STRIPED BASS:: THE DEVIL WENT DOWN TO JERSEY

The Devil went down to Jersey, he was looking for some bass to steal.

He was in a bind because the stock declined,

and he was willing to make a deal. 

He came across some fishermen,

whining that their quota was cut.

So the devil cried "You're upset but"

“You might have never thought it, but I’m a fish hog, too.

I love killing all those striped bass; I’m the same as you.”

“Let’s kill all the spawning stock, for photos on the tackle shop wall,

Then we’lll knock off all of the little ones, and not save any at all!”

The folks down in New Jersey.

Said “It might be a sin, but we’ll sell our souls to kill more bass.

You can count us in.”     

                                   --with apologies to Charlie Daniels, and

                                          “The Devil Went Down to Georgia”

I'll say I'm sorry in advance to anyone who might think that, in writing the above, I might be taking the whole striped bass situation too lightly, but there’s a lot of truth in the old saying that, in some cases, you can either laugh or cry, and I prefer the former.

Then, too, I don’t know how many of you listened in on last week’s Atlantic Striped Bass Technical Committee meeting, and the supposedly “conservation equivalent” striped bass regulations that New Jersey has proposed, but if you did, and you heard what New Jersey was proposing, you’d understand why diabolical intervention might be as good an explanation for what they want as anything else.

Maybe it’s best to provide a little background.

As everyone knows by now, the striped bass stock is overfished.  A lot of that is due to overfishing, but below average recruitment between 2004 and 2010 also played a role.  The below-average recruitment also led to a stock structure which includes a relative abundance of older fish from the big 2003 year class, and even some spawned earlier than that, quite a few (but fewer than originally expected) young females from the large 2011 year class, and a lot of immature bass spawned in 2014 and 2015.  What we might refer to as middle-aged females, which usually comprise much of the spawning stock, are relatively scarce.

That being the case, in order to halt the decline in the striped bass stock, a two-pronged strategy might be in order.  One prong would protect the big females from the 1996, 2001 and 2003 year classes, which are capable of producing large numbers of viable eggs, in order to maximize current spawning potential; the second prong would protect the successful 2011, 2014 and 2015 year classes, which represent the future of the striped bass stock. 

Many anglers, including myself, believed that a 35-inch minimum size was the best way to do that, even though it protected the young fish at the expense of the biggest females.  The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board felt that a 28 to 35-inch slot limit, which would reduce coastwide harvest by 18 percent, was a better approach.  The slot would protect both the big females and the still-immature 2014s and 2015s, although it would focus most of the fishing effort on the already fished-down 2011 year class, and make the 2014s and 2015s vulnerable to harvest as soon as they were recruited into the spawning stock.

But few management measures are perfect.  While the slot wasn’t my first choice, it seemed to be a measure that might work.

That is, it did before conservation equivalency came into the picture.

“Conservation equivalency” is an ASMFC policy that allows states to adopt management measures that are different from those adopted by the management board but, at least on paper, will have the same conservation impact.  As described in the ASMFC’s conservation equivalency policy, it actually makes quite a bit of sense, as it should be the result of reasoned deliberation, that determines whether it is appropriate in the circumstances (including whether it is appropriate for an overfished stock), must be subject to regular review, and should not be maintained indefinitely.

But in the real world, the ASMFC seldom if ever follows its own policies.

To set the stage for what happened in the case of striped bass, I’ll quote from the December 2019 newsletter of the Jersey Coast Anglers’ Association, in which Tom Fote, a long-time JCAA spokesman and New Jersey’s Governor’s Appointee on the Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board, spells things out pretty well.

“There was a major shift at the Striped Bass Board Meeting.  We realized that by using a slot fish without conservation equivalency would put undue hardship on some of the states.  New Hampshire would have an 88% reduction, New Jersey would have an over 40% reduction and Massachusetts would also have an over 40% reduction.  The Striped Bass Board did pass the slot limit that allowed the states to take an 18% reduction on the 2017 catch figures.  This will give us a broader set of options.  As I pointed out before, that slot limit was the worst management tool for protecting the 2011 and 2015 year classes.  It would do just the opposite of what we did when we rebuilt the stock by not directing any fishing on the 82 year class until 95% of the females had spawned at least once.  I am hoping New Jersey implements an option that will spread the catch over many year classes.”

As noted in the JCAA newsletter, the proposed slot limit would impact each state differently.  Some, like Connecticut, would take a very small reduction.  Others would take a much greater one.  But when all states’ reductions were averaged out, coastwide mortality reductions would equal 18 percent, which is the mortality cut needed to have a 50% probability of achieving the target fishing mortality rate.

That might not seem fair to states that had to take a greater cut, and probably seemed more than fair to states that had to take a lesser one.  Be that as it may, most states took the responsible path and accepted the mandated reduction.  

For example, even though New Hampshire was facing an 88 percent reduction, probably the largest proposed cut of all, Dennis Abbott, the state’s Legislative Proxy, made an ultimately unsuccessful motion, at the august 2019 Management Board meeting, to prohibit the use of conservation equivalency for so long as the striped bass stock was overfished or experiencing overfishing.

Massachusetts voted against that motion, but ultimately submitted no conservation equivalency proposals.  Its anglers will fish under the 28 to 35-inch slot, and apparently face a 40 percent reduction, this year.

Because that’s what responsible fishery managers do when an overfished stock needs help; they place the long-term health of the fish above short-term concerns about the “fairness” of harvest cuts.

