FULL CIRCLE?

 

I caught my first fish in 1956, when I was barely two years old and walking on two legs was still something of a novelty.  It was a bergall—more properly, a cunner—and I use the word “caught” advisedly, because while I did have one hand on the rod, and was told that I did manage to laboriously crank the little wrasse to the surface, my father kept a firm grip on the whole assemblage to make sure that my grasp on the rod didn’t fail and let everything fall overboard.

In the years between then and now, as my size and strength steadily increased, I caught quite a few fish, all but the first handful without the same degree of parental assistance.  They were mostly eels, winter flounder, and snapper blues at first, but quickly progressed to other things like striped bass, tautog, adult bluefish and cod, various critters that swam under a Florida bridge, and eventually bigger stuff like mako sharks, sailfish, and bluefin.

I’ve seen stocks of fish wax and wane, sometimes to wax abundant once more, sometimes to just disappear.  I’ve seen new species invade my old fishing grounds, and old, familiar targets retreat to other waters.

During those years, Congress passed the Fishery Conservation and Management Act of 1976 (now, the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act), the Atlantic Striped Bass Conservation Act of 1984, the Atlantic Coastal Fisheries Cooperative Management Act of 1993, the Sustainable Fisheries Act of 1996, the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Reauthorization Act of 2006, and the Modernizing Recreational Fisheries Management Act of 2018.

During those years, the striped bass stock thrived, became overfished, collapsed, rebuilt, increased, declined, became overfished, and might be on the way to collapsing again.  Cod collapsed, the southern stock of winter flounder collapsed, smelt and tomcod disappeared from most waters south of Maine, and the North Atlantic stock of shortfin mako shark dropped low enough that all harvest, throughout the North Atlantic Basin, has been outlawed; it has a 50% chance of rebuilding over the next 50 years.

At the same time, once-overfished stocks of black sea bass and scup were fully rebuilt, than soared to more than twice their target abundance.  The bluefin tuna population, facing unsustainable commercial fishing pressure, dropped sharply throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s, but seems to be rebuilding nicely; as I write this during the second week of November, triple-digit bluefin are still being caught within sight of Long Island’s shore.  Bluefish, once so abundant as to be a pest, became overfished, but a rebuilding plan seems to be working, and the stock may be rebuilt within three or four years.  Even weakfish, which had fallen to just 3 percent of their spawning potential a few years ago, now seem to be showing signs of revival; whether it will last, or the stock will decline again, is yet to be seen.

Looking back on over 60 years on and around salt water, it might be time to try to figure out whether people—anglers, commercial fishermen, fishery managers, and anyone and everyone else who might be in a position to influence fisheries policy—seem to have learned any lessons in the years since the Soviet Union launched Sputnik and Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected to his second term as President of the United States.

I’m really not sure that they have.

Congress passed the Fishery Conservation and Management Act of 1976 because the nation’s fish stocks were in serious decline, in large part because big factory trawlers belonging to a host of European and Asian nations were sweeping the life off the continental shelf.  So legislators pushed the foreigners 200 miles offshore but then, apparently thinking that overfishing by the United States fleet was somehow less malign than overfishing by boats from other nations, provided cheap loans to U.S. fishermen so that they could buy bigger boats and more efficient gear, and begin where the foreign fleets left off, killing more fish than the stocks could sustain and driving the abundance of just about all of the important commercial species—many of which were also important recreational targets—low enough that the stocks were deemed overfished.

At the time, the law required that stocks be managed for “optimum yield,” just as it does today, but back then, “optimum” was defined as

“with respect to the yield from a fishery…the amount of fish which will provide the greatest overall benefit to the Nation, with particular reference to food production and recreational opportunities; and which is prescribed as such on the basis of the maximum sustainable yield from such fishery, as modified by any relevant economic, social, or ecological factor.  [emphasis added, internal formatting omitted]”

In theory, fishing mortality should never exceed maximum sustainable yield, but since fishermen could always make more money if they brought more fish back to the dock, at least in the short term, yields were regularly “modified” upward, well above maximum sustainable yield, for economic reasons, and so fish stocks continued to decline.

Things got bad enough that, by the early 1990s, a lot of boats were staying tied up at the docks because fish were so scarce that it was no longer economically viable to go out and try to catch them.  In response, Congress chose to amend federal fisheries law by passing the Sustainable Fisheries Act of 1996, which among other things prohibited overfishing, required overfished stocks to be rebuilt within a time certain, generally not more than 10 years, and changed the definition of “optimum” yield by deleting the word “modified” and replacing it with “reduced,” so that annual quotas that exceeded maximum sustainable yield would no longer be entertained.

But fishermen are a creative bunch, and found ways to get around the Sustainable Fisheries Act’s restrictions.  One of the easiest ways to do that was to forego annual quotas altogether, and instead adopt so-called “input controls” such as limiting a boat’s days at sea, or limiting the size or horsepower of any new vessel that was replacing an old one on a fishing permit.

While such measures worked in theory, and so technically complied with the law, they failed in practice.  Stocks of Atlantic cod, winter flounder, and other species were still chronically overfished, and steadily approached the brink of stock collapse.  In order to close the loophole, Congress acted again, passing the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Reauthorization Act of 2006 which, among other things, required that all fishery management plans

“establish a mechanism for specifying annual catch limits in the plan (including a multiyear plan), implementing regulations, or annual specifications at a level such that overfishing does not occur in the fishery, including measures to ensure accountability.”

