RECREATIONAL FISHERIES MANAGEMENT: THE (INTENTIONALLY?) FORGOTTEN TOOL

 

Saltwater fisheries are never easy to manage. 

Even in the case of the most studied species, there are always some questions about the size of the population, the number of new fish being recruited into the population to replace those that are removed, the magnitude and duration of typical, temporary swings in abundance and the longer-term impacts of a changing climate on the marine environment. 

Most of those issues fall under the general category of “scientific uncertainty,” being matters that are generally connected to the biology of the fish and the productivity of marine habitats.  Although fisheries scientists may not be able to quantify them exactly, they recognize that such uncertainties exist, and try to quantify and account for them when they set the acceptable biological catch (ABC) and annual catch limit (ACL) for each managed species.

Out of all saltwater fisheries, recreational fisheries are particularly hard to manage because they are affected by a different set of unknowns.  While commercial landings are reported in near real time, and largely ground-truthed by the records of the fish docks and wholesalers that purchase the fishermen’s product, recreational landings can only be estimated through the Marine Recreational Information Program (MRIP) which, although reasonably accurate when estimates are used on a regional or coastwide basis, is prone to provide less precise results when data is restricted to a limited time or area, or relates to a species of fish that is only infrequently caught by anglers.

Since the effectiveness of recreational fishing regulations depends on the accuracy of the data that they’re based on, MRIP’s estimates add a degree of uncertainty to recreational fisheries management that doesn’t arise in commercial fisheries. 

Even more uncertainty is added because such regulations assume that future angler behavior will be similar to what it was in the past.  That is a very dubious assumption.  Weather, the relative availability of the regulated species compared to other fish, fuel prices, and even COVID-19, can and do impact how many people go fishing each season, how many trips those anglers make, and what they choose to fish for.

Add to that the unknown number of recreational fishermen who don’t abide by the regulations, and instead take home undersized, over-limit, or out-of-season fish, and even illegally sell their supposedly “recreationally-caught” striped bass, bluefin tuna, etc. to unethical shops and restaurants, and uncertainty grows again.

All of those things fall under the category of “management uncertainty,” which is supposedly one of the things that fisheries managers are supposed to consider when drafting each year’s regulations.  However, unlike scientific uncertainty, management uncertainty is rarely part of the conversation when such rules are established.

That doesn’t appear to be what the National Marine Fisheries Service intended when it published Guidelines for regulations that would comply with National Standard 1, which requires managers to prevent overfishing and constrain harvest to optimum yield, in the Federal Register.

Those Guidelines note that

“Management uncertainty refers to uncertainty in the ability of managers to constrain catch so that the ACL is not exceeded, and the uncertainty in quantifying the true catch amounts (i.e., estimation errors).  The sources of management uncertainty could include:  Late catch reporting; misreporting; underreporting of catches; lack of sufficient inseason management, including inseason closure authority; or other factors.”

The Guidelines then go on to say that

“[Annual catch targets], or the functional equivalent, are recommended in the system of [accountability measures] so that the ACL is not exceeded.  An [annual catch target] is an amount of annual catch of a stock or stock complex that is the management target of a fishery, and accounts for management uncertainty in controlling the catch at or below the ACL.”

They then note that, when setting annual catch limits,

“If an Annual Catch Target (ACT), or functional equivalent, is not used [to account for management uncertainty], management uncertainty should be accounted for in the ACL.”

It all sounds good and logical in theory, and would seemingly make a lot of things simpler in practice. 

For example, the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council is now looking at what it calls a “recreational reform” initiative, which is intended to reduce or eliminate some chronic issues in recreational fishery management, including how to address the known imprecision (“percent standard error’) in MRIP estimates, how to deal with “outlier” estimates in the recreational data which almost certainly are inaccurate reflections of catch and landings, whether and how to best project annual landings from preliminary estimates, and other, similar issues related to recreational fisheries data and resulting regulations. 

They’re important issues.  When catch and landings data shifts from year to year, even if those shifts are within the known margin for error of such data, regulations often change in response, becoming more restrictive in some years, less restrictive in others, with no apparent pattern and based on no change in resource abundance that can be clearly noted by anglers.  Such constantly changing rules can whipsaw anglers and angling-related businesses, making it difficult or impossible to plan for the future, sometimes causing hardship, and often creating distrust in the management system.

However, as all of those issues constitute some sort of management uncertainty, it’s not clear why a multi-year reform initiative should be needed to address the problem, when the desired regulatory stability, along with adequate protections for managed fish stocks, may be achieved much more simply by accounting for such uncertainty in an annual catch target.

Yet the Mid-Atlantic Council’s recreational reform initiative is, in the overall scheme of things, a relatively minor example of ignoring the benefits of an annual catch target.

Not too many years ago, in the Gulf of Mexico’s recreational red snapper fishery, anglers chronically overfished their ACL, but the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council repeatedly failed to account for the management uncertainty that led to such overharvest.  Eventually, things became so intolerable for the commercial fishing sector, which was being hurt by the recreational overages, that some fishermen sued. 

The result was the 2014 court decision in Guindon v. Pritzker, which saw the United States District Court for the District of Columbia find that regulations recommended by the Gulf Council and adopted by NMFS

“were arbitrary and capricious and not in accordance with the [Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act].  Under the MSA, NMFS has a statutory duty to:  prohibit the retention of fish after quotas are reached in the Gulf of Mexico red snapper fishery; use the best scientific information available when making management decisions; require whatever accountability measures are necessary to constrain catch to the quota; avoid decisions that directly conflict with the ‘fishery management plan’s] allocation of catch; and, where sectors are managed separately, avoid penalizing one sector for overages that occur in another.  [emphasis added]”

The District Court didn’t specify what sort of accountability measures were needed to address recreational overfishing, but the chastened Gulf Council ultimately decided on an annual catch target that reduced the recreational ACL by 20 percent to account for management uncertainty.

