COURT FINDS THAT NORTH CAROLINA FISHERIES MANAGERS VIOLATED THE PUBLIC TRUST

 

On August 17, 2026, a Superior Court judge in Wake County, North Carolina found that, in managing its marine fisheries, North Carolina “has failed to meet its ‘obligation to manage and protect fisheries for the benefit of the general public’ as required under the public trust doctrine, failed to ‘keep fisheries safe from injury, harm, or destruction for all time’ as required under [the North Carolina state constitution], and failed to ‘protect the harvestable fish population for the benefit of all its citizenry’ as [also] required under [the state constitution].”

The decision was handed down in the matter of Coastal Conservation Association v. State of North Carolina, a lawsuit filed in 2020, but not heard until early 2026. Since the suit began, North Carolina has filed various motions seeking to keep the matter from going to trial, and has taken appeals to a higher court when its motions were denied. However, all of the state’s efforts to defeat the plaintiffs on procedural grounds failed, and in January 2026, the trial finally began.

The initial phase of the trial lasted for five weeks, and involved extensive testimony from expert witnesses, state officials, and recreational fishermen. Its sole purpose was to determine whether the state was liable to the public for its failures to maintain healthy stocks of marine fish.

The court decided that it was.

In reaching its decision, the court made over 300 findings of fact, including findings that

Most North Carolina citizens who are shore-based anglers have limited boat access or no boat access, and for that reason, they have historically depended on certain readily accessible, mostly estuarine finfish species. Those species include Atlantic croaker, blue crab, Eastern oyster, flounder of various species, hard clam, kingfishes (sea mullet), red drum, river herring, spot, spotted seatrout, striped bass, and weakfish…

In the 1960s and 1970s, sought-after fish like spot, Atlantic croaker, weakfish, and flounder were highly abundant. Recreational anglers with little experience could harvest dozens of weakfish in a single day on the Pamlico Sound, stock their freezers on vacation trips, catch flounder from docks along the banks of the sound, and harvest enough Atlantic croaker for neighborhood fish fries.

In the 1970s, however, commercial finfish landings increased dramatically. Between 1972 and 1981 alone, commercial finfish landings increased from 40 million pounds to over 90 million pounds…

Commercial finfish landings then began a precipitous decline in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Today, they are half what they were in the early 1970s. [citations omitted]

Those findings are of critical importance, as they go to the heart of the case—the argument that North Carolina has an obligation to manage marine fish stocks for the benefit of the general public, and the argument that a provision of the North Carolina state constitution, adopted in 2018, granted individuals a constitutionally-guaranteed right to hunt, fish, and harvest wildlife.

In 2022, the North Carolina Court of Appeals upheld the trial court’s ruling against the state’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit. The appellate court’s decision said, in part, that “the State contends that the language of this [constitutional] provision places no affirmative constitutional mandate on the State to preserve the right of the people to hunt, fish, and harvest wildlife for the public good. We disagree.”

Instead, the court found that the right to harvest fish would be meaningless unless the state managed fish stocks for long-term sustainability, saying “[T]he General Assembly, when drafting the proposed amendment, intended to create an affirmative duty on the State to preserve the right of the people to fish and harvest fish. However, the right to fish and harvest fish would be rendered meaningless without access to fish. Therefore, the State’s duty necessarily includes some concomitant duty to keep fisheries safe from injury, harm, or destruction for all time.”

While much of the court’s decision focused on the public trust and constitutional issues, it also found that the state failed to meet its statutory obligations to manage marine fish stocks pursuant to the Fisheries Reform Act, which was adopted by the North Carolina General Assembly in 1997, and requires that the state’s fisheries be managed for “long-term viability.”

The court decision notes that Katherine Rawls, the North Carolina Department of Marine Fisheries’ Fisheries Director, stated on the record that “long-term viability is the standard” for the state’s management of marine fisheries, and that long-term viability “means more than just sustainable harvest.” Other state witnesses supported her assertions, and none disagreed.

Experienced fisheries scientists, who served as expert witnesses, also supported Ms. Rawls’ statements.

The court found that, in 2017, North Carolina established a set of criteria for whether a fish stock was viable. “Those viability criteria required that a stock cannot be overfished, that overfishing of the stock cannot be occurring, and that the stock must exhibit the following: stable or increasing trends in average length and weight, stable catch per unit effort, stable spawning stock biomass, stable juvenile abundance indexes based on historical averages, stable age structure that includes representatives of the older age classes, and stable or declining trends in fishing mortality.”

The court also noted that when plaintiffs, during the course of pre-trial discovery, served an interrogatory on the state, asking which North Carolina-managed fish stocks exhibit long-term viability, the state proved evasive, only replying that it “makes no contention regarding whether any of the species listed exhibit long-term viability.”

However, Dr. Louis Daniel, who worked for the North Carolina Department of Marine Fisheries for 21 years, served as the state’s Marine Fisheries Director from 2007 to 2016, and appeared as an expert witness for the plaintiffs, testified that of the 13 stocks managed by North Carolina, five were overfished, one is experiencing overfishing, and the status of the other seven is unknown; thus none of them could be said to exhibit long-term viability under the criteria established in 2017. Dr. Daniel’s testimony then went a step further, when he said that after having the Fisheries Reform Act in place for nearly 30 years, “we haven’t got a success…and we haven’t rebuilt any stocks.”

For eight days of the five-week trial, plaintiffs experts testified as to how North Carolina’s marine fisheries management failed to achieve long-term viability for any species, failed to rebuild overfished stocks, failed to end overfishing, failed to get bycatch under control, and failed to provide adequate fisheries law enforcement. The court noted that North Carolina failed to rebut such expert testimony. Moreover, the court found that “In contrast, the State did not present any expert who testified as to the sufficiency of the State’s management at the system level (i.e., the agency level or commission level)…Instead, the State took an unusual approach: Rather than retain independent, qualified, outside experts in fisheries management, the State simply designated seven of its DMF employee fact witnesses as experts, then sought to elicit various expert conclusions from them about their employer.”

Given such an approach, it might not be surprising that the court found in plaintiffs’ favor. However, the state’s decision not to rebut the plaintiffs’ experts’ testimony with its own expert witnesses has elicited criticism from members of the commercial fishing community.

Although the plaintiffs’ core argument was that North Carolina failed to properly manage its marine fisheries, the focus of that argument was that the state failed to properly regulate its commercial, rather than its recreational, fisheries. Shrimp trawling within the Pamlico Sound, and what the plaintiffs considered underregulated gill net fisheries, along with the bycatch and dead discards such fisheries allegedly produce, were the targets of particular criticism.

Dr. Daniel, in a report provided by him as an expert witness, noted that North Carolina “allow[s] commercial gears that have been prohibited in other jurisdictions because of their extraordinarily high levels of bycatch,” singling out estuarine shrimp trawling and gillnets. That led the court to find, “That allowance has created a management problem virtually unique to North Carolina, making the State’s disregard of the high number of discards from those gears highly risk-prone and contrary to sound management principles.”