The law further requires that when preparing such plans, regulations, or specifications, a regional fishery management council must

“develop annual catch limits for each of its managed fisheries that may not exceed the fishing level recommended by its scientific and statistical committee or the peer review process established [elsewhere in the law].”

That pretty well stopped fishermen sitting on the regional fishery management councils from finding ways around annual quotas, and helped to prevent overfishing, but it created another problem.  Fishermen—and, in particular, recreational fishermen—wanted to kill and take home more fish than the new regulations allowed.  Because there are so many recreational fishermen, and because their harvest, unlike that of commercial fishermen, can’t be counted and managed in near real-time, they often exceeded their recreational harvest limit, and so faced more restrictive regulations, intended to constrain their landings to or below the science-based limit, in the following year.

Restricting anglers to a science-based harvest limit was good for the fish, but it meant that for-hire vessels—party and charter boats—carried fewer passengers, and that the fishing tackle industry sold less product, reducing the profits of both.  Thus, the recreational industry, along with “anglers’ rights” groups such as the Coastal Conservation Association and the philosophically similar, but now-defunct Recreational Fishing Alliance, began to rail against the federal fishery management system.  The result was the Modernizing Recreational Fishery Management Act of 2018, the so-called “Modern Fish Act,” which was intended to create management paths that would let anglers escape their obligation to keep landings within an annual catch limit, and so put more fish in their coolers while putting more cash in the recreational fishing industry’s coffers.

Empowered by the Modern Fish Act, the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council, along with the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (which is not bound by the terms of Magnuson-Stevens), set about finding a way to let anglers regularly exceed their annual catch limit of four popular species, bluefish, summer flounder and, in particular, scup and black sea bass, as the spawning stock biomass of the latter two species has risen to more then twice the biomass target in recent years.

The result was something that was called both the “Harvest Control Rule” (which, strictly speaking, it wasn’t) and the “Percent Change Approach,” which established a methodology for setting a so-called “recreational harvest target” that could be well above the Recreational Harvest Limit or the recreational sector’s Annual Catch Limit, and that, when combined with the commercial sector’s Annual Catch Limit, could lead to landings exceeding the overall Annual Catch Limit, the Acceptable Biological Catch, or even the Overfishing Limit.

The Harvest Control Rule/Percent Change Approach was not warmly embraced by the Mid-Atlantic Council’s Scientific and Statistical Committee and was ultimately rejected by Mid-Atlantic Council staff.  However, it was enthusiastically embraced by the National Marine Fisheries Service’s Greater Atlantic Regional Fisheries Office, which went to extraordinary lengths to convince the Mid-Atlantic Council to adopt it.

The approach has now been used to set black sea bass recreational management measures for 2023 and 2024, and will again be used to set 2025 measures.  After that, it will sunset, although it is virtually certain that the Mid-Atlantic Council will either approve its future use or, more likely, replace it with a modified approach that will also allow the recreational sector to exceed the Recreational Harvest Limit with absolute impunity.

In early 2023, the Natural Resources Defense Council sought judicial review of the Harvest Control Rule/Percent Change Approach, but the court ultimately sided with NMFS, finding that the Annual Catch Limit was not ultimately a hard limit on catch, and that optimum yield could even allow maximum sustainable yield to be exceeded for a year or so, provided that spawning stock biomass remained above target, based on relevant social and economic factors.

A month or so before the court decision was handed down, the Mid-Atlantic Council and ASMFC’s Summer Flounder, Scup, and Black Sea Bass Management Board were presented with a new Management Track Stock Assessment for Black Sea Bass.  The stock assessment found, among other things, that black sea bass biomass was about 20 percent lower than previously believed, and that both the biomass target and the maximum sustainable yield of the stock were more than 20 percent lower, too.  Based on that stock assessment, the Mid-Atlantic Council’s Scientific and Statistical Committee recommended that black sea bass landings be reduced by 20 percent, which seemed a logical finding.

However, the Management Board disagreed, choosing to ignore both the findings of the stock assessment and the advice of the scientists on the committee, and instead carried the 2024 black sea bass specifications over into 2025—even though, by doing so, the combined annual catch limits for the commercial and recreational sectors would exceed the stock assessment’s calculation of the Overfishing Limit.  The Mid-Atlantic Council, bound by the provisions of Magnuson-Stevens, accepted the scientists’ advice.

The National Marine Fisheries Service, apparently taking the position that only the regional fishery management councils, and not NMFS itself, are legally required to set annual catch limits at or below the scientists’ recommended level, rejected the Mid-Atlantic Council’s recommendation and instead emulated the Management Board’s actions, carrying over 2024 specifications into 2025.  NMFS thus adopted an Annual Catch Limit for the combined sectors that is about 20 percent above the Overfishing Limit set in the stock assessment.

Thus, federal fishery managers now appear to have come full circle.

They began in the late 1970s, allowing regional fishery management councils to set annual harvest levels above maximum sustainable yield, in order to provide greater short-term economic benefits to the fishing fleet.

That didn’t work out too well, so federal managers found themselves bound by a new law that prohibited overfishing.  And as managers worked within that law, they began to end the overfishing of many stocks, and once-overfished stocks began to rebuild.  Yet some regional fishery management councils, particularly the New England Fishery Management Council, tried to find ways around the new law’s strict requirements.  Thus, they came under additional strictures, that required them to adopt management plans containing science-based annual catch limits, which had the effect of further limiting overfishing, and helped more stocks to rebuild.

