MALIGNING MRIP FOR FUN AND PROFIT PART I: FOR THE SHEER JOY OF BEING WRONG--LOUDLY

 

There is no such thing as the typical angler.  Some fish for food, some fish for fun, most seek a little of both.  Some anglers fish only lures, some stick with bait, some use whatever works at the time.  Some fish offshore.  Some stay in the bays.  Some fish despite rain and wind, some wait for fair weather.  

Some…

But that’s enough.  I've hopefully already made the point that even anglers fishing in the same place can be very different; anglers fishing for different species, along different parts of the coast are likely to be even less alike.

Yet despite all those differences, there seems to be one common thread connecting them all.  Just about no one has anything good to say about the Marine Recreational Information Program, the survey that the National Marine Fisheries Service uses to estimate recreational effort, catch, and landings.

The hostility toward MRIP is, in many ways, understandable.

After all, MRIP is the tool that both NMFS and the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission use to set recreational fishing regulations, and people usually dislike anything that restricts or regulates their actions.  Speed limits, customs inspections, and MRIP all attract the same sort of disdain.

That’s particularly obvious when it comes to MRIP, because every time a bag limit or season is cut, or a size limit upped, as the result of MRIP data, you hear all sorts of folks crying that MRIP is flawed, that “the numbers are bad” or that, for some other reason, MRIP data is faulty and should not be used.  But when the opposite happens, and the MRIP data allows managers to increase a bag limit, lengthen a season, or let anglers take home smaller fish, you never hear a single angler complain that such data is wrong and should not be believed, or that regulations should remain more restrictive.

It is almost a cliche that "bad data" reduces landings, while "good numbers" let anglers kill more fish.

Which is enough to tell you where a lot of the hostility toward MRIP comes from.

But then, it comes from other places, too.

People tend to distrust the unfamiliar, and things that they don’t understand, and the fact is that MRIP is a complex construct involving multiple surveys and intricate statistical calculations.  Most anglers don’t really understand how MRIP works, and few in the angling community (myself very much included) have the mathematical background needed to understand its statistical basis.

So they fall back on arguments like “No one ever asked me what I caught” and “I don’t know anyone who was surveyed,” write off the math as the next thing to witchcraft, and label MRIP a fraud.

Unfortunately, the angling press is often complicit in such misdeeds.  One of the most recent examples of that appeared in an article in Delaware’s Cape Gazette, titled “The problems with the Marine Recreational Information Program.”

There, the author, a local outdoor writer, led off with the somewhat remarkable statement that

“The Marine Recreational Information Program is the basis of all regulations made by federal and state agencies, and these regulations are what we have to live with.  The regulations are formed by scientists, many of whom do not know a striped bass from a sea bass, and then these regulations are reviewed by the Scientific and Statistical Committee that is made up of people who are supposed to know what’s going on in the field.  But after looking at the numbers, I must conclude they do not.”

He then goes on to pick a few specific estimates which, in his view, demonstrate that MRIP is badly flawed.

In reality, he only demonstrated his own ignorance about MRIP and about the greater management process.

It would be easy to write off the first line—that the biologists who manage East Coast fisheries “do not know as striped bass from as sea bass”—as mere hyperbole, and not something that readers were meant to believe, if we didn't hear something very similar at most management meetings, where someone from the recreational or commercial fishing industry will get up and announce that the scientists are mere pencil-pushers who only view fisheries through their data sets, and have no idea of “what’s really going on out on the water.” 

There are far too many people, including those who ought to know better, trying to convince us that such things are true.

The problem is that such folks, to the extent that they actually believe what they're saying, likely just don’t know enough fisheries scientists.

Over the course of my life, I’ve had the privilege of knowing, conversing with, and even fishing with, quite a few fisheries scientists, people who range from fledgling biologists still working on their graduate degrees to experienced researchers who have been in the field for decades, and can assure anyone reading this that every one of them can tell the difference between a striped bass and a sea bass—and distinguish between the various species of skates, herrings, and hakes, too, which is something that I doubt the author of the piece in question could manage.