But that’s not what happens in New Jersey, where a more diabolical form of fisheries management has long had its home.  There, the goal is always killing as many and as small a fish as possible, over the longest possible season, and the impact on the stock, or on other states, be damned.

So it’s hardly surprising that when the Management Board voted on final management measures in October 2019, Adam Nowalsky, New Jersey’s Legislative Proxy, in harsh contrast to his counterpart from New Hampshire at the previous meeting, focused on conservation equivalency above all else, at one point even trying to hold up discussions on management measures in order to give the equivalency decision priority.  In the end, he convinced the Management Board to allow states, as Fote reported, to adopt alternative measures that only reduced landings by 18 percent, the coastwide reduction, instead of by the reduction each state would have actually experienced if they adopted the slot.

As a result, instead of being compelled to adopt regulations that reduced its fishing mortality rate by 40 percent, as the slot would have, New Jersey only had to reduce mortality by 18 percent, less than half of that figure.  And when the state with the highest coastwide landings does that, it means that the fishery management plan, which depends on achieving a coastwide reduction, is also likely to fail.

Yes, that’s a bad thing.  But in the overall scheme of things, it’s the sort of bad thing that might be worthy of an Alastor or Mammon or Zepar, or some other member of the hateful demon horde, but not of Old Scratch himself.  To reach the truly diabolical, New Jersey would have to do more than that.

And, in the end, it did.

At last week’s Technical Committee meeting, a slide appeared on the screen that set out New Jersey’s proposed conservation equivalency measures.  There were six, presented as alternative proposals.  Both include New Jersey’s regular recreational landings, plus the so-called “bonus fish” that represent recreational landings taken out of the state’s unused commercial quota.

As you can see from the screenshot, if you click on the above link, the New Jersey proposals are grouped in two sets of three, one based on a regular season slot of 24 to 28 inches, the other on a 24 to 29-inch slot.  

Yes, you read that right.  New Jersey wants to reject the ASMFC’s 28 to 35-inch slot, which will at least let most of the females mature and hopefully spawn before they recruit into the fishery, with a 24 to 28- or 29-inch slot, which will directly target the 2014 and 2015 year classes, on which the future health of the fishery probably depends, and remove them from the water before they have a chance to spawn even once.

Fote’s JCAA newsletter piece emphasized the need to protect the young fish until they spawn at least once, so it will be interesting to see whether the JCAA actively opposes these proposed regulations, or whether Fote himself speaks against them, for targeting the young fish, when the Management Board meets in February to consider every state’s conservation equivalency proposals. 

Given what’s said in the newsletter piece, doing otherwise could hint of alliance with the Prince of Lies.

But killing off young fish before they can spawn is only half of New Jersey’s proposal.  They want to kill off the big females, too.

In order to do that, they have to change their “bonus fish” program.  In recent years, anglers obtaining free bonus tags were allowed to take immature, 24 to 28-inch fish during the fall run.  Supposedly, few fish were actually landed that way—only about 3% of the quota—but that figure assumes that all fish were tagged and reported, even if no enforcement agents were around to enforce the rule.  Whether you believe that or not depends on your views of human nature. 

With 24 to 28 inches the regular size limit, angling effort will be focused on the immature females,  and a lot of those little fish will be killed, whether or not they were killed under the bonus program before—if the Management Board approves New Jersey’s proposal.

As far as the bonus fish goes, two of New Jersey’s six proposals would keep the 24 to 28-inch slot, and would wipe out more of the future spawners, but would at least protect the oldest, largest, most fecund members of the spawning stock.  But the other four proposals would kill those, too, and establish a minimum size of either 35 or 43 inches for “bonus” striper.  At that size, it’s not hard to believe that anglers wouldn’t just kill 3 percent of the fish available to the program, but instead would land, or even exceed, the entire bonus quota, which is expected to be somewhere around 175,000 pounds.

What they actually tag and report, there’s no way to tell.

Thus, the proposed conservation equivalency measures presented to the Technical Committee would not only mean that, because of New Jersey, managers’ efforts to reduce fishing mortality to the target level are likely to fail, it also means that New Jersey anglers would be targeting the very fish—the big, fecund females and the immature bass spawned in 2014 and 2015—needed to assure the striper’s future.

It’s hard to understand how any angler who still owned his own soul could agree to that.

It’s difficult to understand how the ASMFC could agree to that, either.  We can still hope that the Management Board demurs.

But that’s the sort of thing that conservation equivalency can lead to, and it’s hard not to believe that it will move forward.  Instead of a higher minimum size, that lets the smaller fish recruit into the spawning stock and spawn a few times before becoming a part of the fishery, or instead of a slot limit, that protects whatever big females manage to live long enough to survive the slot, conservation equivalency is likely to give us a mishmash of coastal regulations that, in the end, gives no member of the spawning stock complete protection as it migrates along the coast .

The immature fish would be vulnerable in New Jersey as soon as they hit 24 inches, probably two years before they would spawn for the first time.  They would escape the New Jersey slot at 28 (or 29) inches, but at that point they would be vulnerable in Massachusetts, Virginia and North Carolina, and perhaps other states that adopt the ASMFC’s preferred slot.  At 30 inches, if New York, Connecticut and Rhode Island agree on a joint measure, they will become vulnerable there, and then just as they finally reach what should have been safety—at 35 inches in some states, and maybe 40 inches in others—they become “bonus fish” to be killed in New Jersey again.

It’s hard to believe in a system that allows such a thing that to happen.

For it’s a system that has lost its soul.