But the recreational fishing industry convinced Congress to give federal managers more leeway to manage fish stocks, so in the Mid-Atlantic region, they approved management measures that again allowed the regional fishery management Council to adopt annual recreational catch limits that, when combined with the commercial limits, exceeded the scientific recommendations and could at times exceed maximum sustainable yield, all to accommodate certain social and economic factors.

And now, we find the Greater Atlantic Regional Fisheries Office going a step further and, again yielding to economic considerations, setting annual specifications for black sea bass that not only exceed the recommendations of the Mid-Atlantic Council’s Scientific and Statistical Committee, but also ignore the best scientific information available, the most recent Management Track Stock Assessment.

No one seems to be exercising any caution.  Economic factors are driving management decisions even though, this time, it's probably not permitted by law.

It’s almost like we’re in the 1970s all over again.

Of course, the black sea bass stock is supposedly still at 219 percent of the biomass target, and not overfished.  But the stock assessment’s projections still show abundance declining over in the next few years.  Reports from the 2024 season indicate that anglers in the northeast caught fewer and smaller sea bass than they did in 2023, making those projections more credible.

At the same time, ocean bottom temperatures in the northeast were reportedly cooler than normal in 2024.  Since black sea bass recruitment is dependent on warm, saline water at the edge of the continental shelf, where the Year 0 sea bass spend their first winter, we might easily see poor recruitment this year.

So at a time when we seem to have an abundant, but declining, stock largely made up of just a few, relatively young year classes and dependent on good annual recruitment to maintain its size, facing cold water conditions this winter that may significantly hamper the recruitment of Year 1 fish in 2025, we also have federal fishery managers who, instead of following the advice of the stock assessment and the Mid-Atlantic’s Scientific and Statistical Committee, have adopted specifications that make it likely that the stock will be overfished in 2025.

That would seem to be a recipe for failure.

Just about everyone is familiar with George Santayana’s quote,

“Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it,”

although when we look at the way Mid-Atlantic fisheries managers, after shaking off their earlier problems and finding some real success, are now seemingly coming full circle, repeating the mistakes of the past as they move into the future, Karl Marx’s comment that history will repeat itself

“the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce”

may be more apropos.

 

GRADUALLY AND THEN SUDDENLY--HOW FISH STOCKS COLLAPSE

 

When Ernest Hemingway wrote The Sun Also Rises nearly a century ago, he created the bankrupt character Mike Campbell who, when asked how he fell into bankruptcy, responded

“Gradually and then suddenly.”

The phrase has been used so often that it’s become a cliché, but it does provide a pretty good description of how fish stocks collapse.

That was certainly how it seemed when the striped bass stock crashed in the late 1970s and early 1980s.  I was bass fishing pretty intensively back then, going out before work just about every morning and after work many nights.  In retrospect, we could see the collapse coming, but it came gradually enough, and disguised itself well enough, that most anglers and, seemingly, most fisheries managers were nonetheless surprised when the fish were suddenly gone.

We’d been spoiled for a few years by the big 1970 year class, the largest ever recorded up to that time, which first showed up in Long Island Sound as two-year-old, 14-inch-long fish that seemed to swim in every creek, along every sod bank, and around every tide-washed rock along the Connecticut shore.  The small fish were joined by older, larger bass spawned during the 1950s and ‘60s, giving us a chance to fish on what might have been the most age- and size-diverse population of striped bass that I have ever seen.  While the small fish were everywhere, there were also significant numbers of 40s and 50s, and even a couple of 60s, in the mix.

We watched, and caught, the 1970 year class as its fish grew larger, producing a vibrant fishery for school-sized striped bass.  But sometime in the latter half of the ‘70s, we started noticing something else—the really small bass, the nuisance 14- and 16-inchers that, for a few years, had been an annoyance as they attacked and got themselves hooked on lures meant for larger fish, had grown scarce.  By 1978 or so, we weren’t seeing much under three or four pounds, and a year after that, nothing under four or five.

And the bigger school fish—those from the ’70 year class—weren’t as abundant as they should have been.

But the absence of school fish was largely ignored because of to the sheer numbers of big bass that shadowed the menhaden schools and were being caught by anyone with the minimal skills needed to snag one of the menhaden and let it swim around the boat.  I worked in a tackle shop during the summer in ‘78, and just about every day, one or more of our customers, many of whom barely know how to tie a hook to the end of their line, would drag big bass up to the shop’s door, wanting to get them weighed in and photographed.

A few people, most notably Bob Pond, the creator of the Atom line of striped bass lures, were aware of the declining number of smaller fish, and tried to convince anglers and fishery managers that they were facing a serious problem.  But the number of large bass that were being caught blinded just about everyone to the coming crash, and the plain truth was that, in the short term, encouraging anglers to kill more striped bass was good for business.  The owner of the shop where I worked used to get enraged when I spoke to customers about striped bass conservation.

So the stock collapse gradually evolved, with fewer and fewer small bass in the water as more and more big bass were being removed from the spawning stock.  Commercial netters were still seining truckloads of bass from New York beaches, while down in North Carolina, one group of fishermen—a crew of baymen from New York’s Long Island—dragged so many bass onto the beach that they flooded the markets, were unable to sell their entire catch, and so ended up burying tens of thousands of pounds of big female striped bass in the Outer Banks sand.

