FORSAKING THE FUTURE OF NEW ENGLAND LOBSTER--PART I

 

Two decades ago, the future of the Southern New England lobster stock, which ranges from Cape Cod south to Virginia or so, began to look bleak. As early as 2006, a stock assessment noted that “stock abundance is relatively low compared to the 20-year time series and fishing mortality is relatively high; further restrictions are warranted. The [stock assessment] Panel believes the declining trend in population abundance is well established and warrants a reduction in fishing mortality.”

The stock assessment went on to advise that “The Panel recognizes that it would only take a sequence of two to three years of poor recruitment to collapse any component of the lobster resource, and the appearance of extremely low recruitment in recent times in some areas is a cause for concern if not alarm.”

Lobster fishermen did not embrace the stock assessment’s recommendations. Instead of acknowledging the need to reduce landings, the fishermen sought to blame the decline in lobster numbers on natural mortality rather than fishing. A 2006 report from the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s (ASMFC) American Lobster Advisory Panel (Advisory Panel) noted that Advisory Panel members were “concerned that the stock assessment did not take into account the increases in natural mortality…[Advisory Panel] members were also concerned that the assessment does not take into account predation of lobsters by striped bass, cod, and dogfish…”

In time, a pattern emerged. Stock assessments would make ominous warnings. Fishermen would ignore them.

In 2009, a benchmark stock assessment advised that “Current abundance of the [Southern New England] stock is the lowest observed since the 1980s…Recruitment has remained low in [Southern New England] since 1998. Given current low levels of spawning stock biomass and poor recruitment further restrictions are warranted.” Shortly thereafter, the ASMFC’s American Lobster Technical Committee (Technical Committee) opined that the Southern New England stock “will need a rebuilding strategy to attempt to regain its former recruitment productivity.”

In 2010, the Technical Committee went a step further, issuing a report titled, “Recruitment Failure in The Southern New England Lobster Stock,” which asserted that the stock was “critically depleted” and “experiencing recruitment failure,” and that “it is this recruitment failure in the [the Southern New England stock] that is preventing the stock from rebuilding.”

The report suggested “that the distribution of spawning females has shifted away from inshore [Southern New England stock] areas into deeper water in recent years. This shift may impact larval supply to inshore nursery grounds.” It cited a warming ocean as the primary reason for the shift of females to deeper waters, and noted that “continued fishing pressure reduces the stock’s potential to rebuild, even though overfishing is currently not occurring.” Because the problem was so severe, the Technical Committee recommended that a 5-year moratorium be imposed on the Southern New England lobster fishery.

In doing so, it acknowledged “the severity of this recommendation and understands the catastrophic effects on the fishery participants, support industries, and coastal communities.” But it also stated that “This recommendation provides the maximum likelihood to rebuild the stock in the foreseeable future to an abundance level that can support a sustainable long-term fishery.”

As one might expect, the lobster fishermen rejected the findings of the Technical Committee’s report.

At the May 2010 meeting of the ASMFC’s American Lobster Management Board (Management Board), William McElroy, a lobster fisherman from Rhode Island, argued that “if you chose a five-year fishery moratorium to keep the fishery from collapsing, you’ve kind of jumped the shark and guaranteed that the fishery collapses without ever giving the opportunity to collapse, because there would be no fishery left after five years. There would be no infrastructure.”

The Management Board, wanting to fully explore the issue, called a special meeting for July 2010, where Joseph Horvath, a lobster fisherman from New Jersey, challenged the Technical Committee’s findings, arguing that “I don’t know how we all got painted into this picture of doom and gloom…I’ve been fishing for 40 years…I don’t see any crash of any fishery. We’re doing well. We had a good recruitment…Our lobsters that we catch, we’re doing fine. We have plenty of recruitment…”

Steven Smith, a Rhode Island lobster fisherman, also disagreed with the Technical Committee, saying “The area I’m fishing right now, there is a large recruitment of lobsters,” while Connecticut lobster fisherman Bart Mansey asserted that “What we have now, there is no disaster. The board is making a disaster…We’re witnessing and catch more lobsters…We’re actually catching more and seeing more lobsters.”

