SCENES FROM A STOCK COLLAPSE

 

Everyone who has gotten involved with fisheries issues has heard the term “stock collapse,” yet beyond a general agreement that stock collapse is bad, there’s not too much agreement on what the term means.

The Encyclopedia of Ocean Sciences defines stock collapse as

“a rapid reduction in stock abundance, …distinguished from short-term natural fluctuations,”

but that doesn’t provide too much guidance.  While it tells us that any decline in abundance must be “rapid,” it doesn’t tell us anything about how significant such decline must be to earn “collapse” status.  Intuitively, we recognize that a five or ten percent decline isn’t good enough, but is 25% good enough?  Does the population have to decline by more than half before “collapse” becomes an accurate description?  Or is even that not good enough?  Is something like a 75%, or even a 90%, decline needed before the term “stock collapse” applies?

And how, exactly, does one distinguish a stock collapse from “short-term natural fluctuations?”

There is no generally accepted formula.

Five years ago, a group of sixteen scientists attempted to provide meaningful guidance.  They published a paper titled “When is a fish stock collapsed?” which can be accessed through the ResearchGate website.  In the paper, the authors noted that

“numerous definitions exist for classifying stocks as collapsed, and that the classification of a stock’s status is sensitive to changes in the collapse definition’s formulation.”

In an attempt to bring some consistency to how “stock collapse” is defined, the authors wrote,

“The definition we propose views a collapse as an abrupt change to an undesired state.  It consists of two sequential, interlinked criteria that capture the collapse process; an abrupt decline, and an ensuing period of prolonged depletion.  Indicative of impaired production, prolonged depletion is an undesired state for a fish stock.  Each criteria is defined as follows:

1.  Abrupt decline:  a stock’s adult biomass declines by 70% within a maximum of three generations or 10 years.

2.  Prolonged depletion:  a stock’s mean adult biomass over a succeeding generation remains below the 70% abrupt decline.”

While that definition is not generally accepted either, it provides a good starting point for a discussion, allowing us to assume that, to qualify as a stock collapse, the abundance of adult fish has to fall by far more than half, and has to stay at low levels for a while; a stock that falls quickly and bounces back just as fast is merely experiencing a temporary fluctuation.

With that in mind, let’s go back in time, to get an idea what a stock collapse looks like.

It’s 1968.  My family had purchased a new boat that year, a 15-foot no-name outboard—if I recall, the brand was something like “Glasscraft,” made in some ramshackle facility in Norwalk, CT—with a 33 hp Evinrude hanging on the back.  But it was the day after Thanksgiving, the town dock was officially closed, and the boat was sitting on blocks in our back yard.  Striped bass, bluefish, weakfish, mackerel, and just about everything else was already in the year’s rear-view mirror, which is why I was sitting on the supposedly shut-down town dock, with one line down on the bottom for flounder and tomcod, and the other suspending baits just a few feet below the surface, where they’d hopefully attract my main target—smelt.

I wasn’t alone.  There were a few older guys—and by “older,” I mean retirees, or men who owned seasonal business who could sneak away to fish during the day with no one complaining—who were also hoping that the smelt would appear, but the real show wouldn’t begin until after dark, when the after-work crowd would arrive, armed with rods, Coleman lanterns, and maybe a bottle or two to stave off the cold.  Those were the serious smelt fishermen, and from late October until the creek froze over, they’d be lining the dock—and just about every other dock and seawall along the Connecticut and Westchester shores—with some just stopping by for an hour or two and others planning to stay until midnight or the wee hours of morning, seeking the small, silvery fish that were crowding into estuaries all along the north shore of Long Island Sound.

I don’t recall how many smelt I caught that day—I know that there were a few, along with some flounder and tomcod—but I do know that it was the last time I caught any at all.  The river began to ice over shortly thereafter, and when the autumn of ’69 came around—the smelt didn’t.  They didn’t show up at all.  They just disappeared, and a quirky fishery that attracted far more anglers than one might expect—and helped pay tackle shops’ bills at the end of the year—vanished over the course of a single season, with few people alive today even remembering that it ever existed.

