On Wednesday, May 4,
the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Atlantic Striped Bass
Management Board (Management Board) completed its work on Amendment 7 to the Interstate
Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Striped Bass (Amendment 7).
Amendment 7 maintains
the conservation measures adopted in earlier amendments, while embracing
additional improvements to striped bass management that promote conservation
and should help to ensure the success of future management actions.
Such a favorable
outcome didn’t seem likely three years ago, when Amendment 7 was first
proposed. Then, much of the impetus behind initiating a new amendment came from
Management Board members who sought to change the reference points used to gauge the health of
the striped bass stock, in order to lower target abundance while increasing
landings. Such sentiments remained strong a year later, when a Work Group created by the Management Board not only
recommended reviewing the reference points, but suggested that any new
amendment be built around the “themes” of management stability, flexibility,
and regulatory consistency.
Rebuilding the
overfished striped bass stock did not appear to be among the Work Group’s
recommended priorities.
Stakeholders got their
first opportunity to comment on the proposed Amendment 7 after the Public
Information Document for Amendment 7 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan
for Atlantic Striped Bass was released in February 2021. They made it clear that they were far less concerned with
bureaucratic concerns such as stability and flexibility than they were with
seeing striped bass managed for abundance rather than for yield; they also made
it clear that they were very unhappy with the Management Board’s failure to
make any effort to initiate a rebuilding plan for the overfished stock.
The Management Board
heeded the stakeholders’ message, and proposed no changes to either the
reference points or to the goals and objectives of the management plan.
Instead, the draft of Amendment 7 that was finally released for
public review addressed only four issues. Those included proposed modifications
to the so-called “management triggers” that determine when managers must
respond to potential threats to the stock, strategies to reduce recreational
release mortality, rebuilding the overfished stock, and modifications to the
Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s use of “conservation equivalency,” a management tool which allows
states to adopt regulations different from the standard coastwide measures
adopted by the Management Board, provided that such state measures achieve “the
same quantified level of conservation for the resource under management.”
Even limited to those
four issues, the draft Amendment 7 was nearly 150 pages long and densely
worded, facts that led to many stakeholder complaints. Nonetheless, oral and written comments were submitted by about 5,000
individuals and organizations. About 99% of those comments supported strong and
effective striped bass conservation.
Management triggers that
prevent delay
In 2003, the
Management Board adopted Amendment 6 to
the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Striped Bass (Amendment 6), which included five
triggers for management action. Two of such triggers tripped if fishing
mortality rose too high, two tripped if female spawning stock biomass fell too
low, and one tripped if an extended period of below-average spawns led to
recruitment failure.
In the nearly twenty
years since Amendment 6 was adopted, the fishing mortality triggers were
tripped twice, in 2014 and 2019, causing the Management Board to adopt the management
measures needed to reduce fishing mortality back to its target level within one
year.
The biomass triggers
were also tripped in 2014 and 2019. In 2014, the Management Board, on the advice of then-Fishery Management Plan Coordinator
Michael Waine, ignored its clear obligation to initiate a 10-year rebuilding
plan. When the stock was declared overfished in 2019, the Management Board delayed
again, initiating the Amendment 7 process instead of a rebuilding plan. The
Management Board has since committed to drafting a rebuilding plan once a stock
assessment update is completed in October 2022; however, past delays will make
it more difficult to achieve rebuilding by the 2029 deadline.
The recruitment
trigger was tripped only once since 2003. That happened in 2020,
after three consecutive years on very low recruitment in North Carolina’s
Albemarle and Roanoke rivers. Low recruitment in Chesapeake Bay, which
contributed to the stock becoming overfished, never tripped the trigger,
despite recent Maryland Juvenile Abundance Indices that were every bit
as low as they were during the stock collapse of the 1980s.
As part of the drive
for management stability and flexibility, some Management Board members sought
to inject delay into the fishing mortality triggers. They proposed allowing two
years, rather than one, to reduce fishing mortality back to its target level
after a trigger was tripped, and would have required a two-year average of
fishing mortality to exceed the overfishing threshold, rather than just a
single year of overfishing, before management action was needed.
Stakeholder comment
overwhelmingly opposed such delay, and the Management Board opted against both
proposals. To speed up its response to the spawning stock biomass triggers, the
Management Board also approved a new proposal that requires it to adopt a
ten-year rebuilding plan within two years after such a trigger is tripped.
