UNREALISTIC HOPES FOR RECREATIONAL CATCH REPORTING IN NORTH CAROLINA

 

Toward the end of last April, I wrote a piece about a new initiative in North Carolina that would require recreational anglers (as well as commercial fishermen) to report their landings of flounder, weakfish, red drum, spotted seatrout, and striped bass, beginning this December. 

In that piece, I noted that the initiative was the brainchild of the North Carolina legislature, and was not proposed by the state agencies that had real expertise in fisheries management.  I also noted that the reporting system was going to have to be built from scratch, which may be a difficult task to complete by December, and that there was no guarantee that the state’s fisheries management agencies had either the money or the personnel to maintain and operate such system on a continuing basis, much less collate, analyze, and employ the data it develops in any meaningful way.

I also noted that there was no realistic way to enforce a supposedly mandatory recreational reporting system, since once an angler had returned from fishing at the end of the day, enforcement authorities have no way of knowing either that the angler had been fishing or that any reportable fish had been caught, unless law enforcement agents contacted the angler during the fishing day, such angler had reportable fish in their possession at the time of contact, and the enforcement personnel followed up to make sure that a report was filed—a labor-intensive procedure that would surely take up time far better spent in more meaningful enforcement activities.  For that reason, I suspected that anglers would be slow to comply with the reporting requirement.

Yet, there are those who believe that such mandatory reporting is a good idea.  One of those people is Chad Thomas, the executive director of the North Carolina Marine & Estuary Foundation, who worked hard to convince the state legislature to enact the mandatory reporting law.  Mr. Thomas recently published an opinion piece on CoastalReview.org, a website maintained by the North Carolina Coastal Federation, in which he argued in favor of mandatory recreational reporting.  His thoughts are worth reading, and provide fertile ground for comment.

Solely with respect to recreational data collection (he also commented on commercial data, but that is outside the scope of this essay), Mr. Thomas wrote,

“Despite the significance to our economy and culture, those responsible for maintaining a robust fishery population have precious little data to guide their efforts…

“…without reliable numbers, many policy decisions will be wrong, risking the very existence of critical species in our coastal waters, unnecessarily limiting recreational fishing seasons, and ultimately harming the entire fishing industry…

“On the recreational side, the data used to inform fishery management decisions is collected through a federal survey process known as the Marine Recreational Information Program.  With rare exceptions, this annual data stream is the only source of recreational harvest data used by state fish agencies to set size limits, daily creel limits, and season lengths.

“Not shockingly, the federal surveys have their limitations, and in August 2023 new sources of error were identified that brought the survey program to a halt through at least 2026.”

It all sounds good, and it’s nearly impossible to disagree with Mr. Thomas’ basic premise:  Effective fisheries management is based on reliable data.  However, Mr. Thomas’ comments in support of the North Carolina legislature’s reporting scheme often veer wide of the mark.

To begin, there is no reason to believe that the reporting system ultimately adopted by North Carolina will provide the “reliable numbers” that Mr. Thomas calls for.  In discussing accuracy and error in recreational data surveys, the Marine Recreational Information Program Data User Handbook informs us that

“Coverage error occurs when members of a target population are omitted, duplicated, or wrongly included in a sample frame.”

The Access Point Angler Intercept Survey used to sample recreational catch, landings, and effort is designed to include all members of the target population—that is, it is designed to capture a representative sample of fishermen that includes all demographic categories in the same proportion that such categories are present in the angling population.  While the North Carolina survey currently being developed would ideally capture every striped bass, red drum, speckled trout, flounder, or weakfish landed by recreational anglers in North Carolina waters, such ideal is not at all realistic.

Instead, different segments of the angling population will have different compliance rates, and because there is currently no provision for either determining such differing compliance rates or adjusting the raw data to take compliance rates into account, the reporting data will almost certainly be biased by what is called “coverage error.”  For example, is a more educated and more affluent angler fishing primarily for recreation more or less likely to report their catch than is a less educated angler who fishes for food, to supplement what they can afford to buy at the grocery store?

Will boat fishermen, pier fishermen, beach fishermen, backwater fishermen, and those who fish from for-hire vessels all report at the same rates, or will the rates differ from group to group?

Will there be racial or ethnic differences in reporting rates?  In that regard, is an angler who speaks English as a second language, particularly if they aren’t close to fluent, report at the same rate as a native English-speaker?

