FISHERIES 2025--IT'S NOT LOOKING GOOD

 

This is going to be a very hard post to write.

Each year, I try to provide an overview of what the major fisheries debates of the upcoming year will look like.  Prediction is always a difficult business; usually I get more right than wrong, but inevitably I either focus on an issue that ends up falling off the radar, miss an issue that ends up turning hot, or do a little of both. 

My 2024 predictions probably turned out better than most.  In the case of striped bass, I noted the possibility that the Management Board wouldn’t initiate action to reduce landings in the 2025 season if the probability of rebuilding wasn’t too much below 50 percent, although if that happened, I didn’t think that they’d initiate an addendum, either.  I also correctly called the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council’s decision to move forward with a scoping document that would consider special regulations for the for-hire industry, anglers’ rights groups using the recently-discovered errors in the Marine Recreational Information Program to justify undercutting the federal fisheries management system,  greater focus on bycatch in at least some fisheries, and the controversies caused by new stock assessments for black sea bass and Gulf of Mexico red snapper.

To the best of my knowledge, I didn’t miss any of the big issues, nor did I predict any upcoming disputes that never materialized.

In retrospect, predicting 2024 events was fairly easy, while predicting what will happen in 2025 is extremely difficult, and in some respects, nearly borders on the impossible.  That’s not because 2025 won’t see its share of fisheries fights—if anything, I think we’ll see more than we typically do—but because I don’t think that I have seen a year with so much potential for things to go wrong in the past quarter-century.

A lot of those things can’t even be readily identified at this point, but result from a changing political environment in Washington and what seems to be a changing, more conservation-averse attitude that is emerging in some fisheries management bodies.  So most of my 2025 predictions will be focused on broader political and management trends, although one species-specific issue must be addressed.

Addendum III to Amendment 7 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Striped Bass

At least, that’s how I expect the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission will title the addendum initiated at the December 16, 2024 meeting of the Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board. 

It’s too early to know what the draft Addendum III will look like, and we may not know until the August Management Board meeting, although we should have a pretty good idea before then.  The original motion to initiate the addendum read

to initiate an addendum to support striped bass rebuilding by 2029 in consideration of 2024 recreational and commercial mortality while balancing socioeconomic impacts.  Options should include, if needed, a range of overall reductions, consideration of rec vs comm contributions to the reductions, rec season and size changes taking into account regional variability of availability, and no harvest vs no target closures.  Final action shall be taken by the Summer 2025 meeting to be in place for the 2026 rec and comm fisheries,

although it was later amended to push the final action back to October.

At best, the addendum may contain some modest measures intended to make it more likely that the spawning stock biomass will be fully rebuilt by 2029.  Based on the votes at the December 16 meeting, any such measures will probably be focused on the recreational fishery, while leaving the commercial fishery largely untouched, although in all honesty, I’d be surprised if Addendum III any landings reductions at all.

That’s why it’s not the “at best,” but the at worst that we need to worry about.

At the December 16 meeting, Michael Luisi, a Maryland fisheries manager, complained that since the early 2000s, efforts to reduce fishing mortality “added complexity” to the recreational regulations, and that the addendum process would provide an opportunity to use “things learned” to draft management measures, and suggested that such measures might be more “creative.”

Those comments suggest an intent to go beyond the simple “range of overall reductions, consideration of rec vs comm contributions to the reductions, rec season and size changes taking into account regional variability of availability, and no harvest vs no target closures” specified in the motion passed by the Management Board.  

He might will be considering efforts to undo provisions of Addendum II to the management plan, adopted last January, which placed additional restrictions on Maryland fishermen and were vigorously opposed by Luisi.  

He might be contemplating a provision giving special privileges to fishermen aboard for-hire vessels, which would not be enjoyed by the great majority of striped bass fishermen; a similar provision that was shot down during the Addendum II debate.  

He might even be considering revisiting issues that were rejected during the debate over Amendment 7 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Striped Bass, which the Management Board adopted in 2022—and which embraced a number of measures that dated back to the early 2000s and so contributed to the “complexity” that Luisi railed against.

