STRIPED BASS: TO REBUILD THE RIGHT WAY, AND ON TIME

 

When the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board meets in October, one thing will be foremost in everyone’s mind—the results of the latest stock assessment update, which will be released ahead of the meeting.

If the update finds that there is at least a 50% probability that the striped bass stock will rebuild by 2029, without any additional management measures being taken, everyone will breathe a little easier and move on to the next item of business.  But if the assessment finds that the stock is unlikely to rebuild by that deadline, the Management Board will face a politically difficult decision.  It will have to decide how to further restrict striped bass fishing mortality, in order to allow timely rebuilding to occur.

A lot of that will depend on how much damage the 2022 spike in recreational landings impaired the recovery, and how successful the emergency measure adopted in May 2023 was in reducing fishing mortality and putting the recovery back on track (since 2023 will be the assessment update’s terminal year, the impacts of Addendum II to Amendment 7 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Striped Bass, adopted last January, will not be reflected in its findings).

The last stock assessment, which considered the health of the stock at the end of 2021, predicted that the stock would very probably be rebuilt by the 2029 deadline, but excessive recreational landings in 2022 quickly changed that forecast.  Marine Recreational Information Program landings data suggests that, as a result of the emergency measure, 2023 recreational landings were about halfway between 2021 and 2022 levels (we’ll get a better understanding of that at the August Management Board meeting).

So, realistically, additional action will probably be needed to rebuild the stock on time.

The big question is what those additional management measures will look like.  In that regard, the Management Board will have to make two big decisions.  One is the form such measures will take.  The other is how such measures will be adopted.

Typically, when new management measures are proposed, the Management Board will ask the Plan Development Team to put together a draft addendum, containing multiple management options, which will be sent out for public comment.  Public hearings are held and, informed by the comments received, the Management Board will finalize the management document.  However, the Management Board will have another option to choose from in October.

Addendum II provides that

“If an upcoming stock assessment prior to the rebuilding deadline (currently 2029) indicates that the stock is not projected to rebuild by 2029 with a probability greater than or equal to 50%, the Board could respond via Board action where the Board could change management measures by voting to pass a motion at a Board meeting instead of developing an addendum or amendment (and different from the emergency action process).  [emphasis added]”

Thus, the Management Board could, if it chose to, adopt new management measures at the October meeting, or at a subsequent meeting (perhaps a special meeting called for solely that purpose).  By fast-tracking the new management measures, the Board could have them in place for the 2025 season, thus eliminating some of the debate that swirled around Amendment II, which was not adopted until after some states had already issued commercial tags.  Getting the new management measures in place for 2025 will also make it more likely that the bass will be rebuilt on time; engaging in the full addendum process would probably see new measures adopted in 2026, allowing landings to remain too high for an additional year, and reducing the chances of a timely recovery.

On the other hand, there will certainly be those on the Management Board who will seek delay, trying to eke out another year of higher landings for their commercial and for-hire fleets.  They will argue that action should not be taken before stakeholders have a full opportunity to provide comments on the proposed management measures, using a feigned concern for stakeholder input—feigned because, after multiple rounds of comment on Amendment 7, the emergency action, and Addendum II, there is little doubt where the various stakeholders stand—to maintain excessive levels of harvest for at least an additional year.

Having said that, there is one reason that stakeholder comment—both past and present—may turn out to be very important, and that is the Management Board’s apparent obsession with reducing recreational release mortality.

To put things in the simplest terms possible, the key to rebuilding striped bass—or any other fish stock—is to get to a place where the number of new fish entering the stock (“recruitment”) is greater than the total mortality experienced by such stock.  It’s not much different than your personal checking account:  If your deposits exceed your withdrawals, your balance grows; if withdrawals exceed deposits, it’s not too long before your checks start to bounce.

So lowering total mortality is a good thing.

Total mortality—often represented by the symbol “Z”—has two components, fishing  mortality (“F”), which is just what it sounds like, fish removed from the stock by fishing activities, and natural mortality ("M”), which are removals due to natural processes such as disease, predation, etc.  Unfortunately, there is usually little that managers can do to reduce natural mortality, so when total mortality is too high, the answer is always to somehow reduce F.

