A SLOW-MOVING TRAIN WRECK

 

Train wrecks have been in the news lately.

In just one month, the Norfolk Southern Railroad has seen two different trains go off the rails in Ohio, creating severe environmental issues.  There is some suggestion that the worst of those wrecks, which saw multiple hazardous chemicals released into Ohio waterways, causing a significant fish kill, was due not to mere accident, but to the negligence of corporate management, who allegedly ignored safe maintenance and operating procedures in order to increase profit.

Some say that, given the railroad’s sloppy operating procedures, they could see the accidents coming.  It was only a matter of time.

The train wreck that I recall best was also a result of sloppy management practices.  It was also completely predictable.  But it had nothing to do with railroads.

Instead, it caused the striped bass stock to collapse.

Most bass fishermen have heard the stories, although today, many are too young to have experienced the tragedy for themselves. They don’t recall how it broke, like a sudden, violent thunderstorm on a balmy August afternoon, catching so many people by complete surprise.  Nor do they recall how the signs predicting the collapse were, in retrospect, all out in the open for everyone to see, or how those who might have been able to avert the collapse tried as hard as they could not to see them.

At the time, most people connected to the fishery were living too much in the moment to care.

As 1970 dawned, Maryland produced the largest year class of striped bass that, up to such time, had ever been recorded.  The fish spread out along the coast so that, by 1972—the year I was graduated from high school—two year old bass were everywhere.  At around 14 inches in length, they were still too small to take home, but they provided plenty of action for a recent high school graduate with a boat, a car, and a summer job that allowed him to spend plenty of time on the water.

Thanks to smaller, but consistent, year classes produced in the late ‘50s and ‘60s, there were also plenty of larger fish around.  While they weren’t anywhere near as abundant as the shorts from the ’70 spawn, they were plentiful enough to reward diligent use of a bucktail, pencil popper, or swimming plug; the folks who preferred to fish bait were taking fish between 20 and 40-plus pounds without too much trouble.

By 1973, the bass from the ’70 year class grew past the 16-inch minimum size that was in place throughout the northeast.  There were no bag limits back then, so just about every “keeper” was kept, even if that meant that many would end up in the trash, yellow and freezer-burned, at some point the following spring.  

There were also no such thing as commercial fishing licenses or commercial quotas, so the dividing line between recreational and commercial fishermen was hopelessly blurred.  Anglers commonly sold their excess catch, and the more skilled an angler was, the more likely it was that he took his fish to market.  Even in Connecticut, a “gamefish” state where I lived at the time, anglers regularly sold their striped bass to restaurants and markets; there was even a marina in Stamford that quietly shipped its customers’ illegally sold bass to the Fulton Fish Market for a few dollars per box.

The true commercial fishermen were doing their own sort of damage.  Aside from the minimum size, they fished with little or no restrictions.  The highest commercial landings ever recorded in the fishery, 14,734,000 pounds, were made in 1974, and those figures were bracketed by 10,104,800 pounds in 1972 and 11,016,900 pounds in ’74 which, when combined with the landings in '73, constitute the highest three-year landings total on record.

To provide some perspective, commercial landings in 2021 were about 4.290,000 pounds.

Over the next few years, the fish from the ’70 year class kept getting bigger, kept getting caught, and ended up in kitchens and markets and garbage cans all along the striper coast, while the bigger fish from earlier spawns fell victim to the commercial fishermen’s gill nets, haul seines and trawls, as well as to legions of anglers who had fallen in love with fishing bait--either live menhaden or chunks of menhaden and mackerel--and with dragging their catch out for photos in front of their tackle shops’ doors.

What happened to all of those fish--sometimes, a customer would show up with half a dozen or more bass, all over 20, at the same time--is best left to the imagination.

I was working in a tackle shop during those years, which gave me a chance to fish every day before the shop’s doors opened at 7 a.m., so between what I saw for myself on the water and what I heard from the shop's many customers, I had a pretty good feel for what was going on.  There were plenty of bass being caught, and what we thought of as the “quality” of the fishing—that is, the size of the fish we were catching—just kept getting better. 

In 1974, I decided that I needed to catch a 50-pound bass before I turned 20, and ended up getting it done with nearly a month to spare.  But I ended up disappointed when my fish was quickly eclipsed by a 63 that someone else brought to the shop a day or two later.  There were so many big fish around that one of our customers ended up foul hooking a bass over 50--I remember it as something like a 54 or 56--while trying to snag some bunker for bait.

We were fixated on the abundance of older, larger bass, but we weren’t paying enough attention to what was going on at the other end of the population.

For me, that revelation came around 1976 or ’77.  I was alone in the shop, catching up on reel repairs, when an man with a shock of white hair, a tanned face, and cardboard box under his arm walked through our front door.  His name was Bob Pond.  I had never met him before, but had certainly knew him by reputation; he was a legend along the striper coast, a dedicated angler who had developed the Atom line of fishing lures, some of the most popular bass lures that were ever sold.

