WHEN FISH STOCKS DECLINE

 

I never knew that it could be so hard to buy a container of clams.

My boat went into the water ten days ago, and with a good offshore forecast for Friday, I thought that I would run outside and see if there might be some fish on our local.  So on Thursday, I ran the boat to a nearby fuel dock, topped off the tanks, and tried to buy a gallon of clams, along with some ice to put in the cooler.

It turned out that neither was available.  The dock hadn’t turned on its ice-maker yet, and wasn’t planning on stocking clams—or any other frozen bait—for another week or so.

That created a bit of a nuisance, but I figured that I could always stop at a 7-11 to buy ice the next morning, and pick up some clams at another shop.

It turns out that the ice was no problem, but I was very wrong about the bait.  I stopped at two more shops, including one that was big enough to have a national clientele, but there was nary a clam to be found.

At that point, I was getting frustrated.  It was April 19^th, which from a historical perspective, was well past the start of the local fishing season.  The South Shore of Long Island, New York is a traditional hotbed of fishing activity, both inshore and offshore.  It's a place where, if an angler wasn’t too choosy about what they caught, fish had always been available 24/7/365.

Most of the fishing during the coldest quadrant of the year—say, from mid-December through mid-March—was usually done on for-hire boats, most particularly the big party boat fleet moored at Captree State Park, which targeted winter cod, ling (red hake), and pollock on offshore wrecks, with blackfish (tautog) a lesser but still important part of the mix.  But beginning around the middle of March, private boats would start being launched, as anglers looked forward to St. Patrick’s Day, the unofficial start of the winter flounder season.

But note the language that I used:  “Historical perspective.”  “Traditional hotbed.”  “Fish had always been.”

Lots of past tense, and with good reason.

As I said, it was April 19^th.

When I moved to Long Island forty years ago, the winter flounder season would have been well underway, with the Captree party boats sailing daily, fishermen lined shoulder-to-shoulder along their rails.  Private boats would have been clogging the flats and channels where flounders fed, while shorebound anglers cast their baits from public piers, parks, and bulkheads.  

Atlantic mackerel would not have been be too far away, as offshore anglers waited for them to show, hoping to fill their freezers with fish that would later serve as bait for shark and tuna.  The first striped bass would be in the back bays, with a few scattered fish on the open beaches, while somewhere nearby, the very first bluefish of the season would be caught.

But as I eased down the State Boat Channel last Thursday morning, all of that was clearly in the past.  Outside of a single commercial boat outside Babylon Cove—I’m guessing he was setting crab pots—the upper part of the bay was empty, as was the state channel.  There were two empty trailers at the Captree boat launch, so some folks were on the water, but no cars to speak of at the party boat dock; from what I could tell, not a single one of those boats had sailed.

There was a little more life in the lower bay.  Three private boats fished in the shadow of the Robert Moses Bridge, probably hunting striped bass, although they might have been hoping that an early blackfish or two had already moved into the inlet.  A fourth boat, definitely targeting stripers, drifted along the south side of the inlet.

That was all.

It was thus pretty clear why I hadn’t been able to find any clams:  There weren’t yet any fishermen to buy them, because the fish that they used to target in the spring were just about gone.

The April fishery on the South Shore has, for all practical purposes, died.

Winter flounder collapsed close to two decades ago, although the writing was on the wall by the late 1980s.  

When New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation tried to put in regulations to stem the flounder’s decline around 1987 or 1988, they got a lot of pushback from the recreational fishing industry, particularly the party boat industry, which argued that customers needed the “perception” that they could have a “big day,” which meant keeping a pailful of fish, or they wouldn’t come out.  Such comments led the DEC to adopt regulations less restrictive than needed to protect the population, and began a series of management measure that were always too little, too late to stem the stock’s decline.

New York was not alone in such practices, nor can recreational fishing be blamed as the sole cause of the flounder’s decline. 

The New England Fishery Management Council was responsible for regulating the commercial and recreational flounder fisheries in federal waters; it allowed the stock to be continually overfished for decades, refusing to impose annual commercial catch limits for any groundfish species until compelled to do so by Congress.  

