My wife and I were in the mood for fresh fish, so last Wednesday, we climbed into the boat and headed out through Fire Island Inlet.
I pulled back the throttles maybe 20 miles out, where we
found a swarm of dolphin—mahi-mahi—hanging around an offshore buoy. We started casting bucktails and poppers, and
it wasn’t too long before we had enough fish, ranging from small “chicken
dolphin” to the (very) low double digits, in the fish box to guarantee that our fresh fish drought was over, but also to provide another half-dozen
packages of vacuum-packed fillets to serve as a frozen reserve against future
slow times.
It was the sort of trip that happens countless times every
day off Florida and the other southeastern states, and that has been happening there since anglers first started taking their boats offshore. But we were fishing out of Long Island, New
York, not Florida. Up here, anglers looking to take
home some fish have historically targeted fluke (summer flounder), scup or,
more recently, black sea bass; those who liked somewhat oilier fare might add
bluefish to their list.
Making directed trips for dolphin, as the most likely
way to put fish in the freezer is, for Long Island, something fairly new.
We always had a few dolphin around, but when I started
fishing offshore forty or so years ago, they were never something that you
could count on.
You might have one grab a lure intended for tuna while
trolling out in the canyons, or maybe closer inshore if an eddy of warm, blue water broke off from the Gulf Stream and moved onto the continental
shelf. You might come across a log or a
board while fishing offshore that had a few dolphin sheltering in its shade, or
you might be surprised when a larger dolphin picked a bait up in the chum slick
while you were drifting for sharks.
Back then, when dolphin were caught, they tended to
be happy accidents, targets of opportunity that you caught once in a while, but
never intentionally targeted.
Recently, that has changed.
Dolphin had been growing ever more abundant over the past couple of
decades. Maybe a dozen or so years ago,
they finally reached the tipping point, where an angler heading offshore any
time between mid-July and mid-September could reasonably expect to run into
dolphin, and could target them with a very good chance of success.
For the climate is certainly changing, the ocean is warming,
and fish stocks are shifting as a result.
Some of the shifts, like that of the dolphin, seem to be beneficial. Fish are more available to the north, with no apparent reduction of their numbers in southern waters (or, at least, no reduction due to climate shifts; there are signs that fishing activity may be reducing dolphin numbers off the southeastern U.S.).
Black
sea bass seems to be another win-win situation. Recruitment seems to be driven by water temperatures at the edge of
the continental shelf, where the young fish spend their first winter; in recent years, warming winter water temperatures seem to be
responsible for the spike in black sea bass abundance off southern New
England. At the same time, different
stocks of black sea bass extend from New England into the Gulf of Mexico, and
there is no sign that the species is abandoning southern waters.
But other climate-related shifts aren’t so benign.
When I was a boy, I fished for winter flounder year-round;
although fishing was best in the spring and the fall, I could always find a few
fish even during the dog days of August.
Now, warming waters seem to be pushing flounder out of the southern portion
of their range; even
as far north as Rhode Island, the population is only a very small fraction of
what it was a few decades ago. There is well-grounded speculation that other
coldwater species, such as cod and pollock, are also moving north in response
to increasing ocean temperatures.
Climate change wreaked some of its worst havoc on the southern
New England stock of American lobster. Over
ten years ago, the biologists of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries
Commission’s American Lobster Technical Committee released a report titled “Recruitment
Failure in the Southern New England Lobster Stock,” which observed,
“Overwhelming environmental and biological changes coupled
with continued fishing greatly reduce the likelihood of [the southern New England
stock] rebuilding. There has been a
widespread increase in the area and duration of water temperatures above 20oC
throughout [southern New England] inshore waters. Long term trends in the inshore portion of
[southern New England] show a pronounced warming period since 1999. Prolonged exposure to water temperature above
20oC causes respiratory and immune system stress, increased incidence
of shell disease, acidosis and suppression of immune defenses in lobster…Loss
of optimal shallow habitat areas is causing the stock to contract spatially
into deeper water… [citations omitted]”
The Technical Committee viewed the state of the southern New
England stock to be dire enough to justify a 5-year closure of the fishery,
although the American Lobster Management Board opted not to take such action.
Which gets us to the core question: When faced with clear evidence of shifting
stocks, and of the impacts of climate change on both fish stocks and fishermen,
what are fishery managers willing to do to address such situations?
So far, the answer has been “Nothing much.”
In the
case of southern New England lobster, the American Lobster Management Board
asked a panel of three internationally-recognized experts to peer review the
Technical Committee’s report. After two
of the three panelists effectively endorsed the Committee’s suggested 5-year
moratorium, and the third panelist opined that such moratorium wasn’t necessary
so long as fishing effort was immediately reduced by 50 to 75 percent, the
Management Board
decided that it was more important to try to preserve the lobster industry than
it was to preserve the lobster itself, so it merely tried to reduce landings by
10 percent, and let the lobsters figure out how to deal with the warming
seas on their own.
