STRIPED BASS AMENDMENT 7: WHAT REBUILDING MIGHT LOOK LIKE

We’re just about a month away from the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s 2022 Winter Meeting, when the Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board will again consider the Draft Amendment 7 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Striped Bass and, most expect, approve a version of that document for public comment.

For a while, it looked like such approval might happen last October, at the ASMFC’s 2021 Fall Meeting, but concerns over the complexity of the draft presented to the Management Board, along with the Board’s new instruction to include a rebuilding provision in Amendment 7, led to the document being remanded to the Atlantic Striped Bass Plan Development Team for further modification.

The addition of a rebuilding provision was good news for the striped bass, as the original draft of Amendment 7 was focused primarily on the procedures used to manage, and hopefully rebuild, the striped bass stock, but never directly addressed the question of how and when such rebuilding would actually take place.

To some extent, that has now changed.  The Plan Development Team met on December 16, and the discussion provided a little more clarity asa to what the rebuilding process might actually look like, at least over the next couple of years.

The good news is that the Plan Development Team appears to be committed to the 2029 rebuilding deadline.  The discussions that took place on the 16^th all assumed that such deadline was firm; there was no talk at all about pushing rebuilding further into the future.

Hopefully, the Management Board will remain equally committed to getting the job done on time.

However, I was surprised to learn that Amendment 7 will not contain any specific rebuilding proposals. Given that the short time until the 2029 rebuilding deadline, and the fact that Amendment 7 won’t become effective until 2023, I had always assumed that concrete rebuilding measures would be included in the document.  But as I listened in on the PDT meeting, it became clear that the only rebuilding issue likely to be included is whether the rebuilding plan will assume “standard”—which, for the purposes of this blog, we can consider “average”—levels of striped bass recruitment during the rebuilding period, or whether it will assume a low-recruitment scenario.  Both approaches will probably be included as options for public comment when the draft Amendment is released.

The PDT apparently intends to include rebuilding measures in a separate addendum to Amendment 7, which will presumably be initiated after the amendment is finally approved, something that won’t happen until at least May, and possibly not until August.  That will make it very difficult—in fact, pretty close to impossible—to have rebuilding measures in place for the start of the 2023 season.

There is a valid reason for such delay.  A stock assessment update will be completed in the latter part of 2022, most likely early in autumn.  Waiting until that update is released will allow the Management Board to adopt measures based on the most recent data.

Current management measures are based on the condition of the striped bass stock at the end of 2017, when the big 2011 year class was just recruiting into the coastal fishery, and the strong 2015 year class was still largely unfished.  Next year’s assessment update will include data through 2021, so will consider the current state of the 2011 and 2015 year classes, as well as the impacts of low Marylandjuvenile abundance indices in 2019, 2020, and 2021, when making projections of future stock abundance. 

Delay will also assure that rebuilding won’t color the Management Board’s final decision on conservation equivalency measures.  

Should the measures needed to rebuild the stock by 2029 prove to be very restrictive, as may well be the case, more Management Board members might tend to support permissive conservation equivalency standards, in order to provide the greatest opportunity for striped bass harvest.  However, if the use of conservation equivalency is sharply curtailed in Amendment 7, as many anglers believe that it should be, it will make it easier for the Management Board to adopt rebuilding measures that will be consistent along the entire coast, and so best protect the fish as they travel through the waters of the various coastal states.

One thing that seemed virtually certain after the recent PDT meeting is that Amendment 7 will not offer special protection to the 2015 year class, nor to the smaller but still important year classes of 2017 and 2018.  Although the Management Board will make the final call on such protections, the Plan Development Team currently plans to advise against them, for a very simple and legitimate reason—calculations made by the Atlantic Striped Bass Technical Committee indicate that protecting the 2015s, and maybe the 2017 and 2018 year classes will have little impact on striped bass rebuilding. 

With or without regulations protecting the 2015, 2017, and 2018 year classes, female spawning stock biomass is predicted to rise above the threshold level at about the same time, and also take the same amount of time to reach the rebuilding target.

