2017, head and shoulders
above the next-largest harvests of about 475,000 bass in New York and 400,000
in Massachusetts. But while it was
OK for New Jersey to have the highest landings, it was certainly not OK, at
least in the New Jersey folks’ eyes, to take the biggest reduction.
So Nowalsky moved to table the discussion on the “meat” of
Addendum VI, the management measures, in order to decide how conservation
equivalency was going to be calculated. Because, of course, how many fish you
can kill is far more important than how many you can conserve.
At least, it is in New Jersey.
Nowalsky’s motion ultimately failed, with 5 in favor, 8
against, and the two federal agencies abstaining, but that didn’t really
matter. It just pushed the conservation
equivalency issue a little farther down the line.
At that point, the original motion was back on the table, at
least for a minute, and then there was another diversion as Eric Reid,
Legislative Proxy from Rhode Island, made a motion to substitute Option 3 for
Option 2, and cut recreational mortality by 20 percent, and commercial by just 1.8. John Clark, a Delaware fisheries
manager, liked that idea enough to second the motion, but he was in a distinct
minority, with the motion garnering only 4 supporting votes.
Finally, Option
2, which had received overwhelming support at the public meetings and in
comments sent in to the ASMFC, was put to the vote, and passed with a total
of 11 votes in favor and 4 opposed.
That was a good start.
After that, it was time to decide on coastal management
measures. The options all included a
1-fish bag limit, but gave the Management Board a choice between a 35-inch
minimum size, a 28 to 35-inch slot, a 30 to 38-inch slot or a 32 to 40-inch
slot. All would supposedly meet the 18
percent reduction goal, with some of the slots achieving more, although Addendum
VI included some caveats about the slots’ long-term impacts.
I favored the 35-inch minimum size, both to avoid the slots’
tendency to concentrate harvest on the very year classes needed to rebuild the
stock, and because it would allow the 2011 and 2015 year classes to spawn two
or three times before they were vulnerable to harvest, while the 28 to 35-inch
slot, at least, would allow some fish to be removed from the stock before they
had spawned even once.
That being said, I had heard enough scuttlebutt coming out
of the meeting to know that one of the slots, probably the 28-35, was going to
be the most likely choice of the Management Board—even though anglers
speaking at the various meetings that ASMFC held, and anglers who sent comments
in, preferred the 35-inch minimum by a ratio of more than 3 to 1.
The rumors turned out to be true. Justin Davis, Connecticut’s fisheries
manager, moved for the 28-35 slot, explaining that he felt that such slot would
minimize release mortality. He noted
that anglers in some places, and in some sectors, would release too many bass
in their efforts to find a 35-inch fish, and cause such mortality to
spike. His choice was also influenced by
a desire to protect the oldest, largest females in the spawning stock.
Michael Luisi, a fisheries manager from Maryland, seconded
the motion, largely because he felt that Maryland charter boats would have a
hard time finding larger fish. A few
members of the Management Board objected to the motion, with Richard White of
New Hampshire pointing out that anglers overwhelmingly preferred the 35-inch
minimum, and reminding the Board that it was a single, high minimum size that
brought the stock back from collapse in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Jim Gilmore, New York’s fisheries director, commented that
while New York anglers sent conflicting signals (comments made at the ASMFC
meetings differed from those made in a state Internet survey) angler comment that the 36-inch minimum worked to rebuild the stock before and would also work
now “Rings in my head” and caused him to lean toward the 35-inch minimum. Tom Fote of New Jersey also spoke in favor of
the 35-inch minimum, due to its historical success, while John McMurray,
Legislative Proxy from New York, said that he favored 1@35” both because of the
broad public support and because the anglers who wanted the 28 to 35-inch slot felt
that way because it would allow them to kill and take home the very fish from the
2011 and 2015 year classes that Addendum VI was supposed to protect.
