MARINE RECREATIONAL FISHERIES: WE NEED TO UTTER THE "A" WORD

 

Recreational fishery management has its own language with some terms, like “optimum yield” and “fishing mortality target,” unique to the management arena, while other words are taken from everyday speech, although they might be repurposed a bit. 

If we began sorting those terms alphabetically, it wouldn’t be long before we got to “allocation,” which is pretty important to everyone, because it’s all about which sector—commercial or recreational, with the for-hire fleet sometimes considered as well—gets to kill the largest proportion of the fish.

Allocation discussions that involve recreational fishing are usually very intense, but just about all of them can be broken down into the same simple terms:  The commercial fishing sector is awarded some proportion of the landings of a particular species, and the recreational fishing sector wants to take some or all of those landings for itself (on rare occasions, it works the other way, with commercial fishermen seeking a larger share of the pie, but that does not happen often and such efforts are generally very short-lived).

Typically, the angling folks might be seeking to make a popular recreational species, such as striped bass, a “gamefish,” and preclude all commercial harvest.  They’ll argue that recreational fishing yields greater economic benefits (which is probably true); that there are so many recreational fishermen that they could easily kill the entire annual catch limit themselves (which is hardly a recommendation); and that people who either won’t or can’t catch their own dinner aren’t entitled to wild fish, but should be happy purchasing whatever the fish farms turn out. 

Other recreational advocates aren’t looking to take the whole hog; they’re willing to leave the snout and the ears and maybe the trotters for the commercial folks, so long as they get all of the hams and the ribs and the bacon.  

People who take that sort of stand make the same economic arguments as the “gamefish” proponents, but often spin them around the proposition that because the recreational sector is growing, and generating more effort, the allocation should be shifted to accommodate the greater demand.  (It's interesting to imagine what their response would be if the National Marine Fisheries Service embraced the mirror image of that argument:  What if NMFS announced, let's say, that because the commercial summer flounder fishery is a limited entry fishery, there are quite a few commercial fishermen that would like to participate but can’t get a permit, so the agency was going to issue some additional commercial permits to meet the demand, and compensate by increasing the commercial quota at the expense of the recreational sector?  Does anyone believe that the same "the sector is growing" argument that is used by various recreational organizations would go unchallenged if it was used against them?)

The Gulf red snapper fishery has seen some of the most blatant examples of that sort of thinking, with Brad Gentner, a fisheries economist who has been associated with anglers’ rights groups such as the Coastal Conservation Association and Center for Sportfishing Policy, testifying before a committee of the United States Senate that

“As fish populations increase, so does recreational effort and catch and, as fish populations decrease, effort and catch decrease as well.  Abundance drives effort.  Effort drives spending and value for small businesses.  Which should be a good thing, but at the moment that value is not only being ignored, it is being squandered.

“During rebuilding, effort increases as the stock increases.  Because the stock is increasing, catch per unit of effort also increases, meaning it takes less effort to catch the same weight of fish as the stock grows.  In fisheries with inadequate recreational allocations, this can induce a downward spiral of ever tightening regulation in the face of rebounding stocks when the recreational sector is managed like a commercial fishery.  The original allocation of red snapper is widely accepted to be totally flawed…This flawed and unfair allocation has created this downward spiral that has all but crushed the recreational red snapper fishery and the businesses supported by recreational red snapper fishing, while the stock continues to grow rapidly…” 

The sense of entitlement reflected in such comments is striking.  Nonetheless, spokesmen for the recreational sector love to speak about allocation—so long as they’re the ones getting the fish.

And before someone perusing our hypothetical list of recreational fishery management terms even got to “allocation,” they would have come to the word “access,” another term popular with the anglers' rights folks.

For most of my life on and around the water, “access” meant having a place to fish.  If a town closed a waterfront park after sunset, you lost “access” to striped bass fishing during the most productive hours of the night.  If a state or county park closed a long stretch of beach to motorized vehicles, you might lose “access” to an inlet or other productive fishing spot located miles from the nearest parking lot, because getting there on your own two legs, while wearing a set of waders and carrying all of the requisite gear (not to mention getting any fish you chose to retain back to a distant parking lot while they’re still in fit condition to eat) was a practical near-impossibility.

