WINTER FLOUNDER: HOW SOON WE FORGET

 

I was sitting around the other morning, drinking the day’s first cup of tea nd scrolling through my news alerts from the previous day when I pulled up an article from Outdoor Life magazine’s website:  “The Lost Art of Winter Flounder Fishing.”

The blurb under the title read

“These delicious underdog flatfish are making a comeback, and now is the time to get in on the action,”

and the only reaction I could have to that was

“Really?  This is going to be good,”

because I’ve lived long enough to remember when there really was a winter flounder fishery, long enough to watch that fishery die, and if anybody really believes that winter flounder are “making a comeback” today, they believe in the walking dead.

I did most of my flounder fishing off the southwestern corner of Connecticut in Long Island Sound, between the late 1950s and 1983, when I moved to Long Island, although I’ve also caught a few in Massachusetts and, for a couple of decades, removed my share from Long Island’s Great South Bay.  There were flounder around in those years, enough fish that, when I was a boy, most people chased them throughout the season.

It didn’t really matter when you fished back then; there were always flounders.  Particularly during the spring and the fall, there were enough fish in the creeks, harbors, and coves that you could usually catch a fair number while fishing from shore.  Even during the summer, the folks lining the ripraps at the town parks usually managed to put a half-dozen or so in their pails.  As boys in third or fourth grade, beginning around the middle of March, we’d go down to the marinas lining the Mianus River and fish off the docks, usually managing to catch enough flounder for a family meal.  The docks were technically off-limits to fishing, but at that time of year, with boats still resting in their canvas cocoons, the folks who worked at the marinas usually looked the other way.

By the time I moved to Long Island, Great South Bay’s flounder were already experiencing overfishing, although we didn’t even suspect it at the time.  Fish were still being caught by the pailful, at least in the spring and fall; 1984 saw New York anglers take home just under 14.5 million winter flounder, the highest annual landings ever recorded for the state.  And it wasn’t only New York that was enjoying the bounty.  In that same year, Massachusetts landed slightly over 4.8 million fish, Connecticut nearly 2.7 million, and New Jersey slightly under 8.5 million; even in little Rhode Island that year, recreational fishermen took a little more than 1.5 million flounder home.

But as pioneer ecologist Aldo Leopold once noted,

“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.  Much of the damage inflicted on land is invisible to laymen.  An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.”

What is true for the land and for ecologists is too often true for fish stocks and fisheries biologists as well.  By the mid-1980s, fisheries managers could see that the winter flounder was experiencing problems; the number of young fish recruiting into the population had dropped, and the population itself was beginning to slide.  But with catch levels still high, and with the flounder driving a lot of business for the tackle shops and the party boat fleet, resistance to any sort of recreational regulations was high. 

When the first regulations came out here in New York, they were, as a result, laughably lax.  As I recall, that first set of rules imposed an 8-inch minimum size and a bag limit of either 20 or 25 flounder, the smallest bag that was even remotely acceptable to the party boat fleet, which argued that their customers had to have the “perception” that a so-called “big day”—that is, a pail filled with fish—was still possible, or they wouldn’t want to pay the cost of the trip.

But outside of the public hearings and the fisheries meetings, everyone quietly admitted that those “big days” were notably few and far between.

From then on, the fishing decayed at first slowly, and then at a faster pace, and fisheries managers were never willing to impose the restrictions needed to stem the tide.  By the year 2000, one didn’t need to be a biologist to see that the flounder were in real trouble; by then, New York’s annual landings had fallen to just 575,000 winter flounder—a long way from the 14,500,000 of just 16 years before—and other states were following suit, with Massachusetts’ landings falling to less than 165,000, Rhode Island’s to 68,000, and Connecticut’s to 18,000.  Outside of northern New England, only New Jersey was maintaining a fairly strong fishery, although at just under 3 million flounder landed, even its recreational harvest was less than half of what it had been in 1984.

The winter flounder population went into freefall after that, and while wishful thinkers might say that the species “is making a comeback,” the facts belie that claim.

In 2024, New York’s anglers landed an estimated 2,737 winter flounder, although the surveyors working on behalf of the National Marine Fisheries Service intercepted so few successful flounder anglers that their estimate is almost meaningless; once its inherent uncertainty is taken into account, the actual landings might have been anywhere between zero (which is extremely unlikely, since if the surveyors hadn’t counted a single fish, New York shouldn’t have been included in the catch data) to 8,334.  Other states are in a similar situation with respect to the number of flounder caught and the quality of the data.  Massachusetts had the highest landings estimate, 32,123 (which might really have been anywhere between zero and 72,292), followed by New Jersey at 1,500, Connecticut at 333, and Rhode Island at 165.  The northern New England states, which exhibited lesser landings twenty or forty years ago, now had some of the largest recreational landings, with Maine and New Hampshire landing an estimated 4,491 and 1,618 winter flounder, respectively.

But compared to the years when the stock was relatively healthy, and over 20 million fish were landed coastwide, such numbers would be lost to rounding error; even the New England states’ landings are still, at best, trivial.  So, when I read about anglers “pounding winter flounder in Cape Cod Bay,” as described in the Outdoor Life piece, the best that I could muster was a bitter smile.

Yes, the Gulf of Maine winter flounder stock, which ranges roughly from the “elbow” of Cape Cod to the Canadian border, seems more abundant than the Southern New England/Mid-Atlantic stock that is caught everywhere south of Cape Cod.  But that doesn’t mean that the fishing is anything approaching good.

Anglers may keep eight Gulf of Maine flounder, compared to just two farther south, and from what I’ve been told, it’s not unusual for an angler fishing at the right time, on the right tide, and probably from one of the charter boats that knows the area well, to put a limit of fish in the boat.  And maybe today, when flounder are scarce, landing those eight flounder seems impressive.

But, once again, some of us remember an earlier time.  We remember the days described by Capt. Jason Colby, who still operates a successful charter operation in Massachusetts and is one of the better-known flounder captains in the region, in an article that he wrote for The Fisherman magazine a few years ago:

“Growing up on Long Island, NY, I often heard tales of fellow fishermen taking buses up to Quincy, Massachusetts to go flounder fishing.  ‘Why,’ I asked, “would anyone travel four-plus hours on a bus when they had a viable local fishery?’  Well, as it turned out, the answer was quite simple:  the fishing was EPIC!

“Upon arrival at Hough’s Neck in Quincy, MA, anglers would be greeted by a sign that proclaimed the area to be, ‘The Flounder Capitol of the World.’  The two major destinations were Harvey’s Fishing Station and Hurley’s Fishing Station, both just off Sea Street.

