219 PERCENT OF THE BIOMASS TARGET

 

In recent years, no fishery management issue on the East Coast has been more controversial than that of governing the recreational black sea bass fishery.

About eighteen months ago, I wrote a piece in which I described the effort as “managing the unmanageable,” given the peculiarities of the species’ life history; an increasing black sea bass population; unpredictable angling behavior; widespread illegal harvest, particularly among the for-hire fleet; and a regional management system that, instead of harmonizing nearby states’ regulations, actually creates severe inequalities between neighboring states.

The situation wasn’t made any better by a stock assessment that, although a notable improvement on the previous effort, still generated a strong retrospective pattern that overestimated fishing mortality and underestimated spawning stock biomass in the northern part of the stock’s range, while doing the opposite in the lower mid-Atlantic region.  

At the August 14 joint meeting of the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council and the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Summer Flounder, Scup, and Black Sea Bass Management Board, Dr. Jon Hare, a biologist at the National Marine Fisheries Service’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center, noted that in trying to correct for the retrospective pattern’s underestimate of spawning stock biomass, managers probably went too far in the other direction, and ended up setting the biomass estimate higher than it should have been.

Perhaps as a result of such overestimation, the Black Sea Bass Operational Assessment for 2021, used to set the Acceptable Biological Catch and Annual Catch Limits for the 2022, 2023, and 2024 seasons, estimated spawning stock biomass to be 30,774 metric tons, “about 2.2 times the updated biomass target reference point.”

The funny thing is, while everyone was willing to accept the Operational Assessment’s estimate of spawning stock biomass, the rest of the science was roundly rejected, even though all of the data is very closely interrelated.

For example, at the December 2022 joint meeting of the Council and Management Board, the data indicated that recreational black sea bass landings had to be reduced by ten percent.  When New York’s Marine Resources Advisory Panel met the following month to consider ways to achieve such reduction, all of the recreational representatives and all of the recreational industry members in the audience were more than willing to agree with the Operational Assessment’s findings that the spawning stock biomass was high, but almost all of them also questioned the rest of the data, particularly the estimates of recreational landings derived from the Marine Recreational Information Program.

Thus, the bulletin reporting events at the meeting noted that one MRAC member

“said we have an overabundance of stock, which the chart shows, yet once you add the MRIP numbers you come out with a 2-year harvest that is way over the numbers [for the recreational harvest limit].  We need to go forward using biomass indexes and not MRIP numbers—they distort the numbers for every fishery.”

Others made similar comments at the same meeting, and at a follow-up discussion held in March.

What such commenters failed to understand is that it is impossible to isolate the spawning stock biomass estimate from the MRIP data, as the MRIP estimates are used, along with other data, to calculate the estimate of SSB.  

At the August 14 joint meeting, Dr. Paul Rago, the chairman of the Council’s Scientific and Statistical Committee, noted that the MRIP estimates have a “huge” influence on the estimate of spawning stock biomass.  Lower estimates or recreational catch would lead to a lower estimate of SSB, just as a higher estimate of recreational catch would cause the estimate of spawning stock biomass to grow larger.

Thus, it is not possible, as the one MRAC member suggested, to use “biomass indexes and not MRIP numbers,” for the MRIP numbers are one of the most important drivers of the biomass estimate.  The data contained in the stock assessment represent an integrated whole; one cannot merely pick and choose, using the numbers that support a particular argument while rejecting the rest as invalid. 

Yet that is exactly what many people do, and that trend only seems to be getting worse.

In November 2023, the Northeast Fisheries Science Center released its new Report of the Black Sea Bass (Centropristis striata) Research Track Stock Assessment Working Group, which took a novel approach to assessing the black sea bass stock.  The new research track assessment employed a model that introduced additional variables not included in the previous assessment, fit the data much better, and largely eliminated the retrospective pattern.  In doing so, it established a new methodology that would be used in subsequent management track assessments which, as their description suggests, are used to set annual management measures.

The first management track assessment employing the new methodology was released in the summer of 2024, and its findings were significantly different from those of the operational assessment released three years before.

The management track assessment’s estimate of spawning stock biomass was 25,572 metric tons, about 20 percent less than the estimate in the operational assessment.  Its estimates of maximum sustainable yield and target spawning stock biomass were more than 20 percent lower, too.  Thus, it should not have been surprising that, when the management track assessment was reviewed by the Scientific and Statistical Committee, that committee found it to represent the best scientific information available, and recommended that the Council reduce the Acceptable Biological Catch by 20 percent, a reduction in line with the reduced biomass estimate.

But it seemed that just about no one—not the Advisory Panel, not the Summer Flounder, Scup, and Black Sea Bass Monitoring Committee, and certainly not the Management Board—wanted to take the Scientific and Statistical Committee’s advice; the changed estimates of spawning stock biomass, maximum sustainable yield, etc. didn’t seem to get their attention at all.

Only one statement from the management track assessment seemed to stick in everyone’s mind:

“Spawning stock biomass (SSB) in 2023 was estimated to be 24,572 (mt) which is 219% of the biomass target.  [emphasis added]”

People fixated on that “219%,” even if the rest of the assessment's estimates were largely ignored.

No one even seemed to consider the fact that the management track assessment’s “219% of the biomass target” was about 20 percent lower than the operational assessment’s “2.2 times the updated biomass target reference point,” due to the big reduction in the biomass target.  All they heard was “219%,” and they wielded that number as a shibboleth in their efforts to ward off any further restrictions on landings.

The Advisory Panel was certainly focused on that one number to the exclusion of everything else; the summary of the August 5 Panel meeting began,

“Advisors were very frustrated with the 20% decline in the 2023 black sea bass acceptable biological catch (ABC) limit recommended by the Council’s Scientific and Statistical Committee (SSC), compared to the 2024 ABC.  Advisors didn’t understand the need for a decrease in the catch limit when the most recent assessment shows biomass at 219% of the target level.”

It seems that most of the advisors could compare the 2024 and 2025 ABCs, but comparing the differing biomass estimates in the operational and management track assessments was something that they could not, did not, or perhaps just did not want to do, for if they had made such comparison, understanding why the ABC was reduced shouldn’t have been that hard.

One advisor, perhaps more creative than the rest, who accepted the 219% figure but not the SSCs conclusions,

“questioned what it would take of the SSC to use a different model and liberalize the ABC for a few years,”

a request not too different from asking a referee to change the rules of a game because someone did not like the score—although he certainly liked that 219%.

But most of the Advisory Panel are, in some way, connected to the recreational fishing industry, and are sharply focused on how management measures might impact their income in the short term, so their willful blindness to the entirety of the management track assessment, and their focus on a single data point, isn’t too hard to understand.