Commercial fishing interests thus felt targeted by the lawsuit, but without anyone to advocate for their interests in the matter. The North Carolina Fisheries Association (NCFA), the commercial industry’s primary trade organization, sought to intervene in the action as a defendant, but its motion to do so was denied by the court, making it impossible for the association to present witnesses or brief issues of concern to the state’s commercial fishermen.

The denial of that motion, coupled with North Carolina’s apparent unwillingness, or perhaps inability, to rebut the plaintiffs’ expert witnesses, left some commercial fishermen questioning the fairness of the process. One fisherman, posting on Facebook, complained that

the State appears to have mounted a defense so inadequate that the judge repeatedly describes important parts of CCA’s case as ‘unrebutted,’ ‘uncontested,’ or met with ‘no evidence to the contrary.’ Meanwhile, the commercial fishermen, seafood businesses and working waterfronts that may actually bear the consequences were not permitted to be parties defending their own interests…

And where was the serious defense of the other side? Where was the history of declining commercial effort, decades of increased regulations and gear improvements, natural boom-and-bust cycles, recreational mortality, habitat loss, water quality, development and environmental change? Where was the challenge to treating declining commercial landings as if they were simply a graph of declining fish abundance? …

Who actually defended North Carolina’s commercial fishermen and North Carolina seafood consumers who depend on them?

Fairness is always subjective, and the commercial fishermen’s perception of inequity doesn’t necessarily mean that anything unfair occurred, but people’s perceptions will undoubtedly affect how they approach the next steps of the process.

In this case, the next step is the “remedy” phase of the trial.

Now that the court has established liability, it has given the parties 45 days to prepare a report intended to help the court craft a remedy for the state’s failure to properly manage its fisheries. The plaintiffs are seeking a permanent injunction requiring North Carolina to take corrective actions to rebuild its fisheries and ensure their long-term viability. Restrictions, and possibly even a ban, on shrimp trawling in North Carolina’s estuaries, strict regulation of gill net fisheries, hard-poundage annual catch limits, and increased data collection requirements are all likely to be considered.

State officials are expected to ask the court to craft a compromise remedy that allows fish stocks to rebuild without threatening the livelihoods of commercial fishermen and radically reshaping the state’s commercial fishing industry. Although commercial fishing practices are targeted in the lawsuit, whatever remedy the court ultimately imposes will probably also have a significant impact on recreational fishermen, as it would be very difficult to rebuild depleted fish stocks unless additional restrictions are placed on both the commercial and recreational sectors.

So far, the state has not issued a formal response to the court’s decision, so it is not clear whether it will accept the finding of liability, or whether it will seek to have the Court of Appeals overturn the decision. However, if an appellate court upholds the trial court’s findings, or if the state chooses not to appeal, the decision in Coastal Conservation Association v. State of North Carolina is likely to have a profound impact on how North Carolina manages its marine fisheries.

The decision’s impacts outside of North Carolina aren’t as clear.

Coastal Conservation Association v. State of North Carolina probably represents the first time that a court anywhere in the nation has found that the public trust doctrine—the principle that the government holds certain natural resources in trust, maintaining and protecting them on behalf of the public as a whole—creates an affirmative duty for the state to maintain marine fish stocks at healthy and sustainable levels. While the decision isn’t binding on courts outside of North Carolina, it does constitute a persuasive precedent that courts in other states could choose to follow if they found its logic compelling.

If other states adopt similar interpretations of the public trust doctrine, it could usher in a new era of fisheries management, in which states could no longer ignore overfished stocks and chronic overfishing, but instead would be held responsible for the state of their marine fish populations.

At the same time, the court’s decision was very North Carolina-specific, as it was heavily reliant on a section of the state constitution which created a right to hunt, fish, and harvest wildlife, as well as on the language of North Carolina’s Fisheries Reform Act. While at least nine coastal states have, over the past twenty years, added language to their state constitutions that created a right to hunt, fish, and harvest wildlife, arguably making the decision’s constitutional basis relevant to those states as well, the Fisheries Reform Act is unique to North Carolina, rendering those sections of the decision that relate to that statute, including the long-term viability standard, unique to North Carolina as well.

Thus, the court’s finding that North Carolina is legally obligated to manage its marine fish stocks for the benefit of the general public is only an intermediate step in the campaign to improve the state’s saltwater fisheries management program.

Should the decision not be overturned on appeal, and should the court be willing to impose a remedy that will materially improve North Carolina’s approach to marine fisheries management, Coastal Conservation Association v. State of North Carolina will, at the least, lead to better fisheries management outcomes in a state with a long history and deep traditions of commercial and recreational fishing.

Should courts in other states follow the precedent set by the North Carolina court, then Coastal Conservation Association v. State of North Carolina may earn its place as a landmark decision that changed the course of saltwater fisheries management in multiple jurisdictions.

It is far too early to know what the final legacy of this lawsuit will be, but it is not too early to hope that Coastal Conservation Association v. State of North Carolina will go far to change the management status quo, not only in North Carolina, but on every coast of the United States.

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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/.

 

A BUNKER MENTALITY

 

The National Fisherman magazine recently reported that

“Chesapeake Bay menhaden fishing protesters in small craft continue to harass Ocean Harvesters boats and fishermen by circling in front of the firms’ [sic] steamers attempting to keep the boats from making sets.”

For those who still sometimes have trouble keeping all the players straight, Ocean Harvesters is the United States company that owns all of the big reduction fishery purse seiners operating on the East Coast (along with others operating in the Gulf of Mexico), and sells all of the fish that it catches to Omega Protein, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Canadian aquaculture and ocean products company Cooke, Inc.).

Monty Diehl, Ocean Harvesters’ chief executive officer complained that

“Over the past three years we have seen a few dozen of these recreational fishing boats racing to get in front of us and just circling so we either can’t get to where we want to go, or to try and block us from setting our nets…

“These go hand-in-hand with the threats we get on socia media and the coordinated effort to disrupt our operations.

“We have notified Virginia Marine Resources Commission (VMRC) on a few occasions when these things happen, but if we can’t get the registration number from the boat, then VMRC does not have anything to go on, and most of these interactions happen quickly, and after a few minutes these folks leave, probably realizing that VMRC may be coming out.”

That sort of behavior garnered significant public attention three years ago, when someone riding a jet ski—very possibly an angler or someone concerned with conservation issues in the Chesapeake Bay—engaged in targeted harassment against commercial menhaden vessels.  As described in The National Fisherman,

“As an Ocean Harvesters crew was making a set, the rider of the jet ski ran his boat between the two purse boats and was able to get inside the set and out before the set was completed…

“The jet skier rode inside the net, sprayed the crew with his wake, and yelled obscenities at them, according to an account by the Menhaden Fisheries Coalition…”

 It’s difficult to understand how anyone could consider such behavior even marginally acceptable.