In response to such sentiments, the Management Board delayed taking any action that would reduce landings of Southern New England lobster, much less impose a moratorium on the fishery. In the end, rather than place any cap on lobster harvest, the Management Board decided to try to reduce fishing effort enough to achieve a 10 percent reduction in landings. By that time, the Technical Committee’s recommended moratorium had long been forgotten.

The most recent stock assessment found that nothing had changed, advising that “The [Southern New England] stock is in poor condition…The assessment recommends significant management action to provide the best chance of stabilizing or improving abundance and reproductive capacity of the [Southern New England] stock.”

Whether such action will ever be taken remains to be seen for, even though management inaction may have doomed the Southern New England lobster stock, there is no assurance that fishery managers will change their ways and finally act to address a lobster stock collapse, whether it occurs in southern New England or elsewhere along the coast.

-----

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/

PROBLEMS WITH PLANKTON

 

When people consider the things that can threaten our fisheries, they typically think of the obvious problems, like overfishing, predation, habitat loss, or a decline in forage.

Sometimes, they also consider the sort of things that don’t necessarily lead to population declines, but can make fishing harder or move fish elsewhere, like warming waters.

But more and more, as scientists look at the problems besetting various fisheries, they realize that the issues often lie at the very base of things, that is, with the tiny plants and animals, the plankton that lie at the very bottom of the food web, and hold the whole thing together.

And it seems that plankton has been becoming more and more problematic in the last decade or so.

A recent article in the New York Times noted that the distribution of phytoplankton, the single-celled plants that convert sunlight into the makings of life, has changed in recent years.  Satellite surveys of plankton abundance have found that there is less phytoplankton in the open ocean than there used to be, but more close to shore, particularly in more northerly regions, where a warming ocean seems to be creating conditions that favor plankton growth.

The increase in inshore phytoplankton has certainly been apparent in my local waters south of Long Island, New York, particularly to those of us who fish for tuna, shark, and other pelagic fishes.  Fishing for such big fish of the open sea is often called “blue water fishing,” because once one gets away from the shoreline—a distance that, depending on place and time, might be anywhere from a mile to 30 miles or so off the beach—the greenish, nutrient-laden inshore waters give way to blue water so clear that we could sometimes see the outlines of a hooked fish when it was still 50 or 60 feet beneath the boat.

I recall drifting near the Yankee wreck, in 20 fathoms of water, on an early September day, and watching a mako come in to a bait that was drifting at least 40 feet under the surface, and seeing it all as clearly as I might have watched someone swim beneath the surface of a backyard swimming pool.  Although green water sometimes extended farther from shore, it was unusual not to have blue water by the time a boat crossed the 30-fathom line.

Today, that’s no longer the case.  Often, these days, when I fish for sharks in 20 or 25 fathoms south of Long Island, I’ll have an angler fight a fish up to the boat, and we’re still not able to see it when my gloved hands get their first grip on the 15-foot wire leader that’s attached to the hook.  Last July, I was 40 miles from the inlet and still fishing in murk, finding bluefish instead of the bluefin tuna that I was seeking.

The green, plankton-filled water has certainly had a negative impact on fishing for billfish and the various tunas, fish which, as sight feeders, generally need clear blue water to locate and run down their prey.  Although there are still quite a few tuna around, we’re running ever farther, trying to find that blue water that holds them.

