ANGLERS' RIGHTS GROUPS DISTORT THE TRUTH ABOUT GULF RED SNAPPER LANDINGS

There’s an old saying that “The facts speak for themselves.”

While such saying usually proves true, it provides little comfort to those making arguments that rely far less on the facts than on emotion and knee-jerk reactions.  The idea of facts speaking for themselves can be downright disconcerting to those who promote a position that isn’t supported by any facts at all.

For a long time, in the Gulf of Mexico’s recreational red snapper fishery facts, represented by things such as peer-reviewed stock assessments and scientifically collected and validated data, have been speaking for themselves very clearly, to the great dismay of a coterie of anglers’ rights, angling industry, and marine business groups, which have been promoting fishery policies that are remarkably fact-free.

That puts such groups in a difficult place, since they have expended quite a bit of money, and quite a bit of institutional and political prestige, promising they’ll find a way for anglers to pile more dead snapper on the dock, regardless of what federal fishery managers say.

For a while, they sort-of succeeded, convincing the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council to divide the private boat recreational red snapper quota up among the five Gulf states, and then let the states figure out the seasons, bag limits and, to a limited extent, size limits that will let their anglers fill, but not exceed, each state’s allocation. 

At first, it seemed like the long, contentious debate over the Gulf’s recreational red snapper fishery might be over.  A spokesman for the American Sportfishing Association, the primary angling industry trade group, said that

“State management of Gulf red snapper has been a game-changer for anglers.  Because of their targeted data collection and their ability to quickly respond to what’s going on in-season, each of the Gulf states has been able to provide substantial red snapper seasons for the private recreational sector…Making this management a long-term reality through the formal approval of Amendment 50 [to the Gulf Council’s Fishery Management Plan for the Reef Fish Resources of the Gulf of Mexico] ensures this great success story will continue for years to come.”

But such statements turned out some troublesome, but unavoidable, facts that I have written about before.

Each Gulf state, in order to administer its portion of the recreational red snapper quota, had to have a way to estimate the number of fish landed by its anglers, and do so quickly enough to avoid overfishing.  So the Gulf states, except for Texas, worked with the National Marine Fisheries Service to develop data collection programs that would supplement NMFS’ Marine Recreational Information Program, and also address the particular data collection needs of each state’s red snapper fishery.  While those state programs were designed to work with the Marine Recreational Information Program, they each used a slightly different methodology, so in order to use the state program data in NMFS’ Gulf-wide red snapper management efforts, the data developed by the different collection methodologies must be calibrated into a single “common currency” that allows the state and federal landings estimates to be compared on an equivalent basis.

When even a rough calibration is done, it shows that some states, most particularly Alabama and Mississippi, exceeded their red snapper quotas.  They caught so many red snapper that those states’ future landings will have to be pared back drastically in order to pay back the overage, as required by the management plan.

State fishery managers weren’t willing to face up to the consequences of such calibration, which would undoubtedly upset many of their anglers.  Alabama even reopened its red snapper season for three extra days in October 2020, to let anglers land fish that, according to Alabama’s data collection system—but not the federal estimates—represented yet-unused quota.

Yet overfishing eventually catches up with everyone.  Alabama and Mississippi may now have to pay back so much over-quota red snapper that they won’t be able to open their recreational seasons in 2022.  The Gulf Council, continuing to ignore the issue, pushed off calibration until 2023, although NMFS has notified the Council that by doing so, and by not basing 2022 state quotas on calibrated data, the Council has violated the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act’s National Standard 2, which requires all management actions to be based on the best scientific information available.

Those are the facts, and they truly do speak for themselves.  Which places the anglers’ rights crowd in a quandary, as the last thing that they want to see is anglers held accountable for their excess landings.

If they rely on the unvarnished facts, their efforts are dead in the water.  Calibration will occur, paybacks will be required, and anglers in some states might not even see a 2022 red snapper season.

They can lie about what’s going on, but lies can be easily fact-checked.

They can also distort the truth, and try to stir up more angler discontent over red snapper management by concealing the facts in a cloud of misdirection.

The latter course was the one that they chose.

