SCIENCE IS MEANT TO BE USED

We hear a lot about “best available science” in fisheries management. 

It’s what decisions are supposed to be based on, and in the federal system, they are.  National Standard 2, included in the Magnuson-Stevens Fisheries Conservation and Management Act, says that

“Conservation and management measures shall be based upon the best scientific information available.”

If the National Marine Fisheries Service issued a regulation that wasn’t supported by the science, there’s a very good chance that they’d be sued.  And that they’d lose.  It’s happened quite a few times before.

However, once you abandon the federal system, science loses its dominant role. 

Folks still give it a lot of lip service.  For example, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Interstate Fisheries Management Program Charter states that

“It is the policy of the Commission that its ISFMP…be based on the best scientific information available…”

The problem is that ASMFC isn’t governed by the Magnuson Act, or any similar law, and there is no national standard that can be used to enforce those words.  To date, courts have not been receptive to legal challenges to ASMFC decisions.  So we end up in a situation where, even when good science exists, ASMFC can wait quite a long time before it adopts it—if it adopts it at all.

I was reminded of that earlier this week, when I attended a meeting of New York’s Marine Resources Advisory Council.

The Council was discussing the August meeting of ASMFC’s Striped Bass Management Board, which will debate a reduction in overall striped bass landings.  Such reductions were called for in a recent, peer-reviewed stock assessment, which found that fishing mortality was too high and that the striped bass stock was about to descend into “overfished” territory.

The stock assessment was presented to the Management Board last October, and represents the “best scientific information available”.  The only problem is that nine months have passed since the Management Board had the assessment, and ASMFC still hasn’t replaced the old, now-discredited data in its management plan with the new information.

That won’t happen until October—a full year later—at the earliest.  There is a slim possibility that it will never happen at all.

Part of the problem is that, before adopting the latest scientific findings, ASMFC has to go out and seek public comment on whether or not they should.

When you stop to think about it, that doesn’t make a lot of sense.  The only comment relevant to the issue would probably be a competing stock assessment, based on equivalent data that passed an equally rigorous peer review.  

The odds of someone making that sort of comment are impossibly high, and comments such as “You suits need to get out on the water.  There’s plenty of bass out there” don’t really add much to the discussion. 

But they do delay the process.

The Management Board was supposed to put the matter out for public comment after its February meeting, then decided to kick the can down the road until May.  At its May meeting, it apparently decided that kicking the can was so much fun that it did it again, delaying release of any draft addendum until August.

So public hearings on the science, which were originally planned for late winter, will now be held in late summer or early fall. 

Unless the can gets kicked one more time.

ASMFC’s failure to promptly adopt the best available science has real implications for striped bass management.

Amendment 6 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Striped Bass contains five “triggers” which, if tripped, require the Management Board to act to end excessive harvest and/or to recover a stock that has fallen to undesirably low levels.

The third trigger states that

“If the Management Board determines that the fishing mortality target is exceeded in two consecutive years and the female spawning stock biomass falls below the target within either of those years, the Management Board must adjust the striped bass management program to reduce the fishing mortality rate to a level that is at or below the target within one year.”

Since ASMFC’s 2013 Update of the Striped Bass Stock Assessment using Final 2012 Data found that the fishing mortality target was exceeded in both 2011 and 2012, the last years for which data is available, and also found that the female spawning stock biomass was below the target in every year since 2006, the Management Board must take action to end overfishing within one year, if the fishing mortality reference points from the latest stock assessment are used.

The same set of facts would also trip the fourth trigger, which states that

“If the Management Board determines that the female spawning stock biomass falls below the target for two consecutive years and the fishing mortality rate exceeds the target in either of those years, the Management Board must adjust the striped bass management program to rebuild the biomass to a level that is at or above the target within [ten years].”

Nine months after the benchmark assessment was presented to the Management Board, no definitive action has been taken to end overfishing, and there has been absolutely no effort to create a plan that would rebuild the striped bass stock.

And the tragic thing is that such inaction can be justified by the argument that, until ASMFC formally adopts the fishing mortality reference points from the benchmark stock assessment, no triggers have actually been tripped, and no action is really required.

Any such argument violates the spirit of Amendment 6; its authors certainly never intended that the Management Board should frustrate the intent of the amendment merely by failing to accept the most recent science.  However, whether such argument violates the letter of Amendment 6 is something for ASMFC to decide.  

And that leaves the bass in a pretty bad place.

