HOW FISHERIES MANAGERS FAIL

 

Children do it instinctively.

When they want to do something, and their father says “No,” they run to their mother and ask for her permission.  Then, if their mother says “OK,” they take that answer back to their father, and try to get him to change his mind.  If he remains adamant, their final tactic is to whine, “But its not FAIRRR.”

Fishermen often do the same thing, trying to arbitrage the decisions of state, federal, and/or regional management bodies in an effort to get what they want, regardless of what the resource might need.

The latest instance of that sort of behavior is occurring right now in North Carolina, and involves that state’s recreational fishing season for southern flounder.

It’s no secret that southern flounder are badly depleted throughout much of their range, and North Carolina’s southern flounder population is no exception to that overall trend.  North Carolina law requires that, when confronted with an overfished stock, state managers must end overfishing within two years, and adopt rebuilding measures that have at least a 50 percent change of fully rebuilding the stock within no more than ten years.

The southern flounder stock was determined to be overfished years ago, so 2028 represents the rebuilding deadline.  In order to rebuild by that time,

“Projections were…carried out to determine the fishing mortality and the associated reduction in catch necessary to end the overfished status and to reach the [spawning stock biomass] target within 10 years (by 2028, assuming management imposed regulations beginning in 2019).  The projections indicate that [a fishing mortality rate] equal to 0.34 and a 52% reduction in total catch is needed to reach the [spawning stock biomass] threshold by 2028 and end the overfished status.  To reach the [spawning stock biomass] target by 2028, [the fishing mortality rate] needs to be lowered to 0.18 and total catch needs to be reduced by 72%.  [internal references omitted]”

72 percent is a big cut in landings, and extremely strict management measures were needed to achieve such goal. 

Prior to the adoption of the most recent management measures (North Carolina Southern Flounder Fishery Management Plan Amendment 3), North Carolina anglers could keep 4 southern flounder per day, with a minimum size of 15 inches (because North Carolina hosts three similar-appearing flounder species, southern, summer, and Gulf flounder, the bag and size limits actually apply to “flounder” of any species, and not just to southern flounder); the season ran for the first two weeks in September.  However, fishery data suggested that the bag limit was almost meaningless, as fully 93 percent of the recreational southern flounder landings occurred on trips when only a single flounder was retained. 

Cutting the bag limit would thus do very little to reduce recreational southern flounder landings, and would not get anglers close to the needed 72 percent reduction (managers also placed severe restrictions on the commercial fishery).

Reducing the length of the fishing season was also potentially problematic.  As noted in Amendment 3,

“Seasonal closures do not enforce a maximum removal level on the fishery and only limit the time when targeted harvest can occur.  Fishing effort can be more concentrated during the open season, potentially altering fishing behaviors from previous years that were used to estimate harvest windows; that is, fishing effort may increase during the open season and lead to higher than predicted removals…seasonal closures alone may not result in the needed increase to [spawning stock biomass] even if maintained long term.”

Thus, to better limit southern flounder landings, North Carolina went to a quota-based management program for both commercial and recreational fisheries, requiring pound-for-pound paybacks in the following year for any sector that exceeded its quota.  That provision immediately led to a problem, because North Carolina anglers quickly exceeded their quota.

In 2022, North Carolina recreational fishermen, using both spears and hook and line, exceeded their quota by an estimated 56,340 pounds.  That took their 2023 quota down from 170,655 pounds to just 114,315 pounds.  But recreational landings and dead discards totaled an estimated 241,609 pounds in 2023, more than double the quota.  As a result, recreational fishermen had to pay back a 127,294 pound overage in 2024, and when that was deducted from the 2024 quota, there weren’t enough fish left to justify opening a recreational season.

That didn’t go over well with many anglers.  Patricia Smith, spokesperson for the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, admitted that

“We have a lot of angry fishermen,”

who argued that the government over-reacted when it shut down the fishery, said that the data used to determine that the flounder stock is overfished are unreliable, and blamed the commercial fishery for most of the harm done to the stock.

So the anglers did the same thing that any normal eight-year-old would do if one parent said "No"—they went to see if someone else would let them kill a few flounder.

They could do that because North Carolina has a somewhat strange fishery management system, which shares management responsibility for southern flounder between the Marine Fisheries Commission, which has the authority to close seasons by proclamation and is responsible for fisheries in coastal waters, and the Wildlife Resources Commission, which can only change regulations through a formal rulemaking process, and is responsible for what are known as “shared waters”—essentially some estuaries where fresh and salt water mix—as well as inland waters.