There are some caveats around those projections. 

Because fishery managers can’t predict how any change in regulations will impact fishing effort, the projections assume that the current effort levels will be maintained throughout the rebuilding period.  While that may be a questionable assumption—protecting the three largest year classes produced during the last ten years might well dissuade some harvest-oriented anglers from fishing if they’re unlikely to bring a bass home, while the increasing abundance of fish attributable to a rebuilding population will probably cause catch-and-release anglers, and maybe some catch-and-keep anglers, too, to fish more often—it is the only realistic assumption for the Technical Committee to make, as any other option would be nothing more than an unsubstantiated guess.

But it is possible that, if fishing effort changed in response to any attempt to protect one or more year classes, the stock could—but not necessarily would—recover more quickly than if no such protections were put in place.

That leads to another, and perhaps greater, consideration.  The Technical Committee projected the impacts of year class protections out to 2032, the year that the 2018s turn 14 years old and are combined with other, older fish in a single “14+” age category.  Estimates of stock performance grow more and more uncertain the farther out into the future the projection goes.  So while it is possible that a particular combination of regulations might grow the female spawning stock biomass more quickly, there is no way to be sure.  A combination of management measures that included a 2-fish bag limit and 18- to 23-inch slot size in the Chesapeake Bay, coupled with a 35-inch minimum size on the coast, was calculated to result in a spawning stock biomass that, by 2032, was 14% larger than could be achieved with the current management measures (other combinations of Bay and coastal size limits would have theoretically increased SSB by between 1% and 8% by the same year), the “confidence interval,” which denotes the likely error, was larger than that, rendering the supposed 14% difference insignificant. 

In the end, the only way to increase the spawning stock biomass is the simplest and most obvious one:  If we want to have more live striped bass in the ocean, we need to start killing fewer of them.  Reducing fishing mortality is the only way to rebuild the striped bass stock.  We can do that by imposing seasons, when no striped bass fishing—even catch-and-release—is allowed, or we can do it by transforming some portion of the current catch-and-keep fishery, where 100% of the bass tossed into coolers are killed, into an expanded catch-and-release fishery, where 91% of the bass returned to the water survive.

But one way or another, the only way to restore the bass population is by killing fewer fish.

That’s why waiting for the stock assessment update to be released makes biological sense.  The update will tell fishery managers how large the biomass is today, whether it is still in decline, or or whether has begun to increase in response to the management measures put into place for the 2020 season.  Based on that information, the Technical Committee will be able to calculate the fishing mortality rate, deemed F_rebuild, which will restore the female spawning stock biomass to its target level by the end of 2029.  The assessment update will also provide an estimate of the current fishing mortality rate, which is needed to determine what measures will be needed to achieve F_rebuild and keep fishing mortality at or below that level until the stock is rebuilt.

The downside of waiting for the assessment update is that the management measures needed to achieve F_rebuild probably won’t be put into place until 2024, unless the Management Board is willing to impose a mid-season change of management measures at some point in 2023, which is a sort of action that the Management Board has historically been loath to take.  That means that managers will have only five, rather than six, years to rebuild the stock by the 2029 deadline, which in turn suggests that the management measures will have to be more restrictive if they are to achieve their goal.

Put all of that together, and it means that at least some members of the Management Board will probably try to find ways to delay rebuilding, so that the Board could adopt a somewhat more relaxed management regime.

Thus, one of the big, if unspoken, takeaways from the December 16 meeting is that the Plan Development Team is willing and able to put together a rebuilding plan that should restore the striped bass stock by 2029—IF the Management Board instructs it to do so.  Thus, the task that confronts those of us seeking to restore the striped bass stock is to keep the Management Board on the straight and narrow, and prevent them from inserting provisions into Amendment 7 that will permit, and even encourage, further rebuilding delays.

Successfully completing that task, and convincing the Management Board to formally adopt a plan to rebuild the stock by 2029, will undoubtedly be the most challenging part of the entire Amendment 7 process.