LITTLE REASON TO RELAX BLUEFIN PROTECTIONS

On March 30, the National Marine Fisheries Service announced that it was relaxing long-time protections intended to reduce the number of Atlantic bluefin tuna killed and, in the past, discarded by the pelagic longline fleet.

Pelagic longliners are not supposed to target bluefin tuna.  However, longlines are not selective, and bluefin tuna, like shortfin mako sharks and white and blue marlin, are often unintended victims of longline gear.  While longliners are allocated some of the bluefin tuna quota to cover such incidental catch, past regulations often resulted in far too many bluefin being returned, dead, to the sea,

Until about five years ago, longliners’ dead bluefin discards were a big conservation issue.  Things were particularly bad along the edge of the continental shelf south of Long Island/east of New Jersey during the spring, when schools of big bluefin were headed back to their summer feeding grounds off New England and maritime Canada.  I still remember going to National Marine Fisheries Service hearings during the late 1980s and early ‘90s, and listening to local longliners complain about how many giants they were discarding dead after retaining the one fish per trip that regulations back then allowed.

Finally, in 1999, NMFS created the “Northeast United States Closed Area,” which prohibited longliners from fishing in those waters during the month of June.  Such closure was predicted to reduce bluefin bycatch by 55 percent, while having no material impact on the landings of swordfish and other target species.

In 2005, further amendments to the fishery management plan created additional closed areas.  One, the Cape Hatteras Gear Restricted Area, ran from December 1 to April 30.  That gear restricted area was designed to address a unique problem, that saw a small portion of the longline fleet produce “a high level of bluefin interactions;” the remainder of the fleet didn’t produce that much bluefin bycatch.  So the Cape Hatteras Gear Restricted Area wasn’t closed to all longline fishing.  Access to the area was

“granted based on an annual assessment of pelagic longline vessels using performance-based metrics.  Pelagic longline vessels [were] evaluated on their ratio of bluefin interactions to designated species landings, compliance with the Pelagic Observer Program, and timely submission of logbooks.”

Based on those standards, nearly 80 percent of longliners fishing in the region were allowed to continue fishing during the supposed closure.

The other closed area—actually, two nearby closed areas—was created in the Gulf of Mexico, where western stock bluefin tuna spawn.  Collectively designated the “Gulf of Mexico Gear Restricted Area,” it was closed to longliners from April 1 through May 31, to protect the spawning bluefin. 

An additional measure intended to prevent longline bycatch of bluefin was the institution of a “weak hook” requirement 2011, which mandated that longliners fishing in the Gulf of Mexico only use hooks made from relatively thin-gauge wire, that would more easily straighten in response to the struggles of mature bluefin tuna, but would retain the swordfish and other tunas targeted by the Gulf longline fleet.  It wasn’t a perfect solution, but

“Research results showed that weak hooks showed that the use of weak hooks can significantly reduce the amount of bluefin tuna caught by pelagic longline vessels.  Some reductions in the amount of target catch of yellowfin tuna and swordfish were noted but were not statistically significant.”

Even so, bluefin bycatch remained high.  During the years 2012-2014, the longliners bluefin catch exceeded the longline bycatch quota by 365 percent, 972 percent, and 210 percent, respectively.  Much  that catch was discarded dead.

So in 2015, NMFS adopted Amendment 7 to the fishery management plan.  In addition to creating the Cape Hatteras and Gulf of Mexico gear restricted areas described above, the Amendment adopted a number of other measures to protect bluefin tuna. 

Among those was a catch share program, the Individual Bluefin Quota management system, that divided the overall longline bluefin quota into shares allocated to each permitted vessel, based on that vessel’s bluefin catch history.  Longline vessels will no longer be allowed to discard legal-sized bluefin tuna; all fish must be landed.  Once a vessel has landed its share of the bluefin longline quota, it must either lease or otherwise obtain additional quota from another vessel, or exit the pelagic longline fishery for the remainder of that fishing year.  Should the entire longline quota be caught in any fishing year, the pelagic longline fishery would be completely shut down until a new fishing year began.

To better assure that longline vessels accurately report all bluefin caught, Amendment 7 also requires that pelagic longline vessels install and properly maintain video cameras placed in locations that allow them to record all fish brought aboard.  Such video can then be monitored to assure vessel compliance with the bluefin regulations.

On the negative side, the Amendment also increased the annual longline bluefin quota by 62.5 metric tons, obtained by reducing the quotas from other permit categories; for example, the general category, that amounts for most U.S. bluefin landings, was reduced by 32 million metric tons, while 13.4 metric tons were taken away from the recreational quota.  Supposedly, that was done  

“to more fully and predictably account for Longline category incidental bluefin catch, including both dead discards and landings,”

but it’s hard not to see it as rewarding the longliners for their use of destructive and non-selective gear, as every other provision of Amendment 7 would have still worked without the increase in quota, although without such increase, the pelagic longline fleet would have been forced to curtail its operations much sooner each fishing year.

On balance, Amendment 7 seems to have achieved its goals.  During the years 2015, 2016, and 2017, after the amendment’s adoption, the pelagic longline fleet didn’t’ come close to landing its quota, never landing more than 51 percent of its quota in any fishing year.  While those numbers aren’t directly comparable to the big overages of 2012-2014, due to the substantial increase in the Longline category quota, the absolute numbers still tell a positive, if somewhat more subdued, story:  For the period 2012-2014, longliners caught an average of 233 metric tons of bluefin per year, while for the period 2015-2017, that average fell to just 81.3 metric tons, a reduction of 65 percent.

