TIME MAY BE RUNNING OUT FOR BRISTOL BAY SALMON

This continent, and this nation, once hosted a wonderful array of living natural resources.

Passenger pigeon flocks once numbered in the billions, and were dense enough to darken the skies when they flew over northeastern woodlands.  But the last passenger pigeon, a female named Martha, died in captivity over a century ago.

During the late 1700s, the American bison still traversed the Great Plains in huge herds; scientists estimate that as many as 60,000,000 bison were still running free.  Yet by 1889 only 541 bison were thought to remain alive.  The numbers have risen since, to 31,000 or so, although most of them are sequestered in Yellowstone National Park; should they roam out of park borders during the winter, they are subject to killing in surrounding jurisdictions, where ranchers fear that they’ll spread the disease brucellosis to cattle, the same disease that cattle initially transmitted to bison many, many years ago.

For many years, it had become a tradition for Maine to send the first Atlantic salmon caught in its rivers each season to Washington, D.C., as a gift to the sitting President.  That tradition ended in 1992, because dams, industrial pollution and overfishing offshore caused so much harm to the salmon that they were almost extirpated from Maine’s waters.  Today, the salmon are listed as endangered, and may not be caught or targeted by fishermen, as Maine’s fishery managers collaborate with experts at the National Marine Fisheries Service, trying to find a way to increase salmon abundance.

In the Pacific, the once abundant salmon of the Sacramento/San Joaquin river system have been devastated by dammed rivers and California farmers’ incessant demand for more and more water, used to irrigate crops that farmers have decided to grow in a sere and near-waterless land.  A court decision handed down a few years ago offered hope to the salmon, but David Bernhardt, Donald Trump’s Secretary of the Interior, pandering to friendly agricultural interests (whom he used to represent, before entering the government) at the salmon’s expense, decided to let the farms strip additional water from the already drawn-down streams.

Farther north, in the Columbia River system, where some salmon and steelhead trout once ran over 900 miles to reach headwater spawning grounds, Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency has suggested that the states of Washington and Oregon no longer include maintaining such spawning salmon and steelhead among their priorities for the river.  In that way, they can be better assured of preserving the dams treasured by varied industrial interests, and more easily sacrifice the salmon, many runs of which are already listed under the Endangered Species Act.

But there are still a few places around where life and beauty prevail, where people can sustainably profit from nature’s bounty, while leaving the place—the ecosystem—intact.  In the United States, perhaps the best of them is Alaska’s Bristol Bay.

The United States Environmental Protection Agency describes it this way:

“The Bristol Bay watershed in southeastern Alaska supports the largest sockeye salmon fishery in the world…

“The Bristol Bay watershed provides habitat for numerous animal species, including 29 fishes, more than 190 birds, and more than 40 terrestrial mammals.  Chief among these resources is a world-class commercial and sport fishery for Pacific salmon and other important resident fishes.  The watershed supports production of all five species of Pacific salmon found in North America: sockeye, coho, Chinook, chum and pink. 

“Because no hatchery fish are raised or released in the watershed, Bristol Bay’s salmon populations are entirely wild.  These fish are anadromous—hatching and rearing in freshwater systems, migrating to the sea to grow to adult size, and returning to freshwater systems to spawn and die.

“…The Bristol Bay watershed supports the largest sockeye salmon fishery in the world, with perhaps 46% of the average global abundance of wild sockeye salmon.

“The Alaska Native cultures present in the Nushagak River and Krichak River watersheds—the Yup’ik and Dena’ina—are two of the last intact, salmon-based cultures in the world.  Salmon are integral to the entire way of life in these cultures as subsistence food and as the foundation of their language, spirituality, and social structure…

“In the Bristol Bay region, salmon constitute about 52% of the subsistence harvest…

“These cultures have a strong relationship to the landscape and its resources.  In the Bristol Bay watershed, this connection has been maintained for at least the last 4,000 years and is in part due to and responsible for the pristine condition of the region’s landscape and its biological resources…

“The Bristol Bay watershed supports several economic sectors that are wilderness-compatible and sustainable:

·         commercial, sport, and subsistence fishing

·         sport and subsistence hunting

·         non-consumptive recreation (e.g. wildlife viewing and tourism)

Considering all these sectors, the ecological resources of the Bristol Bay watershed generated nearly $480 million in direct economic expenditures and sales in 2009, and provided employment for over 14,000 full- and part-time workers.

“The Bristol Bay commercial salmon fishery generates the largest component of economic activity and was valued at approximately $300 million in 2009 (first wholesale value) and provided employment for over 11,500 full- and part-time workers at the peak of the season.  [emphasis added]”

Wilderness.  Massive runs of native salmon.  Native cultures that date back for millennia.  Profitable, sustainable businesses based on the region’s natural resources.

It seems like a sort of utopia, a sort of natural paradise that has been erased from existence elsewhere in the nation, and in most of the world.

But now that paradise is being threatened.  A Canadian mining company, with the active connivance of Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency, is Hell-bent on committing an act of environmental and cultural vandalism.  It intends to rip the guts out of the Bristol Bay watershed, in order to build a huge open-pit mine that will churn out over 10 billion tons of toxic tailings and change the character of the region forever.

