FORAGE FISH MANAGEMENT: MORE COMPLICATED THAN IT APPEARS

Everything has to eat something.

Even a single-celled plant, dependent largely on sunlight, needs nitrates, phosphates, and other chemicals to survive.  While that might not quite constitute eating, it makes the key point:  No form of life is wholly self-contained.

When dealing with animals, there is no ambiguity.  Some eat plants, some eat other animals, some devour a little of both.  In the ocean, the notion that big fish eat smaller fish is generally true, although something like a basking shark will always show up to create an exception.  But in the ocean, where single-celled life shares the water with things like the great whales, there is one category of life that ties the food web together, and links drifting plankton to the largest free-swimming creatures on Earth—the forage fish.

“Forage fish” is not an easy term to define.

In the broadest sense, it is any fish that is preyed upon by another animal; and in that context, even the word “fish” isn’t limited to what most people think of when they hear that word—aquatic vertebrates that breathe through gills and lack limbs with any sort of digits—but is better defined in the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act as

“finfish, mollusks, crustaceans, and all other forms of marine animal and plant life other than marine mammals and birds.”

Thus, we see the Omnibus Unmanaged Forage Amendment, adopted by the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council in 2016, include protections not only for finfish such as anchovies, silversides, and halfbeaks, but also for some species of squid, and for krill, copepods, and four other types of marine crustacean.

Forage fish are such an important component of the marine ecosystem that there is broad consensus that they need to be managed for their ecosystem, rather than their economic, values, although some well-known and respected biologists aren’t completely on board with that idea.  But in the fish-eat-fish ocean, where the broad definition of “forage fish” could include the yellowfin tuna preyed on by blue marlin as well as the menhaden engulfed by humpback whales, the first step in the management process probably requires a narrower, more workable definition of just what a “forage fish” is.

A bill currently making its way through Congress, the Forage Fish Conservation Act, (S. 1484/H.R. 5770) sponsored by Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) in the Senate and Debbie Dingell (D-MI-12) in the House of Representatives, tries to do that, by providing that

“…the Secretary [of Commerce] shall issue a definition of the term ‘forage fish’ for the purposes of this Act.  In defining such term, the Secretary shall determine factors including whether a species covered by such definition, throughout such species lifecycle, is at a low trophic level; is generally small- to intermediate-sized; occurs in schools or other dense aggregations; contributes significantly to the diets of other fish, marine mammals, or birds; and serves as a conduit for energy transfer to a species at a higher trophic level.  [internal formatting omitted]”

Effectively, the legislation allows Congress to punt on deciding just what a “forage fish” might be, and leaves the final decision up to an agency that has greater expertise in the field, while providing some general guidelines.  

The language also seems to suggest that the agency designate which species constitute “forage fish,” although that designation could presumably be done not only at the species, but also at the genus or even order level (e.g., by designating the order Clupeiformes as forage fish, the agency could, with one swipe of the pen, include all of the herrings and anchovies within such), in order to achieve some level of bureaucratic efficiency.  It’s not an unreasonable approach, although it does leave some questions unanswered.

Perhaps the biggest of those unanswered questions is what would be done about fish that otherwise meet the guidelines included in the legislation, but which are already subject to a fishery management plan which emphasizes economic benefits and single-stock sustainability, rather than a species’ ecological role.

It’s probably significant that, in creating its omnibus amendment, the Mid-Atlantic Council limited the amendment’s reach to unmanaged forage, which didn’t already support a significant commercial fishery.  As the amendment was being drafted, significant controversy arose over whether chub mackerel, a forage species that was currently unmanaged, but was already supporting a new and growing commercial fishery, should be included in the unmanaged forage amendment. 

The final compromise was to leave it in the amendment but, instead of limiting possession to 1,700 pounds per trip, as was true of all of the other included forage species, to permit fishermen to land 40,000 pounds of chub mackerel per trip, subject to a 2.86 million pound annual limit, until such time as the species could be included in the Atlantic Mackerel, Squid, and Butterfish Fishery Management Plan.  The amendment to do so was approved by the National Marine Fisheries Service in 2020, and chub mackerel are no longer deemed to be an unmanaged forage species.

Yet fish still eat them.  Although a recent study shows them to be a minor part of the diets oftuna and billfish in the mid-Atlantic region, anecdotal evidence suggests that they have become important forage for coastal sharks, and particularly the common thresher, in the upper mid-Atlantic, but no research confirming that role has yet been done.