Unfortunately, that court decision only applied to recreational red snapper in the Gulf of Mexico, and does not govern the actions of other regional fishery management councils nor the management of other fisheries.  Thus, in December 2019, when the Mid-Atlantic Council addressed chronic recreational overharvest in the black sea bass fishery, the reasoning in Guindon v. Pritzker was completely ignored.

Although the Council’s Summer Flounder, Scup and Black Sea Bass Monitoring Committee acknowledged that it was

“Hard to constrain [recreational] catch under high availability [of black sea bass],”

the same situation that the Gulf Council faced with red snapper in the Guindon v. Pritzker scenario, the Monitoring Committee recommended that the recreational harvest limit for black sea bass be

“Set equal to the ACL, no deduction for management uncertainty,”

even though such recommendation was likely to result in 2020 recreational black sea bass landings that exceeded the recreational harvest limit by 26 percent, exceeded the recreational ACL by 23 percent, and could have caused total black sea bass landings to exceed the ABC by 12 percent. 

When the Mid-Atlantic Council decided to go along with such recommendation—a decision that was ultimately also adopted by NMFS—it not only ignored existing management uncertainty, but it also ignored the Guidelines’ advice on how such uncertainty should be addressed, as well as other language in the Guidelines stating that

“ACL cannot exceed the ABC.”

Still, with respect to the Mid-Atlantic Council’s failure to recognize management uncertainty, the worst was yet to come.

Most people will acknowledge that the onset of COVID-19 made 2020 a very bad year.  It was a particularly bad year for the people trying to manage recreational fisheries as, due to COVID-19, both fisheries-dependent data, such as MRIP catch and landings estimates, and fisheries-independent data, including information about stock abundance and recent recruitment, is largely unavailable.

Both scientific uncertainty and management uncertainty abounded, with management uncertainty levels being particularly high.

Yet the Mid-Atlantic Council decided to ignore management uncertainty once again.

In the case of four recreationally-important species, summer flounder, scup, black sea bass, and bluefish, the Mid-Atlantic Council's relevant monitoring committees acknowledged that

“The Monitoring Committee (MC) discussed the impact of Covid-19 on recreational data collection and the ability to generate catch estimates for 2020.  As discussed in the staff memos, due to a lapse in angler intercept sampling due to Covid-19 restrictions, 2020 catch estimates from the Marine Recreational Information Program (MRIP) will not be available until the end of 2020.”

The monitoring committees went on to discuss the issue in further detail, making it very clear that managers were lacking most of the data needed to calculate recreational catch and landings, and so to craft the regulations needed to prevent overfishing.

If there was ever an example of management uncertainty on steroids, that called out for the use of an annual catch target to keep recreational landings under control, this was it.

But instead of considering management uncertainty, the Mid-Atlantic Council merely decided to leave things unchanged, and carry 2020 regulations over into 2021.

That might work out for summer flounder, as an increase in recreational landings was scheduled for next year, and for scup, as commercial landings are typically well below the recreational quota.  It might even work out for black sea bass, despite the fears that the ABC might be exceeded, as COVID-19 resulted in lower than expected commercial landings, which may very well have offset any recreational overage.

But in the case of bluefish, it’s hard to believe that it was OK.

The bluefish stock is overfished, and there are good reasons to believe that overfishing may have occurred in 2020.  Reading between the lines, it almost seemed that although the Bluefish Monitoring Committee recommended status quo recreational rules, it was calling for Council action when it wrote

“To predict recreational landings, the MC typically uses the most recent 3-year average of landings.  The 2017-2019 average landings (20.30 M lbs.) with the same 28.56% reduction that was projected to be achieved under the 2020 management measures yields a 2021 landings projection of 14.50 M lbs.  This landings methodology indicates a potential 73.86% overage of the 2021 [recreational harvest limit] of 8.34 M lbs.  While the MC still recommends status quo recreational measures for 2021, these analyses indicate a potential range of 2021 landings projection estimates that should be reviewed by the Council and Board…  [emphasis added]”

Yet, despite that advice, the Council and [the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Bluefish Management] Board did not carry out any discussion or review of potential 2021 landings projections at all.  Instead, both management bodies blithely ignored the uncertainty surrounding the 2021 recreational harvest limit and approved status quo rules, despite the extremely high level of management uncertainty and the substantial likelihood that overfishing will, in fact, occur.

Even in normal years, when there is no COVID-19 pandemic to add to fisheries managers’ woes, management uncertainty is present, to a greater or lesser degree, in every recreational fishery.  Yet even a cursory look at the rulemaking process will reveal that regional fishery management councils are very reluctant to acknowledge such uncertainty by adopting annual catch targets or, in the absence of such targets, explicitly accounting for management uncertainty when they set ACLs, despite the published Guidelines.

The reason for that is clear.  

By establishing annual catch targets, the regional fishery management councils would be reducing the amount of fish available to anglers.  And in a management system that, largely due to constant pressure exerted by the recreational fishing industry, places undue emphasis on maximizing the amount of fish available for harvest, rather than reducing landings in order to create a buffer against the unknown, lowering harvest limits when not legally required to do so can be viewed as anathema.

That’s particularly true when the majority of the council members are members of the recreational and commercial fishing industries, and would be personally impacted by harvest reductions.

But management uncertainty is real.  It is something that fisheries managers ignore at their peril.

And at our fisheries’ peril as well.