ASMFC BEGINS THE REAL WORK OF DRAFTING STRIPED BASS AMENDMENT

 This morning, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Atlantic Striped Bass Plan Development Team met to begin the hard work of refining the options to be included in the draft Amendment 7 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Striped Bass, which is scheduled to be unveiled at the ASMFC’s October meeting.

The discussions only addressed the four issues that the Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board voted to include in the draft amendment:  Management Triggers, Conservation Equivalency, Recreational Release Mortality, and Protecting the 2015 Year Class.  Such discussions were fairly wide-ranging, and sought to consider multiple options. 

As I listened to the talks, I thought about how lucky we—and the striped bass—were that so many important issues, such as rebuilding times, plan goals and objectives, and biological reference points were already removed from the draft amendment, because it was clear that, although a number of good ideas were put on this morning’s table, the PDT was still clinging to some of the old paradigms that have poorly served the striped bass in the past.

If we should have learned anything from history, it is that striped bass—and ultimately the striped bass fishery—benefits when decisive and meaningful management actions are taken, and is harmed when managers waffle.  And we should have learned that many Management Board members will try to waffle, and not take decisive action, if given the chance to do so.

That being the case, the provisions ultimately included in Amendment 7 need to be clear and unambiguous, and set forth in language that doesn’t give the Management Board significant opportunities to exercise its discretion.  Unless “flexibility” is excised from the management plan, every opportunity to pursue “flexible” solutions will be used to weaken, delay, and/or completely avoid needed actions.

For a glaring example of that, we only need to look back on the November 2011 Management Board meeting when, despite a stock assessment update warning that overfishing would occur within six years, the Management Board declared striped bass to be a “green light” fishery, and rode that declaration all the way past the biomass threshold, and into overfished territory.

Will management trigger discussions misfire?

Thus, the first discussion, which addressed Management Triggers, left me feeling more than a little concerned.

There are currently five such triggers.  Management Trigger 1 requires fishing mortality to be reduced to target within one year, if overfishing occurs.  Trigger 2 requires the stock to be rebuilt in no more than 10 years if it becomes overfished.

Management Triggers 3 and 4 are analogues of Triggers 1 and 2, but deal with less critical situations.  The former is tripped if fishing mortality exceeds the target—but not the threshold—level for two consecutive years, and female spawning stock biomass is below its target in one of those years; in such case, the Management Board has one year to reduce fishing mortality to target.  The latter is tripped when spawning stock biomass drops below target—but not threshold—for two consecutive years, and fishing mortality exceeds target in at least one of those years.

When you look at the way those triggers are structured, one thing becomes clear:  If the Management Board does its job, then absent some truly extraordinary circumstances, triggers 1 and 2 should never be tripped, because early intervention initiated pursuant to trigger 3 and/or 4 should remedy any problem well before it develops into the sort of crisis situation contemplated by triggers 1 and 2.

Thus, if Amendment 7 modifies the management triggers at all, it should do so in a way that would require prompt action when a threat to the stock first arises.  If, despite such action, things get so bad that triggers 1 or 2 are tripped, Amendment 7 should assure that immediate action is taken to prevent a bad situation from evolving into something much worse.

But that’s not where the PDT seemed to be going.  Instead, today they considered options that would promote delay.  It seems that the traditional ASMFC pro-harvest bias, and the related belief that it is far worse to take management actions that, in the end, might not have been needed than it is to not take badly needed actions until a bad situation deteriorates even farther, still appear to prevail.

The PDT seemed to look favorably on options that involved some sort of rolling average of fishing mortality and/or spawning stock biomass, or that would delay taking management action until the impacts of a previous management measure could be determined.  With respect to fishing mortality-based triggers, some expressed concern about the “variability” inherent in recreational data, and questioned the wisdom of taking action based on a single year’s data from the Marine Recreational Information Program.

Such arguments might appear to be reasonable, but could lead the management process astray, particularly  if they delayed action after Management Triggers 1 and/or 2 were tripped, and the threat to the bass stock was already dire. 

Massachusetts biologist Nichola Meserve acknowledged that issue when she asked whether her colleagues were considering changes to all of the fishing mortality- and biomass-related management triggers, or only to 3 and 4; she was advised by others that, for now, triggers 1 and 2 would be included in the discussions, although that might change later on.

That’s not a good thing for, as I noted earlier, triggers 3 and 4 have a very different function than triggers 1 and 2.

Triggers 3 and 4 are designed to nip a problem in the bud, before the bass face a serious problem.  But if triggers 1 or 2 are tripped, the bass are already in trouble, and face a problem that must be addressed right now.  Thus, if the spawning stock biomass drops a little below target for a couple of years, while fishing mortality gets a just a little too high—the current Trigger 4 scenario—perhaps it makes sense to wait another year or two to confirm that fishing mortality really is excessive.

But if the stock drops below the biomass threshold—if the stock is already overfished—the time for waiting is over, and the time for action has come.

Trigger 4 may be the only trigger where some modification—perhaps looking at whether the biomass is trending up or down—is justified.  Even Management Trigger 3 is a little different, as it already defers action until fishing mortality exceeds target for two consecutive years, which should be enough to address the variability issue, and justify management action.