More recently, there has been interest in creating another fishery for an unmanaged forage species in the mid-Atlantic, the threadfin herring.  New Jersey-based Lund’s Fisheries has proposed that NMFS issue it an exempted fishing permit, that would allow Lund’s to escape the 1,700 pound trip limit currently applicable to the species, and instead allow it to land in the neighborhood of 80,000 to 100,000 pounds of thread herring per trip, and 6,600,000 pounds of thread herring in the exempted fishery’s first year.

Such application effectively renders the protections for unmanaged forage provided in the Mid-Atlantic Council’s amendment meaningless, so long as existing law allows exempted fishing permits to be issued.

So the relevant question, so far as the Forage Fish Conservation Act is concerned, is whether the law intends that the Secretary of Commerce exempt forage species that do, or may in the immediate future, support significant fisheries from “forage fish” designation, and whether the Secretary would be empowered to remove species from the forage fish list should new fisheries emerge.

After all, some already-managed fish, such as Atlantic herring, Atlantic mackerel, butterfish, and both Ilex and longfin squid support significant commercial fisheries, but are also important forage species.  Atlantic herring and Atlantic mackerel are,in addition, both overfished, and so unable to provide their full benefits to either the ecosystem or to the fisheries that pursue them.  

Should forage fish protections extend to such species or, regardless of their role in the food web, should they remain subject to their traditional, fishery-oriented management plans?

The legislation pending in Congress seems to include at least some species currently subject to a management plan, as it defines “forage fish” not only as any species designated by the Secretary (in actuality, by NMFS), as discussed above, but also as,

“with respect to a species in a fishery managed pursuant to a fishery management plan or plan amendment that is approved by the Secretary…any species identified in such plan as a forage fish.”

Such definition, should it become law, could lead to strange outcomes.  Within just the Atlantic Mackerel, Squid, and Butterfish Fishery Management Plan, only butterfish would be clearly be eligible for forage fish treatment, as the original butterfish management plan, adopted in 1978, states that such plan

“is designed to optimize long-term yield recognizing the importance of butterfish as a forage species and thereby contributing to the overall productivity of the ecosystem.  [emphasis added]”

Amendment 5 to the fishery management plan makes tangential reference to squid as a forage species, saying that

“squid provide forage for several important recreational species, including striped bass, bluefish, flounder, and grey trout,”

although whether that would be enough to meet the definition of “forage fish” under the proposed law would probably be an issue decided by the courts.  A similar reference in Amendment 11 mentions northern gannets feeding on mackerel and squid.  However, neither amendment used language as unambiguous as that in the butterfish management plan with respect to either Atlantic mackerel or Ilex and longfin squid.

Amendment 20 did clearly state that

“chub mackerel are considered a forage species due to their schooling behavior and relatively small size.  They are both a forage species and a predator of other forage species.”

Yet that seemingly clear language was qualified by a statement that

“their role as prey for any predators in this region cannot be accurately quantified with the currently available data,”

and given the outcome of the recent study referenced above, which found that chub mackerel are not an important prey species for some of the most important pelagic finfish, it’s not clear that the amendment’s designation of chub mackerel as a forage fish would stand.

Thus, the debate over forage fish, and whether they should be managed primarily for their role in the ecosystem, or for their economic utility, continues. 

The Mid-Atlantic Council seemed to answer that question in 2016, when it adopted its unmanaged forage amendment, which seemed to prevent the creation of new fisheries until the protection of forage species’ ecosystem roles were assured.  But the simple expedient of obtaining an exempted fishing permit allows fishermen to circumvent the intent of the amendment, and renders its value moot.

The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission seemed to answer the question, at least with respect to Atlantic menhaden, at its August 2020 meeting, when it adopted biological reference points based on menhaden’s role as a forage fish.  Yet just two months later, at the ASMFC’s October meeting, the Commission’s Atlantic Menhaden Management Board set catch limits for 2021 and 2022 that were likely to exceed the fishing mortality target in both years, casting doubt on its commitment upholding the biological reference points when economic considerations intervene.

The Forage Fish Conservation Act, if passed and signed into law, would represent a step forward in forage fish management.  Yet it, too, fails to provide a clear answer of what must take priority, when ecosystem and economic concerns collide.

Thus, while effective forage fish management may be an important aspect of maintaining healthy, fully-functional coastal ecosystems, given the competing considerations, it will probably me a long time, if ever, before such forage fish management becomes commonplace.