STRIPED BASS CLEAR FIRST HURDLE ON TRACK TOWARD REBUILDING

 

Last Tuesday marked a milestone on the long road torebuilding the striped bass population, as New York finally adopted the 31-inch maximum size for striped bass that the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Atlantic Striped Management Board established at its May 2^nd meeting.  Tuesday evening saw the New Jersey Marine Resources Commission, on a 5-2 vote, also support the 31-inch maximum size, ending worries that New Jersey might go out of compliance with the ASMFC mandate.

Thus, two of the most important states on the coast, interms of recreational landings, either have or will adopt a 28- to 31-inch slot limit, and hopefully effect substantial reductions in their states’ striped bass removals.

Virginia is now the only state that has not acted on the 31-inch maximum; however, a hearing on the matter is scheduled for June 27, so that state should also soon fall into line.

Putting that emergency measure in place should reduce 2023 fishing mortality by about 29% compared to 2022, but there is a fair amount of uncertainty around that estimate, because scientists can’t know how anglers are going to react to the new management measures.  Taking all things into account, they believe that the new management measures will reduce removals by about 4.9 million fish, compared to 2022.

That’s a significant reduction, and with New York and New Jersey now on board, and Virginia on the way, there’s a very good chance that it’s going to happen.

Unfortunately, as significant as that reduction is, it’s not big enough to reduce fishing mortality to the F=0.17 fishing mortality target, and even if it did, the reduction probably wouldn’t be enough to rebuild the striped bass stock.  It appears that, given the events of last Tuesday, the bass have cleared only one of at least three hurdles they will have to overcome to rebuild.

The next hurdle will be Addendum II.

At the Management Board’s May meeting, Dr. Justin Davis, the Connecticut fisheries manager, made the motion to initiate an addendum

“to implement commercial and recreational measures for the ocean and Chesapeake Bay fisheries in 2024 that in the aggregate are projected to achieve F-target from the 2022 stock assessment update (F=0.17).  Potential measures for the ocean recreational fishery should include modifications to the Addendum VI standard slot limit of 28-35” with harvest season closures as a secondary non-preferred option.  Potential measures for Chesapeake Bay recreational fisheries, as well as ocean and Bay commercial fisheries should include maximum size limits.”

That seems pretty straightforward and simple, but I suspect that getting Addendum II through the public hearing process and finally approved by the Management Board, in the form originally contemplated by Dr. Davis, is going to be a bit of a struggle.

The first hint of that came from the resistance to the original emergency action.

Although the simple expedient of capping the recreational size limit at 31 inches will probably save nearly 5 million bass, hopefully help ensure that we will have a viable bass fishery in the future, and was generally accepted by striped bass anglers, it was strenuously opposed by the for-hire fleet, particularly those sailing out of ports between Rhode Island and New Jersey. 

The region’s for-hire operators seem to believe that the emergency rules are going to hurt their businesses.  However, as Massachusetts fishery manager Dr. Michael Armstrong noted at the May meeting, “any captain worth his salt” ought to be able to find a fish that falls within the new, narrowed slot, given the current state of the population.  

A newspaper article that originally appeared in The Day, of New London, CT, quoted the president of the Connecticut Charter Boat/Party Boat Association, who complained that, because of the new regulations,

“We have to go through more fish to get a keeper fish.  It’s gonna have a long term, unfair effect…it’s drastic overreach,”

yet the same person, who is a charter boat captain, admitted that not even one customer has cancelled a charter because of the new rules.

Nonetheless, when the ASMFC held webinars/hearings on the emergency measures, Rhode Island for-hire operators were particularly vocal in calling for special rules that would give the customers on charter and party boats special privileges that were not enjoyed by other anglers on the coast. 

In New Jersey, for-hire opposition was strong enough to cause the state’s Marine Fisheries Commission to delay action on the measure until last Tuesday night (the video of last Tuesday’s Commission meeting, accessible here https://www.thefisherman.com/nj-de-bay-region-fishing-forecast-june-22-2023/, provides some idea of fishing industry opposition; the pro-industry slant of the narrator is also telling).  In New York,although the for-hire fleet is responsible for less than 2% of all directedstriped bass trips made in the state, they made enough noise to get both stateand federal legislators involved, and delay implementation of the emergency action until earlier this week.

Given that the emergency measures, on their own, won’t get fishing mortality down to the target level, and that Addendum II is specifically intended to reduce the fishing mortality rate to 0.17, it’s likely that the Addendum II management measures are going to be somewhat more restrictive than the current slot limit, although whether that will involve a different slot limit or perhaps include the non-preferred option of seasonal harvest prohibitions cannot yet be known.  But whatever measures are included in the Addendum, we can expect strong opposition from the for-hire fleet.

At joint meetings of the Plan Development Team and Technical Committee, we are also seeing resistance to the concept, included in Dr. Davis’ motion, of capping the size of fish landed by the commercial fleet.  