The plain truth is that many fisheries scientists are attracted to the career because of their early appreciation of the outdoors, whether as anglers, scuba divers, or members of a commercial fishing family.  Even as students, they participate in trawl surveys and other activities that require them to sort, count, and identify a host of fish species as part of their day-to-day activities.  Suggesting that they can’t tell common fish apart is absurd.

Yet the writer’s comment does more than demean fishery scientists; it demonstrates his ignorance of the fisheries management system.  

Regulations and underlying fishery management measures, at least at the federal level, where MRIP plays the greatest role, are not determined by scientists, but by regional fisheries management councils dominated by members of the fishing community.  While such councils are guided by scientific advice, the management measures themselves are determined by council vote; by law, NMFS may only approve, disapprove, or partially approve such council actions.  Except under very unusual circumstances, the agency itself is not authorized to initiate management actions.

And when regulations/management measures are adopted, they are not “reviewed by the Scientific and Statistical Committee," for that’s not the SSC’s role.  Instead, Magnuson-Stevens states that

“Each scientific and statistical committee shall provide its Council ongoing scientific advice for fishery management decisions, including recommendations for acceptable biological catch, preventing overfishing, maximum sustainable yield, and achieving rebuilding targets, and reports on stock status and health, bycatch, habitat status, social and economic impacts of management measures, and sustainability of fishing practices.”

The SSC might play many roles, but reviewing regulations is definitely not one of them.

Having said those things, MRIP is far from perfect.  All of its estimates are just that—estimates—and all include some degree of uncertainty.  Sometimes the degree of uncertainty can be very large.  And sometimes, as in the case of the recent discovery of error generated in the Fishing Effort Survey, there can be flaws in its methodology that need to be fixed.

But that doesn’t mean that MRIP is as badly flawed as its detractors insist.  Often, the biggest flaws are in its detractors’ notions of how MRIP ought to be used.

The Cape Gazette article illustrates that very clearly, when it makes statements that intend to impeach the overall accuracy of MRIP by citing particular estimates, limited to a single state and a single sector, which may seem to be wildly inaccurate, when MRIP already warns users about such estimates' their flaws.

MRIP is no different than any other statistical survey, in that the probable level of error is reduced when the number of samples is increased.  Estimates that, by their nature, reflect very few samples are likely to include a high degree of uncertainty.  Thus, when the author of the Cape Gazette article questions the data related to summer flounder landings by party boats based in Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia, he reveals his ignorance about how the survey actually works.

Uncertainty in MRIP estimates is calculated by a statistical measure called “percent standard error.” The percent standard error in the estimates of Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia party boat landings of summer flounder in 2022 are 89.3, 57.8, and 91.9, respectively; the NMFS website on which such estimates appear warns, in bold red type, that

“MRIP does not support the use of estimates with a percent standard error above 50 and in those instances, recommends considering higher levels of aggregation (e.g., across states, geographic regions, or fishing modes)."

The website also warns that because of the estimates’ high percent standard error, such estimates are not significantly different from zero, effectively warning that they are meaningless.  In answer to the question

“Does Harvest…Total Weight (lbs) Meet MRIP Standard,”

States “NO” on all three occasions.

Yet the author of the Cape Gazette article, who has been warned by NMFS that the MRIP estimates he cites are not accurate enough for management use, nonetheless uses them as examples of why MRIP ought not to be trusted.

In view of such clear misrepresentation of MRIP's precision, it could be easily argued that it isn't MRIP, but the author, that ought not to be trusted.

Yet such misrepresentation of MRIP data, and how it ought to be used, often occurs in the angling press, in articles and editorials that either reflect the ignorance of their authors or, more darkly, seek to impugn MRIP as part of a greater effort to undermine the federal fishery management system, in an effort to increase landings beyond prudent levels in order to increase short-term economic benefits.

Next Sunday, we'll look into the latter situation in greater detail in "Maligning MRIP for Fun and Profit Part II:  For Profit, Full Coolers and Political Gains."