“During the season, local kids would get up at 4 a.m. to put the float cushions, anchors, oars and motors on the boats so that they would be ready when the buses arrived around 8 o’clock.  The men fished while the kids went to school, and when they got out, the skiff fleet was beginning to trickle back to the dock.  Then the real work began!  Hauling the gear back to the boat sheds, and the fishermen’s gear back to the bus, was followed by filleting the hundreds of fish that had to be cut, bagged and tucked into coolers for the ride back to New York.  There were also buses from New Jersey and even some from Philadelphia, which shuttled happy anglers from all across the Northeast.”

Needless to say, all of those busloads of anglers didn’t head up to Quincy to catch just eight flounder apiece. 

Instead, they brought back coolers packed with fillets.  And they didn’t need a charter boat captain’s intimate knowledge of season, bottom, and tides to bring back a peach basket brimming with flounder; the anglers’ boats scattered across Quincy Bay and Boston Harbor, stopping wherever the anglers’ guts told them to stop, and if they might have to move from time to time over the course of the day, and some boats caught more fish than others, no one went home skunked, and very few departed unhappy.

What we see now is the merest remnant of those days.  The surviving fish do not represent a “comeback” of the winter flounder stock, but rather the mere dregs that remain once the rest of the cup has been drained.  But to understand the fishery that we have lost, one must have started their angling career at least twenty or twenty-five years ago.  If you started any later than that winter flounder, for most practical purposes, were already gone.

Thus, I had a few, somewhat contradictory reactions when I read an article that stated, as the Outdoor Life piece did, that

“The funny thing about these fish is that historically they were a real crowd pleaser.  Throughout the Northeast, anglers swarmed the coast in late winter and early spring to target them, creating an entire culture around the fleeting window in which these fish were available.

“That culture has largely dissolved, but the fish are still there for the taking…There’s no boat necessary.  All you need to understand are these basics.”

My first, and perhaps my strongest, reaction upon reading that invoked images of cattle and manure.  Back when there was a viable flounder fishery throughout the northeast, there was not an “entire culture” built around it; we welcomed the flounder when they showed up in the spring, when you would find just about everyone, from the rental skiffs to the big sportfishermen, anchored up in the channels hauling them over the side.  Then, as the waters warmed, most of us moved on to fluke and weakfish, bass and blues, tuna, sharks, and whatever else the sea offered, then returned to the flounder toward the end of the year, to put some fillets in the freezer before the bay froze.

You might make a trip to Quincy, but that was something you did once or twice each year; it wasn’t a “cultural” thing, any more than a trip out to Montauk to charter for stripers or tuna might be.

And there was no “fleeting window” in which to fish, for while fishing was better during the spring and fall, you could scratch up a few flounders—often, enough to fill an eight-fish bag limit, had such a thing even existed back then—even during the dog days of summer, although you might have to fish different spots at that time of year.

But the suggestion that anyone can readily catch a bunch of flounder these days—that “the fish are there for the taking…All you need to understand are these basics” is downright offensive.

I’ve been a member of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Winter Flounder Advisory Panel since the late 1990s.  I know, and am regularly in touch with, PhD-level scientists who have made winter flounder a part of their life’s work.  And if one thing is clear, it’s that the flounder are not “there for the taking” at all.

From the recreational fisherman’s perspective, there are two flounder stocks (the other, on Georges Bank, is almost exclusively a commercial fishery).

One, the Gulf of Maine stock presents an enigma.  The 2022 Management Track Stock Assessment, relying on the number of fish at least 30 millimeters (12 inches) or more in length being detected in trawl surveys, found that the stock was not experiencing overfishing.  However, biologists have, to date, been unable to calculate the size of the stock needed to produce maximum sustainable yield, or what that maximum sustainable yield might even be, and they have no idea whether the stock is overfished or not, although they do know that abundance was higher in 2021 than it was over the previous decade.  Combined recreational and commercial catch in 2021 was 168 metric tons, well below the approximately 8,000 metric tons caught in 1982; although that change probably reflects both a decline in abundance and a halt to overfishing, the fact that recent landings are only about 2% of what they were forty-three years ago certainly suggests that, at most times and in most places, even the more abundant Gulf of Maine flounder are not nearly as abundant as the Outdoor Life article suggests.

When we look at the Southern New England/Mid-Atlantic winter flounder, we uncover a more tragic truth, which is concealed beneath the mere fact that, according to its 2022 Management Track Stock Assessment, the Southern New England fish are neither overfished nor experiencing overfishing.  That stock assessment advises that

“There was a change to the stanza of recruitment that was used in the projections for this species…The new recruitment stanza was the last 20 years of estimates (2002-2021) for both short term projections, and to estimate the biomass target (SSBMSY) from a long term (100 yr) projection.  Previous years have used the entire time-series recruitment (1981-present).  Many of the historical recruitment estimates are overly optimistic, if not impossible, for the current stock size and productivity to achieve.  Very early recruitment estimates are 20 times the levels seen in recent years…

“The stock status of Southern New England Mid-Atlantic winter flounder has changes since the previous operational update and from the status determined at the last benchmark assessment in 2011.  The overfished status of the stock has changed to not overfished, and the stock is now considered rebuilt by the 2023 deadline.  The reason for this change in status determination is directly due to changing the recruitment stanza going into the projections…The truncated recruitment stanza eliminates the highest estimates of historical recruitment and greatly reduces the median recruitment used by the projections.  The lower median recruitment estimates in the long-term BRP projection results in a much lower [spawning stock biomass] value for the SSBMSY reference point.  While the stock status has changed, the perception of the stock has not, and recent model estimates and fishery independent survey indices all reveal a poor stock condition for southern New England winter flounder.  [emphasis added]”

Thus, the fact that the southern New England stock is no longer considered overfished does not mean that the stock is healthy or that abundance is increasing; rather, spawning stock biomass declined substantially, from 6,186.4 metric tons in 2012 to 3,353.2 metric tons in 2021, even as the stock’s status was upgraded to “not overfished.”

Certainly, there’s no comeback taking place there.

And yet, upon reconsideration, I think that my initial reaction to the Outdoor Life piece was too harsh.  I shouldn’t expect an author to know what a truly healthy winter flounder fishery looks like, or the sort of abundance one experiences when the flounder are truly “there for the taking,” when that author neer experienced such fishing or such abundance for themselves. 

After all, the Gulf of Maine stock probably did grow more abundant between 2010 and 2021, and if you weren’t fishing in the early 1980s, and those recent years form your only frame of reference, today’s meager fishery probably does look like a “comeback” to you.  It’s a classic example of the Shifting Baseline Syndrome, in which we gauge the health of a stock based on our own limited experience with an already-depleted resource, and thus never understand just how good fishing on a truly healthy stock could be.

