MARINE RECREATIONAL FISHERIES: IS "ACCESS" OVERRATED?

 

For the past decade or so, one of the big buzzwords in recreational fishery management has been “access.”

Thus, when the Cape Cod Charter Boat Association wrote to the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission in December 2023, requesting special regulations for charter and party boats that were more favorable than those that applied to everyone else, they argued that such special rules would provide

“the necessary conservation restrictions while enabling us to continue to provide access to the fishery for our customers.  [emphasis added]”

The Stellwagen Bank Charter Boat Association made similar comments, supporting

“mode management measures with separate slot limits for each mode type that recognizes that each mode type has its own goals, objectives and financial constraints that impacts ones access to the fishery…the for-hire fleet needs to operate a financially viable business as well as provide a mechanism for recreational anglers to be provided access to the fishery.  [emphasis added]”

In neither case, when asking for more "access," are the charter boat associations talking about their customers’ ability to merely fish for and actually catch striped bass.  No special regulations are required for that; the customers would be completely free to do so under the regulations applicable to all other anglers.  What the associations were really seeking were special regulations that allowed their customers to kill and take home striped bass that all other anglers would be required to release.

But if the Cape Cod folks said that they sought special management measures “enabling us to continue to kill more bass for our customers,” or the Stellwagen charter boats said that they sought “a mechanism for recreational anglers to be provided with more dead fish from the fishery,” it would sound kind of harsh and self-serving.  So they ask for more “access” instead, hoping that asking for more public “access” to a public resource would sound like the sort of motherhood and apple pie issue that no regulator would ever want to be against.

Similarly, out in California, the local chapter of the Coastal Conservation Association—a group one might think, judging from its name, would primarily be concerned with conservation issues, posts on its website that

“Our Mission Statement Is:  ‘Conserving The Resource and Anglers’ Access To It.’  Our Three Main Goals Are To Keep Our Fisheries Open With Pro-Fisheries Legislation And Preventing Arbitrary No-Fishing Zones, Building Artificial Reefs, And Increasing the Finfish Hatchery Program.  [emphasis added, capitalization in original]”

While the mission statement may give lip service to conservation issues, the chapter’s goals don’t speak to conservation at all, but rather seek to “Keep Our Fisheries Open With Pro-Fisheries Legislation,” presumably without regard to whether the condition of some fish stocks might justify closing some fisheries, at least for part of the year; to build artificial reefs that make it easier for anglers to find, catch, and take home fish; and to expand the state’s saltwater fish hatcheries, which serve no purpose other than to artificially mass-produce fish that anglers can then catch, kill, and take home.

So once again, we see an organization seeking to increase recreational landings, and doing so under the rhetoric of maintaining “access.”

A final example from the Gulf of Mexico saw the American Sportfishing Association—the recreational fishing tackle industry’s largest trade organization—organize a conference it called the Gulf Angler Focus Group, to discuss recreational red snapper management and other related issues.

At the time the meeting was held, recreational fishermen, primarily from the private boat sector, had been chronically exceeding the annual catch target, and often the entire recreational quota, for Gulf of Mexico red snapper, forcing federal fisheries managers to impose increasingly strict regulations.  Instead of taking responsibility for their actions, and admitting that they were exceeding the specifications put in place to protect the long-term health of the red snapper stock, the organized recreational fishing community struck out at federal fisheries managers.

Thus, Kellie Ralston, then the Florida Fishing Policy Director for the trade association, stated that

“The Gulf Angler Focus Group presents a more unified recreational fishing community that will result in clear management recommendations to ensure healthy red snapper and reef fish stocks while providing equitable and reasonable public access...

“In recent years, decreasing recreational fishing opportunities for Gulf red snapper have caused the recreational fishing community to become increasingly frustrated with federal management of the fishery.  The Gulf Angler Focus Group consists of representatives of angler organizations, unaffiliated private anglers, for-hire operators and recreational fishing industry members.  In consultation with all five state fisheries managers from the Gulf region, the Focus Group is developing a package of consensus management recommendations by the recreational sector for reasonable access and sustainable harvest of Gulf reef fish, with an emphasis on the red snapper fishery.   [emphasis added]”

One might argue that, if the recreational sector was already exceeding its annual catch target, and often its annual catch limit/recreational quota, on a regular basis it already had “reasonable access” to the resource, but that misses the point that the word “access,” when used by “anglers’ rights” organizations and many recreational industry groups, has become a gentle euphemism for killing more fish, whatever the species in question.