People are free to dislike the menhaden reduction fishery.

They are free to try to have the fishery pushed out of the Chesapeake Bay, perhaps pushed out of Virginia waters, and maybe even legislated out of existence.  They are free to ask fishery managers to reduce the menhaden quota, place restrictions on when it may be landed, and/or allocate some or all of the reduction fleet quota, which is held solely by the Commonwealth of Virginia, to be reallocated to other states and to other sectors of the menhaden fishery.

But what people are not free to do is risk the safety, and perhaps even the lives, of menhaden fishermen by recklessly operating watercraft near their vessels, showering them with water, and trying to prevent them from pursuing what is, up to now, a completely legal fishery, cooperatively managed through the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission.

Virginia legislators recognized that truth after the jet ski incident, and passed legislation making knowingly and intentionally impeding commercial fishing activity, or impeding the commercial fishing activity of a commercial fishing vessel, a Class I misdemeanor, punishable by as much as 12 months in prison and/or a $2,500 fine.  The legislation had extremely broad support, passing by a vote of 99-0 in the House and 39-1 in the Senate.

Ocean Harvesters’ Diehl said that the legislation

“greatly reduced the number of incidents [of people harassing the company’s reduction boats] for that 2024 fishing season, but it started back up in 2025.”

Why?

It’s a given that the reduction fishery is disliked by both Virginia anglers and much of the conservation community in the Chesapeake Bay.  The boats are big, they’re easy to spot when they’re fishing, and they kill a lot of fish at one time.  Plus, over the years, the menhaden industry has sometimes acted with high-handed arrogance, such as it did back in 2019, when it ignored the ASMFC’s then-new 51,000 metric ton Bay Cap on reduction industry landings, and announced toward the end of that summer that it was going to exceed that limit in the Bay waters off Virginia, which had not yet put the Cap in place.

But there are a lot of fishing activities that aren’t particularly popular with anglers and various conservation groups.  Depending on where and when it’s going on, and what fish are affected, gill netting, pelagic longlining, bottom and midwater trawls, and even things like pinhooking striped bass have received their share of fairly vehement criticism, but you generally don’t see recreational fishermen aggressively harassing vessels engaged in such activity.

The menhaden reduction fishery, though, is different.  I can recall how it was more than 50 years ago, when I was still in my teens and growing up on western Long Island Sound, and the reduction boats were operating off the western Connecticut coast.  There was a special hostility directed at them that even the fishermen poaching striped bass for market— Connecticut was the first “gamefish” state on the coast—were spared.  Some particularly aggressive anglers went so far as to find cracked automobile engine blocks, and weld chains and grappling hooks to them, in the hope that when the “bunker boats” set their purse seines in the Sound’s shallow waters, they would reach all the way to the bottom, get snarled by the makeshift booby traps, and ruin the attempted sets and hopefully ruin the nets as well.

Since then, angler attitudes have only gotten worse.

I have to believe that the various menhaden advocacy groups are responsible for much of that, not only fanning the flames but perhaps also igniting them in an already highly combustible angling community.

That doesn’t mean that the advocates don’t make good points.

Menhaden are an important forage fish, preyed upon by other fish, marine mammals, and piscivorous birds.  When they are scarce or absent from a particular place, the ecosystem responds by placing greater demands on other forage species, by predators changing their behavior and, if some research is to be accepted at face value, by reduced reproductive success.

It is possible, although not yet proven, that intense local fishing activity can cause “localized depletion” of the menhaden population, perhaps particularly in the Chesapeake Bay, and result in a cascade of negative impacts.  The current Chesapeake Bay Cap on reduction fishery harvest is a precautionary measure intended to minimize the likelihood of such depletion occurring, and the ASMFC’s Atlantic Menhaden Management Board is currently holding hearings on whether the Bay Cap should be reduced from its current 51,000 metric ton level.

And, last year, a stock assessment found that, due to errors in previous assessments, menhaden fecundity (used as a proxy for spawning stock biomass) was significantly smaller than previously believed, and that the fishing mortality rate experienced by the stock was significantly higher, although the stock was not yet overfished nor experiencing overfishing.

There are legitimate scientific arguments that can be made to reduce overall menhaden landings, including both the landings of the reduction fleet and the landings of the growing segment of the menhaden industry who supply menhaden as bait.

But that’s not the way the menhaden advocates are operating.  Instead of focusing on the scientific arguments, they spend most of their efforts in making emotional appeals that revile the reduction fleet, with criticisms based not on hard data, but rather on the size of its vessels or the nationality of its customers.

Consider a group that calls itself “The Forage Fish Campaign.”  Its web page declares that

“Industrial fishing vessels are stripping billions of pounds of menhaden, herring, mackerel, shad, and river herring from American coastal waters every year—collapsing ecosystems, destroying livelihoods, and shipping the profits overseas…

“Industrial fishing operations are extracting billions of pounds of menhaden, herring, mackerel, and shad every year from American waters.  Not for food.  Not for bait.  The great majority is for industrial processing—ground into meal and oil, shipped overseas to feed foreign fish farms and factory livestock.  [emphasis added]”

It ends with the declaration

“This.  Stops.  Now.”

The message is clearly intended to foment public animosity toward the large-volume, low-value (per-pound) fisheries that typically target forage species, including menhaden.  After all, they are “industrial fishing operations,” that ship their profits overseas, and often sell product to foreign fish farms and factory livestock operations.

What red-blooded American wouldn’t despise the sort of folks who do that?

Perhaps someone who actually understood biology and fisheries management.

From a biological standpoint, it makes no difference to a fish stock whether it is caught by a handful of “industrial” vessels, or by a relative multitude of small-scale fishermen.  So long as the stock is not subject to overfishing—and the last stock assessment made it clear that menhaden are not—it doesn’t matter to the fish whether they are killed by a big net or a small one.

A menhaden killed by a tackle shop owner tossing a cast net is just as dead as one killed by a reduction boat.  Its removal from the population has the same impact.

But the reduction boats are just bigger, more attractive targets for the advocates’ bile.  Something that they hope they can convince people to hate.

The references to “shipping the profits overseas” and shipping fish overseas to be used as feed in “foreign” fish farms follows a similar logic.  The idea is to convince people that the “industrial” fleet is engaged in activities that, at their core, are somehow un-American. 

Of course, such comments ignore the fact that Ocean Harvesters is an American—not a foreign—company, and that the boats are crewed by American fishermen who spend their income from the fishery supporting American families, buying or renting American real estate, and patronizing American stores in their home towns. 

And while most of the menhaden are shipped overseas, no one, other than some people trying to minimize trawler bycatch, seems concerned that the Alaskan walleye pollock trawl fishery—the largest single fishery in the United States, when measured by poundage caught—ships the majority of its product overseas (or that those 3 billion tons of pollock that are landed each year are caught by “industrial” boats).

