SCARE TACTICS IN THE SOUTH ATLANTIC

 

I’ve noticed a trend over the past two or three years.

“Neighborhood” websites, Facebook groups, and similar sorts of social media are appearing across the Internet.  Although they were originally designed to provide neighbors with a way to share local information —perhaps local politics or school board elections, or where to buy a good pizza or donate a used couch (not to mention providing some advertising revenue to the site’s owner)—it usually doesn’t take long for such sites to be taken over by paranoid residents and conspiracy theorists, who track every man, woman, or child who fails to pick up after their dog, and are certain that teenaged kids can’t walk down the road without being involved in some kind of crime.

If you’re really fortunate, someone might post a photo of an unidentified drunk urinating in their front yard.

There is wailing about the general breakdown of society, and how the world as we know it is coming to an end.

And it’s remarkable to see how many people join in.

There’s just something about conspiracy theories and threats of impending doom that seem to appeal to the human psyche.  People seem to want to believe that they’re victims of some sort of scam.  Politicians, fundraisers, and various charitable organizations have taken advantage of that for years, to invoke knee-jerk reactions and keep folks from thinking rationally about pending issues.  And, of course, to keep them off-balance enough that they’re willing to open up their checkbooks and send in donations without really understanding how that cash will be used.

So yes, we’ve seen it for years, but it still rubs me the wrong way when I see such invitations to unthinking hysteria invade the saltwater sportfishing space.

The latest incursion took the form of an article titled “A Permit in Sheep’s Clothing,” which was written by Ted Venker, a spokesman for the Coastal Conservation Association, and appeared in Sport Fishing magazine.  In it, Venker tries to convince anglers that the National Marine Fisheries Service—long one of CCA’s favorite boogeymen—is plotting to prevent anglers from fishing.  The agency will supposedly accomplish that goal by requiring (in South Atlantic waters),  

“a federal permit for offshore anglers to get a better handle on who is fishing offshore and [will] use that information to determine better harvest and bycatch data.”

Even Venker admits that such proposal is innocuous, and even makes sense—on its surface.  But then he rolls out the conspiracy stuff.

Supposedly, anglers should be wary of the permit proposal, first because the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act already requires that recreational fishermen be licensed, so NMFS should supposedly be able to obtain any data it needs by tweaking the license database, and secondly because individuals within NMFS have allegedly stated that there is a need for recreational “effort rationalization,” which Venker interprets as a need to limit the number of anglers.

There are problems with both such objections, but before getting into that, some background is probably needed.

The call for a federal recreational fishing permit in the South Atlantic was largely a response to problems in the South Atlantic red snapper fishery, which remains overfished, has been experiencing overfishing since the 1960s, and saw spawning stock biomass beaten down to very low levels; the first benchmark stock assessment, conducted in 2007, found a fishing mortality rate 7.7 times the fishing mortality target, and a spawning stock biomass just 3% of its target level.

Such stock assessment led to strict management measures intended to rebuild the red snapper population; managers initially closed the fishery but, as biomass increased, began to allow a limited harvest.  In recent years, directed harvest has proven to be the least of the red snappers’ problems  Because the fish is part of a multi-species snapper/grouper complex that shares the same hard-bottom habitat, red snapper are often caught incidentally by anglers targeting other species when the season for their retention is closed.  Because most of those snapper are caught in deeper water, they often suffer barotrauma and don’t survive after being released.  Thus, regulatory discards of red snapper in other recreational fisheries now constitutes the largest source of fishing mortality.

The recreational and commercial seasons are extremely short—with the recreational season perhaps limited to a single weekend—because anglers kill so many red snapper when the season is closed.

Converting at least some of those dead discards into landings would be desirable; if that can’t be done through other means, it is possible that NMFS might close wide expanses of ocean to all bottom fishing during part of the year, although to date, the South Atlantic Fishery Management Council has opposed all efforts to do so.

