STRIPED BASS: STAYING FOCUSED ON WHAT MATTERS

 Rebuilding the overfished striped bass stock to its target level will not be easy. 

Conservation advocates won’t only be facing the usual resistance from fishermen and from fishing industry spokesmen focused on harvest and short-term gain, and from a risk-tolerant Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission that is resistant to change and to making the decisive moves necessary to best assure that recovery of any fish stock, including striped bass.  

This time around, conservative striped bass management is also threatened by the pending Amendment 7 to the ASMFC’s Atlantic Striped Bass Interstate Fishery Management Plan, which could, in the wrong people and states get their way, condemn the bass stock to lower abundance and higher fishing mortality for years into the future.

If there is to be any chance of restoring the female spawning stock biomass to its target level, striped bass advocates will have to walk a narrow and difficult path, remaining assertive in the face of strong opposition while maintaining their credibility by steadfastly sticking to the facts surrounding striped bass management and the striped bass fishery.

As part of that essential strategy, conservation advocates must avoid getting bogged down in peripheral issues that are not essential to the effort of rebuilding the striped bass stock, but waste time and effort while casting doubts on the motives and understanding of at least some in the conservation community.

A good example of what not to do is playing out right now in Massachusetts.

Massachusetts has the largest commercial striped bass quota of all the coastal states, slightly more than 713,000 pounds.  The state had historically kept its commercial minimum size at 34 inches, the minimum set when Amendment 4 to the ASMFC’s striped bass management plan was adopted in 1989, and left it unchanged even after Amendment 5 to the management plan allowed such size limit to fall to 28 inches.  In 2019, due to a dearth of larger striped bass in the population, Massachusetts commercial fishermen did not come close to landing their entire commercial quota.

This year, after the ASMFC adopted Addendum VI to Amendment 6 of the management plan, which called for an 18 percent reduction in striped bass fishing mortality and established a coastal recreational slot limit of 28 to 35 inches, Massachusetts raised its commercial minimum size to 35 inches.  That one-inch increase facilitated law enforcement efforts, as anyone possessing a bass over 35 inches in length, but not possessing a commercial fishing license, was clearly violating the law.  

But striped bass more than 35 inches long are hard to find this year, at least as hard as 34-inch fish were to catch last year.  As a result, Massachusetts’ commercial fishermen are having a very hard time landing their entire quota.  As of 7:15 this morning, August 27, they had landed only about 263,000 pounds of bass, not quite 36 percent of the quota.

That’s a big change from what went on in the recent past, when Massachusetts’ commercial striped bass fishermen typically caught their entire quota, and occasionally just a bit more, before the Labor Day weekend.

Their failure to come anywhere close to doing that today stands as mute and convincing testimony to the sad state of the bass population.  It’s impossible to catch what just isn’t there, and given that after the dominant year class produced in 2003, it took 8years, until 2011, to produce another one.  In between were some years with average spawning success, and a lot of years with below-average recruitment.  Given that a 35-inch striped bass is typically 9 or 10 years old, the typically sub-par recruitment between 2004 and 2010 is showing up in Massachusetts’ commercial fishery.

In Massachusetts, commercial striped bass fishing is only permitted on Mondays and Wednesdays.  Because they have caught so little of their quota so far this year, Massachusetts is proposing expanding striped bass fishing days to Tuesdays and Thursdays, beginning on September 1, and to every day of the week beginning on October 2, provided that the quota has not been filled by then.

Massachusetts proposed something similar last year, but ultimately decided not to go through with it, in part because of the number of comments that it received in opposition to the idea.  It called for comments on the extra fishing days this year as well; the comment period ended last Tuesday, and everyone is waiting to see what Massachusetts will do.

As was the case last year, various organizations, in particular Stripers Forever, are calling on Massachusetts to take no action on the proposal, and only allow commercial bass fishing on two days each week, throughout the rest of the year.  If Massachusetts decides to take that course, the state’s quota will almost certainly remain unfilled.

Stripers Forever notes that it is

“adamantly opposes this proposal [to increase commercial fishing days], believing that increased commercial fishing pressure on striped bass is a mistake.  In October of 2019, in response to years of diminishing numbers, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) declared that the population of wild Atlantic striped bass was ‘overfished, and overfishing is occurring.’  Commercial and recreational regulations were changed to reduce fishing pressure and begin the process of rebuilding a healthy, sustainable striped bass fishery.

“Massachusetts’ failure to catch its full commercial quota is an indication of the declining quality of the fishery.  In past years the entire [pre-2015] quota of over a million pounds of striped bass was caught within a few weeks.  Furthermore, the minimum commercial size of 35” means nearly all striped bass harvested in Massachusetts are mature, breeding female fish—the very fish needed to propagate the species back to abundance.”

Again, given that the striped bass stock is overfished, any reduction in harvest would be a good thing, and that includes Massachusetts striped bass landings that fall well below the state’s quota.

That being said, Massachusetts’ striped bass fishery is not an existential threat to the stock, probably ranks fairly low in the overall threat matrix, and doesn’t deserve all of the effort that has been focused on it, either this year or last.