All of the anti-bycatch regulations seem to be working, but NMFS has now decided to change its approach.  Like a lot of bad ideas coming out of Washington these days, the new managemengt changes are based on a professed desire to “reduce regulatory burden” and “simplify and streamline” the regulatory process.

There is also an expressed desire to help the U.S. pelagic longline fleet come closer to catching its full swordfish quota, something that it hasn’t come close to doing in recent years.  There is a fear that, if the United States keeps falling short of catching its quota, that quota will be reallocated to other nations.  NMFS sees easing bluefin protections as one way to achieve that goal.  

Thus, it has abolished the Cape Hatteras Gear Restricted Area altogether, and has downgraded the Northeast United States Closed Area and Gulf of Mexico Gear Restricted Area to “monitoring areas” for three years, where longliners will again be able to fish; if they exceed certain levels—72 percent of the Atlantic Longline quota, or 55 percent of the Gulf Longline quota—the affected area will be closed for the remainder of the three-year period.  Once that period is over, the need for both areas will be reevaluated.

In addition, longliners in the Gulf of Mexico will only be required to use weak hooks between January and June, and not for the entire year.

While such actions might have made longliners happy, they were not well received elsewhere.

The Pew Charitable Trusts noted that

“after decades of mismanagement and overfishing the population today is a little more than half of what it was in 1974, when it was already depleted,”

and pointed out that under current quotas,

“[International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas] scientists project the western Atlantic population won’t continue to rebuild but will, in fact, decline.”

Pew argues that

“After NOAA Fisheries implemented the [gear restricted areas] in 2015, the average number of bluefin tuna hooked on longlines during April and May dropped by 82 percent compared with the average for those months for 2006 through 2012.  This remarkable reduction in mortality exists only for the closure months, indicating that the [gear restricted areas], not other regulations, are responsible for this success.”

The nation’s largest marine recreational fishing and boating organizations voiced similar concerns, while an editorial in Sport Fishing magazine scornfully observed,

“Despite [the] restriction pertaining to only two small areas (small in relation to the entire Gulf) and only for two months (April and May), it worked.  Following NMFS’ creation of these limited GRAs, the number of bluefin hooked by longlines during these months has dropped by more than 80 percent.

“Before these restrictions, the longline fleet was annually discarding (by law) nearly 70 metric tons of dead Gulf bluefin, exceeding the quota that NMFS allowed it by as much as 218 percent.  Today, they no longer exceed that quota.

“In other words, this program has been an unqualified success.

“So what do you do with a program that has been achieving its goals?

“Why, you weaken or kill it, of course.”

NMFS justifications for its actions were neither as vehement nor as convincing.  In reading all of the agency’ comments, it’s difficult to understand just why the bluefin regulations needed to be relaxed.

Start with the premise that it’s all about swordfish, that NMFS was concerned that the U.S. might lose a part of its quota to another nation if it didn’t start landing more swords.  That’s certainly a legitimate concern.  But will weakening the bluefin regulations really lead to U.S. longliners landing more swordfish?

Maybe not.  And that’s according to NMFS.  

As mentioned above, NMFS has already stated that the Northeast United States Closed area would cause no “substantial changes to target [swordfish] catch,” and that any reductions in swordfish catch attributable to the use of weak hooks in the Gulf of Mexico “were not statistically significant.”  Thus, it’s difficult to argue that weakening those measures can be justified on the basis of increased swordfish landings.

Even so, is it possible that the Individual Bluefin Quota management system was so successful that the other regulations have become redundant and unnecessary?  And have those regulations actually caused U.S. swordfish landings to fall?

NMFS isn’t making a case for that, either.  Instead, in its Three-Year Review of the Individual Bluefin Quota program, NMFS wrote

“The specific regulations that provided the most incentives for vessel operators to avoid bluefin were the IBQ accounting requirements.  The potential need for vessel owners to lease additional IBQ allocation in order to account for bluefin catch and satisfy the minimum IBQ Program requirements, and the cost of such leasing, provided additional incentive to avoid bluefin tuna during pelagic longline fishing operations.”

But immediately after that statement, NMFS also wrote

“It is difficult to attribute the overall reduction in bluefin catch to a specific fishing behavior, due to the number of factors that affect catch in a commercial fishery, and the number of factors affecting fishing behavior in addition to the IBQ program.

“…it is difficult to separate out the influence of the IBQ Program from other factors, including the effect of swordfish imports on the market for U.S. product, or other regulations such as closed and gear restricted areas, as well as target species availability/price.  [emphasis added]”

So, by NMFS’ own admission, the decline in bluefin bycatch might well be attributable to the closed areas that it has now reopened, and not to the IBQ catch share program. 

And if that is the case, then opening up the former closed areas might have been a very bad idea.

When all is said and done, it seems that even NMFS doesn’t really believe that weakening bluefin regulations, as they did on March 30, will either guarantee the bluefin sufficient protection or increase U.S. swordfish landings.  It might do both.  It might do neither.  It might do something in-between.

What we seem to be dealing with isn’t a well thought-out rule based on data, but rather the dilution of one more conservation measure, that was sacrificed on the altar of “streamlining” regulations and easing the “regulatory burden,” a trend we’ve seen far too much of in the last three years or so.

Bluefin tuna, and bluefin tuna fishermen, deserve better than that.