The reaction of the Monitoring Committee was a little more puzzling, for all are professional fisheries managers who are fully capable of reading and understanding the assessment. Yet, if anything, the Monitoring Committee’s response to the SSC’s recommendation was more extreme than that of the Advisory Panel, with six individuals expressing strong reservations about the advice, and four of those refusing to endorse the recommendation.

Once again, most of the focus was on the “219%.”  The summary of the Monitoring Committee’s August 1 meeting noted that

“The four MC members who could not endorse the 2025 ABC said a decrease in the ABC is not justifiable given that the biomass is so far above the target level.”

The fact that the estimated size of the biomass had been reduced by 20 percent between the 2021 operational assessment and the 2024 management track assessment did not seem to enter their considerations at all.  Instead, they focused on projected future declines in the biomass, which they arguably had good cause to question, instead of acknowledging that the black sea bass stock was substantially smaller than they believed one year ago.

The report noted that

“One MC member noted that the projections are based at fishing at [the fishing mortality rate that would produce maximum sustainable yield].  The current management requirements do not allow a large amount of biomass to be removed from the population all at once to help bring highly abundant stocks down to their target level.”

It was a curious comment, given that over the past ten years, the recreational sector has exceeded its annualcatch limit in every year but 2019, that combined recreational and commercialcatch exceeded the ABC in every one of those years except for 2022, and thatthe stock experienced overfishing in 2021, when the overall catch was 21percent above the Overfishing Limit.

Given numbers like that, it would seem that “a large amount of biomass [is] removed from the population” just about every year, and that such removals are not much below—and, in 2021, were over—the level of catch that would equal the maximum sustainable yield from the fishery.

But, once again, such considerations were eclipsed by the focus on “219%.”

And in the end, that focus determined the outcome of an important vote, with the Management Board voting to ignore the SSC’s advice (which is binding on the Council, but not the ASMFC), and making no reductions to the ABC, the ACLs, the Recreational Harvest Limit or the commercial quota.

Worse, by carrying over the 2024 specifications into the 2025 season, without taking account of the management track assessment’s reduced estimate of spawning stock biomass, the management board set an ABC of 7,557 metric tons.  That ABC is 22 percent above the overfishing limit established by the management track stock assessment.

Thus, assuming that the recreational and commercial sectors' catch is anywhere close to their sector ACLs—and, remember, the recreational sector has exceeded its ACL in nine out of the last 10 years—the management board’s actions make it virtually certain that the black sea bass stock will experience overfishing in 2025, and that federal fisheries managers will have to adopt even more restrictive measures for the 2026 season.

But maybe no one cares.

After all, the spawning stock biomass is 219 percent above target.

For now.

MARINE AQUACULTURE FACES GROWING OPPOSITION

On its face, it seems like a perfect solution.

Instead of focusing on wild stocks of fish to feed a still-growing human population, why not do what we did with terrestrial animals long ago, and abandon the hunter-gatherer approach in favor of fish farms?  That way, the problem of fishing down natural populations can be largely avoided (although recreational fishermen will still take a large toll on some), and the process of providing fish for human consumption could become more certain and more environmentally and economically viable.

Unfortunately, things are rarely as easy as they seem.

They found that out in the State of Washington, when salmon pens maintained by Cooke Aquaculture collapsed, probably due to poor maintenance, and released over a quarter-million non-native Atlantic salmon into the environment, where they could potentially colonize local streams and compete with already badly depleted Pacific salmon runs.

Washington regulators decided that Atlantic salmon farming posed such a potential threat to native Pacific salmon that they later outlawed the practice in state waters, with Hilary Franz, the state’s Commissioner of Public Lands stating that

“As we’ve seen too clearly here in Washington, there is no way to safely farm finfish in open sea net pens without jeopardizing our struggling native salmon,”

and acting to end the practice.

The Washington legislature concurred.

In Seattle, a jury awarded the Lummi Nation of Native Americans $595,000 after the tribe sued Cooke Aquaculture for the value of the work done catching escaped salmon and removing them from Washington’s waters.

Across the border in Canadia, the Minister of Fisheries, Oceans, and the Canadian Coast Guard announced earlier this year that open net pen salmon aquaculture will be banned in the waters of British Columbia, beginning June 30, 2029.  On July 1, 2024, the Canadian government stopped issuing new licenses to operate such aquaculture facilities in British Columbia.

In taking such action, Minister Diane Lebouthillier said,

“The government is firmly committed to taking concrete steps to protect wild Pacific salmon.  Today, I’m announcing the essence of a reasonable, realistic, and achievable transition that ensures the protection of wild species, food security and the vital economic development of British Columbia’s First Nations, coastal communities and others, as we keep working toward a final transition plan by 2025.”

Taleeb Noormohamed, a member of the Canadian Parliament who represents the Vancouver Granville region of British Columbia, endorsed such remarks, saying

“Since 2019, Canadians have looked to the federal government to protect wild salmon—including regulating fish farming.  Ending open net aquaculture is a transformative shift that will make Canada a world leader in sustainable aquaculture production, and preserve BC’s pristine coast and fragile ecosystem for generations to come.”

Now, Representative Mary Peltola (D-AK) is trying to severely limit United States government support for aquaculture in federal waters by introducing the Domestic Seafood Production Act, which is intended

“To direct the Secretary of Agriculture and the Secretary of Commerce to incentivize domestic seafood processing capacity, to strengthen local seafood supply chains, to prohibit any Federal agency from funding or regulating commercial finfish aquaculture operations in the Exclusive Economic Zone in the absence of specific congressional authority, and for other purposes.”

More specifically, the bill provides that

“Beginning on the date of the enactment of this Act, notwithstanding any other provision of law, the head of a Federal agency may not permit, authorize, or otherwise facilitate offshore aquaculture; and the Administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration may not award to any person a grant or other financial assistance for the purpose of carrying out or otherwise facilitating offshore aquaculture, except in accordance with a law authorizing such action that is enacted after the date of the enactment of this Act.  [formatting omitted]”

Rep. Peltola explained the reason for such prohibition:

“To ensure the heath of the marine ecosystem, this Act would not allow Federal agencies to permit, authorize, or facilitate offshore aquaculture in U.S. Federal waters in the absence of Congressional authorization.  Additionally, NOAA may not award financial assistance of any kind for the purposes of facilitating offshore aquaculture.  Already outlawed in the states of Alaska and Washington, finfish aquaculture will have a variety of harmful impacts on communities as well as the ecosystem.  Modern-day examples include pollution from fish farm chemicals contributing to harmful algae blooms; high fish density cages contributing to disease and parasite spread—both within fish farms and spilling out to affect wild populations; fish farm gear contributing to increased marine wildlife entanglements; the unsustainable harvest of ‘forage’ wild fish to convert into fish pellets to feed farmed fish (contributing to overfishing); and large farm buffer zones that would limit and displace commercial and recreational fishing, tourism, and other recreational uses.”