A more sensitive
recruitment trigger was also adopted, which would trip if, in three consecutive
years, the juvenile abundance index for four “core” spawning areas, the Hudson
River, the Delaware River, and the Maryland and Virginia portions of Chesapeake
Bay, fell below 75% of the values for such index during the period 1992-2006.
If such trigger had been part of Amendment 6, it would have tripped three times
since 2003. Should the new recruitment trigger be tripped, Amendment 7 requires
the Management Board to adopt lower, interim fishing mortality reference
points, that reflect the low recruitment, and then apply the fishing mortality
triggers to such reference points to determine whether action must be taken.
A trigger that only
trips three times in nearly 20 years does not seem unreasonably sensitive, but
the Management Board was nonetheless concerned that such trigger might trip too
often, and possibly interfere with a management measure already being considered.
Thus, the Management Board included language in Amendment 7 that allows it to
defer action on any new management measure, if it is already working on another
management action.
Such provision was
contrary to strong stakeholder sentiment; about 99% of all comments opposed
allowing the Management Board to defer action when a trigger was tripped,
regardless of the circumstances.
Closed seasons rejected
About half of all striped bass fishing mortality can be
attributed to fish that die after being released by anglers. In hopes of
reducing such release mortality, the draft Amendment 7 included three proposals
that would have imposed closed seasons that would, in theory, reduce
recreational fishing effort.
One such proposal
would have required each state to impose a closed season at least two weeks in
length, during which even catch-and-release striped bass fishing would be
prohibited, during a period when anglers in such state make most of their
directed striped bass trips. The Management Board was unable to estimate the
fishing mortality reduction generated by any such season, while the Atlantic
States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Law Enforcement Committee stated that any
no-targeting closure was completely unenforceable, as there is no way to prove
that an angler was targeting striped bass and not some other species. Such
considerations led the Management Board to vote against including any such
closure in Amendment 7.
The Management Board
also failed to approve two other proposals intended to reduce angling effort.
One such proposal would have prohibited all striped bass harvest in spawning
areas between January 1 and April 30; the other would have imposed a two-week
no-targeting closure in such areas.
The only release
mortality-related measures approved by the Management Board included a measure
that banned the use of gaffs to land striped bass, and another requiring the
release of any striped bass caught on bait and traditional J-hooks, instead of
the circle hooks already required by the management plan. It is not clear how
much either measure will reduce recreational release mortality.
Steps toward rebuilding
the stock
While the Management
Board intends to initiate a plan to rebuild the overfished stock in October
2022, it is not clear what form such plan might take. However, Amendment 7
contains two provisions that makes it more likely that any such plan will
succeed.
The first recognizes
that the recruitment of young striped bass into the population has been lower
than average in recent years. It requires that, in preparing the upcoming
rebuilding plan, scientists must assume that recruitment will remain at the low
levels experienced between 2007 and 2020. By incorporating a low recruitment assumption
into the rebuilding plan, such scientists can better ensure that the stock will
be fully rebuilt by 2029.
Because 2029 isn’t too
far away, the Management Board also approved a provision which allows it to
fast-track the rebuilding plan, and not go through the public hearing process
that is typically required before changes to the management plan may be
adopted. Doing so will allow the rebuilding plan to go into effect early in
2023 while, if the normal procedures were followed, rebuilding would not begin
until 2024.
Conservation equivalency
reform
Conservation
equivalency is one of the most controversial aspects of striped bass
management, and was certainly one of the most hotly debated topics in Amendment
7. It is defined in the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Interstate
Fishery Management Program Charter (Charter) as “Actions taken by a state which differ from
the specific requirements of the [fishery management plan], but which achieve
the same quantified level of conservation for the species under management.”
As initially
conceived, conservation equivalency would allow states to tailor fishery
management measures to the particular needs of their local fisheries, while
still providing needed protections to the managed stock.
In practice,
conservation equivalency has been abused by states seeking to escape their full
share of the conservation burden. In the most recent example, the management
actions originally included in Addendum VI to
Amendment 6 to the Atlantic Striped Bass Interstate Fishery Management Plan (Addendum VI) had a 50% probability of
reducing fishing mortality to or below the target level; however, after a few
states, most notably Maryland and New Jersey, adopted conservation equivalent
management measures, the probability of success fell to a mere 42%, rendering Addendum VI more likely to fail
than succeed.