But no one was all that concerned because there were plenty of big striped bass in the ocean until, suddenly, they weren’t there anymore.

Most of the large, spawning females had been removed from the spawning stock, and there were almost no smaller bass growing up to replace them.  At some point, the stock reached a sort of tipping point where there were no longer enough bass to support the recreational and commercial fisheries.  Charter boats went out of business, commercial fishermen lost a valuable product, and some fisheries managers—finally—began wondering what they might have to do to reverse the fish’s decline and perhaps nurse the stock back to health.

The response, when it finally came, completely shut down some states’ fisheries, and resulted in federal legislation, the Atlantic Striped Bass Conservation Act, which gave theAtlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission the authority to prepare a fisherymanagement plan for the entire coastal population, and to compel every statebetween Maine and North Carolina to put such plan in place.  The ASMFC ultimately decided to protect the1982 year class, which, while still below average, had been the largest inrecent years, and limit annual fishing mortality to no more than 5% of thespawning stock each year.

The management plan proved successful, and the striped bass eventually recovered from the crash, but it took over a decade to make it happen.

While the striped bass is arguably the glamor fish of the northeastern coast, we saw the same sort of pattern emerge with the southern New England/mid-Atlantic stock of winter flounder, a species that was once so abundant throughout the region that it was largely taken for granted.

When I was a boy, we started fishing for flounder sometime in March—St. Patrick’s Day was the unofficial start of the season—and stopped when the creeks where we fished off the docks got their first thin skim of ice in December.  The flounder were mostly small—most of the fish that folks kept started around eight inches long, and there weren’t very many that weighed as much as a pound—but there were a lot of them; we caught them off docks and from shore, from rowboats in the creeks and harbors, and from somewhat larger boats in the coves and open water.  After I moved to the South Shore of Long Island in ’83, and started flounder fishing in Great South Bay, I ran into more and bigger fish than I did off the Connecticut shore.

But what I didn’t know was that, by then, the flounder stock was already gradually declining, and that it would, like the striped bass, suddenly collapse in a few more years.  Although, in the case of the flounder, the decline may have begun before I was born.

We know that because, in 1961, a scientist who worked for the State of New York named John C. Poole published a comprehensive study of Great South Bay’s flounder, using tagging data that went back as far as 1937.  Today, there are biologists at New York’s Stony Brook University who are also doing a considerable amount of winter flounder research.  When I spoke to one of them about Poole’s work, he told me that the tag data Poole used suggested that, even before 1960, Great South Bay’s winter flounder were already experiencing overfishing, as the fishing mortality rate exceeded what would be considered a sustainable rate today.  And when the flounder fishery in the already heavily-fished Great South Bay was compared to the fisheries in the less pressured Moriches and Shinnecock bays, it was clear that the fish in the former bay were both smaller and less abundant.

The impacts of excessive harvest were already being felt.

But the flounder’s decline was gradual enough that the decline didn’t manifest itself for another quarter-century.  In 1984, there were still enough flounder in New York’s waters, and still enough angling effort focused on them, that the state’s recreational fishermen took home almost 14,500,000 fish that year.  But at that point, what had been a gradual decline accelerated.

In 1986, landings fell to barely 6,000,000 fish, less than half of what they had been just two years before.  By 1989, only five years after recreational winter flounder landings had peaked, they fell to less than 3,200,000 fish.

And the decline didn’t stop there.  Suddenly, the flounder stock was in free fall.  New York's annual landings dropped below 1 million fish for the first time in 1994, when they barely topped 667,000.  They sort-of stabilized there for a while, before dropping farther, hitting 410,000 fish a decade later, 115,000 in 2008, 15,500 in 2015, and then 36 in 2018, 126 in 2020, 128 in 2022, and a surprising 2,639 last spring, although since 2010, so few flounder have been landed, making the data so very uncertain, that NMFS advises that the Marine Recreational Information Program does not support the use of such inexact estimates.

To say that, at the end, the winter flounder stock collapsed “suddenly” would be understatement.

I mention those things because the striped bass seems to again be entering dire straits, with the stockoverfished and the past six years’ recruitment even worse than anything leadingup to the last stock collapse.  Yet there is still very good fishing for bigger fish in some times and places, and some people—mostly people in the fishing industry—are using that localized abundance to argue that the striped bass stock is in good shape.

But the last stock collapse has become part of the fishery’s lore, something that striped bass anglers who weren’t even alive at the time nonetheless talk about as if they'd been there.  Some even warn that the same sort of crash could be coming again.  But there are others, particularly within the management community, who respond that that “the stock is still a lot better off than it was in the ‘80s,” implying that the worries about a new stock collapse aren’t justified by the data.

And it’s true that, according to the last stock assessment update, female spawning stock biomass at the end of 2023 was estimated to be about 86,536 metric tons, compared to a spawning stock biomass of about 15,260 metric tons in 1983.  The SSB is nearly four times the size that it was during the depths of the last collapse.

However, we should never forget that biomass is measured in metric tons, and that the increasing size of the fish remaining in the population can partially mask a decline in numbers. 

