Ever since this blog began, I have made it a
habit to review the past year in fisheries management, before making some
predictions about what the big issues in the next year will be. Last year, my review of the past 12 months
was relatively upbeat.
That was last year.
2023, on the other hand, probably didn’t see
a single unqualified management success.
Instead, we had one or two “it could have been worse” situations, and a
few others where “worse” is just what we got.
I’ll begin the review with the species that
probably generated the most debate, at least on the East Coast—the striped bass—then
move on from there.
Striped bass
The striped bass was definitely one of those “it
could have been worse” situations.
A
stock assessment accepted by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s
Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board in 2019 found the striped bass stock to
be both overfished and experiencing overfishing. While Addendum
VI to Amendment 6 to the Atlantic Striped Bass Interstate Fishery Management
Plan got overfishing under control in 2020, the stock remained
overfished. In
October 2022, the Management Board received a stock assessment update which found
that the striped bass stock had a 78.6% chance to be fully rebuilt by the 2029 deadline
established by the fishery management plan.
Unfortunately, the stock assessment update failed
to consider the impact that the big 2015 year class, which was entering the 28-
to 35-inch slot size limit, would have on recreational landings. The
influx of legal-sized bass caused recreational landings to spike in 2022, with
2022 landings approximately 90% higher than they were in 2021; when commercial
landings and a slight increase in recreational releases were added to the
calculation, biologists found that the number of striped bass removed from the
population had increased by about 33%.
The Management Board had not planned to
revisit striped bass management measures until after a stock assessment update
was released in 2024, and had no legal obligation to do so. However, the combination of sharply increased
recreational landings, poor recruitment in key spawning areas, and a 2015 year
class that was largely encompassed within the slot limit caused managers to
take preemptive action. At the May 2023 Management Board meeting, motion
“to initiate an Addendum to implement commercial and
recreational measures for the ocean and Chesapeake Bay fisheries in 2024 that in
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 well 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.
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 2004, 2006) if the stock is not
projected to rebuild by 2029 with a probability greater than or equal to 50%,”
The May meeting marked the high point of 2023
striped bass management. After that,
things began to flow slowly downhill.
The Management Board was supposed to approve a
draft of the new addendum, Draft Addendum II to Amendment 7 of the
Interstate Management Plan for Atlantic Striped Bass, at its August
meeting, when it would select the management options that would go out for
public comment. Such approval would let
the ASMFC schedule hearings on the Draft Addendum in late summer and early
fall, and allow the Management Board to consider such comments, and approve a
final version of Addendum II, at its October meeting. States would then have to adopt new
regulations in time for the 2024 season.
The version of the Draft Addendum that was
finally released for public comment was a pitifully weak management document
that was more likely to fail than to succeed in achieving its goals. The
ASMFC’s Atlantic Striped Bass Technical Committee found that, depending on
which options were ultimately included in the final version of Addendum II,
such Addendum had between a 33% and 56% of reducing fishing mortality to the
target level, and that, if fishing mortality was reduced to Ftarget, there would
still only be a 48% chance that the stock would be rebuilt by the 2029
deadline; when all options in the Draft Addendum were considered, there was
only a 33% to 51% chance that timely rebuilding would be achieved.
The Technical Committee warned against putting
too much faith in such estimates, saying that the uncertainty around the
projected percentages was very, very large, and that any percentages provided
were far more useful for determining the relative value of competing proposals,
rather than determining their actual effect.
At the same time, providing such low estimates of probable success, in
the face of substantial uncertainty, should breed discomfort, as the level of
precaution embodied in regulations should be directly proportional to the level
of uncertainty in the data underlying such rules.
By that standard, Draft Addendum II is a
badly flawed management effort.
At the same time, it at least represents some
effort to preemptively avert a decline in the striped bass population, for
which the Management Board should be commended, as they could
have simply decided to sit on their hands and do nothing until the stock
assessment came out, as a different Management Board, largely composed of
different people, did in November 2011, arguably setting off the chain of
events that led the striped bass down the path that it travels today.