That sort of anti-foreign rancor is generally saved for the menhaden reduction fleet.

Similarly, The Forage Fish Campaign seems bound to attack the reduction industry because the menhaden it catches are used “Not for food.  Not for bait,” but rather for aquaculture and agricultural feeds, which again might be good for growing hostility against the reduction industry, but makes no logical sense.

After all, there aren’t many people in the United States who will want to use menhaden for food, and it’s not clear why using menhaden for bait—bait that is used to catch what are essentially luxury species such as lobster or blue crabs—is a higher and better use of the menhaden resource than using it to feed the Atlantic salmon imported from Canada or Norway or Scotland and eaten by millions of Americans, or using it to feed the birds raised on “factory livestock” farms to produce your kids’ chicken nuggets.

Once more, it’s all provocative language intended to create hostility toward a particular fishery, which makes no logical sense at all.

Still, that provocative language works.  We see far too many anglers blaming the reduction fishery—not the entire menhaden fishery, but the reduction fishery alone—for every ill that besets coastal fisheries, from a lack of blue crabs in the Chesapeake Bay to the current state of the striped bass population.

And for some, whether cursed with poor judgment, psychological problems, or a strong taste for alcohol, their hostility for the reduction fleet turns from mere disdain to the sort of directed harassment that Diehl describes and the Virginia legislature tried to prevent. 

It’s not unlikely that somewhere down the road, some angler is going to do something stupid and threaten, harass, or otherwise interfere with a reduction boat when law enforcement happens by, and the new, stricter Virginia criminal sanctions will be applied for the first time.  And, unfortunately, it is very possible that, at some point, some angler is going to do something stupid and someone—maybe the angler, maybe a menhaden fisherman, maybe both, maybe someone else—is going to be injured or killed.

And that angler, and maybe some injured party, is going to pay the price.

But it will be those who warped people’s perceptions, intentionally whipped up the public’s emotions, and fomented increasing hostility against the menhaden industry, who will truly deserve the blame.

 

NMFS' "LEADERSHIP MESSAGE" SUBORDINATES CONSERVATION TO EXPLOITATION

 

On September 2, the National Marine Fisheries Service released a so-called “Leadership Message” that makes it abundantly clear that the agency plans to subordinate conservation of both targeted fish stocks and protected resources to the sort of risk-prone exploitation that has long been favored by the commercial and recreational fishing industries.

Titled “Advancing Agency-Level Reforms to Restore American Seafood Competitiveness,” the message reflects the efforts of NOAA Fisheries Assistant Administrator Eugenio Pineiro Soler to comply with Executive Order 14276, “Restoring American Seafood Competitivenes” which, among other things, calls for the agency to

“unburden our commercial fishermen from costly and inefficient regulation,”

instructs that

“The Secretary of Commerce, in consultation with the Secretary of Health and Human Services and with input from the United States fishing industry, shall immediately consider suspending, revising, or rescinding regulations that overly burden America’s commercial fishing, aquaculture, and fish processing industries at the fisheries-specific level,”

and directs that

“The Secretary of Commerce shall request that each Regional Fishery Management Council, within 180 days of the date of this order, provide the Secretary of Commerce with updates to their recommendations submitted pursuant to Executive Order 13921 [issued in 2020], to reduce burdens on domestic fishing and to increase production.  Building upon the earlier goals, identified actions should stabilize markets, improve access, enhance economic profitability, and prevent closures.”

Assistant Administrator Soler wrote in the message that

“Over the past year, I have met with fishermen, processers, coastal community leaders, and regional fishery management council members and staff across the country.  In every harbor and at every meeting, the message has been consistent: American fishermen just want to fish, and they need their government to clear the bureaucratic barriers standing in their way…

“Today, I am announcing NOAA Fisheries’ priorities for agency-level actions in support of the Seafood Executive Order.  It will serve as our operational roadmap for regulatory, scientific, and administrative reform.  Informed by the 787 public comments submitted under the 2025 ‘Restoring America’s Seafood Competitiveness’ Executive Order (EO 14276), these priorities focus strictly on the policy levers directly within the agency’s authority…

“NOAA Fisheries will pursue the actions outlined below immediately as we look forward to that broader strategy [which is currently being formulated].  We are moving away from regulations that treat domestic harvesters like a problem to be managed, and toward a science-based, common-sense system that recognizes the importance of those who feed our citizens and the communities that they support.”

The fishing industry was quick to praise the Assistant Administrator’s message, with Lisa Wallenda Picard, President and Chief Executive Officer of the National Fisheries Institute, a prominent trade organization representing the commercial fishing industry, saying

“Calls for modernization and a return to a true risk-based regulatory structure, rather than the inertia of persistent bureaucratic expansion, could go a long way to mitigating the operational and administrative burdens the agency has committed to reduce.”

Of course, talk of a “risk-based regulatory structure” makes those who favor a precautionary approach to fisheries management uneasy, as such risk-based approach raises the likelihood that management mistakes will be made, harming both fish stocks and the broader ocean ecosystem.  Meredith Moore, Senior Director of Fish Conservation at the Ocean Conservancy, a leading marine conservation organization, argued that

“Conservation and competitiveness go hand in hand because fishing communities need abundant fish stocks, and fish stocks need a healthy ocean.  The guideposts of sustainable fisheries management, the ‘National Standards’ laid out in the Magnuson-Stevens Act, America’s premier fishing law, helped American seafood back from the brink because they encourage management with an eye to the future…

“The agency also says it will weaken protections for ecologically important habitats, even though we know fisheries will suffer when habitats are degraded by damaging fishing gear, mining, or other extractive activities…

“Weakening the standards and science that protect fish stocks is not the path to strong fishing communities and continued opportunity for future generations.  At risk are not only the species that power our seafood economy, but the whales, turtles, fish and corals that make up a healthy and productive ocean.”

And there is little question that the “reforms” being proposed by NMFS will weaken the National Standards, increase the risk to managed fish stocks and protected marine resources, and emphasize short-term economic gains over long-term sustainability.

The Leadership Message breaks down the proposed “reforms” into six broad categories:  Protected Resources: Endangered Species Act and Marine Mammal Protection Act Management; Transforming Fisheries Science through Cooperative Partnerships, Innovative Technologies, and Data Pipelines; Monuments and Spatial Access; Updating National Standards and Regulatory Reform; Enhancing Competitiveness and Financial Relief; and Seafood Import Monitoring Program Reform.  Together, they create a near-perfect wish list for commercial and recreational fishing industries focused solely on short-term profit, that will remove protections for endangered and other protected species, while potentially diluting the quality of fisheries science and making fish stocks more vulnerable to overfishing and habitat loss.

