ANGLERS RIGHTS GROUPS RENEW DISHONEST ASSAULT ON FEDERAL FISHERIES MANAGEMENT

 

About four years ago, a group that then called itself the Center for Coastal Conservation, along with a number of affiliated entities, issued a report titled “A Vision for Marine Fisheries Management in the 21^st Century; Priorities for a New Administration.”

The assemblage of organizations supporting the Center’s report was similar to the collection of groups supporting the Modernizing Recreational Fisheries Management Act—the so-called “Modern Fish Act”—in recent years. 

There were anglers’ rights groups such as the Coastal Conservation Association and Recreational Fishing Alliance, each trying to find ways to let anglers kill more fish and escape any accountability should their overfishing threaten the continued health of fish stocks. 

There were industry organizations such as the American Sportfishing Association and National Marine Manufacturers Association, which apparently believed that the promise of greater short-term profits, derived from anglers killing more fish than they should, somehow offset the risk that if fish stocks declined too far, there might not be any profits at all. 

And there were groups such as the Congressional Sportsmen’s Foundation and Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, which generally did good work on other issues, and seemed to have no clear interest in weakening the federal fishery management system, but apparently received some benefit from trying to do so.

About a month after that report came out, the Center for Coastal Conservation changed its name to the Center for Sportfishing Policy, noting that

“The new name more accurately reflects the Center’s purpose, which is to organize, focus and engage recreational fishing stakeholders to shape federal marine fisheries management policies.”

As the Center’s President, Jeff Angers, stated

“Recreational fishing and boating are two of America’s oldest and most beloved pastimes.  They are family-friendly activities that connect people to nature and help them to develop an abiding respect for our natural resources.  We hope that our new website will help lawmakers and the general public gain a deeper understanding of how current federal fisheries law is disenfranchising America’s recreational anglers to the detriment of resource conservation and the country’s economy.  Revising federal law and agency guidance will ensure fair and reasonable access to America’s marine fisheries, and improve fisheries management to guide the future of recreational fishing and boating.”

The name change was a commendable exercise in honesty (for the past half-dozen years or so, I have felt that, in the interests of ethical marketing, the Coastal Conservation Association, which once was a legitimate conservation organization, also ought to change its name to something like the Coastal Sportfishing Association, to reflect its pivot from prioritizing the health of the resource to an anglers’ rights agenda).  

The comments about the Center seeking to influence federal fisheries legislation and policy also ring true.  As for the rest, the professed concerns about “respect for our natural resources” and “resource conservation” and such, it’s probably best to just say that actions speak louder than words, and that the Center’s record on conservation is dismal enough to say all that needs to be said in that regard.

The report that purported to provide “Priorities for a New Administration” was a perfect example of that, laying out an agenda that made a nebulous and factually-unsupported case for undermining the federal fisheries management system in order to let anglers pile more dead fish on the dock while angling- and boating-related businesses piled up bigger profits—at least while the party lasted, and before the country’s fish stocks came crashing down.

And unlike the Center’s name change, the Priorities report was certainly not a model of forthrightness and full disclosure.

Now, with another Presidential election looming, a new version of the report has been issued.  This one bears an almost identical title—“A Vision for Marine Fisheries Management in the 21^st Century; Priorities for the Next Administration”  [emphasis added], which seems to suggest that the Center doesn’t believe that the current Trump Administration will be sticking around—and almost identical content.

As I’ll soon demonstrate, the new report isn’t any more forthright than its predecessor, and both share many of the same, one might call them, “alternate” facts.  But it’s in the places where the two reports differ that the essential dishonesty of both is revealed.

Both the 2016 and 2020 versions of the reports are based on a few misleading premises.  One is that recreational fishermen generate greater economic returns than does the commercial sector, while accounting for only a very small percentage of the fish landed.  Another is that managing federal recreational fisheries through the use of hard quotas is inappropriate.  A third is that state managers do a better job of managing fisheries than their federal counterparts do.

To understand why each of those statements is deceptive, it’s necessary to look at some hard numbers—something that both reports try very hard not to do. 

The first premise—that recreational fishermen generate economic returns that equal or exceed those of the commercial sector, while catching far fewer fish—is probably the only one of the three that contains even a small grain of truth. 