But didn't come to the shop to sell Atom plugs.  Instead, the box that he carried was filled with glass jars, which he hoped our customers would fill with egg sacs and milt from the striped bass that they caught.  He explained that recent striped bass spawns in Maryland had been well below average, and that he was concerned that such lower recruitment was putting the stock at risk.  

He was hoping to get samples of striped bass egg sacs and milt from various sizes of fish, caught all along the coast, so that he could have them tested to see whether some sort of pollutant might be the cause of the recruitment decline.

We talked for a while, and what he said made sense.  I was catching far fewer small bass than I had caught a few years before, and when he cited the Maryland juvenile abundance index figures, things began to fall in place. 

The big year class of 1970 had a JAI of 30.52 (for reference, the long-term average now stands at 11.2).  The JAI then began its decline, to 11.77 and 11.01—both acceptable figures—in ’71 and ’72, then 8.92 and 10.13, before dropping to 6.69 in 1975 and 4.91 in 1976.  We didn’t know it at the time, but the Maryland juvenile abundance index wouldn’t rise above 10 until 1989; in the meantime, it would hit new lows of 1.89 in 1980 and then 1.22 a year later.

Bob Pond convinced me that the bass were on a dangerous track, but few others shared his belief.  

The owner of the shop caught me talking about striped bass conservation with one of his customers, and pretty well pitched a fit, loudly declaring that the stock was healthy--"Plenty of bass out there, plenty of bass"--and declaring that there there was no need to worry.  From then on, he went out of his way to encourage customers to kill more of the big fish—the most fecund, and most important, part of the spawning stock—and bring them in for photos that he might post on the shop's wall.

He saw conservation as a threat to his business, an attitude that many in the trade still hold today.

Meanwhile, commercial landings were in near free fall.  After peaking at more than 14 million pounds in 1973, they declined to just 8.8 million pounds two years later, then continued to fall through 6.5 million pounds in 1976 and 5.5 million pounds in ’77, beginning a decline that would continue for nearly two decades.

The 1970 year class—the biggest year class ever recorded up to that time—was largely wiped out before most of the females had grown old enough to spawn.

But recreational fishermen were still catching plenty of bigger bass—fish in the 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s—so most rejected any suggestion that the stock needed some help.  Commercial fishermen felt the same way.  So, it seems, did state fisheries managers, who did little to address the problem.  

At first, managers seemed to believe that declining striped bass abundance merely reflected a natural fluctuation, and would reverse itself in time.  When it became clear that something more serious was going on, they confronted a fishing industry opposed to any restrictions on landings.  The managers themselves appeared sympathetic to the industry, and were reluctant to impose restrictions on their states’ fishermen if fishermen in neighboring states were not similarly constrained..

The bass were clearly on the wrong track.  With no one willing to step in to address their problems, the inevitable eventually occurred. 

The stock crashed.  The train wreck some of us feared became real.

It took federal legislation and very strong management measures, imposed on the states by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, to rebuild the population once it collapsed.  But, by 1995, striped bass were on a safe track once again.  The population thrived, and as a result, the commercial and recreational fisheries also thrived.

For a while.

But now, striped bass are overfished once again.  Recruitment in the Maryland portion of the Chesapeake Bay has also tanked, with the juvenile abundance indices for the four years between 2019 and 2022 being 3.37, 2.48, 3.20, and 3.62, respectively—the lowest four-year average in the entire time series, even lower that it was when the stock had collapsed.  The lowest Maryland juvenile abundance index ever recorded, 0.89, was also a relatively recent event, occurring in 2012.

On the plus side, 2011 produced a strong year class—although such year class didn’t demonstrate proportionately strong recruitment at Age 1—and another strong year class, which did recruit well, was produced in 2015.  A stock assessment update, released in late 2022, found that the stock has a good chance of rebuilding by 2029, provided that fishing mortality is maintained at or below the target level.  Amendment 7 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Striped Bass, adopted last year, includes new conservation provisions, and represents a real step forward for striped bass management.

The bad news is that fishing mortality seems to be spiking.  Recreational landings in 2022 were 91% higher than 2021 landings, when measured in numbers of fish, and 123% higher if measured in pounds.  Release mortality removed even more bass from the stock.

I look at the increased mortality, I look at the low recruitment, and sometimes it makes me feel almost young again.  It's like I'm still in my early 20s, and once again hearing the faint and all-too-familiar sound of a slowly-approaching train, the sound that its wheels make as they rattle and bounce along an increasingly rickety and badly ballasted track. 

I start to think about how that train’s trip is going to end.

It doesn’t have to end very badly.  Today, we have a management structure in place that we didn’t have—and hardly contemplated—half a century ago.  We have people with the skill, techincal support, and knowledge to get the train over the broken section of track, and bring it safely home.

What we don't know is whether those people have the intention and the will to do so.

We'll learn that in May, when the ASMFC’s Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board will look at the new landings numbers, and receive the Technical Committee's views on how the increased fishing mortality will impact the bass’ recovery.  Once they know that, they will have a very simple decision to make.

They can act to keep the stock safe, without further delay.

Or they can do nothing, and wait, and increase the chances that a serious crach will occur once again.