After holding public hearings and accepting public comments on closing the 2024 southern flounder season, the Wildlife Resources Commission decided not to support the Marine Resources Commission's closure, but to instead allow a four-day recreational flounder season.

Their reasons for doing so seem a bit iffy, at best, and have little to do with the needs of the flounder.  Instead, they focus only on the fishermen's concerns and concepts of fairness, and leave biology out of the picture.

According to an article on Coastalreview.org,

“Wildlife officials said…that the decision was made after considering public comments, most of which did not support the closure, ‘a lot of good discussion’ during the July 24 Committee meeting, and reviewing the data presented to the Marine Fisheries Commission on the recreational allotment available for a 2024 flounder season.”

(Even with the payback from the 2023 overage, there were still 43,361 pounds of southern flounder available for 2024; such figure was roughly equivalent to the dead discards in 2023, and well below the dead discard number for 2022, so the Marine Fisheries Commission decided to allocate such fish to dead flounder discards in other recreational fisheries in 2024, although with no open flounder season, such discards would probably not reach the 40,000 pound mark this year.)

Coastalreview.org also reported that

“Commissioners determined that the ‘closure of the flounder season for 2024 is an unbalanced allocation issue.  If that data suggested that closing the season was necessary as a conservation issue, the [Marine Fisheries Commission] would also close the commercial season.  The Committee therefore recommended a 4-day season as recommended by staff,’ they said.”

Such logic—if one wished to grace the WRC 's thoiught processes with such a term—completely ignores the fact that there was no “unbalanced allocation” at all; instead, by grossly overfishing their quota in 2023, recreational fishermen effectively took an advance on their 2024 allocation, and the bill for that advance has now come due.  

Commercial fishermen did not overfish to that extent last year, and because commercial landings are reported in near real time, while recreational landings take weeks to tabulate, commercial overages are far easier to avoid.  Thus, the commercial season can remain open when the recreational season is closed.

Still, as things currently stand, the commercial sector is allocated 70 percent of all southern flounder landings, although that allocation is scheduled to change over time to provide a greater share of the landings to anglers.  The Wildlife Resources Commission used that scheduled change—which will not go into effect this year—to offer up another bit of twisted logic that, in their view, justified opening the recreational flounder fishery.  Again, from Coastalreview.org,

“After recalculating 2024 numbers by applying the different allocation scenarios, [Wildlife Resources Inland Fisheries Division Chief Christian] Waters said that a 60% commercial and 40% recreational split ‘would, in theory, give you just under four days.  That’s also based on if that reallocation occurred coast wide,’ Waters said.”

The problem, of course, is that the reallocation didn’t occur coast wide.  In fact, it didn’t occur anywhere, as Amendment 3 kept the 70 percent commercial/30 percent recreational allocation in place for 2024.  But the Wildlife Resources Commission seemingly chose to pretended otherwise, and adopted the open season all the same.

The apparent reason was that, like the indulgent parent who allows their child to eat an ice cream sundae half an hour before dinner, that Commission didn’t want to disappoint and upset anyone.

“Of the 438 [anglers] who responded [to the WRC’s request for comments], 89% did not support the rule [closing the 2024 fishery] for multiple reasons, including concerns about commercial fishing, the current allocation for commercial versus recreational, the data used from Marine Fisheries, and that flounder is a public resource, Waters said.  And ‘there was some general displeasure in general [sic], about just the fact that we were even considering not having a season, and then there was [sic] some that expressed distrust for [the Division of Marine Fisheries] and DMF process.’”

It's probably relevant to note that none of those reasons even tried to address the depleted state of the flounder.

So what North Carolina is left with is a badly overfished southern flounder fishery that must, by law, be rebuilt within the next four years, one agency that is making the hard decisions needed to achieve such rebuilding, and a second agency that is more interested in indulging anglers, and worrying about their self-centered claims of fairness versus the commercial fishery and fishery management generally, rather than in furthering rebuilding efforts.

And this is why fisheries managers can fail:  Because some pay too much attention to fishermen’s short-term concerns, instead of remaining laser-focused on the data, the needs of the resource, and the ultimate management goal of fully rebuilding fisheries that will be sustainable in the long term, and so provide the greatest benefits for everyone concerned.

Public input on how to achieve a particular goal—input on size limits vs bag limits vs seasons, etc.—is an extremely valuable part of the management process.  But when it comes down to basic biology, and issues of catch limits or, as with southern flounder, even whether to open a fishery at all, the professionals should have the last word, for the public, like children, will often seek to indulge their wants now, and never consider the consequences that might ensue if they get what they think they desire.