Patricia Kurkul, once the regional director of NMFS’ Greater Atlantic Regional Fisheries Office, did eventually impose a moratorium on harvesting southern stock winter flounder near the end of her tenure, but her successor, John Bullard, soon reopened the fishery once he took over, perhaps hoping to provide the northeastern trawler fleet with something to fish for after annual catch limits for cod were slashed.

Inshore, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission adopted a management plan that required managers to constrain fishing mortality to a rate that would maintain the stock’s spawning potential at a level no less than 40% of that of an unfished stock,  However, in January 1999, after learning that the spawning stock biomass had fallen below that level, the ASMFC’s Winter Flounder Management Board suspended states’ need to comply with such requirement, arguing that that federal measures remained unchanged, and that the ASMFC’s management plan should be consistent with NMFS’ regulations. 

That logic somehow didn’t apply when NMFS imposed a moratorium on landing southern stock flounder; while the ASMFC tightened recreational and commercial management measures, it still allowed harvest to continue.  However, after NMFS again allowed flounder harvest, and liberalized the landings limit as well, the Management Board again saw the virtues of following federal managers’ lead, and increased the length of the recreational season from sixty days to ten full months, despite the fact that the stock had already collapsed.

The recreational fishing industry opposed a flounder moratorium, arguing that they represented the first fish caught every year, and brought customers into shops that had been cash-starved for months.  It never urged managers to conserve the flounder resource.

Now boats don’t sail, and tackle shops don't need to stock much bait in April, because without fish, customers are nearly as scarce as the flounder.

Flounder represent an extreme example, but no matter the species, the recreational fishing industry seems disinterested in the long-term health of fish stocks.  Here in New York, we saw representatives of the for-hire fleet oppose the harvest reductions proposed in Addendum VI to Amendment 6 of the ASMFC’s striped bass management plan.  We saw a mob howling its discontent when the ASMFC tried to adopt science-based tautog regulations.  We saw resistance to measures intended to restore the overfished bluefish population.

A former DEC employee once told me that one of the more aggressive tackle shop owners even said something like (I’m probably not getting this down verbatim, although I am accurately reflecting the sentiment)

“I can’t worry about the long term; I need to get through this season first.”

And thus, even this late in April, few people are fishing, and the shops don't need to sell clams..  The season has grown shorter, and significantly less profitable, for April revenues, once lost, are gone forever.

The industry's short-term focus is, unfortunately, not limited to Long Island, New York, or the northeast. At the national level, the recreational fishing and boating industries are working to undercut federal fisheries management by expanding recreational landings, regardless of the long-term impacts of such efforts. 

We saw that in the fight to pass the so-called “Modern Fish Act” in 2018.  We see it in the continuing efforts to sabotage federal red snapper management in the Gulf of Mexico.  We saw it in the recent adoption of the so-called “Harvest Control Rule” by the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council, despite scientists, and council staff’s, reservations.

So far, the industry has been doing pretty well, as it manages  to convince enough anglers that, if they only buy enough high-tech gear, and fish from boats big enough and fast enough, and laden with enough cutting-edge electronics, to reach the remaining concentrations of fish, they can still be successful.

It has invested considerable talent and resources in lobbying federal and state decisionmakers, urging them to adopt regulations that allow anglers to land more fish now.

But they don’t seem to realize that, at some point, the party is going to end.  You can overexploit a resource for only so long.

Perhaps they lack the long-term perspective to understand that, despite all of today’s technological advances, from a catch-per-unit-effort standpoint, we're catching fewer fish today than we did back in the early 1960s, when we fished from slow wooden rowboats, and rarely ventured more than 15 or 20 minutes from the dock.

But if popular fish stocks continue to decline, following the path of striped bass and bluefish, of winter flounder and amberjack, of Gulf cobia and New England cod, the industry will eventually learn that the number of anglers will also decline, for, as I regularly note, fishing in an empty bay, ocean, or sound soon loses its appeal.

On the plus side, such waters won't be very crowded during much of the year.

And the tackle shops won't have to stock any clams at all.