Right now, a steadily increasing proportion of the striped bass population is more than eight years old.  As of 2023, spawning stock biomass was even increasing, a result of the remaining fish in the spawning stock growing larger while the last good year class, the slightly above-average 2018s, are growing into the SSB.  But the 2018s represent the last of the decent year classes; beginning with the 2019s, all of the subsequent year classes were very small.

Also, the current spawning stock does not exhibit a diversity of age and size classes; the 2011, 2014, 2015, and 2018 year classes provide much of the biomass, along with some very large bass from the big 2001 and 2003 spawns.  Although all but the 2018s will be outside the recreational slot next season, they’re not immune to release mortality, nor to commercial harvest in most ocean states, while natural mortality will continue to take its toll.  As older fish are removed from the spawning stock, there will be very few younger fish coming in to replace them.

That doesn’t mean that we’re looking at a looming stock collapse.  If nothing else, management is a lot better than it was in the early 1980s, when there was a coastal minimum size of 16 inches (fork length) for the commercial and recreational fisheries, a 10- or 12-inch minimum in the Chesapeake Bay, no recreational bag limits (except in New Jersey, where the limit was 10) and no commercial quotas.  Hopefully, managers will do the right thing and put in whatever measures are necessary to avert another collapse.

On the other hand, the Maryland juvenile abundance indices for the years 1975-1979 were 6.69, 4.91, 4.85, 8.45, and 4.24, while the Maryland JAIs for the years 2020-2024 were 2.48, 3.20, 3.62, 1.02, and 2.0, so while better management might let us keep a few more big fish in the population for a few extra years, we’re also producing significantly fewer young bass to replace what is lost.

Looking at the numbers, we might easily argue that if a stock collapse is approaching at all, it is doing so very, very gradually.

Yet if managers shirk in their duty, and don’t do what is needed to conserve the stock, we may suddenly find that the striped bass are gone.

After all, it happened that way before.

 

 

HOW MIGHT THE 2024 ELECTION AFFECT MARINE FISHERIES?

 

Every couple of years, when a national election is held, I’ve looked at the issues and the candidates involved and shared some thoughts on how the outcomes might impact marine fisheries and fisheries management.

Traditionally, fisheries management has been a non-partisan issue, which has had the support of both major parties; that tradition dates back to the passage of the Fishery Conservation and Management Act of 1976, which was introduced by Rep. Gerry Studds (D-MA) with the strong support of Rep. Don Young (R-AK), both legislators committed to addressing the problems confronting the fishermen and fish stocks of the United States.  

In the Senate, the primary advocates of similar legislation were Sen. Warren Magnuson (D-WA) and Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK), legislators who crossed the aisle in a legendarily successful effort to conserve and manage living marine resources.

The two senators’ non-partisan efforts were important enough that, even though it was the House’s, rather than the Senate’s, version of the bill that was ultimately signed into law, the groundbreaking legislation is now known as the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act.  The last significant reauthorization of the Act took place in the early days of 2007, when President George W. Bush, a member of the Republican Party who was also an avid angler and strong advocate of marine conservation, signed the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Reauthorization Act in order to further strengthen the law.

Now, as we stand just two days from a critically important election, in which not only the presidency but also control of both the House and the Senate will probably be decided by a relative handful of votes cast in an few closely contested jurisdictions, it is time to ask what the outcome of the 2024 contest might mean for the health of the nation’s marine fisheries and its living marine resources.

In some ways, that might be hard to know, since neither of the presidential candidates is an active angler, and neither appears to have a close connection to the ocean or the life within.  

Donald Trump prefers to be driven around manicured golf courses in an electric cart, and appears to believe that striking an inoffensive little ball with a stick, before getting back in the cart to be chauffeured right up to the ball again, the apex of vigorous outdoor activity.  Plus, the guy seems to have an unhealthy aversion to sharks.

Vice President Kamala Harris, on the other hand, tends to eschew the golf course in favor of hobbies like cooking and physical training.  But like Trump, she has shown no affinity for the creatures of the sea.

Thus, the candidates’ personal lives provide no clue as to how they might address ocean issues.  That being the case, the next logical step is, perhaps, to look at their respective party platforms, which prove to be almost as uninformative.

The Democratic platform never uses the words, “fish,” “fishing,” or “fisheries,” while “ocean” appears only five times.  That platform states, in relevant part, that the Democrats are intent on

“protecting places that are too special to develop, like Alaska’s Bristol Bay,“

and

“Going forward, Democrats will…ensure clean water for all Americans by protecting rivers and wetlands.  We’ll protect our oceans by working to designate new marine sanctuaries, and protect coastal communities from climate impacts.  We’ll keep pushing to fully fund the Land and Water Conservation Fund, partnering with states and local governments…and continuing to protect lands and waters as National Monuments.”

That might sound good on its face, particularly the part about protecting rivers and wetlands, since the loss and degradation of such rivers and wetlands to dams, unregulated logging, poor farming practices (particularly draining wetlands, destroying marshes, and manure and fertilizer runoff), real estate development, industrial pollution and similar insults has severely harmed runs of diadromous fish, including striped bass, shad, river herring, American eels, various sturgeon and, in particular, the five species of Pacific salmon.