Depending on how fisheries are valued—and economists can use different approaches, that will place different values on identical fisheries—the recreational fishery may well be more valuable than the commercial fishery (it’s interesting to note that even the Center's two reports value the recreational fishery differently, with the 2016 version claiming that saltwater angling generated $70 billion in “economic activity,” which may be defined as “the activity of producing, buying, or selling products or services,” while the 2020 version talks about $74 billion in “sales impacts,” a less well-defined term; it isn’t clear whether “sales impacts” is synonymous with “economic activity,” but one must wonder why, in reports which use much of the same language, those terms were different).

And it’s true that overall commercial landings are much higher than overall recreational landings.

But what the reports fail to state is that much of the commercial landings involve fish of little or no interest to anglers, which are sought by industrial fleets.  I wrote about just this issue two years ago, when I noted that, while it was true that 2015 commercial landings totaled about 9.8 billion pounds, which dwarfed anglers 170 million pound harvest, much of the commercial landings were comprised of things anglers couldn't care less about, such as 3.26 billion pounds of walleye pollock, 1.63 billion pounds of menhaden, and 699 million pounds of Pacific cod.  But when you get down to the fish that anglers actually want to catch, in many cases, it turns out to be anglers who account for most of the kill.

Going back to 2015, just to keep using the same point of reference, Atlantic-coast anglers accounted for about 95 percent of all wahoo landings, 94 percent of the cobia, and 90 percent of the dolphin.  In the South Atlantic, anglers landed 89 percent of the mutton snapper, 86 percent of the yellowtail, 64 percent of the greater amberjack, and 60 percent of the red grouper.  In the Mid-Atlantic, they landed about 74 percent of both the black sea bass and bluefish.

And that’s just the federally-managed species.

At the state level, Atlantic-coast anglers harvested 95 percent of the red drum, 89 percent of the tautog (“blackfish”), 84 percent of the black drum, 83 percent of the spotted seatrout, 81 percent of the sheepshead, and 60 percent of the pompano.

And the last benchmark stock assessment showed that anglers are responsible for fully 90 percent of all fishing mortality for striped bass.

Thus, far from the report’s reassuring reference to

“the scientific reality of the light footprint recreational access has on our fishery resources,”

the hard data shows that, when it comes down to the fish species that really matter—that is, the ones that anglers typically pursue—the recreational fishery’s footprint is far from “light.”  In fact, it’s more like the footprint one might make jumping off of a riverbank in a pair of hobnailed boots.

Which makes one wonder why the Center, in its report, tries so hard to ignore, dissemble—I’m sorely tempted to say lie about—and mislead the targeted policymakers about that particular fact. 

The only reason I can see for doing that is because the truth is just not on the Center’s side.

Then we come to the Center’s constant refrain that

“recreational fishing is a fundamentally different activity than commercial fishing, requiring different management approaches.”

Certainly, the commercial sector is typically comprised of a relatively small number of individual fishermen, who each land large volumes of fish, while the recreational sector is its mirror image, featuring a large number of fishermen who each land small numbers of fish—if they land any at all.  But what that scenario fails to admit is that while individuals may each only land one or two fish, collectively, the recreational fishery may land millions of pounds of a single species; as mentioned above, for many species, recreational landings can far exceed those of the commercial sector.

So why, exactly, should the sector responsible for the lion’s share of removals not be constrained by a hard quota, and not be held accountable if it overfishes?

The Center’s report evades that question, instead throwing up smokescreens such as the statement that

“The Magnuson-Stevens Act relies heavily on fixed, hard-poundage quotas…”

(which is true)

“…that can be managed in real-time, often using limited entry and catch share programs,”

The smoke in that statement emanates from the word “can” because. while hard-poundage quotas can be managed in real time, they don’t have to be.  The typical current practice of setting a recreational harvest limit—effectively, a hard-poundage recreational quota—and then adjusting regulations after the season ends, based on the fishery’s performance, works quite well to constrain recreational landings.

Anglers don’t like the consequences, in the form of additional restrictions, when they overfish, and the Center argues that

“Recreational anglers need predictable, dependable access to healthy and abundant fisheries,”

but achieving such access doesn’t require an overthrow of the federal management system.  There’s a much simpler approach that will even help to assure that fisheries remain “healthy and abundant.”

Don’t try to catch every last fish.