On my last trip down to Washington, D.C., as I wandered around the offices on Capitol Hill, speaking to various legislators’ staffs about fisheries issues, I met one staffer from a western Long Island congressional district.  Like most of his kind, he was young, just a few years out of college or law school.  But this particular staffer was also an avid saltwater angler, and as we spoke casually after our meeting, I learned one thing:

He had never caught, and had never even seen, a living winter flounder.

I was taken aback, but then I realized that, if you hadn’t been fishing twenty or even twenty-five years ago, your chances of catching a winter flounder on Long Island have since become increasingly small.

Over the course of just a few decades, we have forgotten what the winter flounder fishery was.  And over the course of a single generation, many have forgotten—in truth, have never known—that ever existed.

In such a context, catching a handful of flounder could, indeed, seem a big deal.

STRIPED BASS: EARLY THOUGHTS ON ADDENDUM III

 

Last week, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission Plan Development Team responsible for drafting the proposed Addendum III to Amendment 7 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Striped bass held its first meeting.  As might be expected this early in the process, the meeting was largely organizational, serving only to chart a path that leads to future actions.

The meeting didn’t directly address 2024 recreational catch and landings, which were also released last week.  That data will be considered at a Striped Bass Technical Committee meeting that will be held during March, at which point the Technical Committee will make its projections as to whether the current fishing mortality level is low enough to have at least a 50 percent probability of rebuilding the stock by 2029 and, even if it is, whether it is also low enough to have a 60 percent probability of rebuilding.

If the answer to either of those questions is “no,” the Technical Committee will also determine what level of fishing mortality reductions will be needed to rebuild by the 2029 deadline, considering both the 50 percent and 60 percent probability levels.

It’s going to be interesting to see just what the Technical Committee’s calculations show.

There is no question that recreational striped bass landings and recreational striped bass catch were lower in 2024 than they were in 2023; estimates were down by 39 percent and 31 percent, respectively.  Recreational fishing effort was also down, by a more modest 15 percent.

If the current level of recreational fishing mortality continues through 2029—which it almost certainly won’t, as recreational catch, landings, and effort typically make wide and somewhat unpredictable year-to-year swings—rebuilding by 2029 should, in theory, occur without any need to change the existing regulations.  The Technical Committee, the Plan Development Team, and ultimately the Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board will all face the unenviable task of figuring out what the likely trajectory of striped bass fishing mortality will be.

We know that the first swing in fishing mortality will almost certainly be upward.  In a presentation made at the December 16 Management Board meeting, the Technical Committee advised that, because the above-average 2018 year class would enter the 28- to 31-inch coastal slot limit this year, recreational landings could increase by 17 percent.  That estimate is based on what happened when the notably larger 2015 year class entered the slot in 2022, so might overestimate the imact of the 2018s.  The estimate is also effort-dependent; if fewer people than expected target striped bass in 2025, the increase would probably be less than 17 percent, while if effort is higher than projected, fishing mortality could instead be higher than that.

The Technical Committee expects that, as the 2018s grow out of the slot, and legal-sized bass become less available (legal bass are already hard to find in the Chesapeake Bay, where the recreational slot is a smaller 19 to 24 inches, which currently includes bass spawned between 2020 and 2022, years that produced year classes which were well below the average year class size), recreational fishing mortality would drop back to low 2024 levels, which would make rebuilding by 2029 likely.  Since striped bass abundance is arguably the best predictor of striped bass angling effort, it is even possible that recreational fishing mortality will drop below 2024 levels as the below-average sized year classes enter the slot, and not only legal-sized bass, but striped bass of any size, become harder and harder for anglers to find.

Should the Technical Committee find that the striped bass stock is likely to rebuild by 2029 without any additional management measures being imposed, it is not impossible that the Management Board will decide to discontinue work on Addendum III altogether.  We have seen the Management Board discontinue work on addendums before, even when the striped bass stock was headed in the other direction—not toward rebuilding, but toward becoming overfished—as was the case in 2011, when an addendum was discontinued even though a stock assessment update advised that the stock would inevitably become overfished if nothing was done.

But the question of whether the Management Board ought to discontinue Addendum III under the circumstances described can’t be disposed of so easily.

First, although it appears that there is probably a very good chance that the Technical Committee will find at least a 50 percent probability of rebuilding by 2029 even if the Management Board takes no further action, there is no guarantee that that current level of fishing mortality will provide a 60 percent probability that the stock will be rebuilt on time.  The Management Board might—or might not—decide to keep Addendum III alive to provide public input on the 60 percent issue.

Adopting the 60 percent probability target would make good sense because, as North Carolina fishery manager Chris Batsavage noted at the Management Board meeting earlier this month, there is significant uncertainty in the recreational data.  Factors unique to 2024 might have rendered fishing mortality atypically low; should that be the case, the assumption that 2024 fishing mortality levels will continue is immediately called into question.

A particular concern might be whether the 2024 data for Wave 6—November and December—is typical of what we’ll see in the future.  In 2023, anglers landed over 921,000 striped bass, and caught 10,610,000 over the course of 4,275,000 trips taken during that two-month period.  In 2024, for the same two months, all of those values were down by about 45 percent, with 499,000 bass landed and 5,760,000 caught, over the course of 2,321,000 trips. 

If Wave 6 effort returns to something close to 2023 levels in 2025 and subsequent years, it may well be enough to prevent the stock from rebuilding if no additional management actions are taken. 

The Management Board might also want to consider the recent poor recruitment experienced in all four of the major striped bass spawning areas.  While Addendum III was intended to increase the likelihood that the stock will rebuild by 2029, the Management Board also asked, as part of the Addendum III process, that the Technical Committee provide projections of the spawning stock biomass going out to the mid-2030s, to show the impacts of what are now six consecutive years of very below-average spawns.  If those projections indicate that the stock will again decline, and is likely to be overfished during the 2030s, the Management Board might decide to adopt proactive management measures intended to stem at least some of the projected decline in abundance.

There are thus good reasons to keep Addendum III alive, and to impose new management measures, even if the Technical Committee determines that there is at least a 50 percent probability of timely rebuilding if no additional management measures are adopted. 

But if the Management Board decides not to seek further reductions in fishing mortality, Addendum III ought to be set aside, for if the proposed addendum is not used as a means to rebuild and conserve the striped bass stock, it should not be used to favor particular sectors of the striped bass fishery. 

Addendum III should not be the vehicle used to adopt mode splits favoring the for-hire sector, and Maryland should not be able to use the addendum as some sort of lifering, that keeps the state from drowning in the sea of confused regulations that it has adopted over the years in its efforts to elevate its commercial and for-hire fisheries over its private boat and shore-based anglers.

It will be at least another month until we know whether the Technical Committee will complete its projections and determine what, if anything, must be done to rebuild the striped bass stock by 2029.  And we won’t know until May whether the Management Board will decide to move forward with the proposed addendum.

But there is one thing we do know right now.

