ARE FISHERIES MANAGEMENT PRIORITIES SHIFTING AGAIN

 

Not all that long ago, marine fisheries management was a scattershot effort, with no coherent, overarching philosophy.  Regulations were adopted on an ad hoc basis, to address supposed problems as they arose.  

There was no Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act to end overfishing and rebuild overfished stocks.  There was no Atlantic Coastal Fisheries Cooperative Management Act, to bring some order to inshore fishery management on the East Coast.

Instead, just about all management was addressed on a state level, where local politics and local concerns drove the process, with science and the needs of fish stocks both a secondary consideration, if they were considered at all.

When I was a boy growing up along the southwest Connecticut coast during the 1960s, there was only one regulation we had to deal with, a 16-inch (fork length) minimum size for striped bass.  Even that rule wasn’t based on the bass’ biology, but rather on the fact that northeastern markets weren’t interested in bass any smaller than that.

By 1960, commercial striped bass fishing had been outlawed in the Nutmeg State, but that was just political posturing, as bass killed by anglers were just as dead as bass killed by commercial fishermen, and there was no limit on the number of striped bass that a single angler could retain.  Since, in those days, conservation wasn’t something that bass fishermen really thought about, and just about every “keeper” was kept, the ban on commercial landings didn’t provide much benefit to the striped bass.

In those days, most of the truly adept striped bass fishermen sold their bass to local restaurants and markets with complete impunity, regardless of the rules.  About all that you could say in favor of the state’s “gamefish law” was that it left such anglers free to illegally market their catch without having to compete with legitimate commercial fishermen, which I suppose was a benefit of sorts, if you looked at things from the poachers’ perspective.

But the bottom line was that, whether one was talking about anglers, commercial fishermen, poachers, or legislators, the welfare of the fish wasn’t high on anyone’s priority list in those days.  Everyone was pretty much looking out for themselves.

Despite such indifference, there seemed to be a lot of fish around.  Winter flounder were everywhere and, unless the water was sheathed in ice, could be found in greater or lesser numbers throughout the year.  Blackfish (tautog) were also abundant; there were so many that we even caught some while trolling sandworms for striped bass during midsummer.  Bluefish were just coming back in big numbers, and there were porgies (scup) in deeper water.  In the cool months, we caught tomcod and smelt off local piers.

Thus, anglers thought that all was well although, in retrospect, we should have seen that problems were on the horizon.

The first fish to fall was striped bass.  The stock began to collapse in the mid-1970s, as spawning in the Chesapeake Bay declined.  The lack of small fish made it clear that trouble was on the way, but there were still enough big bass around to keep people greedy and maintain their willful ignorance of the problem.  I had a summer job at a tackle shop then, and was on the water just about every day.  I could see the continuing decline of the stock, but customers kept hanging big bass on the store’s scales, and the owner, who was making good short-term money because of such fish, was angered by any talk about conservation.  He encouraged his customers to keep killing fish, and assured everyone who would listen that the striped bass was doing just fine.

But the stock collapsed, despite his assurances.

And it was a lot harder to restore the striped bass to health than it was to collapse the stock.  A lot of that was because the states were jealous of their neighbors, and protective of their own fisheries.  The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, which was then strictly an advisory body, had adopted a plan to rebuild the stock, but it could not overcome states' resistance.  As Nelson Bryant, the outdoor writer for The New York Times, stated in 1982,

“All the states are moving, or striving to move, in compliance—or a partial compliance—with the plan.  In many instances, state legislatures zealously guard their right to regulate fish and game matters.  This almost inevitably results in tedious procedures often vitiated by political considerations.”

Despite the collapse, the needs of the striped bass stock were still not being prioritized.