Once we get to Management Triggers 1 and 2, any delay in taking action is unacceptable; if those triggers are tripped, it means that the moderate management actions taken pursuant to Management Trigger 3 and/or 4 have failed, and more radical actions are called for.  Amending either trigger to allow managers to defer taking action in such situation would only provide further evidence demonstrating why the federal fishery management system, which legally obligates managers to prevent overfishing and promptly rebuild overfished stocks, is superior to the system that prevails at the ASMFC, and why the ASMFC system is badly in need of reform.

In addition to the four fishing mortality- and biomass-based triggers, the PDT also addressed Management Trigger 5, which deals with low recruitment.  Currently, in order to trip that trigger, the juvenile abundance index must be in the lower 25% of all recruitment values for three consecutive years, a requirement so stringent that the trigger has never been tripped.  In its discussion, the PDT considered a number of possible options that might prove to be more effective triggers but, in the end, will seek the Technical Committee’s advice on possible changes, which is undoubtedly the right thing to do.

Progress on conservation equivalency

After that, the PDT went on to discuss options for conservation equivalency.

From a conservation standpoint, that discussion went quite a bit better than the discussion of management triggers.  There seemed to be general agreement among all who spoke that the Management Board’s current approach to conservation equivalency was inappropriate and needs to be reformed. 

There was a thorough discussion of whether the use of conservation equivalency should be limited to times when the stock is in generally good health, and is not overfished, experiencing overfishing, or undergoing rebuilding; however, one PDT member raised the question of whether, in a rebuilding situation, any prohibition of conservation equivalent measures would continue after the stock was no longer overfished, even if spawning stock biomass still fell short of its target.

Max Appelman, who represents the National Marine Fisheries Service and used to be the ASMFC’s Fishery Management Plan Coordinator for striped bass, referred to some states’ “abuse” of the conservation equivalency process, and noted that conservation equivalency didn’t become a hot issue until such abuse became manifest during the adoption of Addendum IV to Amendment 6 to the Atlantic Striped Bass Interstate Fishery Management Plan.  He seemed to support limiting conservation equivalency to situations where there is a biological reason for adopting equivalent regulations, saying “That’s what this [concept of conservation equivalency] is all about,” and added that conservation equivalency is “Less about stakeholder wants and needs.”

Restricting conservation equivalency to such situations would certainly limit its use, and probably also substantially limit its abuse.  Still, one PDT member seemed to want to reopen Pandora’s Box, arguing that socio-economic concerns and the need for “fair and equitable access” should also be grounds for conservation equivalency, even though socio-economic arguments can be crafted to fit just about any situation.

The most disappointing aspect of the conservation equivalency discussion was the PDT’s seeming reluctance to impose accountability on states that adopted failed conservation equivalency measures.  Once again, PDT members seemed uncomfortable with using a single year of MRIP data for accountability purposes although, in that regard, Toni Kearns, the Director of ASMFC’s Interstate Fisheries Management Progaram asked the key question:   Why not use MRIP to hold states accountable, if their conservation equivalency proposals were also based on MRIP data?

Such reluctance to impose accountability was coupled with a reluctance to require a minimum probability of success for conservation equivalency measures.  The biggest obstacle to doing so is management uncertainty; angler effort and the spatial distribution of bass changes from year to year, and such changes also impact both state and coastwide landings.  Such uncertainty can’t be quantified in a way that would allow a probability of success to be calculated.

Thus, it makes sense to create a buffer designed to offset management uncertainty.  For example, if the coastwide measures adopted by the Management Board would reduce a state’s landings by 40%, such state might be required to propose conservation equivalent measures that would achieve, say, 125% of such reduction (in this example, 50% rather than 40%), to allow for management uncertainty.  Some members of the PDT seemed to like that idea, and found it workable. 

As with the management triggers, the Technical Committee will be consulted on conservation equivalency options.

Release mortality in a recreational fishery

And then the PDT moved on to the issue of recreational release mortality.

it recognized that release mortality was a challenging issue to address, but still failed to recognize, despite many comments alluding to it during the recent hearing process, the essential character of the recreational striped bass fishery.

While many anglers will take a bass or two home over the course of a year, the recreational fishery is, primarily, just that:  recreational.  It is about venturing out on the water, and trying to catch striped bass.  The recreational striped bass fishery is not a subsistence fishery.  It is not even a “meat” fishery, in the sense that the summer flounder or scup fisheries are.  It is a recreational fishery, and to fully exploit its potential, catch and release must play a big part.

Thus, it makes no sense to separate recreational release mortality from other forms of recreational fishing mortality; instead, managers must focus on reducing recreational fishing mortality as a whole.  As Max Appelman noted, recreational releases’ contribution to overall fishing mortality has remained relatively consistent from year to year.  That’s because recreational fishermen derive most of their enjoyment from the mere act of striped bass fishing, not in killing fish to take home.  In recent years, over 90% of all bass caught were released.  By releasing so many fish, the striped bass anglers themselves have shaped their fishery, and in doing so have informed managers as to how their fishery ought to be managed.