We won't find out for a while, but whatever the final product looks like, it’s probably far more likely to harm rather than help the long-term health of the bass population

The National Marine Fisheries Service

I was excited when Janet Coit, who did an exemplary job in her decade as director of the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management, was named the head of the National Marine Fisheries Service in 2021. 

Unfortunately, NMFS’ fisheries management record during the Biden administration was far less notable.  That was particularly true for NMFS' Greater Atlantic Regional Fisheries Office, which over the past few years has seemed more interested in making fishermen happy than in properly conserving and managing the region’s fish stocks.  

That trend was particularly notable in efforts to weaken recreational fisheries management, where the so-called “Harvest Control Rule” or “Percent Change Approach” allows anglers to chronically exceed the recreational harvest limit, and has led to the overall annual catch limit and acceptable biological catch being exceeded as well, generally in the case of species temporarily enjoying high levels of spawning stock biomass.

However, regardless of what fishery management approach NMFS might choose to use, it’s not unreasonable to expect the agency to actually abide by rules that it itself adopts, and not ignore the dictates of its preferred management system.  That has not been the case in the Greater Atlantic region, particularly with respect to black sea bass in the mid-Atlantic, where NMFS has maintained the status quo in five of the six years since 2019, even though its own management approaches called for recreational, and occasionally commercial, landings reductions in each of those years.

The most egregious failures to follow its own management policies occurred over the last two years, first in 2023, when the regional office failed to impose the 10 percent reduction in recreational landings called for by the Percent Change Approach, supposedly because managers wanted to wait for an updated stock assessment, which was overdue.  But when the stock assessment that managers were supposedly waiting for was released in 2024, and called for a 20 percent reduction in the recreational and commercial landings, NMFS chose to ignore the assessment's findings and the resultant scientific advice, and came up with what can best be described as “very creative” interpretations of the relevant provisions of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act to justify its actions.

It appears that NMFS’ victory in a recent legal action challenging the Percent Change Approach served to make the regional office, and perhaps NMFS as a whole, more willing to see how far it can push the letter and the spirit of Magnuson-Stevens.

And if NMFS has taken such positions under the current administration, we can only fear what it will choose to do under an administration that, its first time around, overturned an ASMFC finding that New Jersey was out of compliance with summer flounder regulations, reopened the Gulf of Mexico’s recreational red snapper fishery even though such action would lead to overfishing, overturned the ban on commercial fishing in the New England Canyons and Seamounts National Monument, abolished time and area closures intended to protect giant bluefin tuna from longline bycatch and discard mortality, and issued an executive order intended to

“identify and remove unnecessary regulatory barriers restricting American fishermen,”

required regional fishery management councils to produce

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

and, according to NMFS, was meant to encourage

“regulatory reform to maximize commercial fishing.”

Perhaps nothing underlines the potential threat that the incoming administration poses to healthy fisheries and good fisheries management as the fact that the New Bedford commercial fishing community—the very same folks who spawned the outlaw “Codfather” Carlos Rafael and turned a blind eye to his multi-million dollar criminal enterprise, is eagerly awaiting its return.

A conservation-averse Congress

The United States government is structured in a way intended to maintain a beneficial tension between the three branches of government, so that when one oversteps, the others will bring it back into line.  Unfortunately, there is no reason to believe that the incoming Congress will be any more protective of marine fish stocks than the incoming administration.  Instead, we can expect to see an activist, conservation-averse Congress shutting down important conservation initiatives, interfering in the work of professional fisheries managers, and perhaps even threatening core provisions of Magnuson-Stevens.

A look at the few conservation victories of 2024 show how that would work.

In last Sunday’s edition of One Angler’s Voyage, I hailed the removal of the Klamath River dams, and the almost immediate return of the first few chinook salmon, as the premier fisheries conservation victory of the year.  Not long ago, it was hoped that the Klamath River success, which marked the largest dam removal project in the nation’s history, would be followed by an even bigger project—the removal of the four downstream dams on Idaho’s Snake River, which would open up hundreds of miles of spawning grounds for salmon that had already run the length of Washington State to reach the Idaho border.

