GULF RED SNAPPER: COULD THERE BE A DECLINE?

 

Recreational red snapper management in the Gulf of Mexico has displayed the hallmarks of an incipient success.

Current abundance is far higher than it was in 1990, when the spawning potential ratio of the stock—a measure that compares the current spawning potential to that of an unfished population—was a mere 2%, far below the 26% management target that denotes a sustainable fishery.

The most recent stock assessment, completed in 2018, found that the Gulf of Mexico red snapper stock was neither overfished nor experiencing overfishing, although it also noted that

“An important caveat in this result is that under the previous definition of [Minimum Stock Size Threshold] the red snapper resource would still be considered overfished,”

a reference to an action taken by the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council in Amendment 44 to the Fishery Management Plan for the Reef Fish Resources of the Gulf of Mexico which, in effect, moved the goal posts used to define an overfished stock, lowering the minimum stock size threshold for red snapper.  Thanks to Amendment 44, the Gulf red snapper stock went from “overfished” to “rebuilding,” but not overfished with a stroke of a pen, without any increase in red snapper abundance.

A fishery impact statement included in Amendment 44 noted that

“red snapper…would be reclassified from overfished to not overfished but rebuilding.  Despite the reclassification, the rebuilding [plan]…would remain in place until the [stock has] recovered to [its target level].

The fishery impact statement also noted that Amendment 44

“would afford more flexibility to manage the stocks by providing a wider buffer between [the minimum stock size threshold] and the biomass at [maximum sustainable yield].  Therefore, [Amendment 44] would be expected to result in indirect positive economic effects stemming from additional harvesting opportunities that could be made available by the increased management flexibility.  The magnitude of these potential indirect economic benefits would be determined by the additional harvests afforded to recreational and commercial fishermen…”

Amendment 44 was followed by Amendment 50 to the Fishery Management Plan for the Reef Fish Resources of the Gulf of Mexico, which allocated the recreational red snapper quota among the five Gulf states, and allowed those states to adopt state-specific seasons and, within very limited parameters, state-specific size and bag limits, designed to constrain recreational landings to each state’s quota, while better accommodating the particular features of each state’s private boat red snapper fishery.

The big recreational fishing organizations were extremely pleased by the adoption of Amendment 50, with Jeff Angers, president of the Center for Sportfishing Policy, gushing that

“We have reason to celebrate today thanks to the willingness of the state fish and wildlife agencies on the Gulf Coast and the leadership of Secretary Ross and congressional champions like Senator Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) and Representative Garret Graves (R-La.), Steve Scalise (R-La.), and Austin Scott (R-Ga.).  Over the past two years, private recreational and red snapper anglers in the Gulf have become more active partners in the states’ data collection systems and enjoyed much longer red snapper seasons than the federal system was able to provide.”

The recreational spokesmen found even more reason to rejoice when “The Great Red Snapper Count,” a congressionally-funded study designed to estimate the absolute number of red snapper in the United States’ portion of the Gulf of Mexico, revealed that red snapper abundance was about triple the previous estimate, with the increase attributable primarily to snapper found on low-relief bottom that had not been previously surveyed for red snapper, which have long been associated with high-relief bottom structure.

Louisiana Congressman Garret Graves, who has long supported the Center for Sportfishing Policy and its affiliated organizations, said

“There is no doubt this is going to change the entire game in how the fishery is assessed by the federal and state officials.  We’ve made it a point to fully equip the Gulf States with more science and independent data to improve the management of this species so we don’t lose ground on the success we’ve made on conservation efforts…

“Years of working towards these wins will pay off for our conservation efforts, get anglers some more time on the water, and more red snapper in the ice chest for good eating.  I appreciate all of the help and hard work of the Coastal Conservation Association, American Sportfish Association, Center for Sportfishing Policy, [Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership] and all the anglers out there that are the true conservationists that want to assure fishing opportunities for generations to come.  We’ve created a foundation for successful state management of the species through our previous legislation and the results are reflective of the progress we have made.”

If only life were that easy.

It turns out that Amendment 50 wasn’t the panacea that the sportfishing advocates had hoped.  That was largely because the states each used their own approach to estimating recreational landings.  Such approaches provided far more timely estimates than the federal Marine Recreational Information Program but, because they used slightly different methodologies, the data that each state generated wasn’t compatible with the data generated by other states, or by the MRIP surveys.  It would be necessary to calibrate each state’s estimates into a “common currency” that would be compatible with data provided by other states and by MRIP, before the state estimates could be used effectively in the management process.

That wasn’t a surprising outcome.  Fishery managers had understood that reality from the very beginning of the Amendment 50 discussions.

But anglers in Alabama and Mississippi were certainly surprised when they learned that, because of such calibration issues, they had badly overfished their state allocations, and would be facing very substantial cutbacks in upcoming seasons.  

Since, as Rep. Graves noted, the entire point of Amendment 50 and the Great Red Snapper Count was to find ways to give anglers “some more time on the water, and more red snapper in the ice chest for good eating,” the idea of any cutbacks at all, not to mention substantial ones, didn’t go over well.