But if you’re an angler or commercial fisherman, there might also be an unperceived threat lying in the Democratic platform, and its mention of “marine sanctuaries” and “National Monuments,” for while the laws governing fishing in such areas are very flexible—in some national marine sanctuaries, such as the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary, even bottom trawling is allowed, while nothing prohibits anglers from fishing in the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts National Marine Sanctuary, although commercial fishing is not allowed—there are far too many members of the environmental community who would turn large areas of the nearshore ocean into a no-take marine reserves where fishing of any kind is outlawed.  If such voices gained too much influence in a Democratic administration, fishermen could be badly hurt, while the benefits to marine resources would not necessarily be any better than they might receive under active and effective management.

The Republican platform, on the other hand, doesn’t mention, “fish,” “fishing,” “fisheries,” “ocean,” or “sea” at all.  It is more an assemblage of slogans than a comprehensive platform; in that respect, the slogan most relevant to the fishery conservation and management project is probably either

“2. Rein in Wasteful Federal Spending

“Republicans will immediately stabilize the Economy by slashing wasteful Government spending and promoting Economic Growth,”

or

“3.  Cut Costly and Burdensome Regulations

“Republicans will reinstate President Trump’s Deregulation Policies, which saved Americans $11,000 per household, and end Democrats’ regulatory onslaught that disproportionately harms low- and middle-income households.”

The impact of the former platform position can already be seen in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, where the majority sought to slash the 2025 budget for the National Marine Fisheries Service, cutting 11% from its scitence and management funding, 17% from enforcement, 28.5% from habitat conservation and 55% of the funding needed to protect marine mammals and other endangered species from various activities, included but not limited to offshore oil drilling, commercial fishing, and shoreline development.  The report accompanying the overall 2025 budget made it clear that conserving and managing the nation’s marine resources is not, in the Republicans’ eyes, a national priority.

The latter platform position, expressing the party’s hostility to regulation, provides even a clearer threat to marine resources, as it would further restrict even a diminished NMFS’ ability to regulate harvest, prevent overfishing, and rebuild fish stocks, while allowing various industrial interests to pollute streams hosting runs of diadromous fish; divert water critical to such fish to farming, ranching, and similar business interests; allow the smokestacks of inland polluters to contaminate the oceans; etc.

And that is not mere speculation, because perhaps the best way to gauge how either of the candidates, if elected to the presidency, might impact marine resources is to see what they have done before.

That’s tough to do with Vice President Harris, for she was part of a Biden Administration that hardly set the world on fire when it came to marine conservation.

Since President Biden took office, he has not urged Congress to take on a single major ocean initiative.  There was no effort to reauthorize the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, although the last reauthorization took place almost 20 years ago.  About the biggest thing he did in that regard was to sign onto the so-called 30x30 initiative, a global conservation effort that originated well before Pres. Biden took office, and sought to protect 30 percent of the world’s lands and waters by the year 2023.  To promote the effort, the President rolled out his so-called “American the Beautiful” initiative, but the effort never really got off the ground.

One could even argue that the National Marine Fisheries Service took a step backward during the Biden Administration, adopting fishery management measures in its Greater Atlantic Regional Fisheries Office that allowed recreational fishermen to chronically exceed their annual catch limits of scup and black sea bass and, more recently, proposed specifications for the black sea bass fishery that directly contradicted the clear language of Magnuson-Stevens which requires that fishing limits accord with scientific advice.

That is hardly responsible stewardship.

Yet thouh some might claim Vice President Harris to be tainted by the Biden Administration’s mantle of mostly benign neglect of our fisheries by dint of her current office, Trump is stuck with his former administration’s record of doing active, intentional, and frequent harm.

It began with his cabinet appointees, the foremost of whom, when it came to putting fish stocks at risk, was probably Wilbur Ross who, when appointed as Secretary of Commerce at the age of 79, was the oldest person every appointed to a cabinet position for the first time.  As Secretary of Commerce, Ross was in charge of NMFS, but he seemed to have no concept of modern fisheries science.  He had made a successful career out of turning around bankrupt corporations, and perhaps that made him comfortable with dealing with depleted resources, for his first proclamation upon being confirmed was that one of NMFS primary objectives must be

“obtaining maximum sustainable yield for our fisheries.”

although he never seemed too concerned about rebuilding overfished stocks to a level that might make that possible.  Maintaining abundant fisheries was his primary concern, as he declared his intent to reduce American’s reliance on imported seafood, although just where the domestic seafood that replaced it was to come from was never revealed.  Furthermore, he stated that

“Given the enormity of our coastlines, given the enormity of our freshwater, I would like to how we can become much more self-sufficient in fishing and perhaps even a net exporter.”

Although Ross never managed to realize that particular pipe dream, he was able to frustrate at least two fisheries conservation efforts, involving two very popular recreational species, soon after becoming Secretary.

The first incident involved the recreational red snapper season in the Gulf of Mexico.  It saw NMFS, under Ross’ guidance, issue a rule re-opening the private boat season, even though it was clear that anglers had already made very substantial landings of snapper during the original season and that NMFS was aware—and freely admitted—that reopening the season

“will necessarily mean that the private recreational sector will substantially exceed its annual catch limit, which was designed to prevent overfishing the stock.”

Ross’ NMFS also readily admitted that

“if employed for a short period of time, this approach may delay the ultimate rebuilding of the stock by as many as 6 years.  This approach likely could not be continued through time without significantly delaying the rebuilding timeline.”