If Addendum III will provide a clear benefit to the striped bass stock, then the addendum should be put in place.  But an addendum that does not provide clear benefits to the striped bass stock is an addendum that we don’t need at all.

 

AT THE ASMFC: THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE

 

I just learned that Pat Keliher, the long-serving head of Maine’s Department of Marine Resources, will be retiring from that position, and so will also be leaving his post as Maine’s Administrative Appointee at the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission.  He will be missed, even though he is leaving behind Megan Ware, another very capable Maine fisheries manager who has long served as his proxy and, in doing so, has created her own legacy in fisheries conservation and management.

I have known Pat for nearly 30 years, dating back to the late ‘90s when we were both involved with the Coastal Conservation Association.  At the time, he was the Executive Director for CCA’s Maine chapter, who ran a fundraising, membership, and advocacy program that made Maine a standout among CCA’s four New England chapters.  I was the Chair of CCA New York, a member of CCA’s national executive board, and also the chair of CCA’s Atlantic States Committee, which primarily dealt with issues arising at the ASMFC.

In that role, I worked with Pat quite a bit, and was always impressed by his calm and rational demeanor and his commonsense approach to fisheries issues.  It was an approach and demeanor that he carried into his work at the ASMFC (and, I’m certain, in Maine, although I had no occasion to work with him there), where he was often forced to deal with difficult issues affecting two of the most controversial species managed by the Commission, striped bass and American lobster (although two other species, American eel and Atlantic menhaden, also provided more than their share of headaches).

Perhaps the best example of his leadership, his rational approach to fisheries management, and his conservation philosophy can be found in comments he made while serving as the Chair of the ASMFC in 2021, when he addressed the May meeting of the Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board as they were drafting the document that eventually became Amendment 7 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Striped Bass:

“Thank you for allowing me just a moment to address the Board as the Commission’s Chair.  As you all know, striped bass is known as the Commission’s flagship species.  You also likely know that Congress acted back in 1984, and passed the Atlantic Striped Bass Act.

“This was the beginning of the moratorium years, a time we all sacrificed, and a time that the recovery of this flagship species began.  Since then, we as a management body have strived to address and maintain the recovery in a way that benefitted the fish, and the fisheries that support it.  Throughout this time, we’ve continued to exercise our state’s rights, and put forward our opinions on management that is best for both the species and our state’s interest.

“I would say we’ve likely had mixed results over the years.  That brings us to today, I feel there is a lot at stake, not only for striped bass, but for ASMFC as well.  Some are stating that the Commission has a credibility problem, that we’ve taken our greatest fisheries management success story and reversed it.

“Whether you agree or disagree with these comments, you must agree that we are at a crossroads with management, and today we are deciding which way we’ll turn.  Things are changing.  Many species the Commission manages are seeing shifts in their abundance, and distribution.  Striped bass are not immune to this change, as our stock assessment shows that the stock is overfished, and overfishing is occurring.

“While I personally don’t think we’re at a point we were in 1984, the downward trend of the stock is evident in the assessment.  For many of the Commission species, we’re no longer in a position to ‘hold out hope’ that things will revert to what they’ve been previously, if we just hold static.  Change is happening too fast, and actions need to be taken.

“Today I would ask this Board to think about what is best for the species, but also what is best for the future of the Commission.  I suspect that this will be a painful discussion, and sacrifices needed to find a way forward.  The small amount of pain now pays us dividends down the road.  Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, for allowing me to address the Board, and good luck with this meeting.  Thank you.”

We need more voices like Pat’s at the Commission, and his will be hard to replace.

The past year also saw the retirement of Dr. Michael Armstrong, the former Deputy Director of the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries.  I didn’t know Dr. Armstrong.  I never met him face-to-face, and never even communicated with him over the phone or by email, but I was very aware of the leadership role that he played, and the respect that he was given.

Because of the importance of the East Coast striped bass fishery, and the prominence of that species at the ASMFC, I was most aware of his leadership on the Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board, where he was always a champion of conservative management and the long-term health of the fishery. 

Anyone who has spent very much time listening to that management board debate issues knows that there is a contingent of representatives who always try to delay management actions, and when delay seems unlikely, do their best to convince the Board to adopt half-measures that are inadequate to end overfishing or rebuild the stock, but instead would maintain landings at unsustainably high levels.

Dr. Armstrong was skilled at blunting such efforts, never afraid to stand up for the resource and paint a very explicit picture of what everyone stood to lose from delay.  He crafted a significant win in May 2023, when he convinced the Management Board to adopt emergency measures to reduce recreational landings after unexpectedly high landings in 2022 made it unlikely that the stock would rebuild by 2029, the deadline derived from the management plan, if fishing mortality was not cut.  He said to the Board,

“I guess the challenge here is convincing you that this is an emergency…The problem is, we have an entire year of fishing on a very, very strong year class.  Emergency measures haven’t been used much, maybe half a dozen times or so.  The definition is circumstances under which conservation or coastal fishery resource or attainment of fishery management objectives, that’s the key, has been placed substantially at risk by unanticipated changes in the ecosystem for stock, or the fishery.  Let me address the unanticipated first.  We doubled harvest almost.  I went back into the time series for MRIP, all the way back to ’81, and that has only happened a couple of times, the last time being over 30 years ago.

“Although I think we all sat around saying, this is a big year class, you know harvest will go up.  We could not have anticipated that it was going to go up by double.  It’s never had that.  Now, that being said, I have faith that MRIP is right.  We do 6,000 intercepts a year in Massachusetts, about 5,000 are for striped bass.

“That is a lot of data.  You can complain about MRIP for other species.  I think they got it right, especially on a coastal, without breaking it up into modes and waves and everything else.  What we saw was the ’22 harvest completely derailed the rebuilding down to 14 or 15 percent chance of getting there.  I told you a little about what we looked at our recreational fishery, and really great graphics of the 2015 was about 55 percent into the slot, and we doubled the harvest.

“There is no question in my mind that there is zero percent chance of the harvest going down.  I mean the PSEs on this estimate are fine, they are as good as they’ve always been.  I mean there is always biased things that can change, but I have faith that the harvest this year will be the same, or I would say greater, because the entire year class is in the slot.

“We’re going to have to deal with that, and it’s going to get more and more difficult if harvest is huge again this year…We had anglers say last year was the best fishing they’ve ever had, and a lot of it was environmental conditions and the presence of menhaden.

“But also, the presence of a really big year class.  I mean there is just no question that they are more available this year.  How could harvest go down?  There is also, I think we have all seen this, I would call it irrational exuberance by the fishing community.  When fishing gets good, fishing effort goes up, and probably not in a linear fashion.