Suddenly, the same Center for Sportfishing Policy that initially deemed the adoption of Amendment 50 “reason to celebrate” was having second thoughts, at least about the way that federal measure—and we should always remember that Amendment 50 is a federal measure that allows some state input, and not a transition to state red snapper management—has been implemented.  Thus, it complained in The Fishing Wire that

“Just two years after approving a plan to allow the Gulf states to develop their own recreational data collection systems to better manage red snapper and certifying those state programs, NOAA Fisheries intends to force the states to calibrate their data back to the flawed federal data system that caused significant turmoil in the first place.  The federal data system, Marine Recreational Information Program (MRIP), has been widely criticized by many in the recreational fishing community, the states and in Congress, and its limitations are what led to each of the states to develop their own data collection systems.”

The debate over calibration has not yet been settled, although it appears that the National Marine Fisheries Service may finally adopt a calibration system in time for the 2023 season.  However, given the current estimates showing severe recreational overharvest in Alabama and Mississippi in previous years, and almost certainly in this one, it's worth asking whether such overharvest has already impacted the red snapper recovery.

The various sportfishing advocacy groups appear to be relying on the results of the Great Red Snapper Count to bail them out from the consequences of recreational overharvest.  However, the Count only found that there are more red snapper in the Gulf than previously believed.  It doesn’t mean that significantly higher landings levels are permissible, for it’s difficult to predict the impact of one piece of data on a stock assessment, and the results can sometimes be very counterintuitive.  The implications of the Count’s findings on estimates of red snapper productivity, the biomass that will achieve maximum sustainable yield, and perhaps the acceptable level of harvest will remain unknown until a formal stock assessment, which is nearing completion, puts it all into context. 

But right now, there are indications that everything isn’t as rosy as the sportfishing advocates assume.

For the last couple of years, a few of the Gulf charter boat captains who I know have been saying that it is becoming necessary to run farther and farther from port to put their clients on quality red snapper.  While there are a lot of fish on the inshore reefs, they tell me, once the season begins the number and size of those fish quickly decline.  One captain in the eastern Gulf recently wrote

“It’s actually comical that we can actually almost pinpoint the collapse of the red snapper off Alabama.  In 2021, the first 6 days of the private rec season, anglers caught over 465,000 lbs.  It took another 118 days of red snapper season to catch the remainder of the quota.  This year fuel prices were higher but we had very few bad weather days to keep private recs off the water.  State says high price of fuel is reason for extending the season [because private boat anglers haven’t yet come close to catching their quota].  I don’t know many people with $200-800,000 boats that would allow a little fuel to keep them off the water.

“My private recreational friends who fish a lot said they are having a hard time finding any keeper fish on any of their privately built reefs they built in waters out to 45 miles offshore…No surprise there.”

Those are only one person’s observations, made in only one relatively small part of the Gulf.  However, there seems to be corroborating evidence coming out of the western Gulf, too.

This week, the The Daily News of Galveston County [Texas] carried an opinion piece authored by Buddy Guindon, a local commercial fisherman who is very tuned in and understands the intricacies of the fishery management system (it is no coincidence that two successful lawsuits challenging the National Marine Fisheries Service’s misguided recreational red snapper actions are both captioned “Guindon v. Pritzker”).  In that piece, Mr. Guindon notes,

“If you had asked me five years ago if I was worried about red snapper populations in Texas, I would have said ‘no.’

“But I’m not that optimistic today.  Fishery managers have gotten complacent, forgotten where we came from and have put self-interests above conservation and sustainability.

“Our fish stocks are in decline, our commercial fishing voices are being squashed and our fishery managers are playing politics with our livelihoods…

“We expect fishery managers to hold fishermen to their sustainable, science-based limits.  What do we have instead?  Private recreational anglers have voluntary surveys and regularly exceed their quotas, while commercial fishermen have mandatory reporting, mandatory permitting, vessel-monitoring systems and don’t exceed our quotas.

“Now this biased [Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management] Council is pushing to increase the red snapper quota at a time when commercial fishermen, charter fishermen and scientists all over the Gulf are sounding the alarm that the red snapper stock is starting to decline.

“I know what a declining fish stock looks like—I fished hard during the derby days before we developed the individual fishing quota program.  We’re there.”

Again, that is one man’s opinion, even if it comes from someone with vast experience fishing in the Gulf.

But it is one opinion that piles on top of other opinions, and suggests that something may not be right in the Gulf red snapper fishery.

Very soon, a stock assessment will definitively reveal the health of the Gulf’s red snapper stock, and we can stop speculating about the subject.  But even if the assessment’s findings are favorable, here’s something to think about.

There is often a big difference between “abundance” and “catchability.”  

Sometimes, oceanographic conditions converge to create areas of local abundance, even when the overall health of a stock is poor.  Similarly, a stock may be at sustainable levels, but concentrated in places that make it almost impossible for anglers to access (in the northeast, a perfect example of that is whiting (silver hake); the inshore fisheries that we enjoyed through the 1970s collapsed long ago, but the population remains at sustainable levels far offshore, and overall is deemed to be in good shape).

So even if the Gulf red snapper stock is deemed to be relatively healthy, if not completely rebuilt, if most of the fish are scattered over low-profile bottom throughout the Gulf, and relatively few are found on the high-structure pieces that anglers frequent, at least one the season is a week or two old, is the current recreational fishery really sustainable?