The proposed “Pebble Mine” has already become infamous, not only for the irreparable damage that it will due to the wilderness and natural resources of the Bristol Bay watershed, but for the way that the Trump administration has abdicated its duties to protect that pristine ecosystem for the current citizens of this nation, and for the citizens yet to be born who should have this wilderness preserved as a part of their living heritage.

Protecting Bristol Bay is not a partisan issue.

The late Ted Stevens, a Republican senator from Alaska who was a staunch supporter of the mining industry, called the Pebble Mine

“the wrong mine in the wrong place.”

A current Republican senator from Alaska, Dan Sullivan, stated that in his view, the 90-day public comment period on the draft environmental impact statement for the Pebble mine, which was set by the Army Corps of Engineers, was too short to allow the necessary examination of the issues.  

He said that

“It’s a very legitimate request from my perspective to have more time to do the due diligence on a project of this size.” 

Senator Lisa Murkowski, yet another Republican from Alaska, submitted the Senate Appropriations Committee report on the bill providing 2020 funding for the departments of the Interior, Environment, and related agencies.  With respect to Bristol Bay and the draft environmental impact statement for permitting the Pebble Mine, that report said

“…The Committee notes that multiple Federal agencies commented to express their concerns that the [draft environmental impact statement] is inadequate and does not meet the Army Corps’ obligations to thoroughly evaluate the potential impacts of the proposed project.  The Committee shares the agencies’ concerns that DEIS lacks certain critical information about the proposed project and related mitigation and therefore likely underestimates its potential risks and impacts.  Sound science must guide Federal decisionmaking and all gaps and deficiencies identified in comments from Federal agencies and other stakeholders, including Alaska Natives, must be fully addressed, even if that requires additional scientific study, data collection, and more comprehensive analysis of the project’s potential impacts…Adverse impacts on Alaska’s world-class salmon fishery and to the ecosystem of Bristol Bay, Alaska, are unacceptable.  To the extent [the Department of the Interior], [the Environmental Protection Agency], or [the National Marine Fisheries Service] are not satisfied with the Army Corps’ analysis of the project, the agencies are encouraged to exercise their discretionary authorities, which include EPA’s enforcement authority under the Clean Water Act, at an appropriate time in the permitting process to ensure the full protection of the region.”

Under the former administration of President Barak Obama, the EPA did just that, making a decision that Clean Water Act considerations necessarily prevented development of the Pebble Mine.  The Pebble Mine Partnership sued the EPA in response, but the Obama administration did not back down.

Things changed rapidly once the Trump EPA took over.  As noted in an opinion piece published in the Juneau Empire, written by long-time Alaskan fisherman and educator Jake Jacoby,

“our voices are not being heard by this administration, and politics is at play in the rushed permitting process for the Pebble Mine.  For example, after a single backroom meeting between the Pebble CEO and the ethically-challenged former Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt, the mine’s permitting process came roaring back to life in 2018.  The EPA hastily settled a lawsuit brought by Pebble and revoked its own Bristol Bay Watershed Assessment that went through years of scrutiny, public process and scientific peer review.  We have to wonder, what other closed-door meetings are happening now?

“It typically takes at least five years to complete the environmental review for a project of Pebble’s magnitude and complexity.  By some highly-suspect miracle, permitting for the proposed Pebble Mine is expected to be completed in half that time—conveniently right before the end of this presidential administration.  If it’s not for expedient politics, then what’s the rush?  From where we sit, the whole thing stinks to high heaven.

“Public filings show that Pebble Partnership CEO Tom Collier will receive a $12.5 million bonus if the Army Corps completes its Environmental Impact Statement process before 2021.  For Pebble and Tom Collier, getting permits before the end of 2020 is the only thing that matters—not the best interest of Alaskans.  Public records also reveal that of the $11 million that Pebble spent on lobbying since 2011, more than $4 million of that has been spent since President Donald Trump took office.  It’s clear that money spent on this administration is working…”

The final Environmental Impact Statement is going to be released very soon.  It is not very likely that the concerns expressed by the late Senator Stevens, by the committee report submitted by Senator Murkowski, or by the many fisherman and Alaskans such as Mr. Jacoby will be adequately addressed in that final version.

As Tom Sadler, Assistant Director of the Marine Fish Conservation Network has written,

“The fight to stop Pebble Mine has been going on for 10 years.  The proposals have not gotten any better nor the opposition any less.

“Backers of this mine ask us to make a choice between a sustainable resource that has supported native communities and small businesses and that brings healthy seafood to our dining tables or an extraction endeavor that has the potential to cause harm for years to come.

“The marine resources at risk are irreplaceable.  It is time once again to say no to Pebble Mine.”

Mr. Sadler also provided concrete ways to help.

If you’re an Alaskan, you can click on this link http://www.savebristolbay.org/take-action to contact Governor Dunleavy and insist that he tell the Army Corps of Engineers to protect Alaskans’ interest in a healthy Bristol Bay.