“People coming off a great year, I’m guessing that effort will go up much more.  We’ll get the casual anglers will be going out more.  We have no output controls, and that makes it very difficult managing the striper fishery.  I proposed this because I don’t want to be further behind the eight ball.  I don’t want to see another projection again that includes 11 percent probability of restoration, and any, I’ll leave it at that.”

There was some resistance to Dr. Armstrong’s motion, but he laid the argument out so well that, in the end, only New Jersey—perhaps the state most implacably opposed to striped bass conservation effortds—voted against.  His absence from the Management Board is certainly being felt.  It’s hard not to wonder whether, if he had still been seated at the table, the vote at the December 16, 2024 Board meeting might have gone a different way, although such musings are probably a little unfair to Massachusetts' current representative on the Management Board, Nichola Meserve, who has proven herself to be a champion of bass conservation in her own right, and did everything that she could do to adopt needed measures for the 2025 season.  The vote just didn't go her way.

Both the Maine and Massachusetts delegations remain in good hands, and the traditions of stewardship set by both Pat Keliher and Dr. Armstrong will remain behind.  While we often hear anglers criticize the ASMFC—and that criticism is not without cause—what we don’t hear often enough is recognition and appreciation of what a number of dedicated fisheries managers are trying to accomplish when they are part of a management board.

For Pat Keliher and Dr. Armstrong were not alone in their efforts to responsibly manage the striped bass and other species.  There are a host of other state managers—and some governors’ appointees, legislative appointees, and legislative proxies, too—who speak out for conservative, sustainable fisheries management, intended to keep stocks healthy in the long term.  All of them deserve our thanks.

Because there are also the others, who seek short-term advantage for their state, their favored sectors, and perhaps, at times, for themselves, regardless of the scientific advice, or the impact their actions might have on the health of fish stocks.  They’re the ones who tarnish the ASMFC’s name.

But that’s why the Kelihers, the Armstrongs, and all of the other dedicated managers matter.  They stand between us and the irresponsible few.

They aren’t appreciated enough for what they have done, and continue to do.

THE ASMFC FACES TOUGH CHALLENGES IN 2025

 

Just over 43 years ago, in October 1981, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) released a document designated Fisheries Management Report No. 1 of the ATLANTIC STATES MARINE FISHERIES COMMISSION.

It was 329 pages long and extremely well researched. Its title page declared it to be the “Interstate Fisheries Management Plan for the Striped Bass of the Atlantic Coast from Maine to North Carolina,” noted that it was “Prepared by the State of Maryland Department of Natural Resources, Tidal Fisheries Division as part of the Interstate Fisheries Management Program administered by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission,” and revealed that “Funds provided by Northeast Region, National Marine Fisheries Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration under Cooperative Agreement number NA-80-FA-00017.”

It was the first fishery management plan ever drafted by the ASMFC.

And, from a practical perspective, it was just about useless.

That’s not because the information in the report was invalid. The document presented a comprehensive overview of the striped bass fishery, which ranged from the natural history of the stock to a detailed description of the existing commercial and recreational striped bass fisheries.

The problem was that, having produced a striped bass fishery management plan, the ASMFC had absolutely no authority to put that plan to use. At that time, the ASMFC was little more that an interstate debating society, that could perform research and suggest management actions, but lacked the authority to actually manage coastal fisheries.

And that was bad for the striped bass since, in 1981, the stock had collapsed and few young fish were recruiting into the population, but management authority was still in the hands of the coastal states, which seemed more interested in protecting their fishermen’s short-term cash flow than in adopting effective measures to conserve the striped bass.

That all changed in 1984 with the passage of the Atlantic Striped Bass Conservation Act, which, for the first time, gave the ASMFC the legal authority to compel member states to adopt its striped bass management plan. States that refused would risk having a moratorium imposed on their fishery by the federal government. With that law in place, the ASMFC soon adopted Amendment 3 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Striped Bass, a measure that severely restricted striped bass landings throughout the stock’s range, and paved the way for the stock to fully recover from its collapse.

In 1993, Congress passed the Atlantic Coastal Fisheries Cooperative Management Act (Coastal Fisheries Act) which extended the ASMFC’s authority to adopt legally binding fishery management plans to all of the species within its jurisdiction, and so establish consistent management measures along the entire East Coast.

For nearly a quarter-century, the ASMFC’s management authority was never successfully challenged. While its management actions weren’t always popular, and some states delayed adopting them, the threat of a federal moratorium that wouldn’t merely restrict the regulated fishery, but instead shut it down entirely, soon caused states to come into compliance.

But that, too, changed. In 2017, New Jersey’s then-Governor Chris Christie leveraged his relationship with the new Trump administration and convinced the newly-appointed Commerce Secretary, Wilbur Ross, to excuse New Jersey’s decision to go out of compliance with the ASMFC’s summer flounder management plan.

That was the first time that a Commerce Secretary failed to support the ASMFC, after the ASMFC had found a state to be out of compliance with one of its management plans. But there are some worrying signs that the ASMFC might be facing similar challenges in 2025.

Last March, two fishing industry groups, the Delmarva Fisheries Association and the Maryland Charter Boat Association, sued the ASMFC. In a complaint that contained multiple legal and factual errors, the plaintiff groups claimed that a recent addendum to its striped bass management plan constituted an illegal “regulatory taking” of property pursuant to the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution, and deprived the plaintiffs of “of their rights to property and livelihood” without due process of law and in violation of the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment. Plaintiffs asked the trial court to grant a preliminary injunction that would prevent the addendum’s new management measures from going into effect.

The trial court refused to grant the injunction, deciding that the plaintiffs failed to demonstrate that they were likely to prevail in the lawsuit, and didn’t prove that they were likely to suffer irreparable injury if the injunction was denied, that the balance of equities in the matter favored the plaintiffs, or that granting the requested injunction was in the public interest, which are all criteria that must be established before a preliminary injunction may be issued.

Plaintiffs appealed the trial court’s decision. The appellate court’s decision hasn’t yet been released, but after judges began making comments like “Isn’t this regulation intended to save and preserve the striped bass? If you take that at face value, then without this, the striped bass could become extinct, and your client would lose 100% of its business,” it appeared likely that the trial court’s ruling would be upheld.

But the courts aren’t where the real challenge to the ASMFC lies.

Capt. Rob Newberry, the chairman of the Delmarva Fisheries Association, is urging the state to withdraw from the ASMFC, effectively turning the clock back to 1983, when Maryland could still manage its state-waters fisheries without any regard for the views or the interests of its neighboring states, or the coastwide needs of the striped bass resource. While Michael Luisi, an associate director of the Maryland Department of Natural Resources’ Fishing and Boating Services, has said that “the stakes would be too high” to justify such action, has recognized the need for interstate cooperation, and has provided assurances that Maryland has no such plans to withdraw, the mere fact that some stakeholders are urging such action is worrisome.