Thus, for most of my life, fighting for “access” was a good and noble thing, because it meant nothing less than fighting for your ability to reach fishable water.

But “access” is one of those words that has become repurposed in recent times.  The big recreational organizations understand that they’re not going to get too far if they announce that their goal is to permanently remove more fish from the ocean; that just doesn’t have the sort of benevolent ring that politicians will rush to support.  So they instead use the word “access” as a euphemism for “dead fish.”

Thus, in a March 2020 press release, we see the Center for Sportfishing Policy complain that

“Over the last decade, anglers have been baffled by NOAA Fisheries’ decision to radically limit public access to red snapper despite the plentiful number of fish they are encountering on the water…

“’Effectively eliminating the South Atlantic red snapper season is a prime example of federal fisheries management failure,’ said Jeff Angers, president of the Center for Sportfishing Policy.  ‘Unlike a buffet line, anglers cannot choose which fish to reel up from the deep, and when they have to throw red snapper back, many fish inevitably die…’  [emphasis added]”

Elsewhere in their announcement, the Center for Sportfishing Policy admits that recreational fishermen released over 3 million red snapper off Florida’s east coast, so it seems that, contrary to the Center’s allegations, anglers must have pretty good access to the fish—they have no problem getting out on the water and catching them.  

What federal fishery managers have limited is not access, but anglers’ ability to toss the snapper they have successfully accessed into their coolers and take them home; the agency was forced to make the difficult choice between requiring anglers to release most of the snapper they caught while targeting other species, knowing that a significant percentage of those snapper would die after release, or allowing anglers to take more red snapper home while also killing a significant percentage of the snapper that are caught and released while targeting other species.

Thus, the issue presented isn’t the one cited by the Center—preventing anglers’ access to the resource—but rather, preventing anglers from retaining their catch.  A more forthright spokesman might have referenced “NOAA Fisheries’ decision prohibiting anglers from killing their catch and removing it from the spawning stock,” but such a statement wouldn’t play well on the afternoon news, and might provide non-anglers with too clear an understanding of what was really going on.

So, “access” was used.

But while the organized recreational fishing community might be very willing to demand bigger allocations and more of what they refer to as “access,” there’s one more A-word out there, and it’s one that they try to avoid:  Accountability.

The Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act very clearly states that all fishery management plans must

“establish a mechanism for specifying annual catch limits in the plan (including a multiyear plan), implementing regulations, or annual specifications, at a level such that overfishing does not occur in the fishery, including measures to ensure accountability.  [emphasis added]”

Regional fishery management councils have typically done a very good job of holding the commercial sector accountable for its overages; in most cases, when the commercial catch limit is exceeded, fishermen are expected to pay back the overage in the next season.

Of course, the data on commercial fishery landings is generally far better than recreational fishery data.  Commercial landings are generally recorded in something close to real time, and verified by weigh-out records at the dealers which purchase the fish.  

Recreational fishery data is generated by the Marine Recreational Information Program, and always includes some level of uncertainty, known as the Percent Standard Error (PSE).  In the case of infrequently encountered species, or of data maintained at the state, wave, and/or sector level, instead of coastwide, the PSE can be dismayingly high—high enough that, if recreational fishermen were required to pay back overages every time that MRIP data suggested that the recreational harvest limit to be exceeded, anglers could find their annual limits reduced even in years when, once the PSE was taken into account, they might have actually underfished the harvest limit by an appreciable amount.

Managers classify the issues created by the PSE in the category of “management uncertainty,” which is pretty much what it sounds like.  But while scientific uncertainty must be considered by the regional fishery management councils’ scientific and statistical committees each year when they set the acceptable biological catch for each managed stock, management uncertainty is often ignored, even though NMFS’ published guidelines state that it should be considered when setting annual catch limits. 