No matter where you live, you can click on this link https://www.defendbristolbay.com/take-action to send a message to your United States senators and House representative, and ask them to speak up to defend Bristol Bay.

We need to act now.  The clock is running down for Bristol Bay salmon.

Just a few weeks ago, the Trump administration senselessly opened up the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument to commercial fishing, and put rare and effectively irreplaceable, 4,000-year-old deep sea corals at risk.

One of the early acts of that administration was to shrink the Bear’s Ears and Grand Staircase National Monument, and place its cultural artifacts, unique Mesozoic fossils and current high desert ecosystem at risk to the actions of fossil fuel drillers, miners and others who would plunder and deface lands belonging to all Americans.

In Minnesota, the same Trump administration is taking action that could lead to the Boundary Waters Wilderness Area being permanently degraded by waste from a sulfide-ore mine, operated by the U.S. subsidiary of a Chilean mining conglomerate.

So the Bristol Bay saga is just one more chapter in a long list of assaults on the special, beautiful and vital places that have been committed, or will soon be committed, by the Trump administration, a seeming effort to do as much harm as possible in the hopefully short time that this president has left to sell off the best of what’s left of America’s lands, waters and natural resources to his corporate cronies, who will gratefully destroy them before moving on.

Yet there is still time for Bristol Bay, time in which, if we’re fortunate and resolute, we can use in our efforts to assure that the lands, waters and fish that supported Americans for four thousand years before the United States even existed will still be able to support those Americans, physically and spiritually, in the centuries to come.

HAVE WE BEEN MANAGING ATLANTIC COD WRONG--FOR DECADES?

The collapse of New England cod stocks, and their stubborn refusal to rebuild, has caused decades of frustration for northeastern fisheries managers.

The reason for the collapse was clear enough.  People were killing too many cod, and the New England Fishery Management Council spent far too much time trying to look like it was seeking solutions, at the same time that it chronically refused to implement annual quotas or any other measure that would meaningfully restrict fishermen’s landings.

Eventually—meaning after Congress passed the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Reauthorization Act of2006, which finally forced the New England Council to adopt annual catch limits—real restrictions were placed on cod landings, although there is some speculationthat a lot of cod are still being caught and dumped at sea, so that fishermen stillappear to have available quota, which allows them to continue to fish forother, more abundant species such as haddock and pollock under the terms of the catch share management system that is currently in place.

Despite a decade of quota-based management, neither the Gulf of Maine nor the Georges Bank stock of Atlantic cod has shown significant signs of rebuilding.  An operational stock assessment released early this year determined that, as of the end of 2018,

“the stock status for the Gulf of Maine Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua) stock is overfished and overfishing is occurring…Spawning stock biomass (SSB) in 2018 was estimated to be 3,752 (mt) under the M=0.2 model and 3,838 (mt) under the M-ramp model scenario [describing the models isn’t necessary for the purposes of this essay; readers only need to note that biologists aren’t in agreement on which best reflects the population dynamics of the stock] which is 9% and 6% (respectively) of the biomass target…The 2018 fully selected fishing mortality was estimated to be 0.188 to 0.198 which is 109% and 113% of [the fishing mortality rate that would produce maximum sustainable yield].

To put those figures in context, the spawning stock biomass at the end of 2018 was well below the 6,723 metric ton [M=0.2 model] or 8,009 metric ton [M-ramp model] spawning stock biomass that existed at the end of 2011, but is well above the 1,263/1,809 metric ton SSB that occurred when the stock bottomed out in 2014.  On the plus side, the fishing mortality rate, although still too high, has steadily fallen from 1.504/1.308 in 2011 to something that is finally approaching sustainable levels, while the recruitment of new fish into the population is, depending on the model, at or near an 8-year high.

So all of the news coming out of the Gulf of Maine isn’t dismal, although there is little or nothing that might be considered good.

The status of the Georges Bank stock isn’t so clear, with the operational assessment noting that

“the Georges Bank Atlantic Cod (Gadus morhua) stock status cannot be quantitatively determined due to a lack of biological reference points associated with the PlanBsmooth approach but is recommended to be overfished due to poor stock condition, while recommended overfishing status is unknown…”

By the end of 2018, the biomass appears to have grown slightly larger than it was in 2011, after bottoming out in 2014, while the exploitation rate has generally fallen significantly over the same period.  However, substantial uncertainty still surrounds the assessment.

Now, a new study suggests that such uncertainty, as well as the cod’s frustratingly slow recovery, may result from the fact that fishery managers got the cod’s stock structure all wrong.  

Instead of there being only two cod stocks that need to be managed as distinct units, there may be five separate stocks, all with their own, somewhat different, life histories.  By trying to cram those five distinct stocks into just two management buckets, fishery managers could have seriously prejudiced the health and recovery of cod in the northeast.