Updating the National Standards, and what is being called “regulatory reform” will probably have the greatest impact on targeted fish stocks.  Certainly, the first subheading of that section of the Leadership Message, “Reforming Endangered Species Act Section 4, Section 7 and the Definition of ‘Harm’” gives cause for concern, as it talks about NMFS’ intent to

“Reform Endangered Species Act processes by finalizing joint rules with U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on Section 4 [designating threatened and endangered species, as well as critical habitat] and Section 7 [interagency consultations and cooperation].  Work with U.S, Fish and Wildlife Service and Office of Management and Budget to expand economic impact analysis for critical habitat designations specifically focusing on any downstream economic impacts on commercial fishing and other maritime activities stemming from the designation.  Streamline Section 7 interagency consultations to eliminate bureaucratic backlogs that delay fishery management plans and fleet operations through stricter timelines, limiting the use of overly conservative ‘worst-case scenario’ assumptions and prioritizing empirical, consistent data in biological opinions.”

While the Endangered Species Act, in a fisheries management context, is most often associated with various species of sea turtles and marine mammals, people often don’t realize that 28 distinct populations of Pacific salmon and steelhead (sea-run rainbow) trout are also listed as either endangered or threatened.  Basing the definition of critical salmon/steelhead habitat on economic, rather than strictly biological, considerations could easily lead to endangered wild salmon runs being extinguished, and the population driven into extinction, if habitat degradation, which may include commercial fishing in areas where endangered fish are particularly vulnerable, is permitted.

The Trump Administration has already taken action that allows critical habitat for endangered species to be degraded, changing a long-time interpretation of the law that equated harm to or destruction of critical habitat with harm to any threatened or endangered species that were dependent on that habitat.  On July 10, it issued a regulation that deleted the definition of “harm” from the regulations interpreting the Endangered Species Act, which definition had previously read

“an act which actually kills wildlife or injures wildlife.  Such act may include significant habitat modification or degradation where it actually kills or injures wildlife by significantly impairing essential behavioral patterns, including breeding, feeding, or sheltering.  [emphasis added]”

Amending fishery management plans to accord with that deletion will allow the destruction of critical habitat for threatened and endangered marine resources, which could include damage caused by fishing gear, as well as damage to critical habitat for anadromous species such as salmon and steelhead caused by dams, irrigation water drawdowns, industrial effluents, warm water discharges, and similar threats to fish survival.

Possible changes to the National Standards could have a much broader impact, affecting just about every managed fish stock.  In the case of National Standard 1, the Leadership Message states NMFS’ intent to

“fully utilize existing flexibilities to improve catch limit utilization by increasing use of carryover or other flexibilities and providing technical guidance to prevent unnecessary fishery closures,”

approaches that focus management measures on landing the entire quota for a particular stock, rather than on ensuring that any such quota will not be exceeded.

Potential changes to National Standard 2 are perhaps more troubling, for that National Standard requires that fisheries management measures are based on “the best scientific information available,” while the proposed changes seem aimed at degrading the quality of fisheries science, as NMFS attempts to

“Establish protocols for integrating industry-collected data into stock assessments while exploring how to better incorporate social and economic expertise from fishing partnerships, including leveraging commercial vessels as scientific platforms and fishermen as scientific partners into its decision-making processes under the Magnuson-Stevens Act.”

The decision as to what data is appropriate to include in stock assessments should be one made solely by stock assessment scientists, who can evaluate the available data, including industry-collected data, determine whether it is statistically valid and relevant to their assessment of the particular stock. 

Biologists should not be forced by NMFS to incorporate data that they would not otherwise incorporate into a stock assessment, whether for reasons of data quality, inherent bias, or any other cause.  Anyone who has attended fisheries meetings has undoubtedly heard recreational and commercial fishermen complain that the data is “bad,” or “wrong,” often because biologists conduct random surveys rather than targeting local concentrations of fish then way that fishermen do, or because scientists use less efficient gear than that used by fishermen.  Sometimes fishermen object to the data just because they don’t like what it says.  Intentionally opening up stock assessments to such biases could only degrade the quality of both the data and the assessments that result.

Other proposals, such as “National Standards and Recreational Fishing,” which is described as

“Review the National Standards Guidelines to ensure they fully and appropriately account for the unique biological, economic, and social characteristics of recreational fisheries,”

and “Essential Fish Habitat Practicality Application,” in which

“NOAA Fisheries will not implement regulatory measures based solely on Habitat Areas of Particular Concern designations and instead apply the ‘Essential Fish Habitat practibility’ standard to ensure protections are balanced with economic interests”

also have the potential for serious mischief on the part of the agency, which could easily result in degraded fish stocks.

That issue comes up again in another one of the categories, “Transforming Fisheries Science through Cooperative Partnerships, Innovative Technologies, and Data Pipelines,” which appears to be largely a giveaway to the recreational fishing industry, which has long complained about the Marine Recreational Information Program, which is used to develop recreational catch, effort, and landings estimates.  For many years, the recreational industry has been trying to replace MRIP with a series of independent state data collection surveys, all of which are a little different, and none of which can be compared to one another without first going through an state-by-state calibration process, but which—to the industry—seem to justify the extra trouble because they tend to produce lower harvest estimates than MRIP does, and thus allow longer seasons and probably put more fish in anglers’ coolers, both things that tend to increase industry profits.

MRIP has, admittedly, overestimated recreational fishing effort in the past, leading to overestimates of catch and landings, but those problems have recently been resolved, and there is no reason to believe that MRIP is currently any less accurate than existing state programs, although some state programs may be designed to better deal with short seasons, seldom-caught species, and in-season management.

Still, the Leadership Message announced NMFS’ intention to

“Remodel recreational catch estimates by co-designing shared governance data collection frameworks directly with state agencies to replace legacy Marine Recreational Information Program structures,”

apparently whether or not states wish to do so and whether or not all states have the financial and personnel resources needed to support the new data collection approaches.

Not surprisingly, other initiatives announced under this category deal with red snapper, which has been a hot-button fish for the recreational industry for the past 20 years.  Thus, we see NMFS intending to

“Coordinate with South Atlantic states and the South Atlantic Fishery Management Council to implement state-managed exempted fishing permits, which will allow for more accurate red snapper discard accounting [although NMFS doesn’t explain why such accuracy would improve] in the South Atlantic and provide better data to inform future stock assessments and management decisions,”

even though NMFS’ last attempt to issue such exempted fishing permits resulted in a lawsuit and a federal district court imposing a temporary injunction preventing any fishing pursuant to such permits, which were issued in violation of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation Act as well as NMFS’ own regulations.

But, apparently, NMFS wants to try again.

NMFS infatuation with red snapper—or, more accurately, the recreational fishing industry’s political connections within the Administration, which makes it responsive to the industry’s infatuation with red snapper—also led to a proposal to “Prioritize South Atlantic Red Snapper in SouthEast Data, Assessment, and Review (SEDAR), in which NMFS would

“Use the results from SEDAR 90 South Atlantic Red Snapper to ensure catch limits are based on current, robust science.  Ensure the SEDAR process considers the results from the South Atlantic Red Snapper Research Program,”

the latter sentence again raising the problem of politicians and appointed administrators, rather than fisheries scientists, dictating what should be included in a stock assessment, and thus potentially skewing the assessment results.