Still, despite its current troubles, the striped bass is probably in a better place today than the tautog was for most of the last two decades.  

Back in 1996, ASMFC’s Tautog Technical Committee advised the Tautog Management Board that fishing mortality threshold should not exceed 0.15 (about 14% of the population removed annually).  But the Tautog Management Board hemmed and hawed, encouraged by a recreational fishing industry—particularly the mid-Atlantic party boats—to impose less restrictive measures.

So half-measures went in, and the tautog stock, caught in the limbo of ignored scientific advice, declined.  

More half-measures followed, and they caused fishing mortality to peak at more than three times the recommended level, as bag limits got smaller, size limits grew larger and seasons shrank.  

In 2011—fully fifteen years after the Tautog Technical Committee first made its recommendation—ASMFC adopted Addendum IV to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Tautog, which finally set F_threshold at 0.15.

By that time, here in New York, a season that had been seven months long had shrunk to a mere eleven weeks, the size limit jumped from 12 inches to 16, and the bag limit went from ten fish to four. 

The bait shops aren’t selling too many green crabs any more...

Which shows that waiting too long to adopt the best science is in the interests neither of fish nor of man.

For like a wrench, a hammer or a hacksaw—or any other tool in the box—even the best science isn’t much good to anyone unless it is actually used.

DISCOUNTING THE FUTURE

The collapse of a fish stock rarely catches us by surprise—at least if we’re paying attention.

It usually starts out with fishing being a little slow in a lot of different places, although it remains quite good in others.  Then, after a few years, the complaints about bad fishing increase, and rumors of good catches are harder to come by.  Finally, after quite a few years of decline—which can be steady and unmistakable, or halting and harder to notice, depending on the stock involved—there can be no question that the stock has collapsed, and everyone shakes their heads in wonders aloud what went wrong.

Yet, although you can see the crash coming, it is rare that anyone ever gets out in front of the problem and successfully intervenes before collapse comes; instead, those who warn of future calamity are, if not ridiculed, then largely ignored, while many of those who admit that the stock is declining adamantly stand in the way of efforts to fix things.

Once things collapse, though, they call for relief.

Cynics would say that “it’s all about money,” and point to those who harvest fish for sale, but such attitudes aren’t limited to the commercial fishing industry.  The recreational fishing industry is rife with them too, and so are the ranks of ordinary anglers, who make no money from the fishery at all.

It’s a puzzling and frustrating thing for those of us involved with fish conservation, because it seems so illogical on its face.  “Why should a party boat captain,” we wonder, “Be willing to overfish a stock to the point of collapse, when a healthier stock would be better for business?”

It’s a classic question, and one that folks have been asking for a long time.  The answer lies in the tendency of people to  “discount the future” or, to be a little less formal, in the old adage that “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.”

Folks tend to live in the “now.”

The concept is well-known to economists; it underlies just about every business decision.  But it affects a lot more than business, and a lot more than fisheries management.  Back in 1995, an economics professor named Timothy J. Brennan wrote an essay entitled “Discounting the Future:  Economics and Ethics” that examined the problem in a environmental context.

It starts with the concept that a dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow, so if you want someone to forego taking a profit today—say, by not killing too many red snapper, striped bass or winter flounder—they have to believe that there is a bigger dollar waiting for them somewhere down the road.

That dollar has to be big enough to make delaying those profits worthwhile.  And even if it is, the fishermen have to believe that they’re actually going to collect it.

So when I sit down at a meeting of New York’s Marine Resources Advisory Council, and try to convince folks to protect the tattered remnants of the winter flounder stock, I probably shouldn’t be shocked when the folks representing the tackle shops object the the needed regulations.  

They say that even though flounder are scarce, they still bring some folks into the shops in the spring, and given how long it would take to recover the stock, they’re just not willing to pass up what little money they can get now—for a handful of hooks, some sinkers, a few boxes of bloodworms—in the hope of making far more from a recovered stock at some distant point in the uncertain future.

A very small bird in their hands, after all…

And that touches on another point in Brennan’s essay, the question of whether pure economics should govern all decisions, or whether there is an ethical burden placed upon today’s decisionmakers—perhaps on all of today’s society—to assure that those living far in the future, who we shall never know, should enjoy the same quality of life that we know today.

Do the folks sitting around the table at a Marine Resources Advisory Council meeting, for example, have the ethical right to decide that future generations of anglers shall not catch—or perhaps even remember—winter flounder, just because the current generation of tackle shop owners wants to sell a couple more hooks and sinkers—along with some bait, and maybe a rod and a reel or two—today?

