WHAT'S HAPPENING WITH BLACK SEA BASS?

 

New York’s black sea bass season opens today, and I’m curious what it will look like.

Family obligations, along with an unfriendly ocean, are going to keep me ashore, although I hope to be able to get out next week and sit on a wreck or two; black sea bass have long been one of my favorite local food fish, and the start of the season is usually the best time to take a few home.

I’m not sure how many black sea bass—or, at least, how many legal black sea bass—anglers will be taking home this year, for while the fish became very abundant over the past 15 years or so, before tapering off a little recently, there has been a noticeable drop-off in the size of those caught.  That’s true here in New York, and I’ve recently also heard of anglers complaining that Massachusetts black sea bass are also declining in size.

The black sea bass stock was overfished as recently as 2007, then staged a spectacular recovery.  Spawning stock biomass peaked at about 240 percent of its target level in 2014, before slowly declining to its current level of about 180 percent of the SSB target.  It appears that mild overfishing might have occurred in 2021, the terminal year of the most recent research track stock assessment; a management track assessment, scheduled for release later this summer, will provide anglers and fishery managers with a more up-to-date picture of where the stock stands right now.

However, regardless of abundance—and the management-track assessment will gauge stock health strictly in terms of spawning stock biomass, and not the size of the individual fish—the seeming decline in the number of larger black sea bass, if it is occurring over a wide swath of the fish’s range, and not merely off the South Shore of Long Island, ought to give managers cause for concern.

Fifteen or so years ago, the black sea bass stock was much smaller than it is today, but it also drew far fewer recreational fishermen.  In 2010, New England anglers made a little over 190,000 trips primarily targeting black sea bass.  By 2015, that number had almost doubled, to nearly 350,000 trips; by 2021, the number of trips doubled again, to more than 785,000.  Neighboring New York saw a somewhat less pronounced increase in angling effort, with directed black sea bass trips increasing from about 175,000 in 2010 to 650,00 trips in 2015, before falling back to about 320,000 in 2021.

Such increase was unquestionably due to the increase in black sea bass availability, but anglers switching effort from a declining summer flounder population onto abundant black sea bass also played a role.  New England anglers’ directed summer flounder trips dropped from about 630,000 in 2010 to about 430,000 in 2021, even though there was a slight increase, to roughly 775,000 trips in 2015 as anglers responded to the strong showing of legal fluke from the 2008 and 2009 year classes.  New York anglers showed a similar trend, with effort dropping from about 2.8 million trips in 2010 to a little under 2.0 million in 2021, with a spike to about 4.2 million trips in 2015 as anglers responded to temporarily increased summer flounder abundance.

Fishery managers never really got a handle on the increasing effort in the black sea bass fishery; their inability to predict the changes in angler behavior was a textbook case of management uncertainty, and cried out for the establishment of an annual catch target in the recreational fishery, which might have been set below the sector’s annual catch limit and would have provided a buffer for the uncertainties created by changes in angling effort.  The National Standard Guidelines issued by the National Marine Fisheries Service call for such a response, saying

“[Annual catch targets], or the functional equivalent, are recommended in the system of [accountability measures] so the [annual catch limit] is not exceeded.  An [annual catch target] is an amount of annual catch of a stock or stock complex that is the management target of the fishery, and accounts for management uncertainty in controlling the catch at or below the [annual catch limit]…”

However, neither NMFS nor the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council chose to follow such Guidelines which, unfortunately, do not have the force of law, and the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Summer Flounder, Scup, and Black Sea Bass Management Board, which is not legally bound to any performance standard, did not consider the issue.  Thus, recreational fishermen chronically exceeded their sector’s annual catch limit; eventually, spurred by pressure from a recreational fishing industry that is always seeking new ways to maintain or increase anglers’ kill, the Council, NMFS, and the Management Board adopted a new management strategy, the so-called “Percent Change Approach,” which makes it even more likely that anglers will exceed their ACL.

Even so, anglers continue to kill more black sea bass than any established limit supposedly allows, and do so with near-complete impunity.  Chronic overages supposedly triggered mandatory accountability measures for the 2024 fishing season, but the accountability measures contained in the management plan are so toothless that anglers were subject to no real accountability at all.

Ultimately, actions have consequences, and we now might be seeing the consequences of managers’ failure to adequately constrain recreational black sea bass landings.

In 2010, the black sea bass bag limit was high (I think it was 15 fish), the size limit was something around 13 inches and the season was long, but because effort was relatively low, I could still run out to a well-known and easy-to-find wreck on the Fourth of July, find few other boats competing for space on the piece, and limit out easily, with a fair number of fish over 3 pounds, some over 3 ½, and none so small that they required measuring.

Five years later, the fish weren’t as big as they had been, the bag limit was smaller, the season was shorter, and the size limit a bit larger, but as the included photo shows, there were still plenty of quality fish to go around, and it didn’t take long to catch them (the two fish in the photo weighed a combined 7 pounds, 14 ounces, with the larger weighing 4 pounds 2, although by 2015, the average size began to shrink quickly once the season got underway.

Today, it can take a couple of hours—maybe more—to land just three fish over the 16 ½-inch minimum, even on the day that the season begins.  The fishing club that I belong to runs a year-long contest for a number of different species, including black sea bass, awarding first, second, and third place to the largest weighed in.  Although the club has 90 members, plus spouses and minor children, only two black sea bass were weighed in last year, and both weighed less than three pounds.

Granted, most of the bottom off Long Island’s South Shore is sand and gravel, with little structure other than wrecks and artificial reefs to hold black sea bass in any numbers.  Anglers can pick the quality fish off those pieces quickly, particularly when the party boats are active.  Fishing is better on the rock bottoms that prevail to the north and east.

Still, when a fishery loses most of its big fish, and becomes dependent on only a few, recently produced year classes, it is not a good sign.

Right now, there’s no reason to panic, because the spawning stock is still very large and recruitment of new fish into the population has been strong.  Although abundance has been trending downward for the last decade or so, it remains well above target and even a significantly smaller spawning stock biomass, which varies a little above and below target over the years, constitutes a management success story.  Anything more than that is a bonus.

However, should spawning stock biomass fall below 150 percent of its target level—something that probably hasn’t happened yet—the management regime under the Percent Change Approach will become a little bit more restrictive.  That could easily happen a few years from now if managers don’t get recreational overages under control.

We should also remember that the National Marine Fisheries Service may have overestimated recreational effort, catch, and landings.  

While that may seem like a good thing, because it means that anglers killed fewer fish than managers believe, it can actually be a curse in disguise.  That’s because the stock assessment includes recreational landings as part of the data used to calculate the size of the black sea bass stock.  If those landings estimates are too high, then the estimate of stock size are too large as well, and the annual catch limits based on the stock size estimate—for both the recreational and the commercial sectors—are too high, and could well lead to overfishing, and a further decline in abundance, if the stock is smaller than managers believed.

The good news is that black sea bass abundance remains high enough that, even under something approaching a worst-case scenario, it’s unlikely that any long-lasting harm will be done.

The bad news is that if managers keep taking black sea bass for granted, and assuming that high abundance will continue to offset anglers killing too many fish, they might eventually face a reckoning that will probably be harder on managers, and the fishermen who followed their advice, than on the species itself.

As is so often the case with so many species, while the stock remains healthy, a little bit of precaution ought to be exercised to keep things on track.