At least on the East Coast, and along part of the Gulf of Mexico, there is probably no aspect of the fishery management process that is more reviled, questioned, and misunderstood than the Marine Recreational Information Program, or MRIP, that’s used to estimate recreational fishermen’s catch, effort, and landings.
Part of that is because MRIP estimates are used to calculate
recreational management measures, which can increase restrictions on anglers,
and it’s just human nature to dislike something that keeps you from doing what you want to do.
Teenage kids don't like curfews. Nobody likes the IRS.
But a big part of the reason so many recrational fishermen say bad things about MRIP is because most anglers don’t take the time,
and often don’t want to take the time, to learn how MRIP really works, in order
to gain insight into what it does well, where it falls short, and how it
might be improved.
That is an important
topic, for it is those unavoidable errors, and some members of the angling
community and angling press who point out such errors in uninformed and sometimes just
dishonest ways, that undercut fishermen’s faith in the MRIP data, and
the regulations that such data supports.
“Our sport is in jeopardy of being ruined by a bunch of
bureaucrats who have never caught a saltwater fish and have only seen them in
photos. They are using a set of numbers
designed by a fatally flawed system known as the Marine Recreational
Information Program or MRIP…
“Now, if the NMFS used this data to indicate if the fish
populations were going up or down, that would be bad enough, but no, they use
their figures as if they were an actual count of the number of fish recreational
fishermen caught during a certain time period…
“So where does the horrible information from the fish
counters end up? It goes to the various councils
that have the responsibility of managing the resource. In our case, they are the Mid-Atlantic
Fishery Management Council and the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries
Commission. The MAFMC governs the waters
from the three-mile limit out to 200 miles, while ASMFC governs waters out to
three miles.
“Both agencies must abide by management plans developed long
ago with rules set to trigger certain actions should the spawning stock biomass
drop below a certain level, the species be overfished or overfishing be
occurring…
“…when figuring out the black sea bass recreational quota, which
they call Total Allowable Landings, the fish counters took the bad data from the
new MRIP and applied the even worse data from the old MRIP, and decided that recreational
fishermen had overfished their quota and had to pay it back by giving up a 28
percent decrease in 2022. Now, if that
makes no sense to you, welcome to the club…”
Boiled down, it’s the same old argument that you hear at
just about every fishery meeting: The
bad bureaucrats, who don’t fish, are trying to stop you from fishing or from
taking fish home, because they have no idea what’s going on in the ocean, while
creating more restrictions based on worthless data.
It's the sort of rant that one sees far too often in the
outdoor press, and the kind of thing that all too frequently prejudices anglers
against MRIP and the management process, despite the fact that such rants typically contain absolutely no factual support for their core assertions that MRIP is “fatally
flawed,” and that the MRIP estimates used to regulate black sea bass, or any other fishery, consist solely of either “bad data” or “even worse data.”
“Within their intended scope and design constraints, MRIP
data are critically important for fisheries management.”
Yet a lot of recreational fishermen still adhere to the myth
that MRIP isn’t a valuable fishery management tool. “Ask MRIP” will hopefully help to correct their
misconceptions.
In the recent installment, NMFS began its discussion of error in just the right way—by admitting
that
“While we take steps to reduce errors in our recreational
fishing surveys, it’s impossible to eliminate them entirely. Some errors are inherent in the act of
sampling.”
It then explains how error can enter the survey because
of problems inherent in the survey itself. Survey
size is an important factor; the more people surveyed, the more precise the
survey’s estimates are likely to be.
Overall, MRIP surveys about 100,000 anglers each year. That may sound like a lot, but given that NMFS estimates
that saltwater anglers made about 185 million individual fishing trips in 2018,
the odds of any one angler being surveyed in a given year are something like 1,850
to one.
Thus, when you hear some anglers question the validity of
MRIP estimates, because they’ve never been sampled, it just means that they haven’t
yet beaten the odds.
But those odds get back to two other key contributors to
sampling error, the sample design, which ultimately determines who will be
sampled, and whether the differences among the people sampled is representative
of the differences in the people making up the angling public. NMFS has engaged in substantial research to ensure
that MRIP samples a population that is representative of the angling public,
and notes that
“putting a survey into practice is not the last part of the
process. Any time we implement a survey,
we continue to research sources of error so our existing—and future—survey designs
can be improved.”
Of course, anglers can sabotage MRIP’s accuracy, too. They can provide inaccurate information to a
NMFS surveyor by accident—after all, how many of us keep even an approximate
count of the number of undersized black sea bass we release in a typical day of
fishing offshore wrecks—or by intent, pehaps by an angler who misreports the number of trips he made, in an effort to manipulate the system, in
response to the fishing effort survey, or maybe by a for-hire captain who
intentionally understates the number of fish that his fares release, to reduce NMFS' estimates of dead discards, and so avoid more restrictive harvest
limits.
There are also fishermen who refuse to cooperate with
surveyors, either because they just don’t want to take the time, or because
they really don’t want anyone to see the short summer flounder or over-limit
striped bass that are concealed beneath the lids of their coolers.
Such misstatements and lack of cooperation can also lead to
errors that undermine MRIP data.
But that doesn’t mean that MRIP is “fatally flawed,” or that
its data is bad; it just means that MRIP’s estimates are not as precise as they
might otherwise be. And it’s important
to note that the precision of each MRIP estimate, expressed as the “percent
standard error” is included as a part of the data provided, so anyone using the
data can know just how much confidence they can have in the numbers.
When used the proper way, looking at coastwide landings over
the course of a year, the precision is typically good, at least for the
important recreational fish species; data for seldom-caught species can be much
less precise. When broken down to
specific states, sectors, and two-month “waves,” precision quickly
deteriorates, and data becomes unreliable.
That’s not the fault of MRIP, but of the person misusing such
data.
In the end, MRIP is a tool, that is both very useful and,
when used properly, reliable. Like any
tool, one must know how to use it—and how not to use it—to get
good results.
The “Ask MRIP” program provides a lot of advice on how, and
why, MRIP should be used. Stakeholders who
want to learn how the program really works should benefit from reading the
entire series, including the pieces on how
recreational catch, landings, and effort estimates are generated, and on how
recreational data is collected, in addition to the most recent article on dealing
with estimates’ errors.
And if, after reading all that, they still have a question
that needs to be answered, they can truly “ask MRIP” by sending an email to NMFS.MRIP@noaa.gov.
For it’s far better to ask the experts, and become fully
informed, than to read the rants and distortions of MRIP critics, who never
took the time to learn how things really work.
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