I'll let you make up your own mind on that one...

But let’s leave the shops, the party boats and the commercial fishermen alone for a while.  We know that cash is a powerful motivation, and one that’s easy to understand.

So let’s look at the ordinary recreational fisherman, who receives no direct economic benefit from overharvest, and ask why so many of them also seem reluctant to reduce their current kill--say of big female striped bass--in order to achieve more abundance, and much better fishing, at some point down the road.

To some extent, it is again a matter of competing economic values.  Recreationally-harvested fish convey value to anglers, and some anglers may simply believe that the value of harvesting such fish today is greater than any additional value that might be gleaned from recovering the stock and harvesting more abundant fish five, ten or more years in the future.

But there are other factors that also come into play.  Some of those factors were discussed—although not in a fisheries context—in a doctoral dissertation written by Shane Frederick, a student at Carnegie Mellon University.  

He considered a number of other factors that lead to discounting future events, including the probability of the future event not occurring, the quality or duration of the future event, the “utility” or usefulness of the future event, etc.

Those non-economic factors may have a greater impact on angler attitudes than the mere desire to harvest a few fish now rather than waiting to take a few more later on.

For example, if you spend any time listening to anglers object to harvest restrictions, it’s pretty clear that probability—more precisely, their belief that a stock probably won’t be recovered despite tougher rules—is a big reason for their negative attitudes.  

At any major fisheries hearing, you’ll hear a host of reasons why conservation measures are a waste of time, ranging from “If we let the fish go here, they’ll just catch them in New Jersey [or any other state they might choose to name]”, "The commercial guys will just kill them if we don't," “The seals [or the cormorants, or the striped bass, or…] are killing them all” or the favorite claim that  “It’s just ‘The Cycle’ and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

Quality and duration arguments usually pop up when stocks are really in bad shape and moratoriums are being considered—folks just don’t want to have to wait for three or four years to catch a fish again.

And as for utility, well, I can sort of understand that one, because the last time the striped bass began to collapse, it took about 20 years to recover the stock, and if the bass crash again and take as long to recover, I’m going to be in my 80s by the time they’re recovered, and my big-fish days might be nearing their end.  I might not get to enjoy such recovery at all.

Maybe that’s why I’m so intent on avoiding calamity…

But the bottom line is that, like it or not, fishery management is driven by politics and politics are driven by people.  And people are likely to discount the future when the future of any fish stock is on the line.

That’s why we need to be proactive, and put laws in place that proscribe managers’ ability to discount the future when stocks are in trouble.

And that is the core beauty of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act.  It protects the future by requiring managers to do the right thing, even if they don't want to.

And that is why H.R. 4742, Doc Hastings “Empty Oceans Act,” which would enshrine the practice of discounting the future in federal law, must be defeated.

Let’s contact our congressmen and make sure that a bad bill dies.

IMAGINE...A SEA WITHOUT STRIPERS

If you’ve been chasing striped bass for more than five years, you know that something is wrong.

You’re not catching much.  Reports from up and down the coast are poor.  There are a few bunches of big fish around, but it’s getting hard to find anything under 20 pounds.

If you have a taste for science, and maybe even if you don’t, you’ve at least skimmed through the stock assessment that was completed last year.  You found no solace there.  It’s almost even money—a 46% chance—that the stock was already overfished in 2012, and you know that things have only gone downhill since then. 

Overfishing is not merely a threat that looms in the future; it has already occurred over much of the past decade.

The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission knows that there’s a problem, but hasn’t taken a single concrete step to fix it.  Instead, debate drags on, with most of it centering around minimizing economic harm, not maximizing chances for the striper’s recovery.

The biologists of its Striped Bass Technical Committee have presented only a single, high-risk plan to end overfishing; there is a 50% chance that their plan will fail to end overfishing by 2016.

Yet even that anemic plan is too much for some members of ASMFC’s Striped Bass Management Board, who are working to water it down even further.  They would weaken the conservation provisions of the Striped Bass Management Plan, so that the harvest cuts needed to end overfishing would take three full years to implement, instead of the one year currently required by the plan.

No plan to rebuild the spawning stock to target abundance has been put on the table, although it can easily be argued that the management plan requires that as well.

Some folks in the angling press are trying to convince fishermen not to panic, although their motivation for encouraging complacency is not at all clear.  Sure, panic is bad, why shouldn’t we be demanding real action?