Politics trumps science in Louisiana
A little earlier, while discussing the Fishing
Effort Survey, I mentioned how many angling industry and anglers’ rights
organizations prefer state management over the federal fishery management
system, because state systems can usually be manipulated more easily, and
political pressure more easily brought to bear.
No state illustrates that more clearly than
Louisiana.
2023 saw Louisiana’s state fisheries managers
try to implement more restrictive regulations for both speckled trout (more
properly, spotted seatrout) and red drum, and saw their efforts stymied in both
cases by recreational organizations, particularly the Coastal Conservation
Association, that used their political clout to stymie science-based fisheries
management.
“In our experience, changes in recreational regulations
have rarely, if ever, resulted in a direct fishery recovery,”
and declaring that
“Moving to a 13 or 13.5-inch minimum size seems drastic and
unnecessary,”
CCA Louisiana opposed Louisiana’s fishery
management efforts. Its opposition helped
to convince a legislative oversight committee to override the state’s
professional fisheries managers, forcing them to come up with alternative
management measures. Fortunately, their
second proposal, which called for a 15 fish bag and a 13- to 20-inch slot
limit, and allowed anglers to keep two above-slot fish each day, still provided
the speckled trout with a reasonable opportunity to rebuild, and made it past
the legislative committee.
Red drum are now running the same gauntlet.
Current regulations allow anglers to keep
five red drum per day. Such fish must be
between 16 and 27 inches long, although one drum per day may exceed the 27-inch
maximum size. Louisiana’s regulators
determined that by dropping the bag limit to three red drum per day, narrowing
the slot limit to 18 to 24 inches, and prohibiting the retention of any
over-slot fish, they could reduce landings by 55% and rebuild the stock within
about 10 years.
“The majority of our members believe the [Notice of
Intent to adopt the proposed regulations] goes a step too far.”
And once again, the politicians on the
oversight committee vetoed the professional managers’ proposal.
So far, the red drum’s saga doesn’t end as
well as the speckled trout’s. Louisiana’s
managers have proposed a new set of rules, which would drop the bag limit from
five fish to three and adopt an 18- to 27-inch slot limit, while prohibiting
the retention of over-slot fish and prohibiting captains and crew from keeping
fish on trips carrying passengers for hire.
Such regulations will result in a much
smaller reduction in recreational landings, and lead to a significantly longer
rebuilding time. As of now, it is not
clear that they will pass oversight committee review.
Mid-Atlantic “Harvest Control Rule”
This topic, too, could fall into the “it could have been worse” column, although the outcome was already pretty bad. T
he Mid-Atlantic “Harvest Control
Rule” (quotation
marks needed as, from a strictly technical perspective, it isn’t) was
adopted at a joint meeting of the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council and
the ASMFC’s Summer Flounder, Scup, and Black Sea Bass and Bluefish management
boards in June 2022.
It
represents the culmination, or at least a substantial mid-course victory, of
the fishing industry’s efforts to evade the strict, data-based requirements of
the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, and replace them
with a set of management actions largely decoupled from the recreational
harvest limits and annual catch limits previously used to constrain
recreational landings, and even from the allowable biological catch and overfishing
limits used to prevent overfishing.
Such decoupling
will, in many instances, allow recreational fishermen to kill substantially
more fish than they were able to before, an outcome that the recreational
industry views with considerable favor.
The
National Marine Fisheries Service adopted final regulations incorporating the
Harvest Control Rule on March 9, 2023, despite stakeholder comments noting that
the Rule appears to conflict with key provisions of Magnuson-Stevens. In response, the
Natural Resources Defense Council filed a suit in federal district court,
requesting judicial review of such regulations. That challenge is still pending, with memorandums
of law filed and oral arguments yet to be heard.