The study, titled “An Interdisciplinary Review of Atlantic Cod (Gadus morhua) Stock Structure in the Western North Atlantic Ocean,” was edited by Richard S. McBride of the National Marine Fisheries Service and R. Kent Smedbol of Fisheries and Oceans Canada.  It reflects the work of the Atlantic Cod Stock Structure Working Group, which reviewed existing information relating to Atlantic cod stock structure in the northeast.  In their introduction to the study, those editors note that

“Defining the number of stocks of an exploited species, including stock boundaries and other components of its spatial complexity, is fundamental for efficient monitoring, predictive assessment, and successful management.  For example, estimates of abundance and vital rates assume samples come from a unit stock; a well-mixed, reproductively isolated population without significant immigration or emigration…

“Cod in US waters are overfished and subject to overfishing, and among plausible mechanisms impeding its recovery are concerns that cod’s biological population structure is not properly aligned with the current assessment and management units.”

The study looked at a number of factors that could be used to define stock structure.  

The first was the early life history of the fish:  Where are cod spawned, and where do those spawned cod end up?  It turns out that cod populations in the Gulf of Maine and on Georges Bank depend on local spawning.  However, cod spawned in the Gulf of Maine also make significant contributions to cod populations off Cape Cod and in southern New England, even though those regions are, for the most part, managed as part of the Georges Bank stock; the study suggested that managing those two southern regions as part of the Gulf of Maine stock would better match the spawning and settlement patterns.

Genetic markers were also considered.  There have been a number of genetic studies of cod, intended to define spawning stock structure.  Most were spatially limited, but when the results of multiple genetic studies were analyzed as a whole, patterns began to emerge.  The Working Group study found that, when taken collectively, the genetic studies provided evidence that

“the Gulf of Maine stock is comprised of at least two discrete populations that spawn, sometimes in the same inshore locations in the [western Gulf of Maine], in different seasons (winter and spring); there is some degree of connectivity between the western Gulf of Maine and cod that spawn offshore of Cape Cod and in southern New England; the cod that spawn in Georges Bank are distinct from the remainder of the cod considered in that stock (those that spawn in the waters of the Cape Cod area and southern New England); finer scale differences may also occur among geographically separate populations, e.g., southern New England vs. Gulf of Maine; [and] non-neutral markers drive the patterns of genetic differentiation, suggesting the population structure reflects differential adaptation of populations to local environmental conditions.”

One very comprehensive genetic survey concluded that there were probably four or five genetically distinct stocks, including

“1) spring-spawning western [Gulf of Maine]; 2) winter-spawning cod in western [Gulf of Maine] and fall and winter-spawning cod in the Cape Cod and Nantucket Shoals area, including the western part of the Great South Channel; 3) cod spawning on western and eastern Georges Bank; 4) southern New England waters (coastal areas south of the Cape Cod/Great South Channel area); and 5) potentially the eastern [Gulf of Maine], with the caveat that conclusions could not be reached in the absence of data from spawning cod in this area.”

Once again, the current two-stock model, which links Georges Bank with the other southern regions, is not in accord with scientists’ findings.  The Working Group study observed that

“The five-population genetic groupings put forth in the synthesis model are consistent with aspects of prior hypothesized stock structures and with data from other disciplines, including tagging, natural markers, early life history stages, and what is known about oceanographic currents.”

The study included sections addressing such other disciplines, along with a section that reflected fishermen’s on-the-water experience; in the interests of length, I won’t go into them here, except to note that they tended to confirm the findings described at length above.

The question is, now that such information has been gathered, what should managers do?

The Conservation Law Foundation, an organization that has long advocated for more effective management of northeastern groundfish, and has already petitioned the Secretary of Commerce, asking him to impose much stricter management measures on the cod fishery, has responded to the Working Group’s report by asking the New England Fishery Management Council to request that the Secretary take emergency action

“to protect all known spawning areas of Atlantic cod in the Western Gulf of Maine during the entirety of the spawning seasons.”

In its letter, the Conservation Law Foundation noted that

“The law requires the Council to take all necessary actions to end overfishing and rebuild Atlantic cod using the best scientific information available.  Appropriate consideration of stock structure is one of those actions.  As Dean et. al. (2019) stated when referring to assessment models and the importance of accounting for sub-populations, misrepresenting ‘the aggregate dynamics of the population will yield inaccurate catch advice and lead to misguided management, perpetuating, and amplifying the problem.  In short:  it matters where, when, and which cod are harvested from the population…”

The New England Council is expected to address the Conservation Law Foundation’s letter today.

As someone who first fished for cod in the early 1960s, and was active in the fishery until a collapsing population no longer made it worthwhile, I hope that they act on the request.

But as someone who has watched the New England Council fritter away the cod’s future for decades, I’m also not holding my breath. 

GULF RED SNAPPER: PRIVATE BOAT OVERAGES MAY STILL THREATEN REBUILDING

The recreational red snapper fishery in the Gulf of Mexico has a long history of problems, headlined by chronic overfishing in the private boat sector.  

While the commercial fishery embraced accountability and ended its overfishing in 2007, and the for-hire sector also recognized and welcomed the benefits of accountability in 2014, the private boat sector continued to take more fish than it was entitled to through at least 2017.