Ted Venker, the so-called “Conservation Director” for the Coastal Conservation Association, one of the loudest anglers’ rights groups in the Gulf, recently set out to impugn federal fishery managers in a piece saying that

“…as one Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council member from Mississippi said recently, the states aren’t being asked to exchange money with a stable country; they’re being forced to exchange their money with some exotic, wildly fluctuating cryptocurrency that no one understands.”

He then tries to impeach federal fisheries data by saying

“On a single day in 2017, the federal cryptocurrency data system says recreational anglers in private boats made 16,883 red snapper trips from Alabama ports.  That number would require 64 percent of all the licensed saltwater anglers in the state to be snapper fishing on that one day.  Using an average boat length of 26 feet, that level of activity coming out of Alabama ports would result in a solid bridge of boats—lined up bow to stern—more than 83 miles long…”

The mental image invoked by such language is clearly intended to bias anglers against the federal data calibration process.

But let’s take a longer look at his statements, and see precisely how, and how many times, Venker tried to misdirect readers.

First, whatever happened in the Alabama red snapper fishery during 2017, it occurred three years before separate state quotas were adopted, and so is irrelevant to the current calibration issue.

He then argues that the 16,883 trips made on the day that he cited would mean that 64% of all of Alabama’s licensed saltwater anglers would have been fishing that day.  But Alabama only requires anglers between 16 and 64 years of age to purchase a saltwater fishing license, so any kids, and any older anglers, would not come from the ranks of licensed fishermen.  It’s also unclear whether non-resident anglers were included in Venker’s calculations; if they were not, that already-exaggerated 64% figure would grow even smaller. 

He also grossly overestimated the number of boats needed to make those 16,883 trips. 

Let’s do the math.

If we multiply Venker’s imaginary 83-mile long line of boats by 5,280, we get its length in feet:  438,240.  If we then divide that number by 26, Venker’s alleged average fishing boat length, we find that 16,855 boats would have been red snapper fishing that day, which just about equals the number of trips made.

The problem is, that 16,883-trip estimate represents the number of angler trips made, not the number of boat trips, so for Venker’s calculations to work out, every single red snapper angler would have had to be fishing alone. 

That’s just not the way things work.

Sure, a few might have been alone, but the vast majority of people who run offshore don’t do that.  While I don’t participate in the private boat red snapper fishery, I have been running boats offshore, chasing everything from black sea bass to white marlin, for about forty years, long enough to know that offshore fishing isn’t cheap, and that anglers typically head out together to split the costs of bait, ice, and fuel.  Three or four anglers would typically crew Venker’s hypothetical 26-footer, while larger vessels might often carry six anglers or more.

So, once again, we find Venker manipulating the numbers and distorting reality, in an effort to conceal the facts.

But his most egregious distortions of all came when he tried to use single days’ data to disprove the validity of federal landings estimates for an entire season.

In any compilation of statistical data, one will nearly always find “outliers,” particular data points that fall far outside the rest.  That’s why the precision of any estimate based on statistical sampling is highly dependent on the number of samples taken.

NMFS, in describing the Marine Recreational Information Program, clearly states that

“Sample errors are inherent in sample surveys, and can impact estimate precision.  The size of the sampling error can depend on the size of the sample, the design of the sample, and natural variability within the population being sampled.  (Increasing sample size, for example, generally decreases sampling error.)”

By using single-day examples in his effort to discredit the federal landings estimates, Venker knowingly and willfully used examples likely to contain the greatest level of sampling error.

How great might that error have been?  I don’t have the tools to calculate that answer, but I know that the percent standard error in NMFS’ effort estimates for private boat trips primarily targeting red snapper off Alabama in 2017 was 30.2 for the two month “wave” of May/June, 21.5 for July/August, and 73.9 for September/October.  If those already moderately- to unreliably-high estimates for two-month periods were broken down to data obtained on just a single day out of more than 60, the level of error would skyrocket to completely unreliable and unusable levels. 

Venker knew that, and he used such bad data anyway,  just as he also used the estimate for a single day of private boat red snapper effort off Mississippi in September 2020, when NMFS warned that the percent standard error was 100, and rendered such data virtually meaningless.

It is telling that Venker chose to use such unreliable data, and even distorted such data further, in order to make his case against federal red snapper management.

Because, you see, the facts really do speak for themselves. 

If someone can only support his position by distorting an misusing such facts, that speaks the loudest of all.