Good data is critical to improving red snapper management.  As Venker correctly noted,

“federal information on recreational discards is probably the poorest-quality dataset in all of federal fisheries management.”

The offshore permit was postulated, in part, to improve the quality of red snapper discard data.

Requiring such permits is hardly a new idea.

When I bought my first marginally offshore-capable boat—a 20-foot Sea Ox center console powered by a single 115 hp Johnson outboard—in 1982, I had to obtain a federal bluefin tuna permit before taking it to the tuna grounds.  That original permit slowly morphed from a bluefin tuna permit that made no distinction between recreational and commercial fishermen into my current Angling Category Atlantic Highly Migratory Species Permit with Shark Endorsement, which I must have not only to fish for bluefin, but for all Atlantic tunas, swordfish, sharks, and billfish. 

A few times each season, I get a letter from NMFS, telling me that I will be contacted by someone who will ask me when I fished and what I caught during a particular two-week period.  When the telephone call comes, I provide the NMFS representative with the requested information, say goodbye, and maybe—or maybe not—get another such call a month or so down the line.  The data provided by anglers all along the coast, throughout the season, provides NMFS with a more comprehensive look at the offshore recreational HMS fishery than it would likely obtain from the Marine Recreational Information Program survey, because the universe of offshore fishermen is relatively small, and they could easily fall through the cracks of a more generalized survey.

While NMFS could, in theory, mine the database of licensed anglers, and perhaps send out a questionnaire to the entire database asking them whether they fish offshore, and what they caught if they do, but that would be an unwieldy, expensive process, and could be badly biased by non-response.  Requiring any anglers pursuing highly migratory species in federal waters to hold a permit, which they can easily obtain merely by filling out an online form and providing a credit card for the processing costs, is a simpler and more efficient way to obtain better data.

NMFS has never given any cause to believe that such permit threatened anglers’ ability to fish offshore.

Similarly, when the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council wanted better data on the recreational fishery for golden and blueline tilefish a few years ago, it put a permitting requirement into place.  Tilefish are a seldom-encountered species in the Marine Recreational Information Program, and the only way to get the needed data was to define the universe of tilefish anglers, and require them to report on their fishing activities.  Once again, anyone who wants a permit can get one simply by applying online.

There is no evidence that a federal South Atlantic fishing permit would be any different.  It would weed out the many licensed anglers who focus on red drum, seatrout, snook, and the like, while providing NMFS with a database of those fishermen who actually venture offshore, allowing the agency to direct data inquiries to the folks who are actually participating in the fishery.

Yes, NMFS could probably query every licensed fisherman in the relevant states, in an effort to find out who fishes offshore and might provide the needed information, but that would merely create a massive manpower and financial burden on an agency that is already stretched thin for funds.  Requiring a permit makes for more sense, spreading the manpower burden over the every angler who might be fishing offshore, who could obtain the permit through an automated process while paying their share of the costs of the program.

It's hard to see anything threatening there.

As far as recreational “effort rationalization” goes, anglers have to admit a simple truth:  The fish are under more pressure today than they experienced in the past.  Over the last forty years, recreational effort, measured by the number of trips, has been slowly, but steadily, increasing.

That has certainly been the case in the South Atlantic.  In 1982, anglers in the region made less than 55 million trips, targeting all available species.  That number increased to more than 61 million trips in 1992, around 69 million trips in 2002 and 2012, and nearly 72 million trips in 2022.  Thus, fishing effort increased by more than 30% over the course of four decades (it should be noted that effort varies from year to year, and 2022 doesn’t represent the peak of overall fishing activity; that occurred in 2010, when nearly 80 million trips were taken).

But we’re talking about a federal recreational fishing permit, so overall trips aren’t the ones that matter; such permit would only be required of anglers fishing more than 3 miles offshore.  When we look at South Atlantic effort through that lens, we see the nearly 2.6 million offshore trips taken in 1982 increase just slightly, to less than 2.7 million trips, in 1992, then jump to nearly 3.9 million trips in 2002, before dropping off to 3.3 million trips in 2012 and 3.4 million trips in 2022.  Still, although not the highest number in the time series (which would be the nearly 5.3 million trips—double the 1982 figure—taken in 2018), the 2022 estimate would again represent a greater than 30% increase in recreational fishing effort during the period.