Instead, recognize that there is management uncertainty in every landings estimate.  Rather than adopting a recreational catch limit equal to anglers’ share of the acceptable biological catch (ABC), and basing the recreational harvest limit on that, regional fishery management councils might simply incorporate a buffer that accounts for such management uncertainty into its calculations, adopt an annual catch target lower than the recreational share of the ABC, and base the harvest limit on that.  The National Marine Fisheries Service actually suggests such an approach, which would significantly reduce the likelihood that recreational overharvest would force managers to adjust regulations on a near-annual basis.

The use of a more conservative annual catch target would go a long way to ensure that federal fisheries managers could maintain the sort of predictable, dependable regulations that the Center seems to be seeking.

Of course, such an annual catch target would also reduce the recreational kill, which may be why the Center is suggesting a more radical approach.  While an annual catch limit would be an effective conservation measure, we’re talking about the Center for Sportfishing Policy here; they’re not the Center for Coastal Conservation anymore.

Thus, instead of promoting sound conservation measures, they make unsupported attacks on the federal management system, hoping that increased harvest will be the result.

And so we come to the Center's final—yes, this time I’ll say it—lie, that state fisheries managers do a better job than their federal counterparts.  This is one of those things that, no matter how you play with the numbers, is demonstrably untrue.  

Just start with the 2020 report’s statement that

“States are now the experts at managing—very successfully—numerous fish species such as red drum, spotted sea trout, and snook.”

You see, the 2016 version of the report tried to say the same thing, but worded it just a little differently.  In 2016, that line read

“States are the experts in managing—very successfully—numerous fish species such as red drum, spotted sea trout, and striped bass.  [emphasis added]”

But that sentence had to be reworded for 2020, because the truth is that state managers, managing cooperatively through the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, didn’t manage striped bass “very successfully” at all.  In fact, they completely screwed the pooch—and not just once, but on numerous occasions.

There was November 2011 when, after being told that the stock would become overfished within six years, they declared the striped bass a “green light” fishery and made no move to tighten regulations, even though recruitment had been sub-par for years.

Then, there was August 2014 when, after a benchmark stock assessment informed ASMFC’s Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board that fishing mortality had been above target, and female spawning stock biomass below target, for a few years, state managers failed to initiate a 10-year rebuilding plan, even though the ASMFC’s striped bass management plan explicitly stated that they “must” do so.

After that, there was October 2016, when state managers learned that, instead of reducing their fishing mortality by 20.5 percent, as the management plan required them to do, anglers in the Chesapeake Bay had actually increased such mortality by more than 50 percent.  And the state managers did nothing.

So it was hardly surprising that when the most recent stock assessment was completed in 2018, it found that the striped bass stock was both overfished and subject to overfishing.  In response, managers adopted a new addendum to the management plan, that has less than a 50 percent chance of reducing fishing mortality to the target level.  But once again, state managers failed to initiate a rebuilding plan, despite the management plan’s clear requirement that they do so.

So yes, it’s pretty clear why the Center might not want to mention state manager’s “success” with striped bass in the 2020 report…

The problem is that the state managers on the East Coast, working through the ASMFC, haven’t been any more successful in managing other species.  Right now, of the 24 fish stocks and stock complexes managed by the ASMFC, only five are listed as “not overfished/not depleted.”  Eleven stocks are “depleted” or “overfished,” while the condition of the rest is “unknown.”

That’s hardly a record of state management “success,” despite the Center’s claims to the contrary.  In fact, the state managers at the ASMFC have been so unsuccessful that, in the more than 75 years of the ASMFC’s existence, that organization has failed to rebuild even one overfished stock, and then maintain such stock at sustainable levels in the long term.

If we look at the Center’s other two examples of “very successful” state management—red drum and spotted sea trout—we only find more failures. 

In Texas, state managers have been unable, or unwilling, to constrain recreational harvest of either species to levels that can be supported by natural reproduction.  Instead, anglers chronically overfish, and their landings can only be sustained by hatcheries, the pump many thousands of man-made fish into coastal waters.  As the state itself admits,

“Texas Parks & Wildlife Department’s marine hatcheries produce juvenile red drum, spotted seatrout and southern flounder for stock enhancement…It serves as a tool used by TPWD to manage the marine fishery along the Texas coast to ensure that harvest levels are sustained and stocks are replenished.  [emphasis added]”

Thus, in Texas at least, sustaining harvest levels is deemed more important than sustaining naturally reproducing fish stocks at levels that are sustainable in the long term.  Such reliance on hatcheries is a tacit admission that the state's fishery management process has failed, for good fisheries management is all about constraining harvest to levels that are naturally sustainable in the long term.  Hatcheries, on the other hand, are all about maintaining levels of harvest that are not naturally sustainable.

