A CONCERTED ATTACK ON CATCH-AND-RELEASE

 

One of the more interesting things about writing this blog is that in doing my research for one post, I often come across things that are new, fascinating, sometimes maddening, and sometimes just weird.

That happened last week, for as I was looking over the comments on the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s pending striped bass management measures in advance of writing last Thursday’s piece, I found a link to a website called “fish4food.com.”

It’s a very odd website, that announces to the world

“Fish are not a game, but the game is getting Personal [sic].”

Whatever that means.

The website looks like it belongs to an organization.  It includes the motto

“Keep Them On The Dinner Plate,”

declares its mission as

“Preserving Sustainable Fish Harvest”

and bears a logo consisting of a whole striped bass lying on a dinner plate lying atop a crossed knife and fork.

It has the usual links an organization’s website would have: “About Us,” “Join Us,” “Sign Petition” and, of course, “DONATE” (the group also sells a boat decal for the not insignificant sum of $150.00).

But who, and what, would someone be donating to?

One of the most curious aspects of the website is that nowhere, neither on its home page nor on its other pages, does it list a single name.  Most organizations will provide a list of board members, officers, or at least a press contact to let people know who is running the show.  Fish4dinner.com seems to be an exception to that rule.

Its home page includes three purported testimonials, all supporting catch-and-kill.  One allegedly comes from a shore-based fisherman in Massachusetts, one from a Connecticut charter boat captain, the third from a private-boat fisherman in Rhode Island.  The wording of each is different, but one feature of each is the same:  The testimonials are all anonymous, lending a reader to wonder who provided them and, perhaps, if the reader is as cynical and suspicious as I am, whether such people really even exist.

But those are just the cosmetic aspects of the site.  Its core message is real and it’s troubling.  The “About Us” page reads

“For far too long the voice of those who wish to harvest fish for dinner has been an afterthought in the regulatory process.  Our mission is to help regulators understand the cultural, social and economic importance of the recreational food fishery.  Killing more than half of the recreationally caught fish through discarding them to die is not the answer.  We can do better.

“To date the deciding voice in fishery management has been driven by an [sic] small, elite, well off, [sic] segment of the recreational fishing community who have pushed for management practices that demand abundance at the expense of harvest, never considering the mortality caused by releasing millions of fish, never offering to help contribute to a single rebuilding effort.  This needs to change.

“The fish we catch recreationally are as important on the dinner table as they are in the water.  Healthy stocks are a good thing, sustainably harvested fish is a good thing, the thrill you feel when you catch your own dinner is a good thing.  The economic benefits created by your pursuit of dinner is a good thing.  We work to make sure these simple concepts are not forgotten.

“Please join us in our mission to preserve your ability to bring a few fish home to eat.”

It sounds like a coherent message, but let’s take it apart one paragraph—even, at times, one sentence—at a time, to see how it misleads the reader and tries to push emotional buttons in order to obscure the facts.

Let’s begin with the very first line, which asserts that “the voice of those who want to harvest fish for dinner has been an afterthought in the regulatory process,” for nothing can be farther from the truth.  Saltwater fishery management is all about harvest.  It is in most cases based on the concept of maximum sustainable yield—the greatest number of fish that can be removed from the population on a long-term basis without causing the stock to decline—and when it isn’t, as in the case of striped bass, it’s because the model used in the stock assessment does not provide a reliable estimate of MSY and/or, as is also the case with striped bass, because the stock is overfished, and lower landings are temporarily needed to allow the stock to rebuild to a point where MSY can, again, be achieved. 

Of course, there is always some uncertainty inherent in fishery management, so calculating regulations to achieve MSY, expressed as the fishing mortality threshold, could easily lead to overfishing, so most regulations are calculated to achieve a slightly lower fishing mortality target, and provide a buffer that makes overfishing less likely.

But despite that buffer being in place, maximizing the number of fish that may be killed and taken home is a constantly recurring theme in saltwater fisheries management.  That’s why so many management proposals, including the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s pending Addendum II to Amendment 7 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Striped Bass, only seek a 50% probability of achieving their goals; a higher probability of success would necessarily reduce the number of fish that are landed, and so managers disfavor that path.

On the other hand, at least in the case of striped bass, catch-and-release fishing does produce a substantial number of discards.  In 2022, striped bass anglers took home, and hopefully ate (although that, unfortunately, is not a given) slightly less than 3.5 million striped bass, while releasing about 29.6 million which, applying the accepted release mortality rate of 9%, would lead to somewhat under 2.7 million fish that didn’t survive release which, although well below the claimed “more than half of recreationally caught fish” (it’s a lot closer to 40%) is still a substantial amount.

