FISHERIES MANAGEMENT: ARE WE MAKING PROGRESS, OR FALLING BEHIND?

As we sit on the cusp of a new fishing season, I can’t help but feel a little pessimism. 

Inshore, striped bass and bluefish are overfished.  Winter flounder are all but gone.  Summer flounder aren’t overfished, but they’re also not abundant, with some very big fish and shorts around, but not too much in between.  Tautog (“blackfish”) remain fairly scarce, as do weakfish; scup and black sea bass are still abundant, but declining back toward more typical levels.  On the plus side, both kingfish and blowfish are injecting a bit of life into our summer bays.

Offshore, things are not going too well.  Bigeye and yellowfin tuna, along with true albacore, are far harder to come by than they were a couple of decades ago, although bluefin seem to be on an upswing.  Both blue marlin and white marlin remain overfished, while mako sharks are in serious decline. Thresher sharks still seem to be holding their own, although it’s not clear whether that’s due to true abundance, or merely an increased catchability that can be attributed to the large numbers of forage fish, mostly menhaden and chub mackerel, inside the 20-fathom line.  When I head offshore these days, I’m a lot more likely to be fishing light tackle for the abundant dolphin, rather than the 80s and spreader bars that I pull for bigger tuna.

Given the seeming decline in so many species’ abundance the question then is, are fisheries managers getting a handle on the problems?  Or are they involved in a losing fight?

While we’re definitely looking at a mixed bag, and while there are some real and intransigent fisheries issues, I’d argue that, at least inshore, we're making progress, although we will probably still have to face ugly fights before we solve some key problems.

Striped bass are the fish that pull the most anglers into the management process, and it’s hard to argue that the recently adopted Addendum VI to Amendment 6 to the Atlantic Striped Bass Interstate Fishery Management Plan should give anyone confidence in the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s management process.  

Unless angler effort continues to decline, the concessions that ASMFC’s Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board made to Maryland and New Jersey, when it approved their “conservation equivalent” management measures, are likely to prevent the Addendum from attaining its goal of an 18 percent reduction in fishing mortality (compared to 2017).

Even so, the debate at February’s Management Board meeting, which saw representatives from a number of states rise up to challenge the ASMFC’s casual use of conservation equivalency, and fight for some sort of accountability if supposedly conservation equivalent regulations fall short of their goals, was unusual for any ASMFC management board, and hopefully foreshadows a heightened sense of stewardship among at least some of the commissioners.  While the conservation advocates on the Striped Bass Management Board did not prevail with respect to Addendum VI, they will hopefully play an important role when that management board begins debate on a new addendum to the striped bass management plan at its May meeting.

It’s too early to make a prediction about how that amendment will ultimately turn out, but it’s at least somewhat comforting to know that the striped bass will have a number of friends sitting around the table when the conversation begins.

The last few months has also seen the ASMFC make real progress in managing Atlantic menhaden, one of the key forage species on the East Coast. 

Just six months ago, Omega Protein Corporation announced that they would be purse seining more menhaden in Chesapeake Bay than permitted under Amendment 3 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Menhaden.  It seemed like a fait accompli, as Virginia—which controls the section of Chesapeake Bay where the fish were taken—had refused to adopt Amendment 3’s Chesapeake harvest cap.  That rendered Omega’s excessive harvest completely legal.

The ASMFC’s Atlantic Menhaden Management Board had the authority to find Virginia out of compliance with the management plan as a result of such refusal, but if it did that, there was a very good chance that the Secretary of Commerce would overrule the management board finding and excuse Virginia’s inaction.

Then a very unusual thing happened.  The entire Management Board came together, and supported a noncompliance finding.  Even two Virginia representatives, expressing embarrassment over what had occurred (the Virginia governor and state fisheries managers wanted to comply with the ASMFC plan, but the Virginia legislature, which had the exclusive authority to manage the species, refused to do so), and voted in favor of the noncompliance decision.  The Secretary of Commerce recognized the broad support for ASMFC’s noncompliance finding, and imposed a moratorium on Virginia’s menhaden fishery that will go into effect next June.