Although it is unlikely that Rep. Peltola’s bill will get a hearing in the current legislative session, as such session is approaching its end and elections loom, distracting legislators from their lawmaking duties, the concerns that underly the legislation remain very real, and not limited to the United States.

In Chile, where farming Atlantic salmon has become an important industry, fish farmers trying to expand into the relatively pristine waters of Patagonia are running into strong opposition.  There, opponents are concerned about

“the Chilean salmon farming industry’s extensive use of antibiotics and chemical pesticides (Over two-thirds of Chilean farmed salmon is rated red by the nonprofit Seafood Watch due to the high use of antibiotics,) the practice of covering the seafloor (underneath the farms) with organic matter causing eutrophication, large-scale escapes of farmed salmon that have a significant impact on native fauna, and trails of plastic trash and debris in the pristine Patagonian landscapes.”

There are also concerns that the farms deny marine mammals, including whales and dolphins, access to a portion of their historical habitat, and that fish farm workers sometimes kill sea lions found stealing food from the salmon pens.

The fact that many of the new Patagonian salmon farms would be sited in what are supposed to be protected areas such as the Las Guaitecas National Reserve and Kawesqar National Park, is of particular concern to the farms’ opponents.  In response to the opponents’ concerns, the Chilean government has issued new rules that there must be a management plan in place before salmon farms may be established in a protected area, which plan

“includes scientific data about the area, the barriers to sustainable development, and a series of required management practices.”

Applications for salmon farm concessions that lack such management plans will not be granted.

Predictably, the salmon farming industry was not pleased with the new rules.  A spokesman for SalmonChile, an industry trade group, focused on economic, rather than environmental, issues when complaining that

“It’s hard to understand why regulations are issued that cause uncertainty within a productive sector that contributes 2% of the country’s gross domestic product and is the second largest exporter…[Chile] needs investments and economic growth.”

But perhaps Chile, and other nations, do not need the environmental degradation that the fish farms can bring.  Two years ago, the permits of one fish farming company, Nova Austral, were revoked after

“an investigation that used sediment analysis, sampling and underwater filming to show that the company had caused environmental damage in the waters of Alberto de Agostini National Park after exceeding the maximum authorized production level.”

In Australia, The Guardian recently reported that

“Tasmania’s largest salmon company, Tassal [which, as a matter of interest, is owned by the same Cooke Aquaculture responsible for the pen collapse in Washington], has revealed wild fish at one of its salmon farms contained antibiotic residues at almost five times the allowed level.

“In another case, there were low-level antibiotic traces in wild fish caught more than seven kilometres from another Tassal salmon farm.”

High antibiotic levels in farmed fish are, in themselves, a serious health concern, but when the farms’ use of antibiotics becomes so great that the drugs begin to contaminate wild populations…

And, of course, salmon continue to escape from their pens, not only in Washington, but in Iceland, Canada, and elsewhere that salmon are farmed, posing a risk to native fish populations.

And perhaps that’s why Argentina, Chile’s Patagonian neighbor, has decided that the downside of intensive salmon farming more than offsets the benefits, and so, in 2021, banned the practice in Argentinian waters, fearing that it would

“wreak environmental havoc, close down local fishing fleets and threaten the established nature-tourism  sector, which employs 16,500 people.”

And, perhaps, that’s why Congress ought to take a very long, very serious look at Rep. Peltola’s bill, should it be reintroduced in the next session, which starts early next year.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

SHARKS AND THE "LIFTING BASELINE"

 

It was the summer of ’68. 

August was drawing to a close, and with the start of ninth grade looming, my friend Pat and I were doing all that we could to make the most of our last, few days of freedom.  So as the newborn sun slowly climbed out of Long Island Sound to cast its light on the mouth of the Mianus River and the rest of the Greenwich, Connecticut shoreline, it caught us aboard Pat’s 10 ½-foot plywood skiff, snagging a couple of menhaden, the first step in our journey in pursuit of big fish.

There had always been striped bass and bluefish in the river and along the rest of the neighboring shore.  Some of the bass might break 50 pounds, large enough to qualify as “big fish” for most local anglers, but Pat and I had our sights set a bit higher, on a cryptic denizen of the Sound that was not that often seen but was always there, and which might eat that 50 pound striped bass for lunch.

Our target was the brown—more properly, “sandbar”—shark, which had been a part of the Long Island Sound ecosystem for millennia.  It probably wasn’t long at all—using a geological timescale—between the retreat of the glaciers that created both Long Island and its namesake sound and the time the first browns arrived in that sound’s waters and made it their summertime home.  Yet, for a very long time, they got surprisingly little attention from the folks living on the Sound’s shores.

When I was young, I read a book about sharks that included a passage from the log of a small sailboat that cruised the Sound’s waters around the start of the 20^th Century.  The writer talked about leaving some harbor on the North Shore of Long Island—whether it was Huntington or Cold Spring Harbor I can’t now recall, but I do remember that it was one of the harbors not too far from Greenwich—and seeing what he called “big” sharks cruising the shallows from the deck of his boat.

They were almost certainly browns, with perhaps some sand tigers thrown in.

Every now and then, when I was a boy, a fisherman bait fishing for striped bass or blues would hook a fish that stripped all the line from his reel before he could pull up the anchor and give chase.  No striped bass or bluefish could move so fast for so far.

And it was an annual rite of summer to pick up the Greenwich Time and see a photo on its front page, that showed members of the town’s marine police engaging in an armed “shark patrol” off local beaches, ostensibly protecting bathers while, in reality, doing little more than taking a ride in the sun.

But all of that was mostly background noise that no one really listened to until ’68, when a couple of capable anglers, fishing from two different boats, not only hooked, but actually landed, a couple of brown sharks on a sleepy Sunday morning.

The next day, the Monday edition of the Greenwich Time carried a photo of two big browns, allegedly seven feet long and weighing 200 pounds, hanging from a rack near the spot where the marine police docked (apparently, the police involved themselves in the capture of both; my father and I were on the water when one of the sharks was being fought, and watched two patrolmen board an angler’s boat, draw their revolvers, and start firing in the fish’s general direction).

So Pat and I decided that it was time to catch a brown shark, too.

We didn’t have any tackle heavier than our striped bass rods, so we decided that we’d have to handline the beast.  We figured that we’d get the biggest hooks we could find locally—which, looking back, were not very big—and wire them into a water ski tow rope.  Then we’d tie the rope to the bow of Pat’s small skiff, and tie it again to a cleat in the stern, using a reef knot that could be released with a simple tug on the line once we hooked a fish.  At that point, the shark would be free to tow the boat from the bow, giving us a Nantucket sleighride around the Sound until it tired, at which point we’d drag it up on the nearest beach and…do something.