Right now, that’s just a hypothetical question.

But given the warnings that we’re hearing, it might not be hypothetical for very long.

 

 

 

 

THE BLUEFISH CONUNDRUM

 

It’s difficult to describe what fishing for bluefish was like in Long Island Sound forty or fifty years ago.

Back in the ‘70s and ‘80s, and for a while after that, bluefish defined the summer fishery along the Connecticut shore. Every morning, in at least one local harbor, untold hundreds of bluefish, many of them weighing 15 pounds or more, would rip into packed menhaden schools as the first glimmers of light touched the water, churning the water white as waves of baitfish went airborne with a sound that resembled a waterfall. It happened every day, sometimes throughout the day, from June well into October.

Today, the menhaden still fill the harbors, but they circle quietly, casually rippling the surface, unharried by predators below. The few bluefish that remain are a mere shadow of what used to be.

The bluefish’s decline was documented in a stock assessment update released in 2019, which found that the Atlantic Coast bluefish population had become overfished, and that it had been experiencing overfishing in almost every year since 1985.

 

No data were available for years prior to that, but given how badly the stock was overfished in ’85, it’s likely that the overfishing began well before then, so it’s hardly surprising that the Sound no longer hosts anything near the number of bluefish that it did in the 1970s.

In 2021, the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council (Council) and the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Bluefish Management Board (Board), trying to restore bluefish abundance, adopted a rebuilding plan calculated to restore the stock within seven years.

 

Hopefully, the rebuilding plan will succeed, but that success is contingent on two closely related questions: Whether bluefish recruitment is as robust as biologists expected when they drafted the plan, and whether fishing mortality can be maintained at a level low enough to permit rebuilding to occur.

There is little that managers can do about recruitment, which is largely dependent upon oceanographic conditions, but managers can adopt management measures that keep fishing mortality low enough to promote rebuilding.

That will require the Council and Board to adopt recreational catch limits that prioritize rebuilding the stock, even if that happens at the expense of recreational landings. Managers must come up with a realistic estimate of recreational release mortality. And anglers must be convinced, whether through education or enforcement, to comply with the existing bag limits.

So far, managers haven’t shown much appetite for accomplishing any of those three things.

Managers’ reluctance to constrain recreational landings was first demonstrated at a joint meeting of the Council and Board, which occurred in December 2019. The stock assessment update that found bluefish to be overfished had come out a few months earlier; although a rebuilding plan would not be completed until 2021, the Council’s Scientific and Statistical Committee had already determined that, to prevent overfishing in 2020, the annual catch limit that applied to combined commercial and recreational harvest must be reduced from 21.81 to 16.28 million pounds.

 

The recreational sector was entitled to 83% of that total, 13.51 million pounds.

 

To craft the management measures necessary to keep recreational harvest at or below that figure, the Council and Board first had to calculate what 2020 landings were likely to be if the existing rules remained in place. To help with that task, the Bluefish Monitoring Committee (Monitoring Committee), composed of fishery scientists from the Council, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), and the interested states,

recommended that 2020-2021 expected recreational landings be estimated using the three-year average (23.15 M pounds). This recommendation was made because the [Monitoring Committee] was hesitant to use only the terminal year estimate (13.27 M pounds) since the 2018 fishing year represents the lowest recorded recreational bluefish landings. Further, the [Monitoring Committee] indicated that bluefish landings have fluctuated in recent years and that a three-year average helps to mitigate the effects of high variability in the terminal year (2018).

If the Monitoring Committee’s advice were followed, the Council and Board would have to adopt management measures that would cut recreational harvest by more than 40%. A new calculation of recreational release mortality would make that cut even larger.

Historically, when NMFS calculated release mortality, they multiplied the Marine Recreational Information Program’s (MRIP) estimate of the number of bluefish released by the assumed 15% mortality rate, then multiplied the resulting figure by the average weight of recreationally harvested bluefish sampled by MRIP personnel. Biologists at NMFS’ Northeast Fisheries Science Center (Science Center) rejected that approach, believing that it underestimated the average size of released bluefish. Instead, they combined the MRIP-derived weights with other data, including American Littoral Society information on the size of bluefish tagged and released, and data voluntarily supplied by anglers in New Jersey, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, which indicated that released fish tended to be larger than those retained by recreational fishermen.

 

The Monitoring Committee agreed that calculating discard rates based only on MRIP data “does not fully capture what is occurring in the recreational fishery because length frequency data suggests that most anglers keep smaller bluefish and release larger bluefish,” something that anyone familiar with the bluefish fishery would agree is true.

Recognizing that the Science Center’s methodology better reflected angler behavior, the Monitoring Committee estimated that 2020 recreational discards totaled 9.90 million pounds. Subtracting such discards from the recreational catch limit resulted in a recreational harvest limit of just 3.62 million pounds for 2020, about an 85% reduction from the three-year average landings.