But in those cases, phytoplankton are merely an inconvenience that makes fish harder to find.  In other cases, they become a real risk to the health of both people and fish stocks.  Off the southwest Florida coast, so-called “red tides—blooms of harmful phytoplankton—are a regular enough occurrence that the state maintains a web page advising people of “Red Tide Current Status,” which advises viewers of where fish kills take place, and also notes that

“Respiratory irritation suspected to be related to red tide was reported over the past week in Southwest Florida (Pinellas, Manatee and Sarasota counties,”

which is probably not the news that tourists want to see as they plan their winter vacations.  Still, the Visit Florida website dutifully informs potential visitors that

“A red tide is a higher-than-normal concentration of a microscopic alga (plant-like organism).  In Florida, the organism that causes most red tides is Karenia brevis (K. brevis).  This organism produces a toxin that can affect the central nervous system of fish.  At high concentrations (called a bloom), the organisms may discolor the water a red or brown hue.  The water can even remain its normal color during a bloom…

“Some people may experience respiratory irritation (coughing, sneezing, and tearing) when the red tide organism is present along a coast and winds blow aerosolized toxins ashore…

“If you experience respiratory irritation, wear a mask, such as a painter’s mask, that covers the nose and mouth to filter out marine aerosol particles that carry the red tide toxins…Always seek medical care if your symptoms worsen.  For your home or motel room, keep your windows closed, the A/C on and check/change the unit’s filter.”

That might not sound like an enjoyable vacation, but things are even worse for the fish, which live in the region year-round without the benefits of windows or air conditioning that might combat at least a fraction of the red tide toxins.  And things aren’t likely to get better at any time soon.  A 2022 article in Inside Climate News noted that

“A task force organized by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to address the state’s algal bloom crisis concluded in a recent report that ‘without hard work and careful planning’ adverse human health impacts and widespread wildlife mortality would most likely ‘worsen’ because of climate change and the state’s growing population.”

While phytoplankton can have undesirable impacts when it becomes too abundant, zooplankton can have negative impacts on wildlife when it becomes too scarce, or when its abundance shifts to a time when it is no longer available to the creatures that need it.

I first learned of that problem a decade ago, when a paper titled “Slow adaptation in the face of rapid warming leads to collapse of the Gulf of Maine cod fishery” appeared in the journal Science.  The thrust of the paper was that as waters warmed in the Gulf of Maine, the number of cod reaching maturity declined.  The researchers raised the possibility that the increasing water temperatures have led to a decline in the abundance of zooplankton that larval cod depend on for food.

One important element of the missing Gulf of Maine zooplankton seems to be a copepod—a type of tiny crustacean—known as Calanus finmarchicus.  The New York Times reported that

“Calanus hibernate through winter, hiding from predators in the dim light of deeper waters…

“Dr. [David] Fields [a zooplankton ecologist] calls the layer of sleeping Calanus the ocean’s fat layer, a valuable resource for other life.  ‘That’s the whole reason the Gulf of Maine runs the way it does, because of that beautiful fat layer,’ he said.”

The Times also noted that

“specimens [of Calanus finmarchicus] had big oil sacs, full of the calorie-rich lipids that fish and right whales seek out.  In experimental studies, Dr. Fields and his colleagues have found that as the temperature rises, Calanus get smaller and have less fat relative to their body size.”

The decline of Calanus copepods in the Gulf of Maine may also be having a negative impact on the Gulf of Maine stock of American lobster.  While adult lobster remain abundant in the region, since 2012, biologists have noted a marked decline in the numbers of younger individuals.  In particular, they have been noting a dearth of lobster at the stage where they cease being free-floating larvae and settle on the ocean floor.

Some biologists suspect that a shortage of Calanus finmarchicus is again at the root of the problem. 

Historically, Gulf of Maine lobster began hatching in early June, with the peak of the hatch occurring a month or so later.  A new generation of Calanus finmarchicus appeared in April and were abundant into early fall.  The timing was perfect for the young-of-the-year lobster, which could feed on the copepods until the lobsters were ready to settle to the bottom of the sea.  

But warming waters have changed the timing of both events.  Now, the lobster are hatching earlier, while the copepods are spawning at the same time, but the copepod population’s annual decline begins much sooner, so that, but the time the young lobsters need them, there are about 70 percent fewer copepods available than there were three decades ago.  Lacking their once-reliable food source, fewer larval lobsters are surviving to settle on the bottom, a result that can only lead to fewer adult lobster in the not-too-distant future.