Most of the rest of the section—other than one proposal to use acoustic tagging to determine whether the sandbar shark population in the Gulf of Mexico has migratory and resident components—deals with adopting new technologies, including AI and angler-focused applications.  There aren’t enough details to tell whether some of those proposals might be beneficial, and make the data collection process more accurate and more efficient, although the likelihood is that some would improve then fishery management process.  Of course, the other side of the coin is that the recreational fishing industry will—at least for the duration of this administration—always have its thumb on the scale, and will be trying to skew the data collection process to favor those surveys and processes which result in lower landings estimates and more liberal management measures. 

They have been doing that for more than a decade, and are unlikely to stop doing so now, when they enjoy the friendliest political climate they are ever likely to encounter.

The third big category—although it will have a greater impact on protected resources than it will on targeted fish stocks—is “Protected Resources: Endangered Species and Marine Mammal Protection Act Management.”

As the title suggests, NMFS populated this category with multiple proposals that would sacrifice whales, pinnipeds, sea turtles, and other creatures so that commercial fishermen can harvest more fish.  Thus, we see proposals to further endanger the already critically endangered North Atlantic right whale, including one, “Vessel Speed Rule Modernization,” that would supposedly

“integrate technological advancements into North Atlantic right whale strike reduction strategies, reducing unnecessary burdens while ensuring responsible conservation practices,”

although what criteria will be used to determine whether a burden is “unnecessary” or a particular conservation practice is “responsible” isn’t explained at all, and another, “Northeast Lobster Fishery and North Atlantic Right Whale,” which assures lobstermen that

“NOAA Fisheries will not mandate the use of ropeless gear.  Ensure that any decision support tools or other models used by the Take Reduction Team have been independently and empirically reviewed and any future Large Whale Take Reduction Plan is based on the best available data rather than worst-case scenario modeling,”

even though one might argue that, with NMFS itself admitting that there are only about 70 reproductively active females in the entire North Atlantic right whale population, we already entered the worst-case scenario some years ago.

But then, NMFS also says that

“Entanglements in fishing gear is one of the primary threats to North Atlantic right whales.  NOAA Fisheries and our partners estimate that over 85 percent of right whales have been entangled in fishing gear at least once,”

and that

“Vessel strikes are another primary threat to North Atlantic right whales…Vessels of any size can injure or kill a right whale.  The faster a vessel is traveling when it hits a whale, the higher the likelihood of serious injury or death,”

yet it is planning to cut back on  the “burden” of vessels speeding around known right whale locations, and is doing little or nothing to prevent entanglements in fishing gear, so maybe the agency just views the worst-case scenario of possible extinction as an acceptable risk, and less important than maintaining or increasing fishing industry profits.

The same sort of sentiments seem to apply on the Pacific coast, where NMFS proposes to

“launch a ‘Gold Standard’ science review of entanglement risk models for the Dungeness crab fishery and clarify the regulatory scope of the West Coast Take Reduction Team,”

which probably shouldn’t be surprising, given that increasing numbers of humpback whale entanglements have led to changes being made to the Dungeness crab fishery, which in turn led to unhappy crab fishermen and another political effort to subordinate the health of then whale population to economic concerns.

Pinnipeds—seals and sea lions—also seem to have swum into NMFS’ crosshairs, with one proposal to

“Conduct a biological and economic impact analysis relative to California and Stellar sea lions [the latter listed under the Endangered Species Act] and harbor seals on depredation of valuable stocks in U.S. fisheries and, in collaboration with industry, convene a workshop to explore administrative flexibilities for non-lethal deterrents.”

While the mention of “non-lethal deterrents” makes that proposal seem relatively benign a second proposal would have NMFS

“Work with Congress to provide greater flexibility for the removal of sea lions under section 120 for managers to further the goal of rebuilding fisheries and supporting the long-term sustainability of fishing communities,”

which seems to suggest that the only reason non-lethal deterrents are being proposed is that current law makes it difficult to employ anything else, and that if and when the law can be changed, lethal “removal” will immediately be on the table.

A third seal-related proposal almost sounds benign.  It would have NMFS

“Review methodologies for assessing long-term threats to ice-associated seals for Endangered Species Act listing and critical habitat determinations including State of Alaska data, and how current long-term modeling accounts for present population data.”

But given that NMFS already says that

“We do know that ice seals are highly dependent on suitable sea ice condition and distribution for resting and nurturing their pups.

“Concern about loss of sea ice habitat in the current warming climate has been the basis for petitions to NOAA Fisheries for listing all four species as threatened of endangered under the Endangered Species Act,”

and given that the entire thrust of the Leadership Message is to propose regulatory actions that would reduce the regulatory burdens faced by commercial fishermen, it’s not unreasonable to suspect that the “Ice Seals” proposal is intended to find an excuse not to list those seals under the ESA, rather than finding an way to protect them.

Which would be completely consistent with the current administration’s natural resources philosophy.

Sea turtles, too, would be placed in greater jeopardy by a proposal to

“Review and revise turtle excluder device regulations, if appropriate, to incorporate vessel size exemptions and regional flexibility, particularly in the Gulf of [Mexico], conserving sea turtles while ensuring operational practicability and safety for small vessel fleets.”

Other proposals would provide fewer Endangered Species Act protections to Pacific salmon, and investigate the impact of the shrimp fishery on smalltooth sawfish and giant manta rays.  Again, given the context in which the proposals appeared, it’s not likely that they are intended to help conserve any of the species cited.

The other three categories are much narrower in scope, and address things like allowing commercial fishing within national marine monuments, providing loans and other capitalization for the domestic fishing fleet (remember when the original Fishery Conservation and Management Act of 1976 created problems by doing that sort of thing, in its original attempt to “Americanize” the fishery?), and improve the seafood import monitoring program.

For at least the past quarter-century, the National Marine Fisheries Service, using the tools provided by the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, has done a very good job of managing the nation’s living marine resources, promoting science-based management, reducing the number of stocks experiencing overfishing and fully rebuilding 52 once-overfished stocks.

Now, guided by Trump’s executive order, the agency seems intent on abandoning its commitment to long-term sustainability, undoing at least some of its past successes, and exposing United States fisheries to significant additional risk in order to boost the short-term income of the commercial and recreational fishing industries.

It will be another 28 months—nearly 2 ½ years—until another administration takes over the White House, and hopefully reverses all—or at least, with luck, most—of the bad fishery management decisions that will be made between now and then.  But even if it has the best of intentions, no new administration will be able to fix the damage overnight.

Habitats will have been damaged.  Some, like slow-growing deep-water corals, could take centuries to recover.  Vulnerable fish stocks, if they become overfished, could take decades to rebuild.  Currently endangered species, such as the North Atlantic right whale and some salmon and steelhead populations, could be driven to extinction, and removed from the face of the Earth, never to return.