Optimists can point to the strong 2011 year class, and the likelihood that, although numbers are not yet out, the 2014 will be solid as well.

Pessimists can point out that the 1970 year class was a strong one, too, yet was just about gone in five or six years.  They can point to a 1977 article from the Boston Globe, reproduced on Capt. John McMurray’s website, which describes a fishery eerily similar to what we’re seeing today.

No, I’m not asking you to panic; there’s still a good chance to turn things around.

But I am asking you to sit back for a moment and imagine…a sea without stripers.

For some of us, the vision comes freely.  We fished through the last collapse, and remember waters that were once filled with a tumult of life but quickly turned still and barren except when the bluefish churned through.

For me, the iconic moment of the last striper drought came on a glass-calm morning when I was bucktailing the Connecticut shore.  Casting was an act of faith; I knew that the day’s quest would be fruitless, but still placed each cast precisely, and executed each retrieve as if there were still bass in the sea.  On that day, faith was, to my surprise, rewarded, and I had the privilege of hooking, fighting and releasing a bass.

At that point, the angler in the only other boat near me put down his rod and broke out into a hearty yet ultimately haunting applause.

Given the circumstances, I never want to hear such applause again.

Hopefully, we won’t.  But just imagine…

It will be bad enough for anglers, but we’ll somehow scratch by.  After all, we’ve already fished through the moratorium years.

There will be some bluefish.  There will be fluke and porgies and maybe a weakfish or two. 

There will always be the elemental solace of standing alone by the shore.

But imagine if you had a fishing-dependent business sited anywhere between New Jersey and Maine—but didn’t have striped bass.

At that point, imagination turns to nightmare.

The last time the bass disappeared, there were plenty of other things to keep a business alive.

Winter flounder were hot in the spring, but you could catch a few any time the bays were ice-free.  Today, they’re just about gone, and few folks fish for those that remain.  Instead, angling doesn’t begin to heat up until the striped bass come in.

Tautog—a/k/a blackfish—were a year-round fishery, too.  Today, seasons are short and size limits are high, taking them out of the “general interest” category.  So during the spring and fall, so up on the rock-ribbed coast—southern New England and the North Shore of Long Island—anglers have switched over to stripers.  A lot of party boats now chase stripers, too.

Back in 1980, there were lots of big cod on Coxe’s Ledge in the summer, pollock at Block Island in the spring, and hordes of “baseball bat” whiting at Ambrose.  Note the word “were,” because all of those fisheries died decades ago.  Effort has shifted to other species.  Fluke, porgies and sea bass all provide options.  So do striped bass, with some of the headboats that used to chase codfish making three bass trips each day through the season.

Back in the ‘70s, when bass were getting scarce in Montauk, Jaws made its big-screen splash.  Weekend warriors became shark fishermen, and photos from those days show far too many anglers gloating over dead tigers, duskies or blues. 

For those seeking more prestigious game, the school bluefin limit was four fish per person, and 1,000-pound giants swam the seas off Block Island.  Yellowfin tuna swarmed in the Butterfish Hole, while white marlin finned out within sight of the Lighthouse.

Today, most shark fishing is over by early July, you can keep two small bluefin per boat and giants aren’t easy to come by.  Catching a yellowfin or marlin inside of the canyons—which are about 70 miles offshore—is a pretty rare thing, and it takes a lot of expensive fuel to make it all the way out to the “Edge.”

So instead of chasing sharks, billfish and tuna, the Montauk charter boats spend most of their time pursuing striped bass.

That includes a new sort of charter we didn’t have thirty years ago.  They’re small agile boats that use light tackle and fly rods to catch bluefish, bonito, false albacore—and mostly striped bass.

If the bass disappear, most of the for-hire fleet won’t be too far behind.

Some of the party boats will barely hang on, catching fluke, porgies, sea bass and blues, but with the stripers gone, it’s going to be a close-run thing, because without the bass to bring crowds in the fall—when the boats can make two or even three trips each day, while carrying crowds—a lot of captains will be driving trucks and digging clams over the winter, instead of taking their wives to Florida.

If the fluke thin out, too—at lately, recruitment hasn’t been all that good—the lifeline will snap, and most of the headboats, like most of the stripers, will survive only in anglers’ memories.

The charters boat fleet faces even worse risks.