It is even more worrisome that other states, which have long supported the ASMFC process, are expressing their intention to remain part of the organization, but to go out of compliance with one of its management plans, in this case, the updated fishery management plan for American lobster.

Addendum XXVII to Amendment 3 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for American Lobster (Addendum XXVII) established “a trigger mechanism to automatically implement management measures to provide additional protection of the Gulf of Maine/Georges Bank…spawning stock biomass. Under Addendum XXVII, changes to gauge and escape vent sizes in [specified] Lobster Conservation Areas…would be initiated based on an observed decline in recruit abundance indices of 35% from the reference level equal to the three-year average from 2016 to 2018).”

When Addendum XXVII was adopted in May 2023, the ASMFC’s American Lobster Management Board (Lobster Board) assumed that it would be some time, if ever, before that trigger mechanism was tripped. However, in October 2023, the Atlantic Lobster Technical Committee determined that 2022 recruitment had already fallen beneath the 35% threshold, triggering the implementation of more restrictive management measures, which were scheduled to go into effect on June 1, 2024.

That finding caught both lobster fishermen and fishery managers by surprise; practical problems, not the least of which was providing fishermen with new measurement gauges that complied with Addendum XXVII’s changes to the size limit, forced the Lobster Board to delay the implementation date of the new management measures to January 1, 2025. In October 2024, the Lobster Board adopted Addendum XXI to Amendment 3 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Lobster (Addendum XXXI), which further delayed the implementation date to July 1, 2025, in order to provide more time for Canadian regulators to adopt similar regulations, and so not put New England lobster fishermen, who fish the same waters as the Canadians, at a competitive disadvantage.

States must now comply with Addendum XXXI’s July 1 deadline. However, two of the three affected states, Maine and New Hampshire, have signaled that they won’t do so.

New Hampshire has taken the more defiant stance, with Governor Kelly Ayotte writing a letter to the ASMFC that read, in part,

I have heard loud and clear from our lobstermen, commercial fishermen, and concerned legislators and citizens from our Seacoast that this minimum size increase will have a negative impact an industry already strained by existing regulations. To ensure the survival of an iconic and historic industry in our state and our region, and to ensure our nation remains competitive in global trade, I ask you today to rescind these new guidelines. In the meantime, New Hampshire will comply with the previous minimum size for lobster in an effort to preserve this proud industry.

In case anyone had any doubts about Governor Ayotte’s intentions, she also posted an image to the social media website X that featured the image of a lobster along with the legend, “COME AND TAKE IT.”

Maine’s response to Addendum XXXI was far more restrained, but the outcome was about the same.

On January 9, 2025, Pat Keliher, the commissioner of Maine’s Department of Marine Resources, stood before a meeting filled with angry lobstermen and announced that “For now, I pull the rule [that would have kept Maine in compliance with the ASMFC’s lobster management plan]. I called up the governor on the way in and explained the risks of compliance [sic] with ASMFC. She agreed with me that we should pull the rule based on the input we got [at the meeting held] in Brewster [two nights earlier] and the input we got tonight.”

But, unlike Governor Ayotte, Commissioner Keliher did not engage in a show of defiance. Instead, he warned the Maine lobstermen that, despite their claims that the new management measures were unnecessary, “If [the ASMFC] say through a vote, that doesn’t matter, you’re out of compliance, they will send a letter to the secretary of commerce. The secretary reviews the letter, looks at all the science we will submit with that letter, and then the secretary of commerce will make a determination whether the fishery should be forced into compliance or be closed. That means no lobster exported out of the state of Maine. So that’s the risk we run. I’m just laying it out plain.”

That warning may have made at least some of the lobstermen uneasy, as one of the attendees at the January 9 meeting reportedly said, “I don’t think we’re asking you to go to the ASMFC saying we won’t do it. We’re saying we need to see the results of this [upcoming] stock assessment.”

If Maine or New Hampshire doesn’t adopt Addendum XXXI’s management measures by July 1, the Lobster Board, at its August 2025 meeting, could vote to find them out of compliance with ASMFC’s lobster management plan.

If the Lobster Board finds one or both states out of compliance, the matter would then be referred to the Interstate Fishery Management Program Policy Board (Policy Board). Should the Policy Board agree that Maine and/or New Hampshire is out of compliance, the Coastal Fisheries Act would require the ASMFC to notify the Secretary of Commerce and the Secretary of the Interior of its finding within 10 working days.

And that’s when things could get a little bit tricky.

According to the Coastal Fisheries Act,

Within 30 days after receiving a notice from the Commission…and after review of the Commission’s determination of noncompliance, the Secretary [of Commerce] shall make a finding on (1) whether the State in question has failed to carry out its responsibility [to comply with and enforce the terms of the relevant fishery management plan]; and (2) if so, whether the measures that the State has failed to implement and enforce are necessary for the conservation of the fishery in question. [formatting omitted]

The Coastal Fisheries Act also requires that, “Upon making a finding…that a State has failed to carry out its responsibility [to comply with and enforce a management plan] and that the measures it failed to implement and enforce are necessary for conservation, the Secretary shall declare a moratorium on fishing in the fishery in question within the waters of the noncomplying State. The Secretary shall specify the moratorium’s effective date, which shall be any date within 6 months after declaration of the moratorium.”

While it would be nice to believe that the Secretary of Commerce’s decision would be objective and based solely on the facts presented by the ASMFC and the allegedly noncompliant state, politics can also play the deciding role. Before Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross excused New Jersey’s noncompliance with the ASMFC’s summer flounder management plan, his office was heavily lobbied by members of the state’s congressional delegation and by the state’s then governor, Chris Christie, who was an early supporter of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential bid. Given the strong scientific support for the ASMFC’s noncompliance finding, it was New Jersey’s political connections that probably carried the day.

While Maine’s Governor Janet Mills is a Democrat, and unlikely to garner any sympathy from the current Republican administration, New Hampshire Governor Kelly Ayotte is a Republican who might find a more receptive ear in Washington; that might explain the tone of her letter to the ASMFC which aggressively declared New Hampshire’s intent to go out of compliance with the lobster management plan. In addition, although Donald Trump didn’t win a single New England state, he was the favorite candidate of many commercial fishermen in the Northeast. That fact, too, could come into play in any secretarial decision.

After Secretary Ross excused New Jersey’s noncompliance in 2017, Douglas Grout of New Hampshire, then chair of the ASMFC, noted in a press release that

The Commission is deeply concerned about the near-term impact [of Secretary Ross’s decision] on our ability to end overfishing on the summer flounder stock as well as the longer-term ability for the Commission to effectively conserve numerous other Atlantic coastal shared resources…The states have a 75-year track record of working together to successfully manage their shared marine resources. We are very much concerned about the short and long-term implications of the Secretary’s decision on interstate fisheries management…

But, for the moment, such processes and possibilities are no longer a concern.

