“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.
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.
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