Finally, in 2018, a new program intended to better regulate the private boat sector was initiated through the exempted fishing permit process.  Under that program, which was similar to programs long used in the Mid-Atlantic to manage species such as black sea bass and summer flounder, the National Marine Fisheries Service would continue to set the overall recreational harvest limit.  Portions of that recreational harvest limit were then allocated to each Gulf Coast state which would, within limits, be permitted to set regulations intended to keep recreational landings within each state’s allocation.

The experimental program continued through 2019, and preliminary results seemed to show that it was working.  Recreational red snapper landings, as measured by the Marine Recreational Information Program, did not appear to exceed the recreational harvest limit, while regulations crafted to complement each state’s unique fishery permitted longer fishing seasons.

Things seemed to be working out so well that, on February 6, 2020, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, parent agency of the National Marine Fisheries Service, gave final approval to Amendments 50A-F to the Fishery Management Plan for the Reef Fish Resources in the Gulf of Mexico, which permanently adopted the cooperative state/federal management approach.

Unfortunately, things are not always as they seem.

The problem, as so often is the case, came down to recreational landings estimates.

The state allocations set under Amendment 50 were based on MarineRecreational Information Program reporting.  However, the various Gulf States have largely eschewed MRIP when gauging their red snapper landings, and instead use other survey methods that range from the state-of-the-art LACreel in Louisiana and Tails ‘n Scales in Mississippi, to an aged, obsolete and probably highly inaccurate survey in Texas.

The estimates produced by each of the state surveys differ from those produced by the MRIP survey.  While managers have been able to identify a relationship between four of the five state surveys and MRIP (only the ancient Texas survey has not been amenable to such treatment), and can correlate the different state estimates into a sort of “common currency” that allows them to be directly compared to MRIP, the Gulf Council has not yet adopted that common currency into its calculations, but instead is still basing its decisions on the MRIP figures.

That could easily lead to private boat anglers overfishing the red snapper stock, because in many cases, the difference between the state survey and MRIP is substantial.  

NMFS’ Southeast Regional Office produced preliminary adjustments to state red snapper quotas that suggest that Alabama’s private boat quota should be reduced from 1,122,662 to 474,260 pounds—nearly a 58% reduction.  Mississippi would experience even a greater proportional reduction—almost 63%--dropping its allocation from 151,550 pounds to 56,378.  Louisiana would only be reduced by 30%, from 816,233 pounds to 575,036, while Florida would actually receive a small, 7% increase, that would raise its allocation from 1,913,451 to 2,045,862 pounds.  As mentioned before, no similar correlation ratio exists for Texas, where a survey little better—or maybe a little worse—that pure guesswork drives private boat red snapper estimates.

To provide an interim fix for the problem, the Ocean Conservancy has asked the National Marine Fisheries Service to issue a temporary regulation converting each state’s private recreational vessel allocation into a figure reflecting the impact of such state’s red snapper survey.  It said, in part, that it

“affirmatively supports Amendment 50’s delegation of some aspects of management of the private recreational red snapper fishery to the five Gulf States.  However, discrepancies between the state survey data units and the Marine Recreational Information Program (MRIP) Coastal Household Telephone Survey (CHTS) units currently used to set [annual catch limits] raise the significant possibility that the states will exceed their individual portions as well as the total private recreational [annual catch limit] without triggering the necessary accountability measures to prevent catch overages.  It is critical that NMFS complete simple-ratio calibrations to convert data between the state and MRIP surveys.  Anything short of swift implementation of data calibrations undermines the federally mandated red snapper rebuilding plan, puts the livelihood of Gulf fishermen at risk and jeopardizes the future of the recreational red snapper fishery.”

NMFS doesn’t disagree.  In its response to comments made as part of the Amendment 50 process, it stated that

“NMFS agrees that the state [annual catch limits] should be calibrated to each state’s reporting system.  The NMFS Office of Science & Technology is working with the Gulf states to develop a peer-reviewed calibration that it is expected to be available in the spring of 2020.  When the calibration is available, NMFS intends to apply it to the established state [annual catch limits] and implement catch limits in the appropriate state currencies through appropriate rulemaking.  When implemented, each state’s landings will be compared to its revised [annual catch limit], to determine if there was an overage.  As noted previously, this rule requires that each state pay back any overage in a fishing year during the following fishing year.  Because the rule adjusting the state [annual catch limits] may not be complete until late 2020, NMFS intends to inform each state of any anticipated change in its [annual catch limit] as soon as possible in order to allow the states to set or modify their management measures, as appropriate.  This will help assure that the private angling [annual catch limit] is not exceeded and overfishing of the red snapper stock does not occur in 2020.  Implementing the calibrated [annual catch limits] in 2020 will also help assure that this final rule is consistent the [sic] Magnuson-Stevens Act.  [emphasis added]”

Prior to the June Gulf Council meeting, NMFS did provide at least preliminary figures indicating appropriate changes in red snapper allocations to all states other than Texas.  However, there is no indication that any of the states currently intend to amend their red snapper regulations to accord with the revised allocations, and NMFS has taken no action to memorialize the revised allocations in a regulation.