Fishing mortality also has two components, one being landings, and the other deemed “discard mortality” (commercial) or “release mortality” (recreational).  Some  make no distinction between commercial discards and recreational releases, listing them both under the catch-all of “discards,” but that is a very critical mistake, because it ignores the dual nature of recreational fishing.

Some recreational fishermen fish, to a greater or lesser degree, for food.  They plan to bring their catch home.  And some recreational fishermen fish—as the term “recreational fisherman” suggests,”--primarily for recreation, and release most or all of their catch.  The great majority of anglers fall somewhere in-between, keeping some fish, and releasing others, depending on their needs, their mood, and the fish involved.

Fishing for food obviously kills fish, but catch-and-release kills some fish, too; it is not a bloodless sport. 

In what might be deemed recreational “food” fisheries, harvest makes up the biggest component of fishing mortality.  In the summer flounder fishery, for example, the average recreational catch for the years 2020 through 2022 was 11.06 million pounds; that total included 8.51 million pounds of fish landed, and 2.55 million pounds of fish that died after being released.

But sport fisheries display a very different pattern.  Atlantic tarpon in the South Atlantic region may be the most extreme example, with 2023 data showing zero fish landed, and 133,264 fish released.  

Clearly, sport fishermen don’t have to kill fish to have a successful day, yet some of those 133,000 tarpon undoubtedly died from the effects of being caught.  Based on one Florida study, which estimated a release mortality rate of somewhere between 7.3 and 17.1 percent, as many as 22,788 tarpon might have been killed by anglers last year.  Yet such losses are accepted as the inevitable result of a catch-and-release fishery, even though release mortality accounts for 100 percent of all fishing mortality.

Striped bass fall somewhat in-between.  

Many striped bass anglers see the bass as a sport fish, and rarely if ever take one home.  The ASMFC estimates that about 90 percent of the bass caught are released, and also estimates that about 9 percent of the released bass die after being caught.  Other fishermen like to take striped bass home and, of course, 100 percent of those fish fail to survive.  

In 2023, recreational fishermen in New England and the mid-Atlantic landed slightly over 2.6 million striped bass, while releasing about 26 million; if we apply the presumed 9% release mortality rate, about 2.34 million of those released fish subsequently died, meaning that, in 2023, release mortality accounted for about 47 percent of all fishing mortality.  In other years, it accounted for a few percentage points more.

Yet it appears that, should the Management Board decide to adopt additional management measures, they’re going to concentrate on less than half of the fishing mortality picture—recreational releases—rather than on the whole of the issue.

The Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries recently issued a press release in which it noted,

“If action is needed, the Board has signaled that it will be focusing, at least in part, on recreational release mortality.”

If anyone has their finger on the pulse of the Management Board, it is Massachusetts DMP, which has been at the forefront of the striped bass debate for the past five years or so.  And if anyone had any doubt about the Board’s fixation on striped bass release mortality, the first item on the agenda for its August meeting calls for it to

“Consider Initial Recommendations from Recreational Release Mortality Work Group.”

It will be a couple of weeks before we know what those initial recommendations will be, but in truth, there aren’t too many options.  It can try to adopt gear restrictions, mandating things like prohibiting the use of treble hooks in lures, or perhaps allowing only a single hook (which might be a treble) on plugs, and perhaps banning the use of bait in the striped bass fishery.  All of those suggestions would find some support in the preliminary findings of the ongoing Massachusetts release mortality study.

The Management Board could also attempt to regulate angler behavior, perhaps by requiring that all bass over a certain size—say, 35 or 40 inches—be released without being removed from the water.  Florida has long had a similar rule in place for tarpon, and they believe that it is doing some good.

The problem is that the benefits of any of those rules are very difficult to quantify.  No model existing today can tell managers, with anything like an acceptable degree of certainty, how much they might reduce release mortality by outlawing the use of bait, or mandating single hooks.  

Such rules are also practically unenforceable.  Should they be imposed, an angler caught casting out a fresh chunk of bunker or a plug armed with three sets of trebles can easily say, “I’m fishing for bluefish,” and it would be impossible for law enforcement to prove that such wasn’t the case.

Thus, while all such initiatives would seem worthwhile, managers won’t be able to prove that they would lead to a reduction in fishing mortality.