But where the fish4dinner folks fall short is when they start talking about the “cultural, social and economic importance of the recreational food fishery.”  Yes, those things do matter, but with anglers killing and taking home 3.5 million bass in 2022, there’s still plenty of catching and killing going on.  However, the catch-and-release fishery also has cultural, social, and economic importance, and when one realizes that such fishery is about 8 ½ times larger than the catch-and-kill fishery, and that while each bass caught by a catch-and-kill fisherman can only be enjoyed once, a released bass, if not harvested somewhere else along the way, can provide cultural, social, and economic benefits not just once, to a single angler, but 11 times on average, to multiple people, before it is removed from the population, it becomes clear that the value of each individual fish that is released is far greater than one which is killed.

As the late angler and writer Lee Wulff once noted,

“Game fish are too valuable to be caught only once.”

But the fish4dinner folks, whoever they may be, don’t seem to care about the value of a released gamefish or the benefits that accrue from the catch-and-release fishery.  Instead, they make the allegation that “an [sic] small, elite, well-off, [sic] segment of the recreational fishery” is “the deciding voice in fisheries management.”

Trying to play on feelings of economic envy and what might be deemed “class warfare” is a ploy that demagogues often employ, hoping that emotion will serve them better than fact.  Because the plain fact is that the angling community as a whole strongly supports fisheries conservation.  That is particularly true in the case of striped bass management, where, in the period leading up to adoption of Amendment 7 to the ASMFC’s management plan, stakeholders had the opportunity to comment on whether they wished to change the reference points used to calculate regulations, in order to increase landings while necessarily decreasing striped bass abundance.  Thousands of stakeholders responded, and their sentiments were very clear.  98.7% of the comments received opposed changing the goals and objectives of the plan away from abundance and toward larger harvests, while an even larger proportion, 99.6%, opposed any change in the reference points.

Thus, it was not the views of a “small, elite…segment of the recreational fishery” that was the deciding voice” in striped bass management; instead, it was the collective views of the vast majority of striped bass fishermen from every state between Maine and Virginia that decided the issue.

It’s fish4dinner that represents the minority view. 

That doesn’t mean that a lot of bass fishermen don’t want to occasionally bring a fish home; most of those whom I know—and I know a lot of them—will keep a fish from time to time.  But what the majority will not do, as demonstrated by their comments on Amendment 7, is subordinate their desire for a healthy bass stock to the opportunity for larger short-term landings.

And we can only laugh at the claim that catch-and-release anglers never offer to contribute to striped bass rebuilding.  Every fish that they return to the water has a 91% chance of surviving and contributing to the next season’s spawn, while a fish tossed in a cooler is lost to the stock, and to the future of the fishery.  Yes, some fish are lost to release mortality, and we still have some way to go before all anglers release fish the right way.  But I have yet to hear the catch-and-kill crowd speak up at a hearing—and I attend every hearing held here on Long Island—even once, ask for their harvest to be cut for the good of the stock.  Instead, they always sing the same song as the fish4dinner crowd, and its chorus is “We want more dead fish.  More.  More!”

I’ll end this analysis by addressing the ludicrous claim that fish “are as important on the dinner table as they are in the water.”  After all, if there are no—or at least far too few—fish in the water, the chances of catching one, much less putting one on the dinner table, are going to be close to nil. 

Abundance is a prerequisite to maximizing the long-term social, ecological, and economic benefits that accrue from a resource, whether those benefits come in the form of food or recreational opportunity.

As I have noted before, if you want a recreational fishing industry, it helps to have fish.  Anglers don’t like to fish in an empty ocean, and even a cursory review of angler effort shows that such effort follows fish abundance; when fish are abundant, people do more fishing, and generate more economic activity.  Correlating striped bass abundance with angling effort, from 1995 until now, shows that to be true.

So, with that said, just who are the fish4dinner folks, and what do they want?  And why should anyone donate hard-earned cash to folks who won’t even disclose who they are?

Answering the easy question first, the fish4dinner folks seem to want weaker regulations, that allow a larger recreational harvest at the expense of the long-term health of the stock.  Three statements on their website’s home page make that perfectly clear:

“Advocates for ‘Catch and Release’ Fisheries, and ‘Game Fish’ status’s [sic] have been preached for so long it’s become household terminology amongst the public.  We must educate the public as to why this has been preached and also why it is wrong.”

Our current method of collecting data is flawed.  Those that wish to see our fisheries shut down enjoy this method as it highlights only statistics that align with their goals.  However what we see on the water just does not match up.  We believe a better way is out there.”