We never figured out why the smelt collapsed.  At the time, a lot of fishermen blamed it on predation by bluefish, which had only recently begun to flood into our inshore waters.  In retrospect, I suspect that increasing development cut off access to most of the streams where they spawned, and with fewer new fish entering the stock, they could no longer support existing mortality levels—both fishing and natural—and so disappeared.

Whatever the cause, the stock collapsed, although I don’t think that was the stock collapse that you expected me to describe.

So let’s go back to 1968, but start a little sooner.  It is April.  The new boat is in the water, and we’re headed out for winter flounder.

Flounder had actually started to bite during March, but the town dock didn’t open until April 15, so we couldn’t start fishing until the month was almost done.  I can’t provide the details of any one trip, but I can say that from April through the end of May, we did a lot of flounder fishing and caught a lot of fish—most weighing well under a pound—without bothering to use any chum or pay particular attention to the tides.  Flounder were just about everywhere.

Things stayed like that for another decade.  But in the fall of ’79, we suddenly started catching a lot of big flounder, many over a pound and some weighing close to two, where there were only small fish before.  Excited to be catching bigger flounder, we didn’t really notice that the small fish were getting scarce.  The good fishing continued for a few years, but in 1983, my wife and I moved to the South Shore of Long Island, where the same pattern was repeating itself.

We caught lots of flounder, and at first, there were more small fish than large.  But by 1990, the small fish were disappearing on Long Island, too; 2-pound flounder became more common than hand-sized fish, and numbers were starting to drop. 

In the late ‘80s, state regulators tried to adopt regulations to halt the decline, but faced a lot of pushback from the recreational fishing industry, with for-hire boats complaining that a low bag limit would take away anglers’ perception that they might enjoy a “big day”—that is, take home a pailful of fish—and hurt business, while the shops were complaining that regulations would impact their bottom line.

Recruitment of young fish into the stock began declining sharply, but every attempt to constrain harvest met stiff opposition from the fishing industry, which couldn’t see beyond the short term.  By 2005, the fish were just about gone.  Restrictive regulations were eventually adopted, but they came too late to do very much good.  New York’s recreational landings fell from about 14.5 million fish in 1984 to just about 100 in 2022.

That certainly qualifies as a collapse.

But I’m guessing that’s not the stock collapse you were expecting me to write about, either, even though, between the loss of the smelt and the loss of the winter flounder, inshore anglers probably lost at least six weeks of good fishing at the beginning of the season, and about the same amount at the end, and the angling industry lost close to three months of previously dependable income. 

To provide some idea of how the loss of the flounder impacted the industry, in the ‘80s, in my part of Great South Bay, I could drive over the bridge to Fire Island and see the local channels lined with private and for-hire boats, all soaking bloodworms, clams, and sandworms, and chumming with mussels and clams, in pursuit of winter flounder; this April, when I was planning to run offshore for cod, I went to every tackle shop within a reasonable drive and couldn’t find even one that had started carrying bait, because so few folks were fishing that early in the season.

Still, let’s go back to 1968 one more time, and this time, we’ll talk about the collapse you’ve been waiting for—striped bass. 

Of course, that collapse didn’t start in ’68.  1968 was the year that I became a dedicated striped bass fisherman, because we finally had a boat small enough to sneak around the rocks and along the sod banks where bass were most likely to be.  My father and I were out every weekend, trolling the sandworm and spinner combinations that everyone used at the time.  We weren’t the best anglers in our part of the Sound, but there were enough bass around, in sizes ranging from shorts (the size limit back then was just 16 inches) to the occasional 50-pounder, that we managed to put quite a few fish in the boat, although none were particularly large.

In 1970, I got my driver’s license and, shortly thereafter, a well-used car.  Now able to drive myself to the dock, I began fishing after school—at least on nights when I didn’t have to work—and throughout the  summer, expanding my experience and my success as I began fishing not only with bait, but with plugs, bucktails, and the new soft plastic lures that were appearing in the shops.

In the same year, Maryland produced the largest year class of striped bass that had ever been seen.  The juvenile abundance index for 1970 was 30.52, and thought we’ve had four larger spawns since, I don’t think that I’ve ever seen striped bass available in as many different sizes as I did in the mid-1970s.NB

Beginning in 1972, the ’70 year class swarmed into Long Island Sound, first as 14-inchers, then growing larger every year.  Bigger bass, spawned during the 1950s and 1960s, were also readily available.  Thus, on one July morning, I could take out the owner of a local tackle shop, have him hook a couple of rats on poppers at the same time that I was fighting a 17 hooked on a bucktail, and then run to another spot  and put a 51 in the boat.