We never made a plan for what we would do should a shark swim offshore, and take us to water deeper than the towline was long…

In the event, we caught a couple of menhaden, stuck them on the hooks, tied a rock to the end of the line in lieu of a sinker, and began to slowly troll our baits around what seemed to be promising places.  All was going well until the towline went tight and stopped the boat, powered by an old and wheezy 3 hp outboard, dead in its tracks.

We got a little excited and Pat gunned the engine, but then the line went slack.  We hauled it into the boat, and found one hook straightened out—presumably by the rock or whatever obstruction it might have snagged—and the other bait gone.  With the sun rising high and school starting in a couple of days, that was pretty much the end of our shark fishing that year.

But the point is that, despite our lack of success, there were quite a few brown sharks in the Sound in those days.

Thus, I was somewhat amused to read a recent Facebook post that began

“10 years ago, catching a brown shark in Long Island Sound happened but not on a regular basis.  Over the past three years the number of brown sharks in Long Island Sound exploded at a frightening pace…”

It went on to talk about brown sharks stealing hooked striped bass, claiming that they keep bass from biting, at which point the author wrote that

“I believe they are detrimental to the striper population.  The sharks have been protected for decades, and I believe it’s time that we need to control these predators, as their population is spiraling out of control.”

It’s was little different from comments being made elsewhere on the coast, particularly in the South, as anglers complain about “their” fish being stolen by apex ocean predators.W

The truth of the matter is that brown (sandbar) sharks are a slow-growing, late-maturing species that remains overfished.  They don’t become sexually mature until 13 or 14 years old, and then only give birth to five pups after an 8- to 12-month gestation period.  Although a stock assessment now being prepared could alter scientists’ views on the matter, right now the stock is not expected to be completely rebuilt until 2070. 

Given such a life history, it’s not plausible that “their population is spiraling out of control.”

But that comment conceals an even bigger truth:  10 years is a completely inadequate timespan for judging the health of a shark population.

After all, a brown shark takes well over 10 years just to mature and breed for the first time, so using a mere 10-year timeline to gauge the stock’s status makes no sense at all.  When I look back on sharks in Long Island Sound, I’m looking back over 50 years to find something closer to a true baseline—and I suspect that even then, the population was significantly smaller than it had been an additional 50 years before.

The shark depredation debate has been tainted by short-term thinking.  A recent essay that appeared on theconversation.com, titled "Sharks are taking a bite out of anglers’ catch in the Gulf of Mexico, but culling isn’t likely to help,” written by James Marcus Drymon, an Associate Exchange Professor of Marine Fisheries Ecology at Mississippi State University, who has received a grant from the National Marine Fisheries Service to study shark depredation, uses the term “lifting baseline” to help explain anglers’ misperceptions.

While many people are familiar with the “shifting baseline syndrome,” in which

“each new generation of fishermen accepts the current, often reduced, status of a fish population as the baseline and forgets that there was a time when these species were much more abundant,”

the “lifting baseline” is a lesser-known phenomenon, even though it heralds good news.  It occurs when

“conservation and management efforts [lead] to population increases.

“Instances where populations have been overfished and then rebuilt can create a perception of overabundance.  When the species that’s recovering is a predator, that can lead to human-wildlife conflicts.”

Thus, absent a long-term outlook that reaches back to a time when sharks were at a more historically typical level of abundance, their abundance and their impact on recreational fisheries is likely to be substantially overstated.  In a recently published paper, “Depredation:  An old conflict with the sea,” Drymon notes that

“[One study] used angler-documented accounts of tournament-landed sharks to reconstruct a 70-year time series of shark sizes in the northern [Gulf of Mexico].  Interestingly, there was clear evidence of shifting baselines; that is, the gradual acceptance of a reduction in the abundance and size of species.  Older anglers viewed changes in shark sizes more accurately than younger anglers; specifically, only individuals over 60 years of age remembered a time when larger sharks were more common.”

The lack of such long-term perspective is apparently resulting in many of the complaints about shark depredation and claims that the shark population “is spiraling out of control.”  It’s hard for some anglers to understand that an increase in sharks is evidence of a healing ecosystem returning to some semblance of normality when such anglers have never had the opportunity to know what a healthy and “normal” ecosystem might look like.

And as competing predators, anglers naturally object when a more efficient and more effective predator steals their prey.

So it’s easy to forget that, when it comes to predation, it’s the sharks’ ocean, not ours; they have been swimming in it, and preying on its inhabitants, for over 400 million years.  We anglers are merely visitors, members of a species that may have always foraged for food at the edge of the water, but have only had a significant impact on marine fish stocks in the past few hundred years.  Recreational fishermen’s impacts on saltwater fish stocks reach back far less than that.

Thus, from a historical perspective, it is more than a little arrogant for the newcomers to demand that shark populations be culled, just so that anglers might have a little more fun.

For when it comes to gauging the health and abundance of shark populations, time matters.  And, looking back in time, it becomes very clear that today’s shark populations are neither overabundant nor “spinning out of control.”

They’re just returning to where they should have been all along.

 

 

 

 

NMFS WORK TO IMPROVE FISHING EFFORT SURVEY CONTINUES

 

The National Marine Fisheries Service recently issued an update to stakeholders, announcing that work to improve the Fishing Effort Survey, a key component of the Marine Recreational Information Program that is used to estimate recreational effort, catch, and landings, is moving forward, and pointing the way toward more accurate recreational fishing data.

As readers may recall, about one year ago, NMFS announced that it had found a problem with the Fishing Effort Survey, which was leading some anglers to overstate the number of trips that they took in the most recent two-month “wave,” and so resulting in catch and effort being overstated, by perhaps as much as 30 or 40 percent.

Initial investigations suggested that the problem might be as simple as how the questions in the Fishing Effort Survey are ordered.

It is a tenet of survey design that any such questionnaire begin with simple-to-answer questions, and then  move on to those that might take a little more thought.  Thus, the original version of the Fishing Effort Survey began by asking anglers how many fishing trips they had taken in the previous two-month wave.  Following that question was another that asked how many trips the responding angler had taken in the previous year.

When a NMFS quality control team reviewed angler responses, they were surprised to find that a significant number of anglers said that they had taken more fishing trips in the past two months than they had in the past twelve, an illogical and obviously impossible result.  However, such responses were common enough to significantly skew the Fishing Effort Survey’s results.  Although the reasons behind them can’t be determined with absolute certainty, it appears that many anglers were reluctant to report making zero trips in the previous wave, and so reported phantom outings that never, in fact, occurred.

NMFS next needed to find out just how badly the inaccurate survey responses skewed the Fishing Effort Survey data. 