Council staff also prepared a memo, which suggested that the MRIP release mortality estimate be used. That reduced the level of release mortality by more than half, to 4.03 million pounds and, when combined with other recommendations in the same memo, provided for a 2020 recreational harvest limit of 8.05 million pounds, more than twice the harvest recommended by the Monitoring Committee.

Both memos were provided to the Council and Board, which had to decide which route to take.

They ultimately took their own course, rejecting the three-year landings average and deciding that 2020 bluefish landings would equal the 13.27 million pounds landed in 2018, which were the lowest landings on record. They did so even though landings through August 31, 2019 already totaled 12.4 million pounds, about 50% more than landings through the same date in 2018, making it very likely that the low 2018 landings were an anomaly that would not be repeated.

 

The Council and Board also decided to employ the lower MRIP discard estimates, instead of the estimates favored by the Science Center. By combining the 2018 landings estimate with the MRIP estimate of release mortality, the Council and Board could set the 2020 recreational harvest limit at 9.48 million pounds, higher than the limits recommended by either the Monitoring Committee or Council staff.

Because of the Council’s and Board’s decisions, anglers harvested 13.58 million pounds of bluefish in 2020, 4.10 million pounds above the recreational harvest limit. Assuming that the MRIP-based estimate was accurate, another 4.19 million pounds of fish died after being released, although such mortality might have exceeded 10 million pounds if the Science Center’s calculations were right.

 

In December 2020, the Council and Board had good reason to believe that, if management measures did not change, the recreational harvest limit would be exceeded again in 2021. “To project recreational landings, the [Technical Committee] typically uses the most recent 3-year average of landings. The 2017-2019 average landings (20.30 M lbs.) with the same 28.56% reduction that was projected to be achieved under the 2020 management measures yields a 2021 landings projection of 14.50 M lbs.. This landings potential methodology indicates a potential 73.86% overage of the 2021 [recreational harvest limit] of 8.34 M pounds.”

 

However, no one on the Council and Board ever discussed the possibility that 2021 landings might exceed the recreational harvest limit; there was universal support for status quo recreational management measures. As a result, anglers landed 12.46 million pounds of bluefish, not too far below the 14.50 million pounds predicted by the Monitoring Committee, and exceeded the 2021 harvest limit by 4.12 million pounds.

 

It’s still too early to predict whether anglers will exceed the 2022 recreational harvest limit of 13.89 million pounds. Even if they do not, the damage from earlier years’ overages can only reduce the rebuilding plan’s chance of success. To put the rebuilding plan back on track, both the Council and Board, when they meet in December 2022, must adopt management measures that are highly likely to keep recreational harvest within biologically acceptable bounds.

Fortunately, there is hope that the release mortality issue will be resolved. A comprehensive, research-track stock assessment is scheduled for completion late in 2022, and the Monitoring Committee has advised that “this will be the last year that these two differing methodologies will be used. [Greater Atlantic Regional Fisheries Office] staff have indicated that moving forward, they will use the discard estimates resulting from the ongoing research track assessment, similar to what is done for other species.” Thus, beginning in 2024, recreational management measures should be able to take better account of the fish that die after being released.

But angler compliance remains a difficult issue to address. Too many recreational fishermen are either ignorant of fisheries regulations, or believe that they can violate such rules with impunity. The Council and Board cannot change that situation.

However, they could incorporate a buffer that accounts for management uncertainty into the measures that they adopt, something that neither the Council nor the Board has chosen to do in the past, even though such buffers are contemplated in the federal guidelines for fishery management plans.

 

Such guidelines state that “Management uncertainty refers to uncertainty in the ability of managers to constrain catch so that the [annual catch limit] is not exceeded, and the uncertainty in quantifying true catch amounts (i.e., estimation errors). The sources of management uncertainty could include: Late catch reporting; misreporting; underreporting of catches; lack of sufficient inseason management, including inseason closing authority; or other factors,” and advise that “[Annual catch targets], or the functional equivalent, are recommended in the system of [accountability measures] so that the [annual catch limit] is not exceeded. An [annual catch target] is an amount of annual catch of a stock or stock complex that is the management target of a fishery, and accounts for management uncertainty in controlling the catch at or below the [annual catch limit].”

Thus, efforts to rebuild the bluefish stock face a conundrum.

The Council and Board often choose management measures based on their impacts on fishermen, rather than on their benefits to the fish stocks that such bodies were formed to conserve.

Many Council and Board members have no faith in fisheries science or the fishery management system. Thus Tom Fote, New Jersey’s Governor’s Appointee to the Board, opposed adopting any management uncertainty buffer because he believed there was “so much uncertainty that anything we do will make a difference with the bluefish stock,” and argued, without citing any scientific support, that bluefish abundance had declined due to changing environmental conditions, and not because of fishing activity.

Such position was supported by a Council member from New York who, contrary to the best available scientific information, claimed that the “bluefish stock was restoring itself,” without any need for further management action, thus rendering the need for a management uncertainty buffer moot.

In 2021, the Council and Board adopted a rebuilding plan that, if followed, should restore the stock within seven years. But unless the Council and Board are willing to impose the restrictions on landings needed to keep rebuilding on track, and to take a more precautionary approach to bluefish management that resolves uncertainty in favor of the resource, the success of such plan remains very much in doubt.