Fishing was very, very good back then.

But then we started noticing that our small fish were steadily getting bigger.  That is, we saw the 1970s getting bigger and, for a while, a few somewhat smaller bass coming up behind them.  But then we stopped seeing shorts, and then stopped seeing anything under 20 inches or so, and then…

The funny thing is, no one thought much about it until Bob Pond, a legendary striped bass fisherman and creator of the Atom line of artificial lures, started trying to call people’s attention to the fact that the Maryland juvenile abundance index was in sharp decline.  From its record-high level in 1970, it fell to 6.69 in ’75, 4.91 and 4.85 in ’76 and ’77.  It came up to 8.45 in ’78, but then sounded new lows, recording JAIs of 4.24, 1.98 and 1.22 over the next three years. 

While few new fish were entering the stock, too many older, spawning-age fish were still being removed.  Because there were still a lot of large bass being taken, neither striped bass fishermen nor fishery managers paid much attention to the poor Maryland spawns until the stock, stressed beyond any hope of resilience, collapsed.

Every now and again, I hear people say that the striped bass stock is collapsing today. 

While I respect such people’s concerns for the fishery, and know that their hearts are in the right place, they have no idea of what a striped bass stock collapse really looks like.  Right now, spawning stock biomass is three or four times larger than it was in the first half of the 1980s, when the collapse drove it to lows that I hope we will never see again.

There are things that you have to live through to truly comprehend, and a striped bass collapse is probably one of them. 

Imagine heading out before dawn, fishing for stripers because that’s what you do, knowing before you cast off from the dock that your efforts will almost certainly prove fruitless.  Morning after morning, you try, casting to waters that you have fished almost since you first learned how to walk, waters you knew so well that if someone handed you a pen and a blank sheet of paper, you could draw in every ledge and boulder, and show how they appeared at every phase of the tide.  Morning after morning, there’s no sign of even a single striped bass.

Then, one day, that changes. 

The sun is still below the horizon, and everything is windless and still, wrapped in the sort of silver-gray light that you only get on soft, early summer mornings.  There are wisps of haze hanging over the water, enough that you can’t really tell where the sky stops and Long Island Sound begins.  You’re fishing a mile of bouldered shoreline; once a score of boats—maybe more—would have been working the points and rockpiles, but now, there is only one other boat, maybe two hundred yards away, to share the empty water.  But you cast, as you have cast so many times before, retrieving the bucktail with practiced motions, but without any hope.

But this time, something interrupts the lure’s return to boatside.  You lean back on the rod and set your hook into the jaw of a decent fish which you fight to the boat, then quickly unhook and release.

And just then, as you straighten up and reach for your rod, you notice the haunting sound of a single man clapping coming across the water from the other boat.  Whether he was clapping because you released the fish, or simply because you simply managed to find one, is something that you’ll never know.

But you’ll always remember.

That is what a stock collapse looks like.

Last Friday, in the dark before dawn, I met Mike Mucha at his boat on the Mianus River, and we fished my old home waters.  I still know where every rock resides, and how the current wraps around each one at various stages of tide.  We worked from Cos Cob to Greenwich, and found a few bass along the way.  None were very large—Mike had one that might have gone 10 or 12 pounds, from the big Maryland year class of 2015—but we knew that there were bigger fish around, from the strong year classes produced in 2011, 2003, and even 1996.  Anglers are celebrating the abundance of 2015s, and praising the health of the stock.

But of all the fish that we caught, there almost none were smaller than 24 inches or so, probably fish spawned in 2018.

Since then, the Maryland juvenile abundance index has tanked.  For the years 2019-2022, it was 3.37, 2.48, 3.20, and 3.62, the lowest four-year average ever recorded in the 65-year life of the survey.  Predictions for the 2023 year class are not good.

We drifted along the rocks and sod banks, and bass were still hitting our lures.

I’ve cast to those stones for most of my life, and know them well.  But lately, it’s not the rocks that have been giving me an eerie feeling of déjà vu.