At about the same time that the bass stock began to collapse, Congress passed the forerunner to Magnuson-Stevens, the Fishery Conservation and Management Act, in response to declining fish stocks.  During the debate over the legislation, the bill was often referred to as “the 200-mile limit law,” because the primary impetus for its introduction was the presence of large, efficient foreign fishing vessels just 12 miles off the coast of the United States.  The foreign fleet was blamed for the domestic fleet’s problems, so it was hoped that the Fishery Conservation and Management Act would push the foreign vessels 200 miles offshore, and so Americanize the local fisheries.  Modernizing the U.S. fishing fleet was also one of the law's priorities.  Once again, protecting parochial interests, and not protecting the fish themselves, was legislators’ primary concern.  

That fisherman-focused mindset was particularly clear in the bill’s definition of “optimum” yield, which was

“The term ‘optimum’, with respect to the yield from a fishery, means the amount of fish (A) which will provide the greatest overall benefit to the Nation, with particular reference to food production and recreational opportunities; and (B) which is prescribed as such on the basis of the maximum sustainable yield from such fishery, as modified by any relevant economic, social, or ecological factor.  [emphasis added, internal formatting omitted]”

Based on that language, regional fishery management councils, and in particular, the New England Fishery Management Council, frequently set quotas above maximum sustainable yield, and so explicitly promoted overfishing, a “modification” that increased short-term economic returns at the expense of the long-term health of fish stocks.

State and federal solicitude for fishermen, at the expense of the fish, had the predictable effect.  Fish stocks continued to decline until Congress stepped up and forced fishery managers to protect the nation’s living marine resources.  Its first step was passage of the Atlantic Striped Bass Conservation Act in 1984.  Such bill recognized that

“The population of Atlantic striped bass has been subject to large fluctuations due to natural causes, fishing pressure, environmental pollution, loss and alteration of habitat, inadequacy of fisheries conservation and management practices, and other causes; and risks potential depletion in the future without effective monitoring and conservation and management measures.  It is in the national interest to implement effective procedures and measures to provide for effective interjurisdictional conservation and management of this species.  [internal formatting omitted]”

The Atlantic Striped Bass Conservation Act gave the ASMFC the authority to impose its preferred management measures on every state between Maine and North Carolina, and effectively shifted the focus of management from satisfying the fishermen in the various states to conserving and rebuilding the striped bass stock.  The result was Amendment 3 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Striped Bass, a document that, to the displeasure of many commercial and recreational fishermen, effectively prevented most striped bass harvest, and so allowed the stock to rebuild.

While that was good for the striped bass, it didn’t help federal fisheries, many of which continued to deteriorate in the face of excessive fishing pressure.  Finally, Congress passed the Sustainable Fisheries Act of 1996 which amended Magnuson-Stevens and, for the first time, prioritized the long-term health of fish stocks over the short-term profits of fishing-related industries.

In stark contrast to the original Fishery Conservation and Management Act of 1976, the Sustainable Fisheries Act no longer allowed regional fishery management councils to countenance overfishing in order to provide short-term economic benefits to the fishing industry; instead, such councils had an affirmative duty not only to prevent or, if necessary, end overfishing, but also to rebuild overfished stocks within a time certain, which in most cases would not be more than 10 years.  The new law also required fishery managers to base their decisions on the best available science, and not on local concerns.

The results were striking.  Nearly all fish stocks ceased their decline, and most began to recover.  Today, 47 once-overfished stocks have been completely rebuilt.  While biologists have been unable to determine the status of every managed stock, where the status is known, 92% are not experiencing overfishing, and 80% are not overfished.  Focusing fishery management efforts on the fish, rather than on the fisherman, has paid real benefits.

Unfortunately, the pendulum has now begun to swing in the other direction, driven primarily by the recreational fishing industry, which is urging managers to consider the short-term impacts that their actions have on fishermen, rather than emphasizing the long-term health of fish stocks.

Although there have always been some members of the recreational fishing community who have opposed management measures needed to rebuild stocks such as summer flounder and prevent anglers from exceeding their share of the landings, they generally constituted a sort of irrational fringe that found reasons to oppose just about any conservation measure that reduced recreational harvest. 