And such problems aren’t limited to the Gulf of Maine. 

In Maryland, striped bass have experienced their sixth consecutive year of poor reproduction.  While biologists have, for a while, associated poor striped bass spawns with unfavorable environmental conditions, the availability of food, in the form of zooplankton, is now believed to play an important role. 

The Maryland Department of Natural Resources has noted that

“One theory for low spawning success is known as the ‘mismatch hypothesis.’ This suggests that the food source—blooms of cold-water zooplankton—are not matching up with the first time larval striped bass need to eat, as winter temperatures in the Chesapeake increase.  If the zooplankton blooms don’t align with the first-feeding larvae, feeding success is too low for good survival.”

To make things a little more complicated, it’s not clear that any sort of zooplankton will do.  A biologist who has decades of experience working with Maryland striped bass recently stated that one of his former colleagues believed that, of all the zooplankton present in the Chesapeake Bay, the juvenile striped bass focused their feeding on only two or three species.  It’s not clear that the fish would shift their focus if the preferred species were not available.

So yes, to perpetuate a cliché, small things can sometimes make a big difference.  And the presence or absence of plankton—among the smallest forms of life in the sea—can have a very big impact on the health of marine resources all along the coast.

 

 

 

 

 

 

CONSIDERING THE FUTURE OF FEDERAL FISHERIES MANAGEMENT

 

On February 28, the National Marine Fisheries Service closed two bluefin tuna fisheries, the Angling Category Southern Area Trophy Fishery, which targets bluefin larger than 73 inches curved fork length in the waters between central New Jersey and the southeast coast of Florida, and the General Category commercial fishery which targets the same sized fish.  The latter fishery will reopen on June 1.

The reason for the closure is the high volume of large medium and giant bluefin tuna landings occurring this winter off the coast of North Carolina.

Normally, except for the unusually high volume of landings that led to such action, the closure would have been deemed unremarkable.  NMFS routinely closes bluefin tuna fisheries when regional and/or category closures are exceeded.  But this year’s bluefin closure was being watched very carefully, because it was an early test of how NMFS might react in a new presidential administration that is notably hostile to regulatory agencies, and makes no secret of its intent to limit regulatory actions.  

Over the past week, I was in contact with a number of people from both the recreational fishing industry and the conservation community, who were reaching out, asking for my views on the bluefin tuna situation that was unfolding in North Carolina, and whether I thought that NMFS would be able to close the relevant fisheries or whether, as a result of administration policy, would allow the overfishing to continue.

The good news is that NMFS did its job and acted to conserve the bluefin resource, which provides some hope that it will be able to continue to manage other fish stocks in the future.  But how well it will be able to manage U.S. fisheries remains unknown.  Some bad signs have already emerged.

Probably the most worrisome are the cuts already made to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration staff (NOAA is NMFS' parent agency) and the additional cuts that are likely to come.  NOAA has already laid off 880 people, about five percent of its staff, and while most of the news of the layoffs has focused on jobs related to weather forecasting and climate change, many fisheries scientists were also affected.  Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA) opined that such cuts

“jeopardize our ability to forecast and respond to extreme weather events like hurricanes, wildfires, and floods—putting communities in harm’s way.  They also threaten our maritime commerce and endanger 1.7 million jobs that depend on commercial, recreational, and tribal fisheries, including thousands in the State of Washington.  This action is a direct threat to our economy, because NOAA’s specialized workforce provides products and services that support more than a third of the nation’s GDP.”

According to a recent article in Newsweek, the nation’s commercial and recreational fisheries generate $300 billion each year in sales and value-added activity.  Janet Coit, who headed NMFS during the Biden administration, told Newsweek that she believed

“if the NOAA personnel were cut, you would see a cascading set of negative impacts.  While fishermen complain about regulation, as do many businesses, they also know that the regulation is what maintains the resource in the long term.”