Yet, given the philosophy of the past Trump Admimistration, the action was nonetheless justified because,

“Given the precipitous drop in Federal red snapper fishing days for private anglers notwithstanding the growth of the stock, the increasing harm to coastal economies of Gulf States, and that the disparate [state] approaches to management are undermining the very integrity of the management structure, creating ever-increasing uncertainty in the future of the system, the Secretary of Commerce determined that a more modest rebuilding pace for the stock is a risk worth taking.”

It was just another take on the notion that short-term economic benefits should trump long-term resource health.  It was illegal, and was later subjectto a successful legal challenge, but it was nonetheless symptomatic of an administration that believed in cutting regulatory burdens in the name of more profitable business activities.

And it effectively foreshadowed events a month or so later, after New Jersey decided to defy that Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, intentionally failed to comply with its summer flounder management plan, and was then referred to the Secretary of Commerce to suffer the consequences of its failure to cooperate with the other states on the Summer Flounder, Scup, and Black Sea Bass Management Board.

Secretary Ross had the authority to find New Jersey out of compliance, and shut down its entire summer flounder fishery until it decided to conform its rules to the management plan.  As things turned out, he decided to give the state a free pass, without even consulting the people on his staff who were most familiar with the fishery—the NMFS Regional Administrator at the Greater Atlantic Regional Fisheries Office, and the GARFO staff.

The Regional Administrator, John Bullard, was very upset with Ross’ actions, noting that

“the chain of command was broken with this decision,”

and, because Ross’ action marked the first time in 25 years that a Secretary of Commerce every reversed an ASMFC finding of non-compliance, that

“This is a system that keeps all states accountable to each other.  We’re now going to figure out how to repair that system.”

But Ross didn’t act out of concerns for the science or for the management system, but out of pure political cronyism.  The Asbury Park Press reported, three months before Ross ruled on the non-compliance issue, that then New Jersey Governor Chris Christie

“wasted no time to petition Ross this week and ask him to put a hold on the new summer flounder regulations approved by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission on Feb. 2.”

So the fi inx favor of New Jersey—and against the summer flounder and the ASMFC—was already in well before the Commission made its noncompliance finding.  

Should the election go in Trump’s favor, we can probably expect another Secretary of Commerce, with the same sort of casual contempt for the science and the management system, to serve in Trump’s next administration.

And, although the Secretary of Commerce might have the most direct impact on fisheries issues, other cabinet members can also play a very significant negative role.

We learned that the hard way in 2017, after Trump appointed corporate lobbyist and energy company crony Scott Pruit as Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.  Personally opposed to the Agency’s mission, Pruitt set about making the EPA more industry-friendly.  In the 17 months that he served as Adminsitrator role—he eventually resigned after finding himself the target of 14 separate federal investigations brought by agencies as diverse as the Government Accountability Office, the White House Office of Management and Budget, and the U.S. Office of Special Counsel—he managed to either harm or seriously threaten multiple fish stocks.

Perhaps his most infamous action was his decision to agree with the CEO of the Pebble Limited Partnership, a mining operation that wanted to develop a huge, open-pit mine in Alaska’s pristine Bristol Bay watershed, to vacate an Obama Administration decision, made pursuant to the Clean Water Act, that would have prevented the development of the so-called Pebble Mine.  Pruitt reportedly did so after less than an hour’s conversation with the Pebble CEO, and when he agreed to restart the mine's permitting process, he created a substantial risk that the salmon runs of the watershed—it hosts all five Pacific salmon species, all naturally reproducing, including the largest naturally-reproducing sockeye salmon run in the world—as well as its other natural resources would be severely harmed by tailings from the proposed Pebble Mine.

In a new Trump Administration, it’s far from unlikely that a Scott Pruitt think-alike will be the new Administrator of the EPA.

The Trump Administration finally halted the Pebble Mine, and hopefully provided the needed protection to the Bristol Bay watershed, after the Army Corps of Engineers refused to issue the final permit needed by the mining consortium.  But whether that refusal will be enough to finally defeat the Pebble Mine, or whether the various, seemingly almost random machinations and policy changes that took place between the time the Obama Administration initially halted the project and the Corps of Engineers’ final refusal will convince a court that such final refusal was, in truth, “arbitrary and capricious” and thus invalid, and that such court will allow the mine to proceed, we can’t know at this point.

Either way we shouldn’t believe that science or good policy had anything to do with the current halt. 

Good connections and cronyism did.

You see, Trump finally found out that some hardcore Republicans, including his son and namesake, Donald Trump, Jr., liked to fish for salmon in the Bristol Bay watershed, and didn’t want to see one of their favorite playgrounds turned into a cesspool for an open-pit mine.  Trump’s confidante, broadcaster Tucker Carlson, was also a Bristol Bay fan, who aired a statement in support of the watershed, where he noted that

“Suddenly, you are seeing a number of Republicans, including some prominent ones, including some very conservative Republicans, saying ‘Hold on a moment—maybe Pebble Mine is not a good idea.  Maybe you should do whatever you can not to despoil nature…’”

We probably shouldn't be shocked if new incidents of cronyism pop up in a new Trump administration, and the results of such cronyism might again even prove benign, but if that proves to be the case, we mustn't ignore the affects of accident.  For in such a Trump Administration, the concern that “you should do whatever you can not to despoil nature,” only applies to that part of nature valued by family and influential members of the Republican Party, not to those parts valued by the rest of us.