Members of the Lobster Board apparently didn’t want to take the chance that a new Secretary of Commerce might overturn a noncompliance finding. Perhaps they feared that any new secretarial decision to excuse noncompliance would fatally undermine the ASMFC’s ability to enforce the terms of its management plans, for on February 4, 2025 the Lobster Board approved a motion that read, “Move to initiate an addendum to repeal all gauge and [lobster trap escape] vent size changes in Addendum XXVII. The other sections of Addendum XXVII will remain in effect.”

A few members on the Lobster Board criticized the motion, on the grounds that other ASMFC management boards had enforced management plan provisions that some states, and some states’ fishermen, had strongly opposed. New Jersey’s legislative proxy, Adam Nowalsky, explained that he could not support the motion because

the actions of this Commission have been to trust in the joint actions that we have taken regardless of whether or not certain constituents or certain governors or individuals or a couple or three states yell and scream and say, “this isn’t going to work for us.” The Commission goes forward with it anyway. There is an appeal process if someone does not go into compliance with it. There is a process to take it to the Secretary of Commerce. That has happened in the past. So purely from a procedural perspective, from how the Commission has operated in the past, again I can’t support this [motion] for that reason.

New Hampshire’s legislative proxy, Dennis Abbot, responded by asking,

Adam, to your points, I think looking at things realistically, I think we’ve tried to do that. What do you think the odds are if we didn’t, if we failed in this motion, and we find New Hampshire and Maine out of compliance and the noncompliance finding is forwarded to the Secretary of Commerce at some point in time later this year, what do you think in the real world the odds are that the Secretary of Commerce is going to go along with our finding of out of compliance?…I believe we’ll be right back where we are today. And I wouldn’t like to be there. We surely don’t want to be there in any instance.

Mr. Abbott was clearly not the only Lobster Board member who had such concerns.

Yet if the ASMFC doesn’t act to enforce its decisions out of fear of being overruled, it also encourages any state which disagrees with a management action to threaten noncompliance, or even a complete withdrawal from the ASMFC, in order to escape the burdens of a locally unpopular management measure. The members of the Lobster Board sit on other management boards as well, and so vote on issues affected other species; fisheries managers from Maryland and New Jersey both drew connections between Addendum XXVII’s impacts on Maine’s and New Hampshire’s lobstermen and the impact that striped bass management measures, which were supported by both Maine and New Hampshire, had on Maryland’s and New Jersey’s fishing industries.

The unspoken threat was that if Maine and New Hampshire are not expected to comply with the lobster management plan, then perhaps states such as Maryland and New Jersey should not be expected to comply with measures affecting their striped bass fisheries. Should such threat ever become explicit, the resulting race to the bottom could devastate inshore fisheries.

Thus, ASMFC finds itself on the horns of a dilemma, with any action it takes or refrains from taking having the potential to weaken its ability to manage inshore fish stocks.

And that’s not where the ASMFC needs to be. Instead, it must be able to rely on the Secretary of Commerce to cooperate, respect its decisions, and support its management processes. Hopefully that will occur, for while the ASMFC process is not perfect, and not without need of reforms, coastal fisheries management has come a long way in the three decades since the Coastal Fish Act became law, compared to the regulatory chaos that existed when each state was the sole arbiter of how fish were managed within that state’s waters.

Coastal fisheries would suffer if we went backwards now.

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This essay first appeared in “From the Waterfront,” the blog of the Marine Fish Conservation Network, which can be found at http://conservefish.org/blog/

STRIPED BASS: WHAT MIGHT THE FUTURE HOLD?

 

This winter has, in many respects, been the winter of striped bass speculation.

On one hand, there is real concern for the health of the striped bass stock.  Anglers have been watching the numbers decline for a few years now, have noticed the dearth of smaller fish, and are beginning to worry that the bottom is going to fall out of the fishery in the next couple of years.

It has been a very long time—perhaps not since 1995, when the striped bass stock was first declared rebuilt, and managers here in New York proposed relaxing the regulations from a 1-fish bag and 36-inch minimum size to 2 fish at 28 inches—that I have heard as much anger focused on fisheries managers as I hear today, after the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board chose to take no meaningful action last December, and so allowed the 2018 year class—the last above-average year class in the population—to enter the coastal slot limit this year, to become the focus of the entire catch-and-kill coastal fishery, without giving it any additional protections.

I know some people, who have been involved with the fishery for a very long time who, after listening to the February Management Board meeting and hearing some Board members seemingly try to liberalize management measures and increase the striped bass kill, at least for their favored sectors, instead of restricting everyone’s landings and promoting conservation, are now saying things like “It’s over.  The striped bass are done,” because they have lost any hope that the Management Board will find the will or the courage to take decisive measures to conserve and rebuild the stock.  Such folks fully believe that the Board is going to let the stock languish well below the spawning stock biomass target, because doing anything else would be too politically fraught in their home states.

At the same time, I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen the average bass angler’s faith in fisheries science fall so low; it is very hard for most to believe that the spawning stock biomass is really increasing—even though all available data indicates that it is—when they see little but empty water through much of the season.  They often fail to understand that spawning stock biomass, measured in pounds or in metric tons, can increase for a while even as overall numbers fall, because older fish are growing larger and offsetting the lack of new recruits.

Yet it has also been a winter of undue optimism.  While many anglers worry about what they see as a declining stock, others feel that everything is OK.

That’s particularly true of those who caught their striped bass in the fall, somewhere between western Long Island and northern New Jersey, where anglers experienced what might have been some of the best striped bass fishing of their lives.  When most of the bass that spent their summer somewhere between Maine and Montauk move south along the coast, run into big schools of sand eels and menhaden, and decide to stick around for a while, that sort of fishing is going to happen.  Bass are concentrated, and very catchable.  But in many other places, where the fish should have been, they just were not there.

Others, who have some understanding of what might lead to a successful Chesapeake spawn, point to the relatively cold and snowy winter that we’re experiencing, and hope that it will turn things around.  And it is very possible that we will see the juvenile abundance indices in Maryland and Virginia jump this year.  Cold winters followed by cool, wet springs tend to favor striped bass reproduction, so there is reason to believe that the 2025 year class might, at worst, be the best since 2018.

I certainly hope that’s the case, but we need to remember that water temperatures and water flows aren’t the sole arbiters of spawning success.  Even if there’s a strong spawn, those juvenile bass need something to eat once they’re hatched, and there is evidence to suggest that if their favorite food, a type of zooplankton called a copepod, doesn’t hit peak abundance when the bass most need it, the bulk of those juveniles will not survive.  There is reason to believe that such a mismatch between copepod and juvenile striped bass abundance may have been the reason that 2024 juvenile abundance was disappointingly low, despite seemingly good water conditions.