In
the case of various finfish, a recent article in Hakai magazine noted that
“While those with smaller trawlers usually remained in their
traditional grounds…those with larger vessels (over about 20 meters) would
sometimes embark on longer voyages from their home ports to follow their target
fish to new waters…
“…regulations may be incentivizing these long voyages. Each port has a quota for a specific fish
that is based on past harvest levels, with higher catch histories resulting in
higher quotas. This can mean a ready
market for landing catches—even if the species is no longer abundant in nearby
waters…some captains have become itinerant in response to these
incentives. Rather than returning to
their home port to land their catch, they will travel to different ports along
the coast where they can best exploit quota allocations.”
The logical response would be for the regional fishery
management councils to reallocate quotas in a way that reflects the current
spatial distribution of fish. However, both
fishermen and fishery managers are chronically backward-looking; they insist on
trying to conform today’s fisheries to patterns of catch, fish distribution,
and landings that existed several decades in the past, instead of trying to
shape today’s fisheries in a way that will make sense in the future.
Thus, in the mid-Atlantic, we saw
a recent summer flounder stock assessment report that
“summer flounder are shifting northeast over time, and this
shift has continued in recent years…the shift northward is evident even in small
fish. Indeed, recruits seem to be
shifting northward at a faster rate than spawners, suggesting that they are not
merely tracking the expansion of spawners northward. There are apparent changes in spatial
distribution of summer flounder over the last four decades with a general shift
northward and eastward…”
It would seem to make sense for the Mid-Atlantic Fishery
Management Council to abandon the current allocation among the states, which is
based on where the fish were in the 1980s, for a new allocation
based on where the fish are now, or even on where the fish
are likely to be in the future.
But when the Council tried to do just that,
its efforts were stonewalled by representatives from the lower mid-Atlantic,
who no longer had many summer flounder off their shores, but still held plenty
of quota that they had no intention of giving up. The general tenor of their arguments was
summed up by one fisherman who said,
“Managers shouldn’t take what people have, and give it to
other states,”
regardless of whether the people who have such quota have to
sail 500 miles to catch it, while fishermen in the “other states,” who have
summer flounder right outside their ports, lack the quota needed to land it.
Part of the problem is that the
Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, which governs all
fishing in federal waters, lacks any meaningful standards for how allocation
and reallocation decisions ought to be made. A discussion
draft of a Magnuson-Stevens reauthorization bill, that started making the
rounds last December, would have created a “Shifting Stocks Task Force,” composed
of 10 persons who were
“Federal employees, State employees, Tribal and Indigenous
representatives, academics, or independent experts, [who] shall have strong
scientific or technical credentials and experience, and shall not include
members of the Regional Fishery Management Councils. [emphasis added]”
Such Task Force would be charged with developing
“in consultation with the Administrator [of the National Marine
Fisheries Service] and the Regional Fishery Management Councils, science-based
decision-making criteria to make allocation determinations that minimize the
risk of overfishing and maximize stock and ecosystem resilience to the effects
of climate change, are consistent with the national standards [for fishery
conservation and management], the other provisions of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery
Conservation and Management Act..., regulations implementing recommendations by
international organizations in which the United States participates (including to
closed areas, quotas, and size limits), and any other applicable law.”
Establishing such allocation criteria wouldn’t have been a
mere academic exercise, as the discussion draft also provided that
“The Task Force shall make recommendations to the
Administrator and to the Regional Fishery Management Councils recommendations
[sic] for the allocation and distribution of fishing privileges based on the
criteria developed…”
The discussion draft would have even created a mechanism by
which
“Any member of the public may submit a petition to request
the review of potentially shifting stock…
“If the Task Force makes a determination…that a petition
contains sufficient information, the Task Force shall review such petition…
“Upon completion of a review…the Task Force shall determine
which Regional Fishery Management Council’s or Councils’ geographic area of
authority the fishery is located in; and submit to the Administrator, each
Regional FishNery Management Council, and the petitioner written
recommendations for allocation and distribution of fishing privileges within
the fishery. [internal numbering and
formatting omitted]”
Needless to say, the idea of a panel of independent experts,
who would devise science-based criteria for allocating and reallocating fishing
privileges (meaning that “It’s the way we’ve done it for the past fifty years!”
would no longer qualify as a valid allocation criterion), and was empowered to
make allocation recommendations to both the regional fishery management
councils and the head of NMFS, didn’t go over to well with the folks who lived
where the fish used to be, and were still sitting on seemingly obsolete quotas.
They made their opinions known, and when
Representatives Jerrod Huffman (D-CA) and Ed Case (D-HI) introduced their Sustaining
America’s Fisheries for the Future Act earlier this summer, the Shifting Stocks
Task Force had been deleted from the bill, although other, less prescriptive
provisions addressing the shifting stocks issue remained.
That’s unfortunate, because right now, there are no clear guidelines
that address how the regional fishery management councils must address shifting
stocks.
As I said at the beginning of this essay, climate change is
real, and shifting stocks are a real consequence of that change, particularly
in New England and the mid-Atlantic. But
right now, there are no legally-binding standards to address the issue.
When it comes to allocation criteria, “They were always our fish, and we don’t want to give them away
to anyone else,” remains the state of the art.
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