If, for example, you were just an average guy—maybe a tradesman, or a policeman, or a typical nine-to-fiver with a typical white-collar job, and you liked to fish for striped bass in the Chesapeake Bay, the Trump EPA was not on your side.  The Bay has long been the final dumping place for farm runoff, industrial runoff, and other pollution originating in the entire Susquehanna River watershed.  The federal government has a legal obligation to abate such pollution.  But the last Trump Administration refused to take any action to reduce the pollutant load coming into the Chesapeake’s waters, particularly that originating on Pennsylvania farms.  It took two different lawsuits, and an eventual legal settlement, to compel the Trump EPA to do its job.

Now that the striped bass stock has fallen on hard times, cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay, and minimizing the size of its hypoxic "dead zone," can only become more important.  But, based on what happened the last time, any assumption that a Trump Administration’s Environmental Protection Agency will take any action at all to protect the environment of the Chesapeake Bay will almost certainly prove to be false, and it will probably take another substantial legal effort to get it to provide any help.

It even turned out, the last time around, that the Trump-era EPA didn’t have to go near the water to hurt marine fish, fishermen, and fish consumers.  In the spring of 2020, when Trump’s EPA Administrator was Andrew Wheeler, a former lobbyist for the coal industry, Wheeler gutted an existing regulation that limited the amount of mercury that could be expelled from the smokestacks of coal-fed power plants.

Realizing that corporate profits are not a bit less important than people's health, he claimed that

“We have put in place an honest accounting method that balances the cost to utilities with public safety”

because a former coal industry lobbyist would certainly never want that balance skewed in favor of the public’s health…

That’s relevant to fishermen and fish consumers because the biggest source of methyl mercury in big fish such as tuna, swordfish, and some sharks

“is the burning of fossil fuels, especially coal, which releases 160 tons of mercury into the air in the United States alone.  From there, rainfall washes the mercury into the ocean…

“…High-sulfur (‘dirty’) coal tends to be high in mercury as well…bacteria sulfur in biochemical reactions that eventually convert the mercury into methylmercury, the highly toxic form that accumulates to deadly levels as it passes up the food chain.”

And, if anyone has any doubts, that “deadly” can refer to people, as well as unborn infants, and not just to the rest of the animal kingdom.

EPA regulations were actually beginning to drive down methylmercury levels in bluefin tuna, but Trump’s EPA then did what it could to make tuna fish toxic again.

But all of those things were done by Trump’s cabinet members, not by Trump himself.

So is there really anything that suggests that Trump himself would be hostile to good fisheries conservation and management?  There is, in the form of an “Executive Order on Promoting American Seafood Competitiveness and Economic Growth,” which was issued on May 7, 2020. 

Some of that Executive Order was actually beneficial to American fisheries, such as the section that sought to combat illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing, and the section that sought to create a global seafood trade strategy.  As for the rest, it certainly didn’t bring conservation to the forefront.

Instead, the Executive Order included a directive that each regional fishery management council must produce

“a prioritized list of recommended actions to reduce burdens on domestic fishing and increase production within sustainable fisheries,”

a directive that seems to come right out of the deregulation playbook—and I challenge anyone to name a single fish stock that became healthier after deregulation.  Anglers and conservationists were rightfully concerned that Trump’s Commerce Department issued a press release making it clear that the Executive Order was intended to be an example of

“Regulatory reform to maximize commercial fishing [emphasis added]”

that did not consider the recreational sector.

In fact, Ted Venker, then Conservation Director of the Coastal Conservation Association, perhaps the nation’s largest “anglers’ rights” organization, worried that

“There is the potential for NOAA Fisheries to interpret this order as encouraging increased use of commercial fishing gears such as longlines, gill nets, and trawls, which would be a tremendous step backwards for conservation.”

The Trump Administration was voted out of office just six months after the Executive Order was issued, so there probably wasn’t enough time to put its most egregious goals into place.  However, there is no reason to believe that a new Trump Administration wouldn’t begin where the old one left off, and attempt to deregulate commercial fisheries in an effort to increase production, regardless of such action’s impacts on fish stocks.

And, finally, before leaving Trump behind, let’s not forget his aversion to sharks.

It’s hard to know what effect that aversion had on his administration’s policies, but it’s reasonable to wonder whether it affected the United States’ position at the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, which also regulates sharks, swordfish, and billfish in addition to its namesake pelagics.  

Traditionally, the U.S. was a conservation champion at ICCAT, but during the Trump Administration it, along with the European Union, became one of the primary opponents of conservation measures intended to halt the sharp and continuing decline in the North Atlantic shortfin mako shark population, and to possibly rebuild the stock sometime within the next 50 years.

While it’s impossible to say that Trump’s fear of sharks had anything to do with the U.S. stance on shortfin makos at ICCAT, it’s equally impossible not to note that the United States reversed its position, and made mako conservation possible, at the very next ICCAT meeting following President Biden’s inauguration.

And that’s probably as good a way as any to summarize Trump’s effects on marine fisheries issues.

So when the election occurs tomorrow, voters are getting a clear choice, between two very different candidates.

Some voters will make the perceived threat of crime, or of inflation, or of immigration issues, their primary concern, and vote accordingly.

Some will worry about issues impacting our foreign alliances, healthcare choice, and/or education standards, and cast their votes based on those.

But for those who will let a candidate’s impact on the health of the nation’s marine resources at least partially influence where their votes will go, I hope that the above summary of the candidates’ histories and party platforms might have provided at least a small nudge in the proper direction.

 

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