In September 2023, the effort took a big step forward after the Biden administration declared a policy

“to carry out the requirement of the Pacific Northwest Electric Power Planning and Conservation Act…to operate, manage, and regulate the [Columbia River System] to adequately protect, mitigate, and enhance fish and wildlife affected by the Federal Dams in the Basin in a manner that provides equitable treatment for fish and wildlife with the other purposes for which the Federal dams are managed and operated,”

and then, two months later, announced an agreement settling a lawsuit brought by multiple native Tribes, which would provide $1 billion in funding for wild fish restoration in the Pacific Northwest, which was widely viewed as funding that would, at least in part, be used for dam removal.

But some members of the House of Representatives, closely tied to agricultural, energy, and other business interests in the Pacific Northwest, quickly condemned the administration’s actions, and introduced nine bills to prevent the removal of the Snake River dams.  While such bills never passed either house of Congress, should dam removal move closer to reality in 2025, it is a virtual certainty that such bills would be reintroduced, pass the House, and very possibly make it through the Senate as well.

It is pretty safe to say that, with the possible exception of some small-scale dam removals on the East Coast, where no major industry advocates stand in the way, dam removal efforts are dead for the next two years and, because any bills that make it through Congress still have to avoid a presidential veto, are probably dead until at least 2029.

And as a result of those dam removal efforts dying, untold numbers of diadromous fish, on every coast of the United States, will never have the opportunity to live.

Last Sunday’s post also heralded NMFS’ decision not to contest a lawsuit challenging its failure to address recreational overfishing in the South Atlantic red snapper fishery, and the agency’s agreement to have a final regulation addressing such overfishing in place by June 6.  Such action would better ensure that the stock would rebuild on time, and turn some—perhaps even a substantial proportion—of anglers’ dead discards of red snapper into landings.

However, in the fisheries management world, things rarely work out that smoothly.  Thus, in response to NMFS’ efforts to solve the problem, 23 members of the House of Representatives, undoubtedly spurred on by the recreational fishing industry, are asking the agency to renege on its agreement and take no meaningful action to end anglers’ overfishing.  While it’s not clear what the court would say should NMFS reverse its position and refuse honor its agreement, it is probably likely that, if the agency doesn’t go back on its word, someone will introduce a bill to negate any solution that NMFS may come up with.

And in this Congress, there’s a very good chance that such a bill would pass.

For in many ways, this is the Congress that the recreational fishing industry has been waiting for.  Although the margins between majority and minority parties remain razor-thin, and despite the fact that we’re likely to see a Senate tied up with controversial agency nominations and a House bare-majority taking a while trying to figure out who controls the most clowns in that particular circus, eventually they’ll probably get around to the business of drafting, debating, and probably even passing a few bills.

And when that time comes, the angling industry, as represented by the American Sportfishing Association, the National Marine Manufacturers Association, the Coastal Conservation Association, and others of that ilk, all pulled together under the umbrella of the Center for Sportfishing Policy, has invested enough time and donations in influential, largely southern, Republican legislators that they’re going to be able to call a lot of the shots.

Federal fisheries in the South Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico will probably suffer from the greatest level of Congressional interference, but we should also expect damage on a far wider scale, including efforts to cripple the Marine Recreational Information Program, turn responsibility for some federally-manages species over to more politically-influenced state agencies, and very possibly weaken key provisions of the Magnuson-Stevens Act.

That all might be good for business, at least in the short-term, but it certainly doesn’t promote the long-term goal of maintaining healthy and sustainable stocks of fish.

Which is why 2025 is likely to be a very bad year for fisheries conservation.

It won’t be a time for bold new initiatives to conserve and restore depleted fish stocks.  It won’t be a time for making positive changes to the fishery management system, at least not on the regional or federal levels.

It will be a time for hanging on tight to what we have, and fighting as hard as we can against anyone who tries to take it away.

It will be a time of losses.

But while some loss is inevitable, with enough work, loss can be controlled.