Aside from personnel cuts, the House of Representatives’ Appropriations Committee has approved a 2025 funding bill that reduces NMFS Science and Management budget from $710 million to $637 million, while also reducing the agency’s Enforcement budget from $82 million to $68 million. 

While there’s little doubt that some fishermen would celebrate the opportunities for short-term profits that would accrue if NMFS regulators and enforcement agents were less able to do their jobs, there is also little doubt that, without the basic scientific work that NMFS does every day—the fisheries-independent and fisheries-dependent surveys, the updated stock assessments, the expanding knowledge of basic fish biology and how fish respond to oceanographic conditions, including a warming ocean—the long-term outlook for healthy and profitable fisheries would be poor.

For just one example of the problems cuts in NMFS’ funding and staffing could cause, consider Framework 17 to the Summer Flounder, Scup, and Black Sea Bass Fishery Management Plan, also known as the Recreational Harvest Control Rule Framework.  Framework 17 sets out the procedure used to determine the annual recreational landings target for the three named species, which employs a matrix that requires managers to know how the current spawning stock biomass of each species relates to that species spawning stock biomass target, and also requires managers to determine whether recreational landings for the upcoming year are likely to equal, exceed, or fall short of the recreational harvest limit, which limit also considers, among other things, the spawning stock biomass of the relevant stock.

Framework 17 is based on the assumption that the stock assessment for each managed species will be updated every two years.  Such stock assessment provides managers with an estimate of the maximum sustainable yield that can be produced by each managed stock, the spawning stock biomass needed to achieve maximum sustainable yield (the “biomass target”), and how current spawning stock biomass compares to the biomass target.  In order to perform the calculations required by Framework 17, managers also need to know what recreational fishermen’s landings were in previous years, in order to predict what they are likely to be in the future if management measures remain unchanged; the relationship between past and projected future landings determines whether any regulatory changes are needed to either further conserve the stock or to provide more harvest opportunities to recreational fishermen.

Performing the stock assessments, and collecting and collating the recreational landings data, is a labor-intensive effort, yet it is necessary for Framework 17 to work.  If any of the necessary data are unavailable, recreational landings targets for future years cannot be set.  We already saw this happen in 2023, when demands on NMFS’ scientific staff led to a delay in the completion of a research-track black sea bass stock assessment, and resulted in the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council being unable to calculate recreational black sea bass management measures for the 2024 season.

Reductions in NMFS’ scientific staff will virtually assure that managers will lack needed data in the future, and that whatever data is provided will often arrive well behind schedule.

Of course, there will be those, particularly in the recreational fishing community, who are probably looking forward to the federal fisheries management program being crippled.  A group of recreational fishing industry organizations, gathered under the umbrella of the Center for Sportfishing Policy, has long been trying to move the management of certain species, most particularly red snapper, away from federal managers obliged to adhere to the requirements of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, and into the control of state fishery managers, who are not governed by Magnuson-Stevens, and are often more vulnerable to political pressure exerted by special interest groups than is NMFS.

The current efforts to depopulate and defund NMFS plays into the hands of such organizations.  It is easy to imagine them proposing—because they’ve already tried—that that NMFS surrender its role in gathering recreational catch, landings, and effort data, in favor of state data programs that may not be as statistically rigorous as NMFS’ Marine Recreational Information Program, chronically undercount anglers’ landings, and so allow larger harvests to occur.  It’s equally easy to imagine—because they’ve already tried this, too—that such organizations will attempt to convince NMFS to hand management authority of recreationally important species over to state agencies unburdened by Magnuson-Stevens, which may allow overfishing to occur, and need not rebuild overfished stocks if there is political incentive to refrain from acting.