Instead, in a recent letter to the Ocean Conservancy, Dr. Roy Crabtree, the Southeast Regional Administrator, replied that

“…NOAA Fisheries agrees that sound quota monitoring is critical to the success of the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council’s (Council) state management program for private anglers, and believes this issue is best addressed through the Council process.  The Council was scheduled to discuss this topic at its April 2020 meeting, which was cancelled due to concerns about the COVID-19 virus.  However, the Council will be meeting from June 15 to June 18, 2020, via a webinar and this topic is scheduled for discussion during the Reef Fish Committee session, which convenes on June 16, 2020.”

The Gulf Council did take up the matter on that date, but in a close vote decided to take no action in time to impact the 2020 recreational red snapper season.  

If NMFS takes no further action, it may find itself in a situation where it knowingly allowed recreational private boat red snapper anglers to exceed their 2020 harvest limit, paving the way for problems in 2021, when revised allocation figures will, hopefully, be in place.

The Ocean Conservancy responded to the Gulf Council’s failure to act by issuing a statement which said

“Today, the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council further delayed action necessary to ensure that the private recreational sector of the red snapper fishery stays within its sustainable, science-based annual catch limit.  As a result, recreational fishing in the 2020 season will almost certainly exceed sustainable limits.  This puts the entire fishery, including the commercial and for-hire sectors, at higher risk for future reductions in catch levels.

“Ocean Conservancy supports state management of red snapper, but implementation of this new system has been plagued by accountability issues.  Inconsistent catch monitoring systems across the five states prevents a clear picture as to whether science-based catch limits are being met…Currently, each Gulf state is surveying angler catch using different methodologies, making it difficult to know just how much fishing for red snapper is actually occurring across the Gulf.  This approach is statistically indefensible.  Essentially, rather than comparing apples to apples, we have a data fruit salad.

“…Over the course of 2020, the Council will be moving forward with efforts to find ways to calibrate state catch data in order to establish a ‘common currency’ that allows for more accurate and allowable reporting against the private recreational sector’s annual catch limit.  We encourage the Council to finalize this work with all haste, as management of red snapper without a common currency or other management measures to prevent overages violates the Magnuson-Stevens Act.

“…The stakes are high.  The private recreational sector has simply caught too many fish over the last several years, and failure to rein in this fishing is putting the health of the fish population at risk.    Commercial and for-hire fishermen, who have been fishing sustainably for years, may pay the price in reduced quotas and access because of the lack of accountability for private anglers.  The Council is putting decades of hard work and sacrifice by fishermen to rebuild red snapper in jeopardy.”

So it appears that the cooperative state/federal red snapper approach, which has been hailed by groups such as the Center for Sportfishing Policy as

“a proven model that could be applied to other fisheries to other fisheries to improve public access while ensuring proper conservation of America’s marine resources,”

still has a few bugs in it.

As it stands to today, it is not “a proven model,” but still in its prototype stage.  Nor is it “ensuring proper conservation of America’s marine resources,” for in its current state, it is setting the stage for further overfishing by the private boat recreational sector.

Yes, those are problems that can be fairly easily fixed, provided that the members of the Gulf Council have the requisite political will, and further providing that the states, most particularly including Texas, are willing to get their recreational landings data into a form that is both accurate and usable on a regional basis.

Hopefully, that will happen sometime this year.

But given the seemingly intransigent problems that have allowed the private recreational sector to continually kill to many red snapper, at this point, the only thing I can say is that I’ll believe it when I finally see it, and not a moment before.

BLUEFISH REBUILDING PLAN CREEPS FORWARD

The Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council and the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Bluefish Management Board held a joint meeting on June 16, when they spent more than three hours discussing possible alternatives for the Bluefish Allocation and Rebuilding Amendment. 

Progress was painfully slow.  The Fishery Management Action Team charged with analyzing the data, managers’ concerns and public comment, and then crafting alternative measures for the Council’s and Management Board’s consideration, had provided a discussion document to both management bodies prior to the meeting.  In presenting that document, the Action Team explained that it was crafted after a meeting

“to further refine draft alternatives, including identifying alternatives that should not be further pursued in this action due to feasibility or timing concerns.  The [Fishery Management Action Team] discussed the implications of each draft approach and worked to identify any additional analyses needed to guide the Council and Board during their next discussion of this action in mid-June.”

It was a comprehensive document, that was responsive to public comment, the needs of the bluefish resource and the limitations of the available data.  Unfortunately, the Council and Management Board chose to ignore some of the Action Team’s recommendations and, at least for the time being, missed out on an opportunity to adopt measures that would have broken new ground by managing the fishery as what it is:  a predominantly recreational fishery that supports a high level of catch-and-release angling. 

Instead, they chose to bog themselves down with unnecessary and, in some cases, arguably unwise alternatives; rather than take decisive action on some important issues, they merely deferred decisions until August, when action will probably have to be taken in order to meet deadlines imposed by the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act. 

From the moment discussions began, it was clear that some people sitting around the table weren’t particularly keen on moving forward, illustrating why Magnuson-Stevens, and its legally-enforceable requirement that overfished stocks be rebuilt, is so important to the health of our fisheries. 