Given Addendum II’s narrow slot limit and single-fish bag, if the stock assessment update tells managers that they must further reduce recreational fishing mortality in order to timely rebuild the stock, they have only one effective tool left in their toolbox, and that’s to adopt closed seasons.  And that’s where the Board’s fixation with release mortality rubs up against the harsh realities of human behavior and enforcing fisheries laws.

Closing the striped bass fishery to harvest for some defined length of time would certainly cut recreational fishing mortality.  The magnitude of the reduction could be predicted with reasonable precision, based on the length of the closure.  But that’s where the rub comes in:  While a no-harvest closure would reduce recreational landings, it arguably do nothing to reduce recreational releases, and so release mortality (I actually disagree with that conclusion, believing that some “meat fishermen” would choose not to spend time, money, and effort fishing for bass that they couldn’t legally take home, and that release mortality would decline as a result).

The only way that the Management Board might theoretically reduce release mortality is to prohibit anglers from even targeting striped bass during some specified period.  Again, such a closure would clearly reduce striped bass landings, because if anglers can’t target them, they can’t bring them home.  However, whether it would significantly reduce release mortality is not at all clear, because one thing that fisheries scientists have not yet been able to model is regulations’ impact on anglers’ behavior.

As with the case of anglers who would, if faced with a gear prohibition, continue to target striped bass with outlawed bait and plugs while claiming to target something else, plenty of anglers would probably continue to target bass during a no-targeting season, and just claim to be fishing for bluefish, weakfish, or maybe red drum.  And other anglers, who perhaps really were fishing for blues, weaks, or redfish, would accidentally hook and subsequently release plenty of striped bass, because when different species live in the same places and eat the same things, they’re all going to be a part of an angler’s catch.

So the benefits of a no-targeting closure, as opposed to a no-harvest season, are not at all clear.

Still, there will be members of the Management Board who will support a no-target season out of a twisted sense of “fairness,” arguing that, if catch-and-kill anglers’ hopes of taking fish home are frustrated for a while, catch-and-release anglers shouldn’t be allowed to enjoy fishing, either.  It makes little sense, and would unnecessarily reduce the social and economic benefits gleaned from the recreational striped bass fishery, but some Management Board members are ideologically driven, and to them, the “fairness” claims will ring true.

Hopefully, a majority of the Board will feel differently, but once the initial recommendations of the work group are made public, which should occur about two weeks from now, we will need to take a good look at them, and begin to let our representatives on the Management Board know how we feel.

While adopting an unenforceable no-target closure would be a big mistake, it’s not the worst thing that the Management Board might do in October.

It could choose to do nothing at all.

Anglers concerned with the future of the striped bass should go back to the section of Addendum II that I quoted above, the section that empowers the Management Board to change the plan by a simple Board vote, and note one seemingly innocent parenthetical, the one that says “the rebuilding deadline (currently 2029)  [emphasis added]”

Maybe I worry too much, but I can’t help but think that the “currently 2029” language was added because someone in considering the possibility that, if rebuilding by 2029 looks a little too hard, the Management Board might just want to extend the deadline out a few years, although such extension would be contrary to the explicit provisions the management plan.

Yet history tells us that the Management Board has delayed taking action before.

I can easily argue that its November 2011 decision not to cut harvest, in the face of a stock assessment update predicting that the stock would become overfished within six years if nothing was done, was the first in a series of bad decisions that put the stock in the depleted state that it finds itself in today.  I can also argue that, when it followed the advice of then-Fishery Management Plan Coordinator Michael Waine, and so failed to follow the clear dictates of the management plan, which required it to initiate a rebuilding plan at that point, it lost its last, best chance to prevent a serious stock decline.

I hate to think that the Management Board might not have learned those lessons from its past.  In recent years—really, since the Amendment 7 process began—it seems to have grown more responsible, and more responsive to the needs of the striped bass stock and the advice provided by the great majority of stakeholders.

It would be a shame if the Board began to regress.

The Management Board must rebuild the striped bass stock by 2029, within the 10-year timeframe provided in the management plan.

But at the same time, it must do the job right, and not rely on unenforceable, unquantifiable, unjustifiable actions such as no-target closures, that might make some people feel good, but won’t do much to help the striped bass.