While pilot studies suggested that the error was somewhere in the 30 to 40 percent range, the inaccuracies differed from mode to mode (e.g., the magnitude of the error for shore-based anglers was different than the error generated by private-boat fishermen), region to region, and fishery to fishery.  But when NMFS flipped the questions in the survey, and asked anglers how many trips they took in the past year before asking about the previous two-month wave, the estimated number of trips dropped between 30 and 40 percent.

In 2024, NMFS is conducting a much larger-scale study to determine just how to address the previous inaccuracies.  Such study is needed because, as explained by Dr. Evan Howell, director of NMFS’ Office of Science and Technology,

“The findings from [the] limited pilot study should not be taken as the final answer, and the results cannot be generally applied to all fisheries and fishing areas.  We have to do our due diligence in conducting a full-scale study prior to assessing the need for design changes or making large-scale changes to assessments or management measures.”

Throughout 2024, NMFS surveyors will use both the old and the revised survey form, so that they can compare, and hopefully eventually calibrate, the results.  And the new survey form won’t only change the order of the questions.  It will also introduce additional, planned improvements, such as surveying on a monthly basis, rather in two-month waves. 

According to Dr. Howell,

“The switch to monthly sampling will have positive impacts to recreational fishing science and management, and is a very important piece of this study.  Monthly survey administration will produce more frequent effort and catch estimates, which is a priority of our regional partners.  A shorter respondent recall period may also minimize reporting error in the survey.”

NMFS is committed to getting the revised survey format right and, unfortunately, getting things right will take time.  (I’m reminded of the old saying that you can have a job done quickly, done cheap, or done right—pick two out of three; given Congress’ chronically parsimonious funding of NMFS’ science programs, choosing between “quickly” and “right” are the only two realistic options that the agency has.)

Because of the need to move slowly and precisely, we won’t see the results of the new survey format—assuming that it ultimately passes scientific peer review and is adopted by the agency—incorporated into stock assessments and management measures until 2026.  That’s because final 2024 estimates won’t even become available to NMFS until sometime in April 2025, and once they are available, agency scientists will have to prepare their final report on the outcome of the study, and determine how to calibrate historical data with the new Fishing Effort Survey methodology.

Until then, data collected using the current survey methodology will be used in all stock assessments and to compute fishery management measures.

Upon hearing of the overestimation issue, many in the recreational fishing community jumped to the erroneous conclusion that such high estimates resulted in unnecessarily restrictive angling regulations, but such views merely revealed how little such folks knew about the stock assessment process and the science underlying fisheries management.

In fact, recreational landings are an important data input in the stock assessment process, with the assumption generally being that high recreational landings suggest a stock large enough to support such landings over the course of years.  Thus, an overestimate of recreational landings will typically result in an overestimation of the size of a fish stock, leading to commercial quotas and recreational harvest limits that may be higher than the stock can sustain in the long term. 

Instead of resulting in recreational management measures that are unduly strict, an overestimation of recreational landings may well result in regulations that are not nearly strict enough.  That could well be the case with a number of recently assessed, recreationally important fish stocks, including striped bass, summer flounder, black sea bass, and bluefish.

But it will be a couple more years before we know whether that is the case.

In the meantime, the good news is that, as NMFS notes,

“If the agency shifts to a revised design—based on the findings of the follow-up study—the magnitude of historical estimates may change, but critical catch and effort trend information are expected to remain similar.  It’s important to note that stock status determinations are relatively consistent when trend information hasn’t changed.”

To put that in a real-world context, the spike in recreational striped bass landings in 2022 was real, and not merely an artifact of the Fishing Effort Survey overestimating angling activity, and anyone expecting to be able to land more red snapper due to the current glitch in that survey is likely to be very disappointed.

The bottom line is that good fishery management, and good fisheries science, is impossible without good data, and given that recreational fishing has the potential to do real harm to many fish stocks, that means good recreational fishing data as well.

NMFS is making ongoing efforts to assure the quality of Marine Recreational Information Program data, and discovered the issues with the Fishing Effort Survey as a result of such quality control initiatives (ongoing initiatives, it should be noted, that are conspicuously absent from most, if not all, state recreational data programs).  It will be at least two more years before the results of NMFS’ overhaul of the Fishing Effort Survey become available for use in stock assessments and fisheries regulation.

Until such results are available, knowing that overstated estimates of recreational effort, catch, and landings can inflate the estimates of stock size, and make fish stocks more vulnerable to overharvest, we can only hope that regional fisheries management councils’ scientific and statistical committees make note of recreational data uncertainties when setting the acceptable biological catch, and the such councils, and other management bodies, use a bit more precaution when setting annual catch limits over the next few years.

 

MAGNUSON-STEVENS IN A POST-CHEVRON WORLD

After June 28, 2024, when the United States Supreme Court handed down its decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo (Loper Bright), some of the commentary in both the popular press and various legal publications made it sound as if the sky had fallen. One opinion article in the Tampa Bay Times went so far as to proclaim, “U.S. fisheries could be devastated by Supreme Court’s ending the Chevron doctrine.”

Such reactions are almost certainly overblown, at least with respect to fisheries issues. To understand why, one must take a look not only at the lawsuit and the court’s decision, but also at the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (Magnuson-Stevens), which governs all fishing in the marine waters of the United States.

The Issues Underlying Loper Bright

Loper Bright was brought by a group of Atlantic herring fishermen who challenged a National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) regulation that required such fishermen to carry industry-funded observers aboard their vessels, which cost vessel owners as much as $710 per day. The fishermen argued that Magnuson-Stevens did not authorize NMFS to impose industry-funded observers on Atlantic herring vessels, while NMFS argued that language in Magnuson-Stevens, which authorizes it to “require that one or more observers be carried upon a vessel of the United States engaged in fishing…for the purpose of collecting data,” when read together with other language that permitted the agency to impose “measures, requirements, or conditions and restrictions as are determined to be necessary and appropriate for the conservation and management of the fishery” gave it all the authority that it needed to require the observers.

The fishermen argued that, while the statute did allow NMFS to require observers aboard fishing vessels, and stated that observers must be carried in a few specified fisheries, nothing in the law authorized NMFS to force Atlantic herring fishermen to pay for the observers carried aboard their vessels. They also noted that NMFS had originally paid for the herring observers, but that a change to the management plan, made in 2013, allowed NMFS to require industry funding if federal funding became unavailable.

The trial court, after weighing both sides’ arguments, found that there was some ambiguity in Magnuson-Stevens’ language, and invoked the so-called “Chevron doctrine,” created by the Supreme Court when it decided Chevron U.S.A. v. Natural Resources Defense Council (Chevron v. NRDC) in 1984.