Because regional fishery management councils frequently fail to consider management uncertainty, recreational fishermen have chronically exceeded the recreational harvest limit for some stocks.  Such recreational overages became so severe in the Gulf of Mexico recreational red snapper fishery that a federal district court ordered NMFS to impose some sort of accountability measures on the recreational sector, which ultimately took the form of an annual catch target that implemented the NMFS guidelines, and created a harvest buffer that took management uncertainty into account.

In most other fisheries, however, the courts were not involved, and buffers were not imposed.  

The recreational black sea bass fishery, managed by the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Council and the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, may be the worst offender.  Anglers exceeded their recreational harvest limit in eight out of the eleven years between 2010 and 2020, sometimes by a very large margin, and faced only minimal accountability for such overages.  In some years, recreational management measures were made more restrictive, but almost never restrictive enough to constrain harvest to the recreational limit.  In other years, the overages were just ignored, and management measures left at the status quo.

At one advisory panel meeting, held about a year ago, a commercial black sea bass fisherman from Maryland argued that

“Somebody needs to hold these people accountable…To keep rewarding these people and giving them more fish is never going to solve the problem.”

But such words went unheeded.  In June of this year, at a joint meeting of the Mid-Atlantic Council and ASMFC, managers voted to adopt a so-called “harvest control rule” that effectively rewarded black sea bass anglers for their past transgressions,  limiting the severity of any recreational harvest reductions in the event that anglers exceeded their harvest limit again.

Despite the clear language in Magnuson-Stevens, holding anglers accountable for taking too many fish is, unless a stock has been declared to be overfished and/or is subject to a rebuilding plan, just not something that managers seem willing to do, no matter how quick they might be to impose accountability measures on the commercial sector.

The regional fishery management councils are not alone in their aversion to angler accountability.

In August 2021, the ASMFC’s Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board considered including a measure in Amendment 7 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Striped Bass that would have held states accountable if their conservation equivalent regulations—regulations that did not match the coastwide regulations adopted by the Management Board, but supposedly achieved the same quantified level of conservation—didn’t actually achieve the needed reductions in fishing mortality.

Although the concept received significant support from the striped bass angling community, which believed that the conservation equivalency process was being gamed by certain states in order to win a lesser reduction in harvest than that required in the management plan, state fishery managers generally opposed the concept of recreational accountability, and it was removed from further consideration in the amendment development process.

State fishery managers generally avoid recreational accountability with the same fervor that a vampire avoids holy water, garlic, and sharp wooden stakes, and that aversion isn’t likely to end any time soon.

But some people are starting to get tired of it.

Most recently, commercial fishermen in the Gulf of Mexico have gone to court to oppose a reallocation of red grouper quota, based on revised estimates of recreational landings during the base years, that awards more fish to the recreational sector, arguing in part that the higher recreational quota would harm not only the commercial sector, but the grouper themselves, because anglers frequently exceed their catch limit and are not held accountable when overages occur.

But fishermen suing over lost allocation is nothing new.

What is new is that members of the Gulf for-hire fleet, which share the recreational allocation and so would supposedly benefit if the recreational share of landings increased, recently filed a friend of the court brief suppoorting the commercial fleet, and arguing that private boat recreational overages, and the lack of recreational accountability, would end up hurting their businesses more than they might benefit from a bigger recreational quota.

As Capt. Scott Hickman of Galveston, Texas explained,

“We’ve been down this road before.  You set a precedent for taking quota from an accountable sector and dropping it into a black hole,”

such “black hole” being, of course, the private boat recreational fishery, where landings data is uncertain and even regular overages can occur with relative impunity.

When part of the recreational sector chooses to give up some of its potential landings by siding with the commercial fishery, because the rest of the sector is so irresponsible, and so lacking in accountability, that it is might cause real long-term harm to the stock, it’s time to stop and figure out just went wrong—and what needs to be done to set things right.

Holding recreational fishermen accountable for their excesses would be a good place to start.