One might also note that, while the American Sportfishing Association might talk about “present[ing] a more unified recreational fishing community, such unity was only achieved by inviting only those members of the recreational fishing community who agree with the ASA’s goals and objectives for the red snapper fishery.

But lately, some members of the Gulf’s recreational fishing community, who never made the American Sportfishing Association’s A-list of compliant invitees, are beginning to speak out on red snapper management, and opining that the steady expansion of “access” has probably gone too far.

Such concerns were expressed in an opinion piece that appeared in the June 23 edition of The Destin [FL] Log, titled “Red snapper:  The need to balance access with healthy fishery.”

Written by Capt. Jim Green, the son and grandson of for-hire vessel operators and himself the operator of a 90-foot party boat docked on Florida’s Gulf Coast, the piece notes that

“a lot of the fishermen and women, including myself, feel there are issues with the [Gulf red snapper] stock.  The data—both federal and Gulf states—backs this up.

“For a few years, reports of ‘localized depletion’ have come from all over the Gulf.  At what point can we just call it what it is:  depletion?  All of us want longer seasons, but we want them because of a healthy stock.  The truth is, we’re catching smaller fish more frequently, and more of those fish must be discarded due to size restrictions.  These discards often don’t survive, contributing to mortality—further weakening the stock.

“Once the state recreational and for-hire seasons got over 70 days we started seeing the stock struggle to replenish itself.  Over the last three years the average size fish has decreased, reducing the abundance of large breeding fish, which is the cornerstone of a resilient fish stock.

“As we begin to see the stock decline it creates a chain reaction.  As the older age classes of fish are removed from the stock, it starts to affect the stock’s ability to replenish itself.  A 3-pound fish will provide around 2.5 million eggs, a 7-pound fish almost 50 million, and a 16-pound fish around 125 million eggs per year.

“Longer seasons give opportunity for bigger breeding fish to be harvested, crippling the ability to replenish.  Mature fish produce higher quality eggs, providing greater opportunity to provide a healthier fishery.

“Without enough of these fish, we lose the quality of the next generation.  It’s the reason we need management practices that build resilient stocks with quality access instead of just managing for access alone.”

I’ve written about the situation before, because there seems to be real evidence that the state management measures that have been integrated into the federal recreational red snapper management process have not been the panacea that many recreational spokesmen suggest.  Instead, there is a real possibility—very likely a probability—that the extension of the recreational fishing season, and the increased recreational landings that resulted, have had a negative impact on the Gulf’s red snapper stock.

We’ll know for certain in about a year, when SEDAR 98, a new assessment of the Gulf’s red snapper stock, is released.

In the meantime, the angling industry and various allied organizations are seeking greater “access” to other fish stocks.  I’ve already written about how Michael Waine, another spokesman for the American Sportfishing Association, has questioned efforts to rebuild the striped bass stock, which remains overfished and, since 2019, has experienced recruitment failure in its most important spawning area, saying

“where we, where we’re currently focused is where do we go from here?  We want to avoid the scenario like southern flounder and a scenario like red snapper [where recreational seasons are either very short or fully closed].  We want to make sure…that management is aware of the headwinds but also allows for access for anglers to go out and catch a fish, and so how do we balance these values?  How do we balance building back a population to a conservation level that we can all agree on, which we never likely will, with fishing access, with the ability to actually go out and catch these fish, and what worries me, worries me specifically, is like we’ll go too far, meaning we’ll actually tell people to stop fishing for striped bass…”

Because, of course, when a stock remains overfished, and abundance is falling because the last six years saw the worst spawning success of any six-year period dating back to 1958 or so, when managers first began keeping records, the most important thing is to preserve angler “access” to the dwindling resource.  

And let’s be clear about one other thing:  Although Waine links “access” to anglers’ “ability to actually go out and catch these fish,” it’s not mere “catch” that he’s concerned with, because it’s difficult to imagine a situation where managers decide to completely shut down the entire striped bass fishery, including the catch-and-release component, for the course of the year.

That didn’t even happen back in the early 1980s, when the bass stock collapsed; although a number of states did voluntarily shut down their fisheries for one or more years, a coastwide moratorium was never imposed.