In Chevron v. NRDC, the court found that, “if…the court determines that Congress has not directly addressed the precise question at issue, the court does not simply impose its own construction on the statute, as would be necessary in the absence of an administrative interpretation. Rather, if the statute is silent or ambiguous with respect to the specific issue, the question for the court is whether the agency’s answer is based on a permissible construction of the statute.” The Court thus gave administrative agencies, rather than the courts, the power to interpret the meaning of certain statutes, writing, “a court may not substitute its own construction of a statutory provision for a reasonable interpretation made by the administrator of an agency.”

The trial court applied the Chevron doctrine to the issues raised in Loper Bright, and found that NMFS had the authority to require industry-paid observers in the Atlantic herring fishery. The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit affirmed the trial court’s decision, although one member of the three-judge panel dissented, and would have had the court find for the fishermen.

However, the Supreme Court disagreed with the lower courts’ analyses. While it did not decide whether Magnuson-Stevens authorized NMFS to require industry-paid observers in the Atlantic herring fishery, and remanded that matter for the Court of Appeals to decide, it overruled the Chevron doctrine, finding that only the courts, and not administrative agencies, had the authority to interpret the meaning of federal laws.

Chevron Was Never Consistently Applied

While most observers expected the Supreme Court to limit the Chevron doctrine’s application, fewer expected the doctrine to be completely overturned. Yet, throughout much of the Chevron doctrine’s history, the court has demonstrated at least some skepticism about its use.

In 2018, Michael Kagan, a professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas William S. Boyd School of Law, published an article titled “Loud and Soft Anti-Chevron Decisions” in the Wake Forest Law Review, where he pointed out multiple occasions on which the Supreme Court chose to ignore, or at least find a way to work around, its holding in Chevron v. NRDC. He noted that

To a great extent, the current analytical challenge in administrative law is not new—it is just more out in the open. Since the early days of the doctrine, the trouble with Chevron has been in understanding why the Court does one thing in one case but another thing in another case. The problem is not that the court has sometimes explicitly indicated that there are exceptions to this doctrine…Instead, the problem is that the Court far more frequently fails to follow Chevron’s normal two-step analysis in cases to which it seems to apply and then does not explain why. Explaining this inconsistency has long been a preoccupation of administrative law scholarship…

At least one scholar has recently suggested that the Court’s “failure to apply Chevron where it would seem to apply,” should be seen as a signal of reluctance about “a full-throated Chevron doctrine…

The clearest expressions of doctrinal doubts are what can be called “loud” anti-Chevron decisions, where the judges actually articulate a limitation on or a critique of the doctrine…The bigger difficulty concerns the many decisions in which the Supreme Court failed to apply Chevron when it ostensibly should have mattered or applied it is such a way as to render the doctrine irrelevant.

Kagan also notes that, in the beginning, the Chevron doctrine wasn’t viewed as a major change in administrative law, particularly by the Supreme Court.

The doctrinal meaning typically attributed to the case has been much more than anyone would have anticipated from reading the decision itself. The Chevron doctrine actually developed through interpretation by lower courts than from an immediate understanding that the Supreme Court had issued a watershed decision. In fact, it could be said that the Chevron doctrine would more appropriately be termed the General Motors doctrine, in honor of the D.C. Circuit decision that seems to have been the first to cite and explain Chevron as a major change in administrative law.

To further his argument, he quotes Michael Herz’s 2015 article in the Columbia Law Review, “Chevron is Dead; Long Live Chevron,” which opined that “Despite all the attention…the ‘Chevron revolution’ never quite happens. This decision, though seen as transformatively important, is honored in the breach, in constant danger of being abandoned, and the subject of perpetual confusion and uncertainty.”

The Supreme Court’s Reasoning in Loper Bright

In the face of that sort of judicial ambiguity and uneven application, it was probably only a matter of time before the Chevron doctrine was modified, limited or, as proved to be the case, completely overruled. While the court’s decision in Loper Bright will undoubtedly cause some difficulties at federal agencies, the basis for that decision was not, as some have suggested, ideologically extreme. Instead, it was rooted in the plain language of the federal Administrative Procedure Act which, as the court noted, “prescribes procedures for agency action and delineates the basic contours of judicial review of such action.”

The relevant section of the Administrative Procedure Act, Title 5, Section 706 of the United States Code, unambiguously states that “To the extent necessary to decision and when presented, the reviewing court shall decide all relevant questions of law, interpret constitutional and statutory provisions, and determine the meaning or applicability of the terms of an agency action. [emphasis added]” It was in light of such language that the Supreme Court decided that the Chevron doctrine was in direct conflict with the governing statute, and must be overturned.

How Will Loper Bright Impact Magnuson-Stevens?

The important questions now, with respect to marine conservation, are how the Loper Bright decision might impact the application of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, and whether the NMFS’ efforts to conserve and manage the nation’s living marine resources will be badly hampered as a result.

Some within the conservation community fear that the Loper Bright decision will do real harm. They fear that judges who lack the needed technical background and training will attempt to decide between competing scientific arguments, and perhaps substitute their own opinions for an agency’s considered determination. However, the Loper Bright decision does not set the stage for such outcome, as it merely confirms the courts’ sole authority to decide issues of law and statutory interpretation.

Loper Bright does not authorize the courts to substitute their judgement for that of the agencies with respect to issues of fact.

The distinction between the courts’ obligation to decide questions of law and the agencies’ responsibility to decide questions of fact is clearly set out in the Loper Bright decision, when it states,

The [Administrative Procedure Act]…codifies for agency cases the unremarkable, yet elemental proposition…that courts decide legal questions by applying their own judgment. It specifies that courts, not agencies, will decide “all relevant questions of law” arising on review of agency action (emphasis added)—even those involving ambiguous laws—and set aside any such action inconsistent with the law as they interpret it. And it prescribes no deferential standard for courts to employ in answering those legal questions. That omission is telling, because Section 706 [of the Administrative Procedure Act] does mandate that judicial review of agency policymaking and factfinding be deferential.

Thus, an administrative agency may, in its factfinding capacity, adopt the conclusions presented in presumably objective research rather than those developed in industry-funded, and so possibly biased, studies and, so long as the basis for its decision is clearly articulated in the administrative record, have no fear that such factfinding will be overturned by a reviewing court. The agency may use the results of such research to formulate policy without worrying about such policy being overturned during judicial review. But what an agency cannot do, under any circumstances, is decide arguments about the scope or meaning of the statutes that created the agency or define the scope of its authority for, in the wake of the Loper Bright decision, adjudicating such arguments is the sole responsibility of the courts.