As soon as the Action Team completed its initial presentation, Tom Fote, the Governor’s Appointee from New Jersey, tried to cast doubt on their projections of bluefish recovery under various management scenarios by asking whether the Action Team had considered the “history” of bluefish when preparing the document.  

He followed up with his view that the bluefish stock only “started collapsing” after a recreational bag limit was imposed in the 1980s, and that the decline in bluefish abundance since then had “nothing to do with fishing,” despite the fact that the operational stock assessment released less than a year ago demonstrated that the bluefish stock had been experiencing overfishing in every year between 1985 and 2017.

Fote ended by saying that

“I have no confidence at all”

that the proposed management measures would rebuild the bluefish stock, and took great comfort in the fact that Tony Wood, a biologist from the Northeast Fisheries Science Center, stated that bluefish didn’t show a strong stock/recruitment relationship; that is, the strength of any given year class of juvenile bluefish is not heavily dependent upon the size of the spawning stock.

However, that’s true of most fish, other than those such as sharks which take a many years to mature and produce relatively few young during their lifetimes.  One of the reference books that I keep on my shelf is Fisheries Ecology and Management, by Carl J. Walters and Steven J.D. Martell, which is a standard text used to teach fisheries issues.  It notes that

“most fish populations show recruitment relationships that are flat across a wide range of parental stock sizes (i.e., recruitment is independent of the parental stock size)”

and goes on to explain that

“Beverton and Holt [two noted biologists who, among other things, developed a stock assessment model that is still widely used today] (1957) examined early data on the relationship between parental spawning stock and subsequent recruitment, and data on the early mortality rates of juvenile fish.  They noted that the spawning stock is generally a very poor predictor of recruitment (recruitment being independent of parental abundance)…”

Thus, the lack of a strong stock/recruitment relationship in bluefish does not make bluefish exceptional in that regard, and does not suggest that regulating bluefish landings is will be any less likely to increase abundance than would regulating the landings of summer flounder or striped bass, both species that have historically benefitted from management efforts—and, in the case of striped bass, have suffered when managers failed to step in when they should have acted decisively to reduce fishing mortality.

To argue that management measures won’t help to restore the bluefish population is to contradict managers’ successes with a host of other species, and seems a completely fatuous approach to the issue, but Fote wasn’t, unfortunately, the only person at the table to voice such thoughts.

Even so, most of those in the room, and in particular the professionals on the Action Team and on Council and ASMFC staff, tried to keep everyone headed in the right direction.

The first topic addressed were the Goals and Objectives of the management plan, which the Action Team had completely reorganized and rewritten to reflect the state of today’s fishery and today’s fisheries science, which have changed substantially since the original Goals and Objectives were drafted back in the 1980s.  No one had any substantive comment on those, and they will probably appear in the draft Addendum, which will go out to the public at some point in the late summer or early fall, in the same form as they were presented at the meeting.

The next topic was the recreational vs. commercial allocation, and it was here that things went a bit sideways.

The Action Team had presented four basic approaches to setting the allocation between the commercial and recreational sectors.  The first, as must always be the case, was the no-action alternative, in which anglers would continue to receive 83 percent of the landings, while commercial fishermen received 17 percent.  After that, things got a bit complicated, largely due to the discards issue.

Discards are always a difficult thing to calculate.  Currently, for purposes of setting each year’s recreational harvest limit, managers assume that the size range of the fish released is identical to the size range of the fish taken home by anglers and measured as part of the Marine Recreational Information Program.  However, that is merely an assumption, which is completely unsupported by any data derived directly from the released fish.

In fact, there is data suggesting that released fish average larger than those that people take home.  

That finding shouldn’t seem strange to any recreational fishermen, as anglers are often quite vocal about preferring to eat smaller bluefish, which are generally thought to be less oily and “fishy” than larger individuals.  The biologists at the Northeast Fisheries Science Center believe that such data is the best scientific information available, and used it when preparing the operational stock assessment last year.

That data comes from American Littoral Society tagging records, and voluntary angler reporting in Rhode Island, Connecticut and New Jersey.  Unfortunately, it is limited in regional coverage, and doesn’t include areas where most of the releases take place, so it may or may not accurately reflect the size range of released bluefish along the entire coast.  It also failed to distinguish between fish released by surf and private boat anglers and those released by anglers fishing from for-hire vessels.

The Council and Management Board were thus asked to chose between a discard estimate based on an assumption, which was completely unsupported by any hard data, and a higher discard estimate that while based on data, was based on data that was incomplete and did not cover the entire coast.

In the end, they decided to adopt the former estimate, even though, by doing so, they may be substantially underestimating the volume of dead discards in the recreational fishery.

The managers were also asked to decide whether to base allocation on landings, as is currently done, or on catch (landings plus dead discards), which would have been some acknowledgement of the predominance of catch-and-release in the recreational fishery.  

The Action Team recommended that the Council and Management Board abandon the practice of basing the allocation on landings, noting that

“Basing allocation on catch between sectors using landings ignores the catch-and-release aspect of the fishery.”