The entire commercial fishery, from Massachusetts to NorthCarolina, and including the Chesapeake Bay, is only responsible for about 10 percent of all striped bass fishing mortality.  In addition, the commercial quotas reflect the 18 percent reduction in fishing mortality required by Addendum VI, as well as the earlier 25 percent reduction (20.5 percent in the Chesapeake Bay) imposed by Addendum IV,beginning in the 2015 season.  And if any state exceeds its commercial quota, the overage is taken of that state’s quota for the next fishing year.

The overall commercial striped bass quota established by Addendum VI is a little under 5 million pounds, and the amount of striped bass that remain uncaught in Massachusetts is about 450,000 pounds, or about 10 percent of the overall commercial quota—which in turn makes up only 10 percent of all striped bass fishing mortality.

So what we’re ultimately talking about is 10 percent of 10 percent—that is, a mere 1 percent—of overall striped bass fishing mortality.

That’s just not a big deal, particularly when we’re talking about a quota that already reflects an 18 percent reduction from 2019 figures.

What is a big deal is recreational fishing mortality, which accounts for 90% of all bass killed by fishermen.  But it’s kind of strange, because when it comes to recreational overages—overages, mind you, and not just fishermen catching their allotted quota—the recreational community is remarkably quiet.

For example, there is no commercial striped bass fishery in New Jersey, yet New Jersey still has a commercial quota.  So-called “gamefish” advocates, such as Stripers Forever, claim to be opposed to a commercial striped bass fishery, yet they have never voiced any opposition to New Jersey’s so-called “bonus” stripedbass program, which allows recreational fishermen to kill a portion of thatstate’s commercial quota—even though all of that kill is composed of 24 to28-inch fish, including a preponderance of immature females that never had a chance to spawn, not even once.

Objectively, dead is dead, and those bass killed in the bonus program are just as dead as they would have been if killed by commercial fishermen, yet the “gamefish” folks raise no objection.  They didn’t even object last spring when New Jersey was seriously considering (although it ultimately decided against) amending its bonus program to allow anglers to keep a fish over 43 inches in length which, in Stripers Forever’s words “are the very fish needed to propagate the species back to abundance.”

The impact of such a move might not have been too much different than allowing Massachusetts’ commercial fishermen to catch bass on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but for some reason, the “gamefish” advocates apparently thought it was OK.

To its credit, Stripers Forever did oppose the use of “conservation equivalency” to set recreational regulations, and approach that allowed states such as New Jersey and Maryland to get away with overly liberal rules that resulted in an Addendum VI more likely to fail than succeed.

But no one complained a few years ago when, instead of reducing its recreational striped bass fishing mortality by 20.5 percent, as it was supposed to pursuant to Addendum IV, Maryland actually increased fishing mortality by 50 percent in 2015, and kept it excessively high for years after that.  And the excess wasn’t trivial over that time; Maryland anglers landed about 720,000 bass in 2012, and if they made the required mortality cuts, should have landed no more than about 572,000 in each year between 2015 and 2019; instead, the actual figures for those years were 1,112,000, 1,546,000, 1,092,000, 993,000, and 765,000.

Yet if, by some unlikely chance, Massachusetts’ commercial fishermen end up exceeding their 2020 quota because of the extra fishing days, they will have to repay that overage in 2021, while Maryland’s anglers suffered no consequences at all as a result of their failure to make the reductions required by Addendum IV; Maryland wasn’t even required to amend its regulations when the 2015 overage came to light. 

If anything, Maryland anglers were rewarded for their non-compliance, for when conservation equivalency was calculated pursuant to Addendum VI, it was based on the 1,092,000 fish actually landed in 2017, and not the 572,000 that would have been landed, had the 20.5 percent reduction been achieved.

Given that the average fish caught by anglers in Maryland weighs far more than 1 pound, that means that for the years 2015-2019, Maryland anglers landed a greater poundage of fish, in excess of what they should have landed, in each of those years, than Massachusetts’ commercial fishermen might possibly land in 2020 as a result of the extra fishing days—and even if they land the full 450,000 pounds, they will still be within their quota, not over it.

Yet none of the folks who rail against the possibility of Massachusetts’ commercial fishermen catching their 2020 quota raised their voice when Maryland anglers overfished by so much for so long, and were allowed to get away with it.

Which suggests that hostility toward the commercial sector, and not conservation, drives their efforts.

And that, in turn, affects their credibility when it comes to striped bass management issues.  For it's always easy to conserve someone else's fish, but far, far harder to conserve your own.

The bottom line is that, in order to rebuild the striped bass, we must reduce fishing mortality.  And with 90 percent of the fishing mortality driven by the recreational sector, that means we must focus on the recreational fishery to get the job done.

Yes, commercial landings need to be cut too, and in proportion to the recreational reductions.  But focusing on the commercial fishery, without giving the recreational fishery the attention that its harvest demand, won’t get the job done.

If we want to rebuild the striped bass stock to its full potential, we need to focus on the primary problem, and not waste time on peripheral issues.

And we need to accept that as anglers, the primary problem is us.