But that wasn't acknowledged at the PDT meeting.  Instead, the focus was only on reduciung release mortality, whether through gear-related measures such as banning gaffs or treble hooks, or through effort controls intended to reduce the number of recreational striped bass trips, and so reduce angler interactions with the striped bass.  

While the gear controls might be worth looking at, and there is merit in some of the proposed effort controls, such as prohibiting fishing when water temperatures lead to excessive release mortality, and prohibiting fishing in spawning areas (personally, I would be very happy to see angling in Raritan Bay outlawed until May 15, to protect the big female bass that stage there before ascending the Hudson River), there was also another line of comments that, if followed to its logical conclusion, would seek to impose seasonal closures on striped bass anglers.

Mr. Appelman opined that it would be difficult to rebuild the fishery when “50% of the mortality is unmanaged,” a sentiment that he expressed more than once.

Yet, if the striped bass fishery is managed as a recreational release fishery, the issue of “unmanaged” release mortality goes away, for managers would then be looking at a fishery in which 90% of the mortality—that is, recreational release mortality combined with recreational landings—could be managed very easily, by using reductions in landings to offset a constant, or even a slightly increasing, level of release mortality.   

For reducing overall fishing mortality is the only thing that matters; the bass don’t care why or how they die, even if some people dwell on the issue.

Again, this is one of those discussions that is colored by the ASMFC’s traditional pro-harvest bias, which makes it difficult for the PDT to accept the idea that recreational release mortality is neither better nor worse than recreational landings, particularly when managing striped bass largely for catch and release might be the best way to both rebuild the striped bass and generate the highest level of social and economic benefits from the fishery, while at the same time maintaining the fishery’s essential nature.

To protect—or not protect—the 2015s

Finally, the PDT addressed the 2015s.

By that time, the meeting was nearing its end, so the discussion of what many anglers consider the most important issue of all, protecting the 2015 year class, wasn’t given much time.

Some PDT members seemed to believe that, by the time Amendment 7 became effective, it would be too late to take meaningful action to protect the 2015s in any meaningful way.  That may, in fact, be true although, as some PDT members noted, there may be other year classes out there that could contribute to the rebuilding if also given adequate protection.  (Two candidates might be the 2017 and 2018 year classes, which had Maryland juvenile abundance indices of 13.19 and 14.78, respectively, just slightly above the long-term average of 11.6.)

The PDT also never discussed whether it would be possible to require states to protect the 2015s no later than May or June 2022, even if the other provisions of Amendment 7 didn’t become effective until 2023.

The idea of adopting protections that only affected certain year classes seemed to concern a few PDT members, while the tactic that successfully rebuilt the striped bass after the last collapse—protecting at least 95% of the females in a particular year class until they could spawn at least once—didn’t seem to appeal to many of the PDT members, largely because it would involve annual changes to striped bass regulations (although adopting a 35-inch minimum size would probably get the job done with only a single regulatory revision).

Simon Brown, a Maryland biologist, suggested that it might be more important to protect the overall year class structure, rather than specific year classes.  While there’s probably merit in that approach, it  doesn’t address the question of how to rebuild the stock by 2029 without the 2015s (and perhaps without a meaningful assist from the 2017s and 2018s, too).

Again, with respect to this issue, the PDT will probably have to wait until it sees what advice the Technical Committee might provide.

The bottom line

While the first PDT meeting on Amendment 7 produced a few good ideas and quite a few other ideas that weren’t quite as promising, no final decisions have yet been made with respect to the contents of the draft Amendment 7.  Nothing has been scribed in stone.  Only a few tentative suggestions have been made so far.

Emilie Franke, the Fishery Management Plan Coordinator, is going to appoint teams of PDT members to address each of the four issues, and put some preliminary thoughts and options together.  Those options will then be reviewed and discussed by the PDT, run by the Management Board at its August meeting, and then further refined for inclusion in the draft Amendment 7 that will be debated by the Board in October, and eventually sent out for public hearing.

That means there is a long time, and plenty of opportunity, for the PDT to get things right.  And we need to remember that, among all of the proposals that will be put forth in the final draft amendment, status quo will always be among the options. 

Those of us concerned with striped bass management will have to stay on top of things, and take what opportunities we have to keep the PDT, the Management Board and, in particular, our own states’ representatives to the Management Board on the straight and narrow path.

We can be assured that the states that wanted to undercut effective, conservative striped bass management, states like New Jersey and Maryland, will try to use the draft Amendment 7 process to limit their losses and undo some of the progress made at the May 5 Management Board meeting when, despite all of their efforts, the striped bass scored a big win.

And we can be assured that the representatives of other states, in New England and elsewhere on the coast, who stood strong for striped bass conservation on May 5 will do what they can to keep the momentum from that May meeting going.

There’s no guarantee of how the process will end, but if conservation advocates remain vigilant, stay in touch with like-minded folks on the Management Board, and turn out in numbers when the next round of hearings is held, there is a fair chance that Amendment 7 will be, if not perfect, then at least a document that will put the striped bass in a better place than tne one it is in today.