When those principles are applied to Magnuson-Stevens, there is little question that the Loper Bright decision may prevent NMFS from expanding its authority beyond the bounds set out in the statute, and from taking action that is not clearly authorized in such law. Should NMFS base a regulatory action on its own interpretation of a statute, the demise of the Chevron doctrine makes it more likely that an aggrieved party will seek judicial review, and more likely that such party will prevail. That being said, the Loper Bright decision is unlikely to seriously degrade NMFS’ ability to conserve and manage the nation’s living marine resources.

That is because there is little ambiguity with respect to the core conservation and management provisions of Magnuson-Stevens. The National Standards for Fishery Conservation and Management are explicit, as are the provisions establishing and authorizing the regional fishery management councils. Magnuson-Stevens spells out which provisions that must be included in fishery management plans, as well as what provisions may be included in such plans. The duties of the Secretary of Commerce, with respect to fisheries management, are clearly stated, as is the timeline for rebuilding overfished stocks. While some ambiguities remain, one of which gave rise to the Loper Bright case, the meaning of the law’s core provisions, which have been challenged and interpreted by the courts on many occasions, have generally been settled.

Because Magnuson-Stevens’ central conservation and management provisions are clearly expressed, and have already been subject to judicial review, it is unlikely that NMFS’ efforts to properly conserve and manage fisheries resources will be unduly hampered by the Supreme Court overruling the Chevron doctrine. Since the court’s decision in Loper Bright explicitly recognizes that courts must defer to agencies’ findings of fact, NMFS should still be able to use its factfinding authority to determine whether a stock is overfished or experiencing overfishing, and to set annual catch limits likely to rebuild overfished stocks and maintain sustainable fisheries. It will merely have to adopt management measures that clearly fall within the letter of the law.

Finally, when considering the long-term impact of the Loper Bright decision, we should always remember that the Chevron doctrine, when first applied in Chevron v. NRDC, ultimately hindered the cause of conservation.

In the years since, the Chevron doctrine has often been used to preserve an agency’s conservation initiatives, but we should never forget that, in the future, voters might easily elect a new president who is hostile to conservation concerns, and more than willing to allow industry to pollute the air and water, and overexploit the nation’s natural resources. Such an administration might well seek to interpret federal laws in a way that creates a more industry-friendly regulatory environment, in which those who pollute the air and water, or cause harm to living resources, can easily escape significant sanctions.

Under such circumstances, we may be grateful that the law doesn’t allow administrative agencies to issue their own interpretations of the governing law, but rather subjects their actions to judicial scrutiny that might keep at least some legislative safeguards in place.

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This essay first appeared in “From the Waterfront,” the blog of the Marine Fish Conservation Network, which can be found at http://conservefish.org/blog/ 

BLACK SEA BASS ASSESSMENT LEADS TO UNNECESSARY CONSTERNATION

 

On Wednesday, August 14, the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council and the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Summer Flounder, Scup, and Black Sea Bass Management Board will meet in joint session to, among other things, consider 2025 specifications for the recreational and commercial black sea bass fishery.

It promises to be a contentious meeting.

Late last year, the Northeast Fisheries Science Center released a research track stock assessment for black sea bass.  A research track assessment (similar to what the ASMFC calls a “benchmark stock assessment”) is intended to take a new look at the management process, and attempts to address particular issues and/or explore new scientific models, in order to better understand the dynamics of the fishery.  In this case, the research track black sea bass assessment ended up adopting an entirely new assessment model, the Woods Hole Assessment Model (WHAM), replacing the Age Structured Assessment Program (ASAP) model previously used.

The new research track assessment passed peer review, and so represents the current state of the art in black sea bass management.  It managed to largely eliminate what had been a significant retrospective pattern in the previous assessment, which overestimated fishing mortality and underestimated spawning stock biomass in the northern region (that is, north of Hudson Canyon), while at the same time underestimating fishing mortality and overestimating biomass in the southern region.  That in itself was a significant improvement.

However, while the research track assessment provided a new approach to assessing the black sea bass stock, its findings did not directly translate into fishery management measures.  Instead, the methodology of the research track assessment was then incorporated into a management track assessment (similar to what the ASMFC calls a “stock assessment update”) that determined the status of the stock through the end of 2023, and will be used by the Council and Management Board to set 2025 management measures.

Once the management track assessment was completed, the Council’s Scientific and Statistical Committee must set the Allowable Biological Catch, which establishes the upper limit for catch—that is, the combined landings and dead discards of both the recreational and commercial fleets—as the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act dictates that each regional fishery management council must

“develop annual catch limits for each of its managed fisheries that may not exceed the fishing level recommendation of its scientific and statistical committee or the peer review process established”

elsewhere in Magnuson-Stevens.

The Council’s Scientific and Statistical Committee met on July 23-25 to address black sea bass and a number of other species; an Executive Summary of the meeting, released on August 7, noted with respect to black sea bass that,

“The 2024 [management track] assessment in June represented the first implementation of the new modeling paradigm and its use for deriving Biological Reference Points and projections.  The SSC appreciated the conceptual advances, but noted that many of the model features are not easily compared to previous models, particularly fishing mortality reference points.  As in previous models, the stock is not overfished and overfishing is not occurring.  The stock biomass is more than twice the B_msy level and expected to decline towards the biomass target in the short run, but not as quickly as previously thought.  Another [management track assessment] will be conducted in 2025 to get specifications for 2026 and 2027.  (The shortened interval between is a result of a management need to synchronize specifications among the other stocks in the Fishery Management Plan.)  An OFL CV of 150% was used, primarily due to the uncertainty associated with MRIP estimates of recreational removals.  The SSC recommends an ABC of 6.027 [metric tons] for 2025.”

Given that the Acceptable Biological Catch for 2024 was 7,557 metric tons, and that the 2025 recommendation was about 20 percent lower, the SSC’s decision made a lot of people unhappy.

While that unhappiness is understandable, as black sea bass remain one of the most abundant inshore species, particularly in New England and the upper mid-Atlantic, reading both the 2021 management track assessment, which was based on the no-longer-used ASAP model, and the 2024 management track assessment, helps to explain why landings must be reduced in 2025.  In addition, with respect just to the recreational fishery, it’s easy to argue that landings probably should have been reduced by 10 percent in 2024, and that any 2025 reductions that may occur will merely serve as a delayed substitute for measures that should have been adopted a year ago, and don’t even begin to account for the lowered estimate of the spawning stock biomass target.

The ASAP model that was formerly used to assess the black sea bass stock had set the biomass target at 14,092 metric tons; the actual spawning stock biomass was about 220 percent of that target, or roughly 31,000 metric tons.  When the assessors switched to the WHAM model, the estimate of SSB_target dropped to 11,225 metric tons, and 219 percent of that number is only a little over 24,500 metric tons—about 20 percent less.  Such smaller biomass estimate means that, to prevent overfishing, harvest has to be reduced accordingly, as the estimate of maximum sustainable yield fell from 4,773 metric tons to 3,649 metric tons—again, by a little over 20 percent.