There are technical reasons for approaching such a cap with caution, for it takes more smaller fish to fill the same commercial quota that is currently being filled with fewer, but larger, bass; getting the cap right may well involve adjusting current quotas, with a focus on the cap’s likely impacts on spawning potential and yield per recruit, to prevent the cap from doing more harm than good.  But the scientists are working on that.

A more intractable problem is that of dead discards resulting from the use of non-selective commercial fishing gear.  While Massachusetts’ commercial fishermen may only use hook and line, and so can easily release oversized fish, many jurisdictions allow far less selective gear to be employed.  That became clear at the same PDT/technical committee meetings, where a Delaware representative has argued against the commercial size cap because, as he readily admitted, the fixed gill nets used by Delaware commercials are notoriously “dirty”—that is, they catch and kill just about anything they encounter—and so would produce a lot of dead discards.

That’s another problem that can be fairly easily fixed, either by converting the quotas to catch rather than landings, and so charging dead discards against a state’s quota, or—and on paper, this is the simplest fix at all—outlawing the use of non-selective gear types.

While all that is easy to say, it’s even easier to predict that when the draft Addendum II is released for public comment, which will probably happen soon after the August Management Board meeting, there will be a lot of hostile comment, coming from both the for-hire and commercial fishing communities, that could undercut the document’s ability to help rebuild the bass stock.

Again, Dr. Armstrong put it best:

“For next year, everything is going to be looked at, and if fishing mortality has to be cut, it will need to involve the commercial fishery too.  They won’t get a pass on this one.  There will be debate, and they will be arguing that they didn’t cause this, but at some point if you’re part of the harvest you need to be part of the solution.”

That only makes sense.  Unfortunately, when fisheries debates begin, sense is often the first thing to fall victim to at least some of the participants.

Even if Addendum II makes it through the process intact, and the fish successfully navigate their second hurdle, striped bass rebuilding will not be assured.  From what we know now, it won’t even be likely, for at the June 5 meeting of the PDT and Technical Committee, it was revealed that a fishing mortality rate of 0.17—the F_target that is Addendum II’s goal—only had a 28% chance of rebuilding the stock by the 2029 rebuilding deadline.

That means that yet another management action—we can, for purposes of this discussion, call it Addendum III, although it might or might not have that designation—will be required to get fishing mortality down to F_rebuild, the fishing mortality rate that will allow the stock to rebuild by 2029.

Right now, we have no idea what F_rebuild will be.  We probably know that it will be lower than Ftarget, 0.17—and I’ll always say “probably” because sometimes we get surprised when the technical folks crush the numbers—but we won’t know just how low it will have to be until the next stock assessment is released around October 2024. 

Fortunately, after Dr. Davis made his original motion to initiate Addendum II, Dr. Armstrong proposed an amendment which read,

“The addendum will include an option for a provision enabling the Board to respond via Board action to the results of the upcoming stock assessment updates (e.g. currently scheduled for 2024, 2026) if the stock is not projected to rebuild by 2029 with a probability greater than or equal to 50%.

That amendment was approved, as was the motion to which it was attached.  Thus, once the 2024 assessment update comes out, the Management Board will be able to move quickly to adopt needed rebuilding measures, without the need to first compose a draft addendum and send it out for public comment.

However, that doesn’t mean that adopting Addendum III will be easy.  Although the Board won’t take such addendum to public hearing, every Management Board member will be reaching out to and hearing from their states’ striped bass fishermen, tackle dealers, and for-hire fleet, and it’s likely that industry opposition will be even more strident than it was when the emergency measures were released.

We don’t know what sort of measures Addendum III might contain in addition to size limits, but no-harvest closures are virtually assured, along with likely cuts to states’ commercial quotas.  Resistance undoubtedly be stiff, state legislators will almost certainly become involved, and it is far from impossible that some states, which have supported rebuilding so far, with reconsider their positions if the required rebuilding measures will work real hardship on their fishing industries.

Whether there will be enough support on the Management Board to adopt Addendum III, and the measures needed to achieve rebuilding, is anyone’s guess at this point.  I remain somewhat optimistic, given the strong support for striped bass conservation that many states have demonstrated to date, but that may only be because I don’t know what achieving F_rebuild will take; the needed measures might be daunting enough to spark real concerns.

The bottom line is that, right now, we have no way to know how high the bass’ third hurdle will be, and no way to know whether such hurdle will be overcome.

It’s possible that, at some point between now and 2029, Maryland will produce another strong year class, or perhaps even more.  While that won’t help rebuilding, as any pass spawned over the next few years won’t enter the spawning stock before 2029, it would still help ensure the species’ future.

It’s also possible that the current dismal level of striped bass recruitment will continue over the next five or six years, and conceivably into the foreseeable future, at which point discussions about rebuilding become academic, and discussions about how to avoid a stock collapse begin.  Should we get to that point, talk about not mere harvest reductions, but also harvest prohibitions, could well be on the table.

Hopefully we won’t get to that point.

Hopefully, the Management Board will help the striped bass over every hurdle that it confronts. 

I think that, right now, most of the Management Board members intend to do just that.  Whether such intent will survive the challenges of rebuilding is just one more thing that, at this point in the process, we really have no way to know.