And given that angling industry groups such as the Center for Sportfishing Policy, American Sportfishing Association, and Coastal Conservation Association are already fawning over the newly appointed Secretary of Commerce, Howard Lutnick, it is easy to imagine that such conversations may have already begun,.

Still, if the current administration cripples NMFS ability to properly manage fish stocks, it’s not unreasonable to look to the states, and to the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, to provide a backstop, at least with respect to those species that support state-waters fisheries.

But even there, reductions in funding and agency actions can do real harm. 

The ASMFC, for example, receives funding from multiple sources, including payments made directly by the member states.  However, a substantial majority of its funding comes from either NMFS grants or from Congress, and can be badly hurt, and unable to fill in for lost federal management assets, if its federal funds are cut back.

Coastal states also run Sea Grant programs through various state universities, which conduct fisheries research and act as resources for the recreational and commercial fishing industries.  Those programs are heavily reliant on federal grants.  And just last Friday, one of those state programs, Maine Sea Grant, received a letter from NOAA that

“It has been determined that the program activities proposed to be carried out in Year 2 of the Maine Sea Grant Omnibus Award are no longer relevant to the focus of the Administration’s priorities and program objectives.”

As a result, Maine Sea Grant will lose about $1.5 million in financing this year, and about $4.5 million that it had expected to receive through January 2028.

Including Maine, 34 states maintain Sea Grant programs, and so far, as far as we know, none of the others have received similar notices.  So, it isn’t yet clear whether the letter received by Maine was merely the first shot in a campaign to defund Sea Grant—in which case an important source of research and fishing industry support will be lost—or whether Maine's defunding was merely done in a fit of pique after Maine’s governor, Janet Mills, refused to kiss the president’s ring at a meeting of governors that took place at the White House a week before.

But right now, the Sea Grant programs have to be considered at risk.

And things aren’t much better at the international level.

There are rumors going around that the administration is considering pulling the U.S. out of ICCAT, the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas.  While that rumor has not been confirmed, should it prove to be true, it would remove the United States, historically one of the most prominent supporters of highly migratory species conservation, from the international arena, and probably encourage some of the remaining ICCAT members to oppose needed management measures.

Regardless of whether the United States remains an ICCAT member, right now, there is a gag order in effect that prohibits NMFS staff from communicating with their counterparts in other nations, a situation which is hampering international management and law enforcement efforts.

The National Fisherman, a publication serving the commercial fishing community, noted that

“NOAA plays a key role in enforcing global treaties, tackling illegal fishing, and managing migratory species like tuna and swordfish.  Limiting international cooperation could weaken enforcement efforts and disrupt global suppy chains.”

Thus, the future of federal fisheries management is not at all clear.  The current administration seems to be more than willing to undercut fisheries science and law enforcement, while Congress—or, at least, the House of Representatives—appears unwilling to appropriate the funds needed for NMFS to perform its myriad enforcement, conservation, and management functions.  The efforts to hamper NMFS’ operations aren’t limited to the agency itself, but threaten its state, regional, and international partners’ efforts as well.

It is not at all certain that either NOAA or NMFS will survive the next four years and, even if they survive, whether they will bear any resemblance to what those agencies have been in the past, or whether they will merely be gutted shells unable to carry out their intended missions.  And should the latter be the case, there is no knowing when, or if, they will ever be restored to their former capabilities.

It is very possible that, when 2029 dawns, fisheries will find themselves where they were thirty years and more ago, before the Sustainable Fisheries Act was passed, when New Englandtrawlers stayed tied to their docks because there were too few groundfish to make fishing worthwhile, and summer flounder had become so scarce that not onlyanglers, but even NMFS’ survey vessels, had difficulty finding adults more thanthree years old.

Should that be the case, and three decades of progress is lost, we will learn in four years whether Congress might still care enough to begin the long process of rebuilding our fisheries all over again, or whether it will move on, leaving the nation’s marine resources just another casualty of an ill-conceived policy and an administration more interested in tearing down what others have built than in creating anything new that might achieve lasting worth.