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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/

 

AS WATERS WARM

 

A couple of days ago, we were trolling for tuna 30-something miles southeast of Fire Island Inlet, New York.

As usual, I was running the boat, while Mike Mucha did his job in the cockpit, helping me spot life on the surface, and making sure that the lures remained weed-free and running the way they’re supposed to.  Sometime around mid-afternoon, he told me to slow down, so he could bring in the long center line, which had picked up some sort of trash.

From where I stood, I could see a good-sized clump of brown something hanging onto the lure, and figured that we had managed to find the only piece of weed in an otherwise weed-free sea.  But as Mike cranked, whatever was on the line was acting in a very un-weedlike way, splashing on the surface instead of just trailing behind the lure.  The 50-pound trolling rod barely bent, and provided no feel, but Mike noticed the same thing that I did and wondered, “Do I have a fish?”

It's far from unusual for little dolphin to make a pass at lures barely smaller than they are.  Sometimes, somehow, they manage to get the lures’ big hooks in their mouths.  Sometimes they get snagged in the side of the head.  Years ago, we had one manage to knock the line out of the outrigger clip and, a second or so later, when the line came tight against the same stiff 50-pound rod, seemingly snap its spine and come to the boat already, for all purposes, dead.

We were speculating that another small dolphin had met its demise, but…the fish on the line was clearly brown, and lacked the rainbow and silver coloration of the typical dolphin.  We had a brief “What is it?” moment when the fish came over the rail; then I noticed the diagonal black streak running up from it’s eye and tentatively called it a very small amberjack—a tropical reef fish foreign to Long Island’s waters—although its body seemed a little broad, and its color a little dark, to fit that ID. 

I reached for a camera to document the moment and provide a basis for better identification, but the jack, still lively despite its recent ordeal, shook, drove a spine into Mike’s hand and, having created such distraction, launched itself out of his grasp and, fortunately for the fish, back into the sea.

I hit the books when I got home, and decided that I had initially misidentified the fish; it was not an amberjack, but rather an Almaco jack, a closely related species.

Still, amberjack or an Almaco jack, it didn’t belong anywhere close to Long Island.

Every year, a few tropical fish always get lost and stray into Long Island waters.  There are records of tarpon being caught in local pound nets, a Montauk charter boat oncecaught a sailfish, and every season, a variety of juvenile groupers, angelfish, and similar oddities are found swimming in Long Island bays.  I’ve heard rumors of anglers catching amberjack—or maybe they were Almaco jack—in the region before.

But it’s still not what one might consider normal.

To get a better idea of how often it happens, I took a look at New York’s commercial landings, because commercial fishermen catch all sorts of things while targeting their intended species, and will try to market such fish when they can.  

The National Marine Fisheries Service maintains a database of commercial landings, sorted by state, year, and species, going back to 1950.  When I queried that database, seeking any landings of greater amberjack, lesser amberjack, or Almaco jack off New York, I found just one entry, for an undetermined quantity of Almaco jack landed in 2018.  The details were deemed “confidential,” meaning that fewer than three fishermen reported such landings; it was probably a one-time event.

NMFS also maintains a database of recreational landings, which dates back to 1981.  It seems to indicate that Almaco jacks and their close relatives are more frequently encountered in New York waters, providing one record of Almaco jack (2020), four records of greater amberjack (1993, 1995, 1996, 1998), two records of lesser amberjack (1988, 2007), and five records of fish identified only to “amberjack genus” (1995, 2005, 2017, 2018, 2019).

The problem with the recreational records is that, for most observations, we have to accept the anglers’ identification of what they caught, since almost all of the jacks were either released or “reported harvest,” a term that generally means that the fish was likely returned to the water dead or was used for bait but, in any case, was not available for the NMFS surveyor to independently identify.  Even anglers in southern waters have difficulty telling the varjous jacks apart, so the odds of local fishermen getting it right can be somewhat high.

Even when a surveyor identifies an unusual fish, there is room for doubt; for example, all four of the greater amberjack reported were harvested, but their measured lengths were all between 7 and 10 inches, which raises the question of whether they were really amberjack, or whether they might have been banded rudderfish, which are relatively common in New York waters, and superficially resemble a juvenile amberjack.

But regardless of the niceties of identification, the data makes it clear that, with the exception of the banded rudderfish, jacks of the genus Seriola aren’t caught very often in New York’s waters; all records of Almaco jacks, along with most records of “amberjack genus,” which could include the Almaco, occurred since 2017.

If the Almaco jack that we caught had been an isolated incident, it would have been easy to write off as just one of those things that happens every once in a while.  But when it is placed in the context of everything else being caught (or not caught), something becomes very clear, although some people still try to deny it:  The ocean, like the climate as a whole, is warming.

Anyone who spends much time on the water can see it.

Dolphin, once a target of opportunity for New York’s offshore anglers, now support an active directed fishery.  Big cobia are becoming common enough to support a directed fishery, too; last year, someone caught one that weighed 97.40 pounds, a cobia larger than most caught in their traditional southern range.  Anglers fishing around menhaden schools for cobia are running into large numbers of blacktip and spinner sharks, species that were once rarely seen north of Delaware Bay.

