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.