In that context, a harvest reduction of 20 percent seems completely reasonable.  It’s not that the new ABC is being set too low,  as some people claim, because of questionable estimates of recruitment, past fishing mortality, future landings, or any other, similar factor; instead, the old ABC, used in the 2021 management track assessment, was set too high, and probably allowed too many black sea bass to be caught in previous years.  The 20 percent reduction in ABC merely amounts to a reset, which aligns catch with what is now considered the best estimate of spawning stock biomass.

Yet too many people hear the word “reduction” and then hear nothing else, but instead have a knee-jerk reaction to oppose harvest cuts without even trying to understand why such cuts might be needed.  That was clearly the case at the August 5 Advisory Panel meeting, where

“Advisors were very frustrated with the 20% decline in the 2025 black sea bass acceptable biological catch (ABC) limit recommended by the Council’s Scientific and Statistical Committee (SSC) compared to the 2024 ABC.”

At the meeting,

“Several advisors questioned the accuracy of the biomass projections which inform the ABC…One advisor said it feels as if the ABC needs to be cut by 20% just in case recruitment is worse in the future…Several advisors said the current stock projections should not be used in management as the numbers don’t make sense and there is not a comprehensible explanation for why biomass is projected to decline rapidly.”

I’ll be the first to admit that the 2024 management track assessment was a bit sparse, and didn’t provide a particularly clear explanation for why various values had changed significantly since 2021.  Like others, I was a bit puzzled by the assessment's conclusions.  However, instead of merely rejecting the assessment and the advice of the SSC, I took the time to inquire as to why the WHAM seemed to produce such different results.  A biologist from the Northeast Fisheries Science Center provided an explanation:

“The model from the 2024 management track still exhibits the strong year classes in 2011 and 2015, however the magnitude is a bit less.  This is probably owing to our new understanding of the recruitment process in the WHAM model.  These models allow us to include more variability in processes like recruitment, survival, and selectivity, such that these models can have more flexibility to better reflect the actual underlying population dynamics.  There are many additional features in the WHAM model…compared to the ASAP model…that we think better reflect reality—the use of a single fisheries independent index that doesn’t ‘chase noise’ of several fisheries independent indices with small spatial footprints and a selectivity pattern for the recreational fishery in the North that more accurately reflects the size limits that changed over time.  The lessened magnitude of those recruitment spikes does mean the SSB has a consequential increase in the following years…in 2017-2018.  However, both models end up with SSB in the same place in 2019, they just have different explanations for how the stock got there.  The changes in [maximum sustainable yield] and target [spawning stock biomass at maximum sustainable yield] are likely because of our changed perception of SSB…”

A lot of that could probably be summed up by saying, “We thought that the spawning stock biomass was larger than it actually was; now that we know better, we had to revise some of our estimates downward to reflect our current understanding of reality.  Although such summation wouldn’t capture all of the nuances, it would be close enough to provide a better understanding of why the 20 percent reduction was needed—at least to those folks who had any desire to actually understand, and not merely fight for the status quo.

One of the more remarkable aspects of the discussion was that those representing the recreational sector seemed unaware of how the recreational black sea bass fishery was actually managed, and that, because of the so-called “Percent Change Approach” adopted by the Council and the ASMFC’s Interstate Fishery Management Plan Policy Board in June, 2022, the biggest reduction in landings that anglers might experience in 2025 is just 10 percent—and that’s the worst case, because depending on how the numbers turn out, anglers could even get a small landings increase.

That’s because, right now, black sea bass are considered a “very abundant” species, with spawning stock biomass more than 150 percent of the target level.  Thus, Council staff would calculate whether, if 2024 management measures were carried over into 2025, there would be at least a 90 percent probability that recreational landings would exceed the recreational harvest limit.  If the answer to that question was yes, then management measures that would reduce 2025 landings by 10 percent compared to 2024 would be imposed.  However, if the 90 percent confidence interval (essentially, a “margin for error” above and below the point estimate of 2025 landings, calculated so that there is a 90 percent chance that the actual value of 2025 landings would fall somewhere within the specified range of values) overlapped the 2025 recreational harvest limit—something that it not beyond the realm of possibility—recreational landings would be increased, rather than reduced, by the same 10 percent.

Pursuant to the "Precent Change" process, 2024 black sea bass landings should have been reduced by 10 percent, compared to landings in 2023.  However, because competing priorities at the Northeast Fisheries Science Center delayed completion of the management track assessment by one year, and because the Percent Change Approach was intended to be used in conjunction with a recent stock assessment that was not yet available, no reduction in 2024 landings occurred.  Thus, even in the worst case scenario, which sees a 10 percent landings reduction in 2025, the recreational sector will be no worse off than they would have been had the most recent management track assessment been completed in time for the current season.

Given such circumstances, the recreational sector, in particular, has little reason to complain if it must ultimately face a 10 percent harvest reduction in 2025.  Yet not only complaints, but misinformation, is rife.  A recent column in the [Delaware] Cape Gazette is a prime example, where the author complained that

“Our dear friends at NOAA have once again done the unbelievable.  With the population of black sea bass at 219% of the biomass target, they are calling for a 20% decrease in the recreational catch to prevent overfishing.  You read that right:  They want to cut our catch by 20% to prevent us from overfishing a stock that is 219% above the biomass target.  Please let that sink in for a moment.”

Such overblown rhetoric serves no one, except perhaps the handful of people that might profit from overharvesting sea bass in the short term.  It creates antipathy toward fisheries managers and management bodies that are merely trying to execute their obligations under federal law.  And factually, it is just plain wrong.

As noted above, there is no way that 2025 recreational black sea bass landings will be reduced by 20 percent, so long as the Percent Change Approach remains in effect.  The greatest possible reduction will be 10 percent, and a 10 percent increase in landings is not completely out of the question.

The article confuses the notion of a stock being at 219 percent of the target level with that of a stock being 219 percent above such target—which would denote a stock 100 percentage points larger than it actually is.

It suggests that fisheries managers are imposing a reduction on their own initiative, rather than merely carrying out the requirements of the management plan and federal law.

And perhaps worst of all, it makes no serious effort to explain why the 2024 management track assessment might lead the SSC, council staff, or those charged to interpret federal law to believe that a reduction is required.  It is intended only to spawn outrage.

And outrage is a funny thing, because there are a lot of people, in the recreational fishing industry and in the angling press, who get outraged when landings are cut.  But it’s hard to recall a time when many of the same writers and industry members were outraged because managers allowed striped bass to become overfished once again, did nothing to protect the winter flounder when stocks began to decline, or allowed New England cod stocks to collapse.

Which probably says more about their current outrage than you will ever need to know.