Last season, running home after an offshore trip, I saw what was clearly a big king mackerel—a fish close to four feet long—rocket out of the water near the wreck of the Hylton Castle, a typical mackerel behavior when they’re feeding on fish near the surface.

Traditional inshore species are being affected, too.  Black sea bass recruitment is very dependent on the sea conditions on the outer continental shelf during their first winter; warm, salty water is likely to lead to high survival rates, and a large year class of fish.  While the species has long been an important component of Long Island’s recreational fishery, warming water has led to significantly increased abundance.  

Summer flounder abundance also seems to be shifting north, with the center of abundance now somewhere south of Long Island, when it was once located off the New Jersey coast.  While biologists have not yet determined the cause of that shift, the 2018 benchmark stock assessment suggests that “climate-driven increases in ocean temperature” may be the cause.

Thus, in some respects, a warming ocean can prove beneficial.  Yet while warming waters give, they can also take away.  

The most notable example of that may be the collapse of the Southern New England stock of American lobster, a collapse that is clearly attributable to a warming sea.  

A recent study conducted in Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay suggests that winter flounder, a species that was once a backbone of the recreational fishery both there and on Long Island, but has since collapsed, may be permanently disadvantaged by the warming water.  Young-of-the-year fish are particularly impacted, as the warm water supports higher concentrations of predators that feed on juvenile flounder, while young flounder that escape such predators are stressed and sometimes killed by high summer water temperatures and correspondingly low levels of dissolved oxygen.

It is likely that other New England groundfish are being impacted by warmer waters as well.

Thus, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the three regional fishery management councils on the East Coast, and the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission recently held a virtual East Coast Climate Change Scenario Planning meeting to brainstorm on what a warming ocean may mean for Atlantic fish and Atlantic fisheries.

Attendees at the meeting considered four different scenarios, which ranged from the dismaying to the somewhat optimistic.

The most pessimistic of the scenarios was titled “Stress Fractures.”  

It assumed a situation in which a warming ocean led to radical changes in the marine environment and marine fish stocks.  Scientists were unable to cope with the magnitude of the changes, which included stronger, more frequent storm systems fueled by a hotter sea, that wreaked havoc on estuaries and coastal ecosystems.  As a result of the massive changes, a number of important fish stocks, many burdened by disease and parasites that thrive in warm water, collapsed; some fall over the brink to extinction.

Reduced numbers of fish resulted in real harm to the commercial and recreational fishing industries, which could not survive without strong government support.

Sadly, such scenario is not beyond the realm of possibility.

Much less dire, the scenario titled “Ocean Pioneers” does not envision the wholesale collapse of fish stocks.  Instead, it posits a sea beset by unpredictable weather patterns which arguably pose a greater threat to fishermen than to the fish they pursue.  Species may move into new areas and the center of local abundance may shift.

Under this scenario, some components of the fishing industry can still thrive, although fewer people choose to enter the business.  With a fewer people entering the fishing industry, dockside services could suffer, and the size of the working waterfront shrink as new businesses cater to other uses of waterfront space.

A third possible outcome, deemed “Seafood Lemonade,” might well be considered the Goldilocks scenario, depicting a tolerable future that is situated, for purposes of the discussion, between the two dismal possibilities and another that is probably unjustifiably optimistic.  

In Seafood Lemonade, the health of fish stocks still suffers.  Stocks shift north and east as waters warm, and fish abundance declines.  However, scientists are able to keep up with the changes, and in areas with effective fishery management programs, stock rebuilding takes place; elsewhere, as fish numbers drop, the fishing industry falls into decline.

Even in areas with good fishery management, everything is not rosy for the commercial fishing industry, which still has to cope with cheap imports, and must compete with an aquaculture industry able to reliably provide product to consumers, even when wild stocks falter.  However, the amount of cheap imports coming into the United States could well wane as foreign fishermen deal with the same issues that plague the domestic fleet.  If that happened, domestic fishermen could be freed from some of the pricing pressure created by an influx of foreign product.

The fourth scenario, which was called “Checks and Balances,” is probably too optimistic.  It envisions a world in which both fishermen and the fish they pursue are resilient enough to adjust to climate change; fish stocks shift north and east, but don’t decline in abundance.  It posits a reduction in both carbon emissions and other forms of pollution, and sees disease attributable to warming waters affecting only a limited number of stocks.  It also assumes that coastal regions will continue to attract wealth which, in turn, fuels a healthy recreational fishing industry.

As Jonathan Star, who facilitated the meeting, observed, “This may well be one we want to look at again.  This really may be stretching the bounds of plausibility.”

Yet it, as well as the three other scenarios, can claim some plausibility simply because each of them assumes some events that have already happened.

Diseases related to warming waters are already impacting marine resources.  Shell rot disease, which eats away at lobsters and renders them unmarketable, has long afflicted such animals toward the southern end of their range.  As waters warm, it has spread through southern New England, and beginning to appear in the Gulf of Maine.