And even if we do get a strong 2025 year class, that one year class isn’t going to change the bass fisherman’s world.  I sometimes hear anglers make comments that seemingly suggest that this winter could lead to good fishing in the 2025 season, but things don’t quite work that way.  While this winter could impact spawning success, it will have no impact on fish that were spawned in previous years.  The poor spawns that occurred from 2019 through 2024 will still leave a big hole in the population, and it still takes seven years to produce a seven-year-old bass—the average age of a fish in the current 28- to 31-inch slot—so the shortage of fish spawned between 2019 and 2024 is only going to become more noticeable as the big 2021 and 2023 year classes—mostly 50-pound-plus fish, at this point—age out of the population, the 2011s and 2015 suffer attrition from both natural and fishing mortality, and the 2018s become the focus of the recreational catch-and-keep fishery.  Beginning in 2026, when the 2019s would normally have produced most of the slot-sized bass, and more so in 2027, after the last of the 2018s grow out of the coastal slot, the years of poor spawns are going to be very much felt by everyone.

Some people disagree, and argue that there are still plenty of bass, but that most the fish have just decided to go someplace else.

One version of that argument says that as waters warm, the fish have just moved north, and are breeding in more northerly rivers.  Yet the Hudson River, the most northerly major spawning ground, has seen very poor spawns over the past couple of years, with 2023 producing the lowest year class since 1985.  And no one has ever documented significant striped bass reproduction in any New England river, although some very limited spawning takes place in both the Connecticut River and Maine’s Kennebec.

The other version of the argument is that the bass have moved offshore, and that there are great numbers of them somewhere near the edge of the continental shelf.  Support for this argument comes from occasional sightings of bass schools offshore, usually made by commercial fishermen, and from tag returns obtained by the use of pop-up satellite tags.  The truth is that bass sometimes to sojourn offshore, but an acoustic tagging study conduced off Massachusetts, based on fish captured offshore on the Stellwagen Bank, found that all such “offshore” bass soon return to their traditional inshore grounds.  And as far as the satellite tracking goes, proponents fail to account for a critical factor, which is the inherent inaccuracy of the satellite tags.  I have spoken to two different biologists about the issue, one employed by a university in Maine, and one here in New York, and both told me that the positions fixed by the tags can be off by as much as 30 miles in latitude and 60 miles in longitude—enough that a bass supposedly swimming a few miles north of Hudson Canyon might in reality be cruising the flats inside Great South Bay.  In the case of at least one much-publicized detection, which suggested that a bass was lingering at the outer edge of the continental shelf, the scientist from Maine told me that he was getting data from satellite tagged yellowfin tuna that were supposedly in the same vicinity, but that the data was indicating two very different water temperatures, meaning that either the bass or the tuna had to have been somewhere else.

So the trick, when we’re trying to figure out what the striped bass’ future might be, is to avoid both extremes, and try to be neither too hopeful nor too pessimistic.  Although it’s tempting to try to extrapolate future events from the facts that we have on hand, the existing uncertainty is great enough to render such attempts at prophecy generally unrewarding.

Still, there are some things that we know.  We know that we had poor recruitment from 2019 through 2024, that the Chesapeake is, by far, the most important spawning area for the species, and just two other rivers, the Delaware and the Hudson, are responsible for almost all of the rest of the fish that enter the coastal migratory population.  We know that the stock remains modestly overfished, and we know that overfishing is not currently occurring.  We know that there has been a trend toward warming winters and more quickly warming springs, and that colder winters and cooler, wetter springs tend to produce the strongest year classes of bass.

And that’s about the extent of our knowledge; everything else remains within the realm of speculation.

Based on that knowledge, we can reasonably expect the spawning stock biomass to increase over the next few years, even as relatively few fish recruit into the stock; the stock still could rebuild to the target level by 2029. 

We also know that the target level in 2029 might not be the same as it is today.  If that proves to be the case, it’s not because anyone “moved the goal posts,” as some skeptics might claim.  Instead, it’s because the National Marine Fisheries Service has discovered a seeming error in the Marine Recreational Information Program data, which is used to estimate recreational catch, effort, and landings, which they believe has lead to each of those values being overstated.  Corrected values will be available by 2026, and those corrected values will be incorporated into the benchmark stock assessment that is scheduled for completion in early 2027. 

Because recreational catch and landings play a big part in the stock assessment and in the calculation of the spawning stock biomass threshold and target, a downward correction in the recreational catch and landings would result in a downward revision in the spawning stock biomass reference points as well. 

But there will be nothing sinister about such change; instead, it will be just an example of how the “best scientific information available” works; as new and more accurate data is developed and incorporated into the models, new and more accurate reference points will be the result.

But regardless of whether the spawning stock biomass is fully rebuilt by 2029, it is likely to decline in the early 2030s as the poor spawning years leave their mark on the population.  If fishing mortality can be constrained to or below 2024 levels, the decline may not be too bad, with spawning stock biomass not dropping too much below where it is today.

How long SSB will stay at that level is a very different question, and one that’s impossible to predict right now.

The last period of poor recruitment ran from 1975 through 1988, with a couple of just-about-average peaks along the way.  If that happened again, just like it did in the past, we wouldn’t see a material improvement until 2033, and few mature fish until 2040. 

But nothing requires the future to mirror the past.  It is possible that we’ll see a strong year class produced this year, that will enter the spawning stock biomass in significant numbers by 2032, with good year classes being regularly produced every few years thereafter.

That’s the best-case scenario.

But it’s also possible that the recent climate trends will become permanent, or even accelerate, so that cold winters and cool, wet springs occur less often—perhaps once a decade, if that.  If such favorable spawning conditions occur less often, the striped bass fishery that we knew and enjoyed through the early 2020s is likely to become a mere memory.  Instead, the fishery may more closely resemble what we’ve come to expect from weakfish—a boom-and-bust fishery that generally sees abundance too low to support significant commercial or recreational fisheries, interspersed with occasional periods when, thanks to particularly favorable conditions, a big year class is produced and provides far better fishing.  Should such a fishery become the new reality, the good news is that, with proper management, the striped bass’ longer lifespans should allow the boom years to last a little longer than they do in the weakfish fishery.

But it still wouldn’t be like any bass fishery that we’ve ever known before.

Thus, the striped bass, and striped bass fishermen, face a host of possible futures.  Some look a lot like the past.  Some look distressingly new.  With no way to be certain about what is to come, it makes sense to hope for the best while preparing for the worst, and adopt management measures that emphasize maintaining abundance and a spawning stock that includes the greatest possible variety of ages and sizes—exactly what the current plan envisions—in order to achieve the greatest possible resilience, and a stock able to overcome whatever challenges nature or man might throw in its path.