Will reporting differ by age and by familiarity with any technology that may be used to file reports?  Will a serious angler, who fishes multiple times each week, report at the same rate as the weekend warrior or the angler who only fishes a few times each year?

I could come up with other such questions, but you get my point.  MRIP gets around such questions by directly contacting and interviewing the anglers present at spots—marinas, launching ramps, fishing piers, parking lots—where anglers access the resource, and thus stands a pretty good chance of encountering anglers representative of the overall population. 

But the proposed North Carolina reporting system, which is reliant on anglers taking the initiative to affirmatively report their landings, relies on anglers’ good faith and willingness to comply, which is certainly not a given.

In addition, the scope of the North Carolina reporting system will be too limited, for only landings need be recorded.  While that might work with commercial fisheries, in which every fish caught is landed provided that it meets any applicable minimum size, trip limits, or season, in recreational fisheries, which see many fish released even though they might be legal to keep, not recording releases creates a significant problem.

For example, looking at just the five species included in the reporting requirements, 99% of the striped bass, 92% of the weakfish, 86% of the red drum, and 82% of the spotted seatrout (but, supposedly, only 3% of the southern flounder) caught by North Carolina anglers in 2023 were released, and so would not be captured by the proposed survey.  Yet not every released fish survives, and in species that see anglers release significantly more fish than they keep, release mortality can constitute a significant proportion of overall fishing mortality.  In the case of North Carolina striped bass, for example, the roughly 10,000 fish expected to succumb to release mortality (if the generally accepted 9% release mortality rate for striped bass is applied) would exceed recreational harvest by an order of magnitude.

The failure to record the number of fish released would thus result in a substantial underestimate of fishing mortality for some species.

The proposed North Carolina reporting system also fails to record effort—the number of times that anglers choose to go fishing.  That is a critical omission, and one that severely degrades the utility of the reported data.  That’s because effort matters.  There is a very big qualitative difference in a fishery where 1 million red drum are caught in 500,000 trips, and one in which it takes 3 million trips to catch the same number of fish.  The former situation might signal a healthy stock, while the latter might indicate a stock in decline, so landings information alone, without the context of effort, provides little useful information.

And speaking of effort, Mr. Thomas is completely wrong when he states that “new sources of error were identified that brought the survey program to a halt through at least 2026.”  While it is true that the National Marine Fisheries Service has reason to believe that its Fishing Effort Survey overstates the number of times that anglers go fishing, and so somewhat inflates catch and landings estimates, NMFS has not halted the MRIP program, but instead continues to survey angler catch, landings, and effort, while remaining mindful of the possible overestimates.

Thus, Mr. Thomas fails to make a compelling case in support of mandatory recreational landings reports.

The failure to record releases or angling effort, and the failure to eliminate sources of coverage error, means that such mandatory reports will not provide the “reliable numbers” that managers need to manage fish stocks.  Mr. Thomas tries to minimize the issues created by angler non-compliance by arguing that

“Reporting big game harvests in ingrained in our culture, although it might shock you to learn that not everyone reports their deer kills.  And here is the remarkable thing—that’s okay!  The data is still valuable.

“Our state wildlife agency doesn’t need 100% accuracy because it monitors trends in the reported harvest—how it compares to last season, where it’s concentrated, and the like.”

But if all Mr. Thomas is interested in is trends, then he—and North Carolina’s fisheries managers—already get that from the Marine Recreational Information Program.  Even with the likely errors in the Fishing Effort Survey, MRIP’s ability to display year-to-year trends remains unchanged.

There is no reason to burden North Carolina fishery managers, or North Carolina anglers, with another reporting program that, at best, will only duplicate data already produced by MRIP.

Any money that might be dedicated to the proposed reporting system would be better used to enhance MRIP surveys within North Carolina, so that more anglers can be surveyed and the uncertainty inherent in any estimate can be reduced.

The North Carolina legislature will probably prove unwilling to admit that it made a mistake, allocate more funds to enhance MRIP, and repeal the reporting requirement, even though that would be the wisest thing to do.  However, we can hope that North Carolina’s example, where significant money and effort will be expended on a program of dubious merit, which was never requested by the professional managers and will provide no recreational data not already provided by MRIP, will dissuade other states from making the same mistake.