At least, a moratorium would have gone into effect next June, had Virginia not come into compliance with the ASMFC’s management plan.  Faced with the reality of a pending moratorium, Virginia’s legislature passed a bill, which has been signed by Virginia’s governor, transferring menhaden management authority to the Virginia Marine Resources Commission.  The Virginia commission may now adopt regulations that lower the Chesapeake harvest cap to the 51,000 metric tons required by the management plan.  Such reduced cap will help to assure that there are enough menhaden in the Chesapeake Bay to provide food for its wide array of finfish, seabirds and marine mammals.

And the ASMFC didn’t stop there.  It has approved a stock assessment that would set reference points—the standards used to measure the health of the menhaden stock and the sustainability of the menhaden fishery—based on such ecosystem considerations, and not merely on the characteristics of the menhaden stock itself.  While the reference points themselves weren’t made a part of the management plan at the February meeting, there is a very good chance that they will be adopted in May.  If that happens, menhaden will be the first East Coast species managed as a forage species, with an eye toward providing adequate food for predator species all along the coast.

Such ecosystem-based management would certainly be a big step forward.

Even when the initial news is bad, as in the case of bluefish, which a recent operational stock assessment found to be overfished, there can be good news waiting in the wings.  

Some of the good news is that the National Marine Fisheries Service and the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council moved quickly, and started work on a rebuilding plan within just a few months after the stock assessment was completed.

The rest of the good news is that there is a chance—far from a certainty at this point, but still a real chance—that the upcoming amendment to the bluefish management plan will not only rebuild the stock to target abundance, but that it will break new ground by managing bluefish as a recreational species, emphasizing the need for an abundance of living individuals in the water, rather than the highest possible number of dead fish on the dock.

It will take a lot of work, and a lot of angler comment, for that to happen, but the mere fact that the Mid-Atlantic Council is willing to talk about it is a good sign.

Another bit of progress—which led to the discovery that bluefish are overfished—is the National Marine Fisheries Service recent improvement of its Marine Recreational Information Program, in order to get a better handle on anglers’ catch, landings and effort.  In the past, angler effort, and so calculations of catch and landings estimates, were based on an inefficient and not particularly accurate telephone survey; in recent years, NMFS has moved to a mail survey, a move that has been given high marks by the National Academy of Sciences, which found that it improves the quality of the data.

As a result of the improved data, we know that most popular fish stocks are more abundant than previously believed; we also know that anglers are catching and taking home more fish than anyone had thought.  That information will help fishery managers keep scup, black sea bass and summer flounder populations healthy, and rebuild bluefish to their former abundance.

Our inshore fish populations should thus grow healthier as time goes on.

Offshore, it’s a different story.  Most of the big pelagic species, including the marlins, the larger tunas, and pelagic sharks, are managed by the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, and United States regulations follow ICCAT advice.  Unlike NMFS, ICCAT isn’t governed by laws such as the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Magnuson Act, and one of the few exceptions to Magnuson-Stevens’ deadlines to rebuild overfished stocks are those stocks managed by ICCAT and similar organizations.

While ICCAT stock assessments are generally based on the best available science, ICCATs management measures require international consensus, and that can be hard to come by, as illustrated by the 2018 clash between European purse seine boats and Asian and American longliners, who couldn’t agree on the proper management of the overfished bigeye tuna (although they reached at least partial agreement last year).  In the end, economic considerations usually trump science, and effective conservation measures are typically delayed unless a real crisis is at hand, or someone is losing money because a stock has declined too far.

And even then, some countries always try to cheat.

So if, like me, you often fish offshore, don’t expect life to get better at any time soon.

But inshore, things are slowly getting better, even if sometimes, perhaps with striped bass, they’re going to get somewhat worse before they improve.

You might not always notice the improvement, because there will always be things, like New Jersey’s “bonus” striped bass or Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay bass regulations, that make you feel like you’re losing ground.

The trick is to not lose hope, just because the path gets a little rough.  We made real progress with menhaden in the past year, and there is reason to believe that we can, with time, make progress with striped bass and bluefish, too.  

In the meantime, we will have scup and sea bass around to keep us busy, and a few summer flounder as well.  Hopefully, we can catch a few kingfish on hazy August afternoons, dine on blowfish tails, and know in our gut that with work, dedication and a refusal to quit, we can continue to move ahead.