The last bass collapse forced a lot of the six-pack boats, including some very big names, out of business, even though there were plenty of other fish still being caught. Today, striped bass are the lifeblood of the northeastern fleet, with anglers having far fewer alternative species to fish for.  Another bass crash would devastate the six-pack fleet; few boats are likely to survive on fluke, porgies and sea bass, and the occasional trip offshore.

But the six-packs would do better than the light-tackle boats..  Yes, they fish for bluefish (which get tiring after a while), bonito (which are getting scarce) and false albacore (which didn’t even show up off Long Island last year).  But striped bass gave birth to the light-tackle business, and if the bass go away, the fly boats will follow.

A sea without stripers is an empty and desolate place.

Some of us would stick it out, just as we did before, because we don’t know how to do anything else.  But the majority of anglers—the folks who fish for whatever bites best, will be looking to catch something else.

They’ll drive up the landings of whatever they target, and that will lead to more restrictive regulations for fish such as fluke.  There was a time, not so long ago, when regulations made it harder to catch a legal fluke than a legal striper.  If increased fluke landings push size limits up over 20 inches again, and the stripers just aren’t around, well—what will anglers be fishing for then?

Black sea bass can’t take the pressure, and not everyone wants to eat porgies.

A bass collapse would be a very bad time to buy a tackle shop, although if you were foolish enough to want one, there would likely be plenty for sale...

Given how badly a striped bass collapse would hurt the recreational fishing industry, it’s more than a little surprising that the industry isn’t standing up and demanding that ASMFC put effective conservation measures in place now, while there’s still enough time to stave off real problems.

Yet that’s not happening.

As Fred Golofaro—a long-time bass fishermen who lived through the last crash—noted in the July 3 edition of The Fishermen, “some narrow minded industry folks” don’t want folks talking about the current decline.  He pointed out that, during last fall’s run, mates on party boats—who, as noted, have a lot to lose if the bass disappear—were telling anglers not to let fish go, even if no passenger wanted to take such fish home (the mates, were apparently more than willing to take them, for reasons completely their own).

I can already hear the cries for “disaster relief” if the fish disappear…

Many anglers, too, are a big part of the problem, killing more fish than they need or can possibly use, and continuing to fish—even using destructive gear such as snag hooks—when a limit of bass is already on ice and any fish gut-hooked must either be returned to the water to die or brought back to the dock in violation of the law. 

And we won’t even talk about illegal sale…

So, perhaps, there are some industry folks and quite a few anglers who should really start to imagine what the sea—and fishing, and the fishing business—would be like if bass disappeared.

But a lot of us, Fred Golofaro and myself included, don’t need to rely on our imaginations.

We experienced a sea without stripers first-hand.  We don’t want to experience it again.

And neither do you, my friends.

Believe me, neither do you.

AN ILLUSION OF ABUNDANCE

It’s no secret that striped bass are harder to find than they used to be. 

Most anglers along the striper coast are complaining that fish are harder to come by this year, and a benchmark stock assessment (updated in December of last year) presented to the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission notes that

“Female [spawning stock biomass] grew steadily from 1982 through 2003 when it peaked at about 78 thousand metric tons.  Female SSB has declined since then and was estimated at 58.2 thousand metric tons [at the end of 2012].  The SSB point estimate in 2012 remained just above the threshold level of 57.6 thousand metric tons and indicates that the striped bass are not overfished.  However, given the error associated with the 1995 and 2012 values, there is a probability of 0.46 that the female spawning stock biomass in 2012 is below the threshold...”

In other words, what anglers are seeing on the water is reflected in the scientists’ numbers.  Striped bass abundance is sliding downhill, and there is a 46% chance that bass were already overfished in 2012.

We don’t know for certain where things stand this year, but given that the spawning stock biomass sure didn’t increase in 2013, it’s pretty safe to say that the stock is in worse shape right now than it was in 2012.

So if you wanted to bet that the female spawning stock biomass of striped bass is already overfished—to be technical, that it had dropped below the spawning stock biomass threshold—don’t expect me to bet against you.

Even so, if you happened to be on the South Shore of Long Island over the past few weekends, it might have seemed as if the bass weren’t in any trouble.  Ridiculous numbers of truly large bass—some in excess of 50 pounds—are being caught by anglers fishing around the pods of bunker (a/k/a menhaden) that are passing a few hundred yards south of the beach.

Some days, the fish are picky, and not too many are caught.  On others, a single boat may land upwards of two dozen fish, with few weighing less than 30 pounds.