But when Waine says “go out and catch a fish,” what he really means is “go out and kill a fish” for, as a spokesman for the tackle industry’s trade association, he can’t support regulations that might impair sales.

If you want to keep sales strong, “access” to even overfished stocks is important.

But perhaps the most confounding stock, from both a management and “access” standpoint, may be the northern stock of black sea bass, which ranges from New England south to Cape Hatteras, North Carolina.

In many ways, black sea bass may be the red snapper of the Northeast, although it’s a somewhat imperfect comparison.  Both are structure-oriented bottom fish that aren’t particularly difficult to catch once you find them, anglers value them both as food fish, and both are important targets for the charter and party boat fisheries.

But, where red snapper numbers might be declining, black sea bass spawning stock biomass has been increasing steadily for about the past fifteen years, reaching 30,896 metric tons—and, at 284 percent of the biomass target, the highest SSB every recorded—in 2024.  

Because of that abundance, the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council, in conjunction with the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, adopted a new approach to recreational black sea bass management that allowed anglers’ landings to exceed the recreational sector’s annual catch limit—and might even allow combined recreational and commercial landings to exceed the overall annual catch limit—with impunity.  One of the stated motivations for pursuing such approach was to

“Accessability aligned with availability/stock status.”

Yet, like red snapper, anglers’ observations—not only my own and those of people I know here on Long Island, but also folks I’ve been in contact with in Massachusetts and Rhode Island—suggest that most of the large sea bass have been removed from the stock.  While that hasn’t yety impacted recruitment-- recruitment of Year 1 fish was 55.1 million and 60.5 million fish in 2022 and 2023, respectively, compared to an annual median recruitment of about 33 million--it could well be leaving us with a large population of fish composed of relatively few year classes. 

A population structured that way can be vulnerable to a situation where a substantial harvest removes most of the older fish from the population at the same time that, for whatever reason, recruitment declines to below-average levels and remains low for a while.  

With the older fish gone and few young fish entering the population, those left in the middle can be squeezed pretty hard.

And it’s just possible that we’re entering a period when conditions won’t support strong black sea bass recruitment.

That’s because black sea bass recruitment success largely depends on the conditions that the Year 0 fish encounter during their first winter near the edge of the continental shelf.  Warmer, more saline water generally leads to strong year classes, while cooler, fresher water tends to keep recruitment low.  And a publication recently released by the National Marine Fisheries Service, “2025 State of the Ecosystem, New England,” informs us that

“Late 2023 and early 2024 observations indicate movement of cooler and fresher water into the Northwest Atlantic, although there are seasonal and local exceptions to this pattern.  Anomalously cold and low salinity conditions were recorded throughout the Northwest Shelf and were widespread across the Slope Sea for much of the year.  These cooler and fresher conditions are linked to the southward movement of the eastern portion of the Gulf Stream and possibly an increased influx of Labrador Slope and Scotian Shelf water into the system…

“Colder, fresher water detected deep in the Jordan Basin [of the Gulf of Maine] for the first half of 2024 suggests an influx of Labrador Slope and Scotian Shelf water, which resulted in colder and fresher conditions throughout the Northwest Atlantic and contributed to the increased size and colder temperatures of the Mid-Atlantic Cold Pool.”

A NMFS press release related to that publication noted that

“A companion longer-term outlook, also developed by NOAA scientists, suggests that more frequent inflows of cooler deep water may continue to temper warming in the basin for the next several years.”

If those observations are accurate, it doesn’t bode well for black sea bass recruitment over the next several years.  2024 recruitment seems to support the notion that recruitment conditions have deteriorated since, after two consecutive years of very high recruitment, 2024 saw recruitment fall to 27.8 million fish, much less than half of what it was the year before, and below the long-term average.  Of course, one year doesn’t constitute a pattern, and it is entirely possible that 2024 recruitment was an anomaly, and that 2025 will see a significant increase.

Yet it is also very possible that 2024 saw the stock’s expected response to the first year of unfavorable recruitment conditions, and that such below-average recruitment will become the norm until warmer, more saline water returns to those parts of the continental shelf where young black sea bass spend their first winter.

Thus, in the case of black sea bass, as in the case of Gulf red snapper, Atlantic striped bass, and more than a few other species, it may be time for fisheries managers to spend less time worrying about angler access, and more time trying to maintain the long-term health and abundance of important fish stocks.  For in the end, if the fish are abundant, there will be sufficient access for all.