There is no reason to believe that such possibilities worry an administration focused on short-term economic gain, regardless of consequences.

Thus, in the short term the only hope will come from Congress and the courts.  Congress—if the mid-term elections erode administration support—will probably try to prevent the worst abuses, but its power will be limited, as any legislation it passes to conserve fish stocks can, and almost certainly will, face a presidential veto.

The courts offer more hope, for just as the district court for the District of Columbia enjoined the exempted fishing permits for the recreational red snapper fishery in the South Atlantic, other courts can and hopefully will act if and when NMFS again acts illegally.  But for that to happen, there needs to be people and organizations willing and able to retain counsel and make a principled stand.

That isn’t always going to happen.

So yes, the recent Leadership Message outlines a very real threat to the health of the nation’s fish stocks, and to protected resources as well.  We can, unfortunately, expect some of that threat to manifest itself, and for resources to suffer as a result.  We can hope that other efforts to overexploit or otherwise threaten marine resources will be thwarted, whether in Congress or by the courts.

But have no doubt that the next 28 months will see the fishing industries and the administration try to drag the management process back into the bad old day before 1996, when science was trumped by economic concerns, and fish abundance quickly declined.  Citizen-led efforts might thwart some of those efforts, but others will inevitably prevail.

It will take a lot of time and effort to fix the resulting damage.  And some things, like extinctions or profound habitat damage, may end up being beyond repair.

SHARKS OF THE CONNECTICUT SHORE

 

August was almost over.

We were trolling sandworms along the Connecticut shore, ‘way down in the state’s southwest corner, between the mouth of the Mianus River and Greenwich Harbor.  It was one of those still, steamy mornings that had you starting to sweat even before the sun was fully above the horizon, when Long Island Sound was perfectly still, and not a breath of wind stirred.

We had enjoyed some pretty good striped bass fishing for just about all of the month, but that morning, our luck seemed to change, with not a single bass deigning to strike the spinner and worm combination that we slowly dragged through the water, just off the rockpiles that stretched out from what, in that part of the world, passed for a sandy beach.

It was getting kind of tedious when a big fish rolled on the surface, just ahead of the boat.

A big fish. 

Our first thought was a fifty-pound bass, although the swirling eddy it left on the surface almost seemed too big for that, and we held onto our rods just a little bit tighter waiting for the strike that never came.  After a while, we made it all the way west to Tweed Island (named after the infamous “Boss” Tweed of New York City’s Tammany Hall), that marks the turn into Greenwich Harbor, pulled in the lines and tried to figure out where to go next.

We noticed a little cluster of boats a few hundred yards offshore.  They were in open water, and so probably not catching bass, but hoping that they might at least be on bluefish, we took a ride out to see what was going on.

We found something completely unexpected.

A fisherman in the stern of the boat was hooked up to something that was much bigger than a blue.  He was hanging on to what was a typical bait fishing setup—a heavy boat rod, a substantial reel (back then, either Penn 500 “Jigmasters” or 3/0 “Special Senators” were commonly used), and probably 30 or 40 pound line.  Whatever he had hooked was completely unimpressed by the gear, and was going wherever it wanted, as a second person at the controls waved nearby boats away if they got too close to the hooked fish.

We stopped to watch the fight, expecting to see an extremely large striped bass eventually brought to gaff, but the battle just kept going on.  Stranger still, maybe about 10 minutes after we got there, a Greenwich Police boat came out of the harbor, pulled alongside the anglers’ boat, and two patrolmen climbed aboard.

A few minutes after that, as the hooked-up angler pumped and reeled, a dark triangular fin broke the surface perhaps 50 feet out from his boat.  At that point, the patrolmen pulled their revolvers, and started throwing shots in the general direction of the fin, perhaps not the smartest decision given that it was a Saturday morning, there were boats scattered across that part of the Sound—although none directly downrange—and bullets have a nasty habit of ricocheting when they hit flat water at shallow angles.

So at that point we figured that we had hung around long enough, and headed back toward the Mianus River while the shots were still being directed the other way.

Near the mouth of the river, just off a big rockpile southwest of Bluff Island, another angler fought what appeared to be a very big fish—at least for the western Sound.  This time, we didn’t stick around to watch the fight and, with the bass fishing not getting any better, headed back to the dock.

The next Monday, the front page of The Greenwich Time featured a photo of two dead sandbar (“brown”) sharks, alleged to be about seven feet long and weighing close to 200 pounds, hanging from a beam above the ramp at the police boat dock.

I, and one of my equally adventurous friends, tried to catch a shark of our own from his 10 ½-foot plywood skiff, but couldn’t manage to get the job done, which was disappointing, as we would have loved to start our first year of 9^th grade with that sort of fish—and hopefully our own picture in The Greenwich Time—on our resumes.

But even though we failed, the August of 1968 certainly ended on an interesting note.

Which is why I now have to laugh when I hear people treat sharks—particularly sandbar sharks—in the Connecticut section of Long Island Sound as something troubling and new.

Historically, sharks have always been a part of the Long Island Sound ecosystem.  Published reports from the late 1800s and early 1900s tell of sailors seeing sharks in the shallows of Long Island’s North Shore bays—not Connecticut, but directly across the Sound from the Connecticut shore.  The species of shark weren’t reported, but they could have been sandbars or, perhaps more likely, sand tigers, a large but somewhat sluggish inshore species that is seen in the Sound today.

Up through the 1960s and early ‘70s, there were occasional stories of striped bass fishermen who had a “huge bass” pick up their bait and strip all the line from their reels before they could pull the anchor and follow.  The problem is, striped bass weren’t really capable of doing that, given the heavy tackle most anglers used back then.  Sharks were.

And there were enough sharks around back in the ‘50s and ‘60s that, every summer, The Greenwich Time would feature a photo on its front page of a couple of marine policemen brandishing rifles or shotguns—I was young back then, and don’t recall which—as they sat in the cockpit of one of their boats, on “shark patrol” off local beaches.  The odds that they ever actually shot at a free-swimming shark are probably surpassingly low, but the fact that they were out there at all meant that sharks were on people’s minds.

And that was off the quiet, western corner of the Connecticut coast, many score of miles from the sea.  So it’s logical to believe that closer to Block Island Sound—say, anywhere east of New Haven—the shark population was a little higher than it was off the Fairfield County coast.

So, again, the fact that people are making such a fuss because they’re seeing sharks today doesn’t make much historical sense.

Unless, of course, those people haven’t lived long enough to understand what a normal shark population looks like.  And that may well be the case.

From the late 1970s through the mid-1990s, an active commercial shark fishery, driven largely by bottom longliners in the South Atlantic, depleted the populations of large coastal sharks, including sandbars, and drove the population to very low levels.  Most people fishing today don’t remember a time when sandbar sharks abundance was close to historical norms; instead, they have only fished during the past 50 years, when the stock was overfished and the population depleted, and so came to believe that the relative absence of sharks was “normal.”