It’s a pretty fair bet that the biomass of South Atlantic reef fish didn’t increase by 30% over the same period. 

We also need to acknowledge that the technical advances in boats, fishing electronics, and fishing tackle have made today’s anglers far more efficient than they were forty years ago.  Fast, long-ranged, more sea-capable boats, equipped with GPS, side-scan and 360-degree electronics, and “spot-lock” technologies that allow boats to hover above a small piece of hard bottom with minimal skill or effort involved, coupled with advances in braided lines that let anglers get away with lighter jigs and sinkers when fishing deep water, mean that anglers are fishing far more effectively today than they did in the ‘80s, when everyone was still getting along with LORAN C, had to learn how to anchor over a piece of productive structure, and were somewhat limited in the depth that they could fish due to relatively large-diameter Dacron and monofilament lines.

At some point, between an increasing number of angler trips and increasingly efficient angling technologies, the need to maintain fish stocks at sustainable levels will probably require some restrictions on recreational effort.  That’s just reality.

However, restrictions on effort do not automatically equate into creating privileged classes of anglers, who can fish (because they hold a permit), and a mass of those who cannot.  Instead, effort restrictions can just as easily be accomplished by imposing closed seasons, which have been well-tested fishery management tools, in both fresh and salt water, for many decades.

The seasons may have to be tweaked a bit, to minimize the sort of discard mortality issues that are plaguing red snapper bycatch, but there is no question that can be done.

In the end, it may be that the data developed by a federal recreational fisheries permit demonstrates that such restrictions aren’t needed.  It’s not inconceivable that, if better data could be obtained from a larger universe of snapper/grouper anglers, we might learn that red snapper discards are less than currently believed, and that the recreational season could be expanded.

But that, of course, is not why we’re seeing the scare tactics hauled out.

Because it is equally—let’s be honest, it’s far more—conceivable that, if NMFS increased the accuracy of its data, not only regarding red snapper releases but also regarding the effort, catch, and landings affecting other members of the snapper/grouper complex, it could discover that the recreational fishery’s footprint is greater than currently believed, and that additional restrictions are needed.  That would certainly be unpalatable, both to CCA and, by extension, to the Center for Sportfishing Policy to which it pays fealty, and which zealously guards the sportfishing industry’s ability to sell copious quantities of boats, bait, and tackle.

Thus, Venker once again seeks to make anglers suspicious of the federal fisheries management process, so that he can call for his favorite nostrum, suggesting

“One way anglers could support the original goal of an offshore permit is to task the states with adapting their own systems—which already exist—to determine the offshore angling universe.  Putting the states in charge and ensuring that any such permit is used only for data collection and education purposes has a much higher likelihood of cooperation and success.”

Such suggestion is, of course, a red herring, as even if data is collected by state managers, federal managers could still use it to place onerous restrictions on anglers, if the data indicated that such restrictions were called for.

Thus, it’s easy to believe that the motivation for opposing a federal permit is far simpler.  Inducing the South Atlantic states to develop their own recreational data programs, similar to programs developed by the states bordering the Gulf of Mexico to monitor their red snapper landings, could easily create the same issue that already arose in the Gulf:  State programs that employ a different methodology than does the MRIP survey, and so undercount (when compared to MRIP) recreational landings, and so creating another opportunity to attack the federal management system and to promote state programs that would allow higher landings.

So if the song seems familiar, it’s because we’ve all seen this show before.

It’s unfortunate, and a little sad, that we’re now seeing scare tactics being used in the South Atlantic, in an effort to manufacture the same sort of long-running, self-serving red snapper crisis that we’ve seen in the Gulf.

But given human nature, and the interests involved, it was probably inevitable.