Storms seem to be growing fiercer, and even when no storms rage, it seems that the winds are gusting higher than they once did.  When I began fishing offshore, absent a tropical storm or the occasional cold front, the last two or three weeks of July and the first two of August were reliably calm, with the NOAA forecast usually calling for winds between 10 and 20 knots, and seas between 2 and 4 feet.  Often, a big Bermuda high would settle in off the East Coast, and we’d enjoy uninterrupted calm seas for weeks at a time.  For many years, before I bought a larger boat, I chartered every summer, and never had a trip blown out.  Today, wind seems to be the rule, and not the exception, and comfortable days offshore are nowhere nearas common as they used to be.

Fish stocks are shifting.  I already mentioned fluke and black sea bass, which are more abundant off southern New England than they once were.  Cobia and warm-water sharks are now regulars off Long Island.  Dolphin abound.  Every year, there are more reports of black drum, spot, and croaker being taken from local waters.  

At the same time, even though pollock are abundant farther north, the once-spectacular late spring run off Block Island is now just a memory, while the silver hake (“whiting”) that once fueled a very active for-hire fishery off northern New Jersey and western Long Island ended long ago, although the species remains abundant offshore.

The recreational fishing and boating industry is, more and more, focused on wealthy consumers who are willing and able to spend their money on the fast boats, state of the art electronics, and high-tech fishing gear needed to find and exploit locally abundant fish, while the surfcaster or low-income angler, limited in where he or she can fish, suffers from local scarcity and declining abundance.

In those respects, all four scenarios are coming true.

Right now, given the many uncertainties, we can’t confidently predict which of the scenarios comes closest to future realities.  All we can know right now is that things are changing, and will continue to change.  Whether such change is for the better or worse may depend on just where you’re standing.

Still, it’s somewhat comforting to know that NOAA, the councils, and the ASMFC are trying to prepare for at least some of the possible eventualities.  While we can’t avoid the consequences of a warming sea, with enough preparation and perhaps some luck, we might at least deflect the worst impacts.

 

 

 

 

STRIPED BASS REBUILDING: THE REMAINING UNCERTAINTIES

Last Sunday, I released what some might consider an uncharacteristicallyoptimistic essay that predicted that there will be a striped bass rebuildingplan in place for most—and, in many states, all—of the 2023 fishing season, andthat such rebuilding plan will require fishing mortality reductions that, whilesubstantial, will be small enough to make rebuilding by the 2029 deadline avery realistic goal.

However, I also noted that the data discussed at last week’s Atlantic Striped Bass Technical Committee meeting was preliminary, that there would be more analysis done, and that the precise magnitude of the needed fishing mortality cuts had yet to be determined, although such reduction might well be somewhere around 25%.

Those comments led to some questions by readers, including some readers who are very familiar with the fishery management process.  Thus, I thought that today’s edition of One Angler’s Voyage ought to describe the remaining uncertainties in a bit more detail.

Uncertainty in the striped bass stock assessment update flows from two primary sources.  One is a retrospective pattern in the estimates of fishing mortality and spawning stock biomass, which only becomes apparent when additional years of data are added to the original estimates.  The other is the selectivity of the gear used in both the fishery-dependent and the fishery-independent surveys used to gauge striped bass abundance, and how such selectivity impacts estimates of spawning stock biomass.

I’ll address the retrospective pattern first.

Typically, in just about every stock assessment, the data relating to the assessment’s terminal year are the most uncertain.  As time goes on, and a stock assessment update provides additional years of data, the estimates of fishing mortality and spawning stock biomass for what had been the terminal year often changes.  If such change is consistent in direction and approximate magnitude across many years’ data, a “retrospective pattern” emerges.

Such pattern can, in some situations, be significant.  Fortunately for striped bass, the retrospective pattern produced by the current assessment model is relatively minor. 

The 2018 benchmark stock assessment notes that

“Very little retrospective trend (+/-2%) was evident in the more recent estimates of fully-recruited total [fishing mortality], female [spawning stock biomass], and age 8+ abundance [in the structured catch-at-age model]…Approximately 5 years of additional data are needed before the percent-difference from 2017 estimates increases to +/1 10 to 15%...The retrospective pattern suggests that fishing mortality is likely slightly over-estimated and could decrease with the addition of future years of data.”

Four years have passed since that was written, and the preliminary stock assessment update data does, in fact, show a small retrospective pattern in the data from 2017 and immediately prior years.  However, such pattern does not indicate that fishing mortality in 2017 had been slightly overestimated.  Instead, it indicates that the conclusions in the benchmark assessment were slightly optimistic; fishing mortality was actually somewhat higher, and female spawning stock biomass somewhat lower, than indicated in the 2018 benchmark.

While the differences between the benchmark stock assessment and the pending update don't appear to be large, the Technical Committee still needs to decide whether the retrospective pattern is significant enough to consider when recommending rebuilding measures to the Management Board.  

Retrospective patterns have long appeared in striped bass stock assessments, but have generally not been given much, if any, weight when management measures were crafted.  Given the relatively small pattern that is emerging in the assessment update data, that trend will probably continue, although given the overfished state of the stock, it is possible, if not likely, that the Technical Committee will want to adjust for the retrospective pattern in order to provide for a more precautionary management approach.

Selectivity presents a somewhat more complex issue.