Dr. Marcus Drymon, a biologist from Mississippi who often works on shark depredation issues, used the term “lifting baseline” to describe how that impacts fishermen’s perceptions:

“Experts agree that there are more sharks…today than there were 30 years ago.  But how do these levels compare with levels before 1989, when commercial shark fishing spiked?

“Over time, this question becomes more difficult to answer as people gradually accept environmental decline.  Marine biologist Daniel Pauley calls this habituation ‘shifting baseline syndrome.’  For fisheries, each new generation of fishermen accept the current, often reduced, status of a fish population as the baseline and forgets that there was a time when these species were much more abundant.

“In this case, modern anglers are comparing increased numbers of sharks…to the past 30 years—a time when many shark populations were overfished.

“The recovery of populations that were once overfished can create an opposite situation, known as lifting baselines, with conservation and management efforts leading to population increases.

“Instances where populations have been overfished and then rebuilt can create perceptions of overabundance.  When the species that’s recovering is a predator, that can lead to human-wildlife conflict.”

That seems to be what’s happening off eastern Connecticut, as well as off Rhode Island and parts of eastern Long Island.  So now we hear Connecticut charter boat operators complaining that

“They are everywhere—from Westbrook to Watch Hill.  Thousands of them, not hundreds…

“We have seen over 15 sharks today in two hours…

“We’re not going to be able to fish for stripers the way it’s going.”

The fact that the sharks sometimes steal striped bass, fluke, and other fish off anglers’ lines isn’t endearing them to the captains, nor to some Connecticut anglers.  Thus, we saw one disgruntled angler post on a popular fishing forum that

“At the very least, the anglers that are impacted by their depredation will be allowed to kill them [if NMFS again allows recreational sandbar shark landings], myself and the rest of the rec/charter fleet will certainly kill their limit, whether they’re being eaten or not.  I could care less about eating one.  I just want to be able to kill them without fear of steep fines from the feds.  Already it feels so wrong to do nothing about it.  I feel like I’m being forced by the government to do the wrong thing, which is release sandbars unharmed, knowing full well these sharks are destroying the future fishery and the charter business throughout southern New England.  They have already destroyed the summer bass fishery in a number of places, and for the first time this year I lost a Fluke to a Sandbar shark.  The trend is very concerning.  As time goes on this issue will expand to bottomfish and Tuna, when there’s no Bass left, certainly no Menhaden left, and more sharks than there is now.”

It’s somewhat startling to believe that people still think that way—the sentiment seems to belong back in the 1930s, when hunters convinced state game departments to designate predatory mammals and birds as “varmints” and allowed them to be shot year-round, with some states even paying bounties to hunters who brought in evidence that they had killed a wolf, coyote, fox, bobcat, seal, etc.—but it does exemplify just how upset the sharks are getting some Connecticut anglers.

Back in the 1960s, although sandbar sharks were in the Sound, we never heard much about them stealing a fish from anglers, something that occurs far more often today.  But there might be a good reason for that.

Last April, a paper titled “Characterizing a century of shark depredation in US Atlantic recreational fisheries” was published in the ICES Journal of Marine Science.  It made the case that

“At its essence, shark depredation is the result of human-wildlife overlap, in this case, spatially and temporally dynamic overlap between recreational anglers and sharks competing for a shared resource.”

The paper broke the past century down into four 25-year periods, examined the characteristics of the angling, shark, and prey populations for each period, and tried to explain how those characteristics impacted the predation issue.  For the most recent period, 2001-2025, the authors wrote:

“The new millennium ushered in the birth of the shark conservation movement, characterized by the public’s growing understanding of the importance of sharks to marine ecosystems.  During this time, management restrictions led to decreases in US shark landings while recreational fishing effort continued to intensify.  Concurrently, many studies noted the prevalence of positive attitudes from the general public toward sharks.  Yet, a growing body of recreational anglers were expressing concern that proliferating shark populations were causing increases in depredation.  Collectively, these anglers were vocalizing a change in attitude from ‘sharks threaten our safety’ in the 1990s to ‘sharks threaten our recreational fishing opportunities.’  This led recreational anglers to associate rising depredation with management measures that protect sharks.  These frustrations are presently reflected in the SHARKED Act, legislation introduced into the US Congress (2025) to ‘…address problems posed by increased depredation…’  Today, there are more anglers than ever before, shark populations are rebuilding following three decades of management, and many target fishery species are recovering from overfishing.  Thus, overlap between these three groups is likely at an all-time high.  [emphasis added, citations omitted]”

While that formula might not quite fit what we’re seeing off Connecticut—there are plenty of anglers and sandbar sharks, but perhaps not as many target species as there are elsewhere—the overlap between anglers and sharks is certainly substantial.  And given that sandbar sharks typically eat small bony fish, smaller sharks, rays, and invertebrates such as cephalopods, shrimp, and crabs, it may well be that the lack of menhaden and other small schooling fish off the Connecticut coast in recent years has caused the sharks to move closer to shore in search of prey, putting them in a position where they are more likely to compete with anglers for whatever fish are available.

What may be making things worse is that it appears that the sandbar sharks may have learned that fishing boats can provide an easy meal.  One Connecticut charter boat captain complained that

“They follow fishing boats around; they wait for us to hook a fish and then they bite our fish in half.”

NMFS has said that

“Emerging evidence indicates that individual sharks may learn from repeated encounters with fishing activity and associate the sound of vessel engines, the hauling of gear, or the discarding of undersized [or, in the case of striped bass, perhaps oversized] fish with feeding opportunities.”

So, if we add an increasing number of anglers with an increasing number of sharks capable of learning that fishermen provide easy meals, it is natural that depredation incidents will increase.  Unfortunately, too many anglers want to blame the depredation problem entirely on an increase in sharks, conveniently forgetting that an increase in anglers is probably as much to blame.

Thus, we hear anglers say things like,

“We need a balance back and we need to manage the sharks like we manage other species and allow a season for them,”

which is perfectly fine if the best available science indicates that the sharks could sustain the fishing pressure, but does seem a little inequitable, given that there’s no talk about needing to manage the anglers who are targeting what remains of the overfished striped bass population, and generating release mortality from an already stressed spawning stock in order to bring things back into balance.

Perhaps it is the State of Connecticut that comes closest to getting it right:

“Sharks play a vital role in keeping our ocean healthy by maintaining the balance of natural marine ecosystems.

“Sharks have existed in Connecticut’s marine waters for millions of years.  They are apex predators, which means they are at the top of the food chain and have few natural predators.

“Sharks remove sick and weak individuals from prey populations, they influence prey distribution and behavior, and prevent other species from monopolizing limited natural resources and degrading the marine environment.  The presence of sharks is a positive sign of a healthy marine ecosystem.”

Even if it doesn’t feel quite that way when one swims off with your five-pound fluke.