Thus, a large
percentage of stakeholders and Management Board members wanted to see
conservation equivalency reforms included in Amendment 7. They got their wish.
The Management Board voted to prohibit the use of conservation equivalency at
any time when the stock was overfished. Because state-level recreational
fishing data is less precise than coastwide data, the Management Board also
adopted a precision standard that prohibited the use of any recreational data
with a percent standard error (PSE) greater than 40 to calculate conservation
equivalent measures.
Stakeholders wanted to
prohibit the use of data with a PSE greater than 30, and a number of Management
Board members, including Massachusetts’ Dr. Michael Armstrong, who made the
relevant motion, agreed that, based on purely scientific considerations, a
maximum PSE of 30 would have been the right way to go. The Management Board
ultimately settled on the less precise standard out of fear that, particularly
in smaller states, more precise data might not be available.
In an effort to address
the uncertainty inherent in state level data, the Management Board also decided
that states adopting conservation equivalent measures would be subject to an
“uncertainty buffer,” which would lead to slightly more restrictive management
measures. Such buffer would impose a 10% penalty on all conservation equivalent
regulations based on data with a PSE of 30 or less (i.e., if the coastwide
rules would have required a state to achieve a 20% reduction, its conservation
equivalent measures would have to achieve a reduction of 22%), which would
increase to a 25% penalty for conservation equivalent measures with a PSE above
30 but no higher than 40.
But the single most
important reform was the Management Board’s decision to define “conservation
equivalency” in Amendment 7 the same way that it is defined in the Charter: Any
conservation equivalency measures adopted by a state must have the same
conservation impact, in that state, as the standard, coastwide measures.
While that result is seemingly mandated by the Charter, the Management Board
had previously chosen to ignore the Charter’s language, and permitted states to
adopt allegedly conservation equivalent measures which only achieved the
coastwide, and not the state-specific, reduction.
The Management Board’s
decision to allow states such as New Jersey to only achieve Addendum VI’s 18% coastwide reduction, instead of
the much larger reduction imposed on such states by the coastwide rules, is the
sole reason why Addendum VI had such a low probability of success. By
prohibiting such abuses of conservation equivalency, Amendment 7 will make it
more likely that future Management Board actions will succeed.
What comes next?
Once its discussions
of conservation equivalency concluded, the Management Board voted to approve
its final version of Amendment 7. The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries
Commission’s Interstate Fishery Management Policy Board approved the completed amendment
on May 5.
Most of Amendment 7
became effective upon such approval, although the two equipment-related
provisions, which ban the use of gaffs and require the release of all bass
caught on bait and J-hooks, don’t need to be adopted by the states until
January 1, 2023. The two rebuilding-related provisions are technically in
effect right now, but will have no practical impact on striped bass management
until the Management Board begins work on a rebuilding plan.
Still, the fact that
Amendment 7 has been completed does not mean that the striped bass debate is
over. Some issues are likely to resurface soon.
If the management
measures needed to rebuild the stock by 2029 prove extremely severe, it is far
from unlikely that some Management Board members will try to argue for a longer
rebuilding period, despite the clear language of the management plan.
And given some
comments made at the last Management Board meeting, it is also likely that some
Management Board members will again argue that the current biomass target and
threshold are unrealistically high, and will try to reduce them, at some
not-too-distant point in the future. When that question arose on May 4, Capt.
John McMurray, New York’s Legislative Proxy, asked Dr. Katie Drew, who leads
the striped bass stock assessment team, whether it is possible to rebuild the
stock all the way to the current biomass target. Dr. Drew answered the question
in the affirmative, based on the current state of the science, but her answer
won’t prevent others from asking the question again.
Even so, that debate
lies in the future. Contrary to early expectations, Amendment 7 represents a
step forward for striped bass conservation, and sets a firm foundation for the
upcoming rebuilding plan.
Right now,
stakeholders should thank the Management Board for a job well done.
-----
This essay first
appeared in “From the Waterfront,” the blog of the Marine Fish Conservation
Network, which can be found at http://conservefish.org/blog/
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