In preparing the benchmark stock assessment, biologists used data from 13 different surveys to create indices of relative striped bass abundance, as well as the relative abundance of the various year classes composing the bass population.  12 of the 13 surveys were fishery-independent surveys conducted by various state natural resource agencies.  Data developed by the Marine Recreational Information Program, sampling of commercial landings, information developed by various tagging programs, and other data is also taken into consideration.

One of the big questions that the scientists have to consider is whether the various surveys and other sources of data sample a relatively equal proportion of fish from each year class, or whether some cohorts are over- or under-represented.  It’s not an easy question to answer, as different fisheries often target particular cohorts, and such cohorts don’t always utilize the entire range of the striped bass population.

Thus, immature striped bass dominate both the population and the fisheries in the Chesapeake Bay, while adults play a far larger role in coastal regions, particularly in the northeast.  

Historically, the selectivity curves used in striped bass assessments include a “domed” selectivity in the Chesapeake Bay, which shows a sharp peak indicating very high sampling of the younger year classes that dominate both the Bay's striped bass population and its striped bass fisheries, then tapers off sharply as older fish enter the coastal migratory population, and a flat-topped curve on the coast that ramps up sharply as maturing bass enter the migratory population, then flattens out and remains generally constant once such fish grow into the 28-inch minimum size that has long been in place for most states' commercial and recreational fisheries.

The problem with the latter curve is that Amendment VI to Amendment 6 to the Atlantic Striped Bass Interstate Fishery Management Plan upset historical norms by eliminating the minimum size in recreational fisheries, and imposing a 28- to 35-inch slot limit on most of the coast, although a couple of states were permitted a slot limit with a top end that was an inch or three higher.  Such measure was put in place beginning in 2020, and may well have altered the selectivity curve for the coast.

While the measure would not have impacted the fishery-independent surveys, it would have substantially altered the data developed by the Marine Recreational Information Program, since fish over 35 inches could no longer be retained by anglers along most of the coast, while bass over 38 inches could only be kept during the few weeks that Maryland’s so called “trophy season” was open in the Chesapeake Bay.

So while data from the Chesapeake Bay still seems to fit the domed selectivity curve used in the past, an argument can be made that, for the years 2020-2021, the flat-topped selectivity curve used for the coast should be replaced with a domed curve that reflects the lower proportion of large striped bass appearing in MRIP data.

The use of a domed selectivity curve implies that there are more large striped bass in the population than indicated by the existing data.  That implication forces the Technical Committee to use their professional judgment to make a decision:  Are fewer large striped bass showing up in the data because the selectivity has changed, or are fewer striped bass showing up in the data because they are also absent from the population as a whole?

Arguments can be made for both propositions.  There is no question that the selectivity of the recreational fishery-dependent survey has changed, at least with respect to the coastal fishery.  The question that the Technical Committee will probably have to decide is whether the decline of older, larger fish reflected in the MRIP data is also reflected in the fishery-independent surveys.  If such surveys don’t show a similar decline, then a new selectivity curve for 2020-2021 is probably justified; on the other hand, if the fishery-independent surveys also show a similar decline in large bass, such fish probably also make up a small part of the overall population.

And, as is often the case with fisheries issues, the right answer is probably somewhere in between.  

The Maryland juvenile abundance index, which has historically been the best single gauge of striped bass abundance, indicates that, over the past 25 years—few, if any, bass will live longer than that given the current level of fishing mortality—notably large year classes were produced in 2001, 2003, 2011, and 2015, with smaller, but still well above average, year classes produced in 1999 and 2005.  Many of the years in between saw recruitment that was significantly below average.  Given that the largest of the big year classes, 2001, is now two decades old, and that most of the other “large” year classes were about half of its size, the number of large bass in the population must be relatively low.  At the same time, whatever big bass remain were probably underrepresented in the 2020-2021 recreational data.

So the Technical Committee will have to resolvethe selectivity issue.  If it decides that because of domed selectivity, the number of large bass present in 2020-2021 was significantly under-sampled, then it follows that the size of the fishing mortality reduction needed to rebuild the spawning stock by 2029 will be less than it would be if the Committee decides that selectivity in those years is a relatively minor issue.

Right now—and as new information develops, the situation could change—the manner in which the Technical Committee resolves the retrospective pattern and selectivity issues will result in a rebuilding plan that calls for a fishing mortality reduction somewhere between 9 and 27% (there is another scenario that would eliminate the need for any rebuilding plan at all, and allow for a 17% increase in landings, but that one seems to be an outlier that will not be seriously considered).

While there is already a certain amount of grumbling that the Technical Committee will open the door to Management Board efforts to adopt half-measures that won’t rebuild the stock, I don’t believe that will happen.

The Technical Committee is composed of capable and experienced fishery scientists, who have always demonstrated both competence and integrity, along with a desire to provide the best scientific advice possible.  I have confidence that their final recommendation will, in their professional judgment, reflect the current state of the striped bass stock and provide good advice on how to move forward.

Whether the Management Board will take their advice is another, very different question.  Still, given how most Management Board members have responded to both the state of the striped bass and the concerns of stakeholders throughout the Amendment 7 process, I hope and believe that they will take the correct actions, too.

Time will tell.