In the meantime, at the December 2023 joint
meeting of the Council and the ASMFC’s Summer Flounder, Scup, and Black Sea
Bass Management Board, the Control Rule was used to set 2024 recreational
specifications for the summer flounder and scup fisheries, which are respectively
facing 28% and 10% landings reductions, and was not used to set
recreational specifications for black sea bass which, according to the clear
and unambiguous language of the Rule, should have also been facing a 10%
landings reduction. However, the 2024
black sea bass landings target will remain unchanged because, thanks to advice
from the Summer Flounder, Scup, and Black Sea Bass Monitoring Committee, which
elevated the Committee’s view of the Rule’s intent above its clear language,
both the Council and the Management Board decided that status quo was OK.
Marine Recreational Information
Program/Fishing Effort Survey
The problem was completely unexpected, and
was only discovered because NMFS was engaged in quality control research
intended to assure the integrity of MRIP data.
It came from an unexpected source.
The Fishing Effort Survey followed best practices in survey design, in
that it asked the respondent a simple question—How often did you go fishing in
the past two months?—before asking the supposedly more difficult question of
how often an angler fished over the past year.
However, the researchers found that about 16% of respondents stated that
they made more trips in the past two months than they made in the past twelve,
which is an obviously impossible result.
Apparently, surveyed anglers were so willing
to help NMFS out that they were overstating the number of recent trips, compressing
their activity to include trips made over a longer period of time into a
two-month window. Researchers discovered
that if they broke from the usual protocol, and asked how many trips were taken
in the past year before asking about the last two months, the initial question
provided a bound which limited responses to the two-month question to a more
believable number.
NMFS is now engaged in a year-long study to
determine whether the overstatement is limited to certain states and particular
fisheries, or whether it occurs more widely.
The agency expects to be able to adjust MRIP data to better reflect the
actual number of trips taken by 2026.
Predictably, the chronic critics of the
federal fishery management system were quick to use NMFS’ announcement as new
grounds to attack MRIP and resultant management decisions. A
September editorial in The Fisherman magazine was titled “NOAA Bombshell! Angler Effort Surveys Still Flawed,” and criticized
then-recent management actions to reduce the annual catch limit for summer flounder
and impose an emergency, 31-inch maximum size limit on striped bass.
Farther south, the Center for Sportfishing
Policy and its affiliated organizations, which have long tried to shift management
of popular recreational species to more
easily manipulated state management bodies which are not bound by the
strictures of Magnuson-Stevens, issued
a press release calling on NMFS
“to stop making the same mistakes, stop wasting taxpayer
money, and stop causing chaos in recreational fisheries management and coastal
communities. It’s time for all parties
to work together to properly fund state efforts to manage recreational
fisheries.”
Of course, the critics fail to mention that
the same sort of problems that affected the Fishing Effort Survey might lurk
somewhere in state surveys too, but no one really knows because, unlike NMFS,
no one is really trying to find them.
The critics also fail to understand that the
Fishing Effort Survey’s problems, although not insignificant, have less of an
impact on recreational fisheries management than they might choose to believe. As Dr. Evan Howell, Director of NMFS’ Office
of Science and Technology, announced when describing the Fishing Effort Survey
issue on an August 7 conference call, the issue creates an error in the
magnitude of recreational landings estimates, but does not impact trends in
those estimates. So if estimates show that
landings were 25% higher in one year than they were in the previous season, the
percent increase is still essentially accurate, even if the absolute size of
the landings in both years was overestimated.
But some people just can’t help trying to
spin the story to suit their own needs.
Summer flounder experience overfishing
As a result, the 2024 annual catch limit was
reduced by about 40%.
Summer flounder recruitment has been below average for more than a decade, and it is possible that the current low recruitment, which has largely remained stable, represents a new normal for the species. If that is the case, returning to higher levels of summer flounder landings may not be possible, at least in the near term.
And those are some of the more significant fisheries issues that we faced in 2023. On Thursday, I'll make some predictions about what we'll see in 2024.
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