Thus, in Texas at least, it’s hard to argue that state fishery managers have successfully managed either red drum or spotted sea trout.

In Louisiana, red drum seem to be doing OK, but spotted sea trout are having serious problems.  Data indicates

“serious problems with statewide estimates of spawning stock biomass, spawning potential ratio and fishing mortality.”

It appears that the stock has been overfished since 2014, overfishing has occurred in 6 of the last 10 years, and the proportion of older fish—age three and older—in the population is the lowest ever recorded.  Yet managers are only now considering measures to rebuild the spawning stock.  ‘

Mississippi recently also took action to rebuild its spotted sea trout population, which managers allowed to shrink to low levels, while, just last year, Alabama biologists found that that state’s spotted sea trout

“breeding stock are not at a sustainable level.”

Such facts give lie to the Center’s claim that management or red drum and spotted sea trout are “very successfully” managed at the state level.  (It should be noted that the foregoing discussion was limited to fisheries in states bordering the Gulf of Mexico, as Atlantic states’ fisheries managers haven’t even been able to figure out whether their red drum and spotted sea trout fisheries are overfished or not, which in itself is raises questions about the efficacy of state management efforts.)

The Center’s related claim that

“many coastal states have created world-class data systems to manage their coastal and marine fisheries.   The State systems have proven far more accurate and timely than the Federal system, and NOAA Fisheries should recognize such certified programs as the best available science”

is also dishonest, and needs to be debunked.

The statement seems to draw a distinction between the “state” recreational fisheries data systems and the “Federal system” when, in fact, the state systems are merely a supplement to the federal Marine Recreational Information Program.  In the words of the National Marine Fisheries Service,

“Since last December, NOAA Fisheries has certified designs for three surveys in the Gulf of Mexico:  Louisiana’s all species, general survey LA Creel; Mississippi’s red snapper-specific Tails ‘n Scales; and Alabama’s red snapper-specific Snapper Check.  Florida’s Gulf Reef Fish Survey, which supplements MRIP’s general surveys for a limited group of reef fish species, is expected to be certified later this year.  Each survey uses a different methodology to gather data and produce estimates based on the unique characteristics of the state’s fishery…

“The MRIP state surveys are designed to improve regional monitoring of the recreational red snapper catch and effort.  Estimates from these surveys can be used for federal scientific stock assessments and fishery management once there is a transition plan that describes how to integrate state and general data, and how to calibrate new and historical catch and effort estimates.  [emphasis added]”

Thus, in truth, there are no separate state and federal data systems; the state angler surveys are, in truth, incorporated into the Marine Recreational Information Program, and are intended to supplement, and not supersede, the federal fisheries data-gathering process.  The Center’s language suggesting otherwise is just not true.

And even if the Center was accurate in that respect, just who has determined that "State systems have proven far more accurate...than the Federal system"?  Should we just take the Center's word for it?  Because it certainly didn't provide any proof that might support such a claim.

Once again, the Center is just trying to relax recreational fishing regulations, by seeking to use raw data from the state surveys, which has not yet been calibrated to work with the federal data gathering system and, in its raw form, suggests that anglers caught fewer fish than indicated by the federal estimates.  But calibration is necessary to allow managers to consider the state and federal data in the same context.  Without calibration, the state data is worthless.

The bottom line is that the 2020 report, like its predecessor from 2016, is a deceptive and essentially dishonest document, intended to mislead policymakers in what the Center seems to believe will be “the Next” Biden Administration, and convince them to abandon the proven federal fishery management system in favor of management approaches that will allow a larger recreational kill, while disclaiming any real recreational responsibility for the health of fish stocks.

Frank Herbert’s classic science fiction novel, Dune, begins with the words

“A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct.”

There is no more profound a beginning than a change of Presidential administrations.

And if we cannot balance the Center’s self-serving demands with a steadfast support of science-based management and the long-term health of fish stocks, then any balance that may have existed will be destroyed.

If that happens, the fish, and ultimately all fishermen, will surely suffer.