For a while, it looked as if that would happen.  Steven Heins, who holds the obligatory Council seat from New York, and Hannah Hart, who I believe is a state fisheries manager for Florida and sits on the Management Board, included it in a motion listing alternatives to be removed from the Amendment.  

However, Adam Nowalsky, the Legislative Proxy from New Jersey and also a Council member, made a motion to amend that list of deletions to keep the landings option in the Amendment, arguing that landings might still be used to allocate bluefish between surf and private boat fishermen and the for-hire sector, and saying that

“Consistency in the use of data is extremely important.”

Both the Council and the Management Board went along.

It’s impossible not to note that “consistency in the use of data” could also have been maintained by deleting both the alternative that would use landings to determine the recreational/commercial allocation, and the alternative that would use landings to calculate any private angler/for-hire split, should that ever occur.  Such dual deletion would have been a win-win, that addressed the consistency issue while also recognizing “the catch and release aspect of the fishery.”

But things didn’t happen that way.

Fortunately, the issue is not dead.  The decision is merely delayed, so anyone with strong feelings about the issue ought to contact their Council and Management Board representatives prior to the August meeting.

A related issue, discussed later in the session, was that of transferring unlanded recreational quota to the commercial sector.  

While some anglers speaking at the scoping hearings, including myself, called for managing for maximized abundance rather than maximized landings, and so asked that such transfers no longer occur, the Action Team did not include that suggestion among the possible alternatives.  Managers will only choose between maintaining the status quo, creating a cap on such transfers that is expressed as a percentage of the allowable biological catch (and notably not of the significantly lower recreational harvest limit or annual catch target), or so-called “bi-directional” transfers, in which unused commercial quota could be shifted to the recreational sector.

Interstate transfer of commercial quota also got some attention, as a proposal for regional management, suggested earlier by Florida’s representatives on the Management Board, garnered debate.  A motion to delete it, in favor of establishing minimum quota allocations for every state on the coast, was made by Massachusetts fishery manager Nicola Meserve and Earl Gwin, who holds the obligatory Council seat from Maryland.  However, a substitute motion to retain both the Florida proposal and the minimum quota was made and ultimately adopted by both management bodies.

The assembled managers also had to decide on alternatives establishing the rebuilding timelines.  

Possible alternatives ranged from a “constant harvest” strategy that set a low annual catch limit and would theoretically rebuild the stock within four years, a “constant fishing mortality” strategy that should rebuild the stock within the required ten years, and another constant harvest strategy that seemed to set an unrealistically high annual catch limit, but would still supposedly rebuild the stock within ten years. 

Both the Council and Management Board voted to remove both constant harvest strategies, leaving alternatives that would rebuild the stock, depending on the option ultimately chosen, in between five and ten years.

Finally, the Council and Management Board addressed the issue of sector separation; that is, setting up separate annual catch limits, sub-annual catch limits or recreational harvest limits for the surf/private boat and for-hire sectors.

The Action Team recommended that the sector separation proposals be removed from the Amendment, saying

“The [Fishery Management Action Team] reached consensus that for-hire sector separation should be removed from the amendment.  The FMAT expressed several concerns with pursuing this issue further.  Foremost, the FMAT thought that developing for-hire sector allocations is such a large task that it could significantly delay the amendment timeline.  FMAT members were concerned about the reliability of MRIP data at the mode level when generating allocations.  MRIP data with high PSE values poses additional issues for catch accounting and accountability.  There is also the difficulty of determining how accountability measures are implemented between modes.  Lastly, according to MRIP data, the for-hire sector is a relatively small portion of the recreational fishery and for-hire fishermen may draw issue with the resultant small allocation.”

Despite such recommendation, Management Board representatives from southern New England, as well as the National Marine Fisheries Service, seemed interested in developing sector separation alternatives.  Other representatives from elsewhere on the coast were adamantly opposed to the idea.  In the end, sector separation alternatives were retained for the time being, although the issue will be reconsidered in August.

And that’s about where the Bluefish Reallocation and Rebuilding Amendment stands today.  There were a few other issues discussed, which I didn’t mention as they would have little to no impact on the resource itself but would take quite a few words to explain. 

While this week’s meeting moved the process forward just a little, most issues remain up in the air. 

Unfortunately, we’ve already lost the most important point; the Council and Management Board have effectively vetoed the concept of managing bluefish for abundance instead of landings; inter-sector quotas transfers will remain alive in some form, assuring that bluefish will continue to be managed for dead fish on the dock, as opposed to live fish in the water. 

At the same time, the first step in the right direction, allocation by catch, rather than by landings, to better acknowledge the catch-and-release fishery, remains alive.  It was the preferred position of the Action Team, and can still be adopted in the final Amendment, provided that concerned anglers keep pressure on their representatives and convince them to do the right thing.

Perhaps that best defines where we really are right now:  Still early in the debate, with real opportunities to influence and improve bluefish management before the draft Amendment is finalized, during the public comment period for that draft, and even as part of the final debate, when public comment is again considered, and the Council and Management Board vote on the ultimate shape of the Amendment that is forwarded to the National Marine Fisheries Service for approval, something that will probably happen in September 2021.