It wasn’t until 2014, and the release of a position paper titled “A Vision for Managing America’s Saltwater Recreational Fisheries,” that mainstream recreational fishing organizations, including those representing the angling and boating industries, began actively pressing for a management system that focused on benefitting fishermen, even if such benefits came at the expense of fish stocks.  Such position paper contained statements that included

“The NMFS should manage recreational fisheries based on long-term harvest rates, not strictly on poundage-based quotas.  This strategy has been successfully used by fishery managers in the Atlantic striped bass fishery, which is the most sought-after recreational fishery in the nation.”

Of course, we later learned that by 2014, the Atlantic striped bass fishery was in serious trouble, and was declared both overfished and subject to overfishing in a benchmark stock assessment completed in 2018, yet the virtues of such “alternative” management approaches are still being trumpeted by the angling industry.

The position paper would also delay the recovery of fish stocks, in order to minimize the short-term economic impacts on the angling industry.  It complained

“The Magnuson-Stevens Act currently states that the timeline for ending overfishing and rebuilding fisheries ‘be as short as possible’ and ‘not exceed 10 years,’ with a few limited exceptions to allow for longer timeframes…”

while supporting a recommendation that

“the regional councils and fishery managers set lower harvest rates that would allow fish stocks to recover gradually while diminishing socioeconomic impacts,”

even though such longer rebuilding times can increase the uncertainty about when—and if—the stock will be fully restored.

Ironically, the recreational fishing industry’s efforts to undercut Magnuson-Stevens came at the same time that many leaders in the commercial fishing industry, an industry that had traditionally been hostile to any sort of regulation, began to acknowledge that conservation benefitted their businesses in the long term.

Recreational industry efforts led to passage of legislation called the Modernizing Recreational Fishery Management Act, usually referred to as the “Modern Fish Act.”  Although the version of that bill was nowhere near as bad as the legislation that was originally introduced, it provided just enough of a framework for an activist fishing industry to use to weaken the existing, science-based recreational management structure.

We saw that earlier this month, when the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council, along with the ASMFC, passed something they and the industry called the “Harvest Control Rule,” even though both Council staff and the professionals who sit on its Scientific and Statistical Committee raised substantial concerns about the measure, which passed largely because it will allow anglers to fish two very abundant stocks, scup and black sea bass, at riskier, and previously impermissibly high, levels.

We also saw it in the Gulf of Mexico where the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council voted to defer calibrating state landings estimates for red snapper until 2023, even though doing so will almost certainly cause one or more states to exceed their red snapper quotas this year, and despite the fact that the director of NMFS’ Southeast Fisheries Science Center had advised the Council that by delaying calibration, 2022 management measures would not represent the best available science.

Last year, the Mid-Atlantic Council adopted a rebuilding plan for the recreationally-dominated bluefish fishery that violated the Council’s risk policy, and required the Council to modify such policy in order to accommodate the plan.  That was the second time since 2019 that the Council voted species-specific amendments to its risk policy in order to adopt a somewhat more fisherman-friendly rebuilding plan, the first time involving the rebuilding plan for the commercially-dominated Atlantic mackerel fishery.

Such actions suggest that fishery managers are now more willing to accept more risk to fish stocks, in order to provide transient benefits to fishermen.  Most of those benefits have accrued to the recreational sector; we have already seen instances at the Mid-Atlantic Council where, after the Council adopted measures that condoned anglers exceeding their harvest limit, representatives of the commercial sector asked whether commercial overages of very abundant species would be handled in the same tolerant way.

Such actions also suggest that the pendulum is swinging away from managers' former precautionary approach, and back toward those of an earlier era, when managers regularly accepted more risk to the stock in order to convey greater benefits to fishermen.  If so, we could be abandoning the management policies that led to the current abundance of many species, and moving back toward policies more likely to lead to overfishing and future depletion.

It's not a direction that managers ought to choose, but right now, it’s very possible that, at least in some regions, it is precisely where they are heading.