As I mentioned earlier, I preferred 1@35 inches, but I could
tolerate the slot on a “better than nothing” basis and the hope that the
Technical Committee was right when they calculated it would result in a 19
percent reduction.
But Nowalsky brought up conservation equivalency again, and
the hope for a real 19 percent reduction went straight out the door.
There were three ways that the conservation equivalency
issue could have been handled. A state
could have been required to craft alternate management measures that would meet or exceed
the needed coastwide 18 percent reduction.
A state could have been required to craft alternate management measures that
would meet or exceed the reduction calculated for the management measure that was
adopted—in the case of the 28 to 35-inch slot, 19 percent. Or, a state could have been required to craft
alternate management measures that would meet or exceed the reduction that such
particular state would have experienced if it adopted the management measure
approved by the Board—which in the case of New Jersey, would apparently have
been substantially more than 18 or 19 percent
It should come as no surprise that when Nowalsky rose to
amend the motion on the floor, he chose to add the least restrictive conservation equivalency
option—18 percent compared to 2017 landings.
Jason McNamee, Rhode Island’s fishery manager, spoke to Nowalsky's motion
to amend. His comments were
critical.
He observed that “You’re
either in or you’re out,” and that “Conservation equivalency can’t work like
this, because we’re not going to achieve our goals,” alluding to the fact that
if New Jersey’s “conservation equivalent” regulations didn’t achieve the same
reductions, in New Jersey, that the slot limit would have, the
odds against reducing fishing mortality to the target level increase.
Despite such comments, Nowalsky’s amendment passed by a vote
of 11 to 2, with two abstentions, and the amended motion passed 12 to 1, again
with two abstaining.
At that point, the chances of Addendum VI achieving its
goal took a nosedive.
It’s just simple math.
When the ASMFC’s Atlantic Striped Bass Technical Committee
determined that the measures included in Addendum VI would have a 50% chance of
reducing fishing mortality by the required 18 percent, it made all of the
calculations on a coastwide basis. That
doesn’t mean that such regulations would impact every state in the same
way. Some states, because of how their
fishery works, might not see much change in their fishing mortality, while
other states—including New Jersey—might experience reductions significantly larger
than 18 percent.
But when everything was averaged out, Addendum VI would have
had a good chance of reducing fishing mortality to the target level, and a
better than 90 percent chance of ending overfishing.
However, if the fishing mortality reduction in a big striped bass
harvesting state such as New Jersey is limited to just 18 percent, when it
would have been much greater under the coastwide measure, the numbers no longer
work. Because New Jersey won’t take the
reduction that it would have taken pursuant to coastwide measures, the average
coastwide reduction will no longer be 18 percent, but some lower figure.
At that point, the probability that fishing mortality will
be reduced to the target level is no longer 50 percent, but some lower
percentage as well. The probability bell
curve is now skewed toward failure.
That doesn’t mean that success is impossible. The lack of striped bass could well
discourage some anglers from fishing, or at least from fishing as often. And a dearth of striped bass might keep anglers from catching many fish, even when they do venture out. Striped
bass landings, measured in numbers of fish, for the first eight months of this
year are nearly 250,000 fish—more than 15 percent—lower than they were for the
same period in 2018. If that trend
continues, fishing mortality might be reduced to target even though Addendum VI
is was badly damaged by Nowalsky's amendment.
But even if that happy accident occurs, managers must come
to realize that Addendum VI is nonetheless badly flawed.
That flaw doesn’t stem from the fact that it
imposes a slot limit, despite the fact that many of us would have liked to have
seen something else.
It stems from the fact that conservation equivalency, as
applied in Nowalsky's amendment, sabotages the Addendum’s chances of achieving its
goal, because it reduces the size of the fishing mortality cuts that occur in
the real world to something significantly less than they need to be.
It is well past time for the Management Board to stop blindly
accepting conservation equivalency standards that all but assure that
management plans will fail. But for now, wee can only
hope that the striped bass don’t pay too high a price for the Management Board’s
recent mistake.
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