And

“We all believe in regulations and see the value they provide to sustain healthy fisheries.  However blindly agreeing to stricter regulations based on bad data does not make them appropriate.  We want the regulations to align with the science and the different ways we each fish.”

The parties behind the website seem to be part of a relatively new organization called the “East Coast Fisheries Coalition,” which claims to represent charter boat associations between Massachusetts and Maryland.  That makes sense, given that I found the site by clicking on a link included in comments submitted by that organization.  According to the best information I can find, the Coalition is a Rhode Island not-for-profit corporation, organized as a trade association that would qualify under section 501(c)(6) of the Internal Revenue Code.  Its registered agent for service of process is Richard Bellavance, a Rhode Island charter boat captain and president of the Rhode Island Party and Charter Boat Association.  The “specific purpose” of the group is declared to be:

“we intend to advocate for the ability to sustainably harvest fish for dinner,”

which is fine, and would seem to be just what the ASMFC also wants.  While 2023 landings are likely to be lower than those of 2022 (which is intentional, as 2022 landings were too high to represent a sustainable harvest), about 1.7 million striped bass were landed through October 31 of last year.  While landings through December 31 won’t be available until the middle of February, the active fishery that New York and New Jersey enjoyed during the last two months of 2023 will almost certainly push landings well over two million fish, and demonstrate that plenty of people had “the ability to sustainably harvest fish for dinner” last year.

The interesting thing in the fish4dinner comments was the disparaging reference to “Gamefish Status’s.” “Gamefish status” is usually understood to mean outlawing commercial harvest and sale of s species, so it not only shouldn’t impact an angler’s ability to take a bass home, it should actually make it easier for a recreational angler to take home a fish, as the current commercial quota would probably be reallocated to anglers.  The fact that the reference is there suggests some input from the commercial sector, which might also feel threatened by conservation-minded anglers. 

Of course, those commercial fishermen might take the form of party and charter boat operators who also hold commercial licenses, as many do, and thus have an inherent conflict of interest if they claim to speak for the recreational sector.

Which finally gets us to the last question:  Why should anyone donate to fish4dinner?

The answer is that, if they’re a surfcaster or private-boat angler, they probably shouldn’t, particularly if they want to see fisheries that are fully rebuilt and sustainable in the long term, because what fish4dinner really represents is not the typical angler but—ironically, given some of its statements—a small, elite group of for-hire operators, who appear ready to hide their objections to fisheries data and fisheries science, and their opposition to conservative, science-based fisheries management, behind a seeming defense of anglers fishing for food.

But anglers should not be fooled.  Although fish4dinner makes fatuous, self-serving arguments, it is nonetheless a serious threat.

Capt. Rick Bellavance and the Rhode Island Party and Charter Boat Association are unapologetic supporters of “mode splits,” or “sector separation,” the notion that passengers on for-hire vessels should be granted special privileges not available to the great majority of recreational fishermen.  Such sector separation policies have already given bluefish anglers on for-hire boats a 5-fish bag limit, as opposed to a 3-fish limit for everyone else.  In the scup fishery, they have created a special “bonus season” which allows for-hire anglers a larger bag limit than those in the shore and private-boat sectors.  Now, in Addendum II, they are again seeking special privileges, in the form of a 28- to 33-inch bag limit, as opposed to the 28- to 31-inch slot that governs the other sectors.

Although, in 2022, shore and private-boat anglers accounted for 98.5% of all recreational fishing trips taken the northeast and mid-Atlantic regions, and so undoubtedly also accounted for the lion’s share of the economic benefits accruing from the recreational fishery, the fish4dinner folks seem intent on creating a small, elite group of for-hire vessels, that will be governed by special rules less restrictive than those that govern everyone else who, despite their economic contributions, will be relegated into a sort of fishing-related peasantry.

The aspersions cast on catch-and-release anglers also demeans the many forward-looking for-hire captains who have embraced conservation and fishing for the pure joy that the sport provides.  They merely provides cover for those in the for-hire fleet who refuse to change with the times, and continue to believe that the only proper gauge of a good day at sea is the number of dead fish tossed on the dock at the end of the trip.

While the desperation shown by such tactics is clear, fish4dinner may well prevail, unless anglers don’t tell fisheries managers at the state, ASMFC, and federal levels, that while taking fish home for dinner is a worthy and laudable goal that almost all of us, at some point, pursue, the primary goal of the fishery management system must be to sustain the long-term health of fish stocks.

For if they fail at that task, there will, in time, be nothing left to take home.