This isn’t a “sharpie’s” bite.  It’s what some of us call “stupid fishing,” that doesn’t require any more skill than it takes to lob a weighted treble hook into the middle of a school of bunker, snag a fish and then let it swim around—often for a very short while—until a striper ingests it.

Experienced striped bass fishermen are catching their share.  But a lot of very average anglers are catching fish, too, and a many of those anglers, who haven’t put in much time chasing striped bass, are interpreting their sudden success as a sign that the striped bass stock is healthy.

We saw the same thing last year, when a big body of sand eels took up residence off Fire Island and, for a month or so, private boats and for-hire vessels from as far away as Brooklyn—some say they saw at least one party boat from New Jersey—found fast action with striped bass that homed in on the bait.

Folks argued that, with party boats limiting out on an every-day basis, the bass stock must be doing pretty well.

But—wait just a minute—did you notice me mentioning boats from Brooklyn and maybe even New Jersey?

They were running all the way to Fire Island, burning a lot of fuel and spending a couple of hours in transit, because there was nothing closer to their own local ports.  During late October and early November of last year, if you wanted a striped bass anywhere along the South Shore of Long Island, you ran east of Fire Island Inlet.

And so far year, you run to the bunker schools.  The surf has been pretty dead, the bays have been quiet and the inlets have given up very few fish.  Most days, the only game in town has been the bunker schools.

And that is a very bad sign.

Even so, people who happen to be fishing where the fish happen to be are catching a lot of bass, and it can be hard to convince them that something is wrong.

Up in New England, we’re seeing the same sort of thing with cod.

A 2013 stock assessment found that

“The Gulf of Maine Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua) stock is overfished and overfishing is occurring.  Spawning stock biomass (SSB) in 2011 is estimated to be 9,903 [metric tons] or 10,221 mt which is 18% or 13% of the SSB_MSY proxy (54,743 mt or 80,200 mt) [depending on which of two population models is used].  The 2011 fully selected fishing mortality is estimated to be 0.86 or 0.90 which is about 4 or 5 times the FMSY proxy (0.18 for both models).”

In other words, Gulf of Maine cod are in pretty rough shape, but you wouldn’t know it to hear some fishermen talk.  

They’re catching a lot of fish, don’t think that there is any problem, and have been saying things such as

“I’m telling you, it’s out there.  We’ve had no problems locating codfish,”

and

"We don't trust your data.  We don't believe there's a shortage of codfish. We don't believe there's a crisis in codfish."

Recently, NOAA Fisheries took a look at the apparent disconnect between what the cod stock assessment was saying about the poor health of the stock and what fishermen were saying about a supposed abundance of cod, and came to a clear conclusion about what happened.

As in the case of striped bass, it was all about an abundance of forage fish that concentrated the predators in one place, although in the case of cod, it was also about a lack of forage everywhere else.

NOAA Fisheries found that, beginning about ten years ago, herring—which once were the predominant forage for Gulf of Maine cod, began to disappear (as an aside, folks such as the Herring Alliance have been trying to correct that problem, and have had some hard-earned success).

At that point the cod—like last fall’s striped bass off Fire Island—switched over to sand eels.  Most of those sand eels were concentrated on a small section of Stellwagen Bank, and the cod—again like the striped bass off Fire Island—bunched up on a 100-square-mile piece of the bank, where they were easy to catch and gave the illusion of abundance, although cod were scarce in the other 20,000-plus square miles of the stock’s historic range.

As NOAA Fisheries pointed out,

“The trends in cod abundance in this small region were not truly reflective of the overall resource at the time.”

Yet it’s hard to convince a fisherman of that when he’s filling his boxes with cod, just as it’s tough to convince a lot of folks new to the fishery that the striper is headed for trouble when they just put a pair of 40-pound bass in the cooler.

Those folks weren’t around in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the striped bass stock last collapsed.  

They don’t remember that even as the fish were disappearing just about everywhere, anglers on Block Island and up on Cape Cod were having some of the fastest action they had ever known with some truly large striped bass. 

Back then, too, they couldn’t see past the big fish they were catching to recognize that bad times had already come.

But if we are to fix our fishery problems—for striped bass, cod, and everything else—we need to recognize that so long as fish swim in the ocean, there will be those times when by some accident of bait, timing and environmental conditions, fish will concentrate in one place and provide the illusion of abundance, even in times of scarcity.

We must reject that illusion, and remember that the true test of the health of a stock isn’t found in the scattered places where fish are abundant, but in the empty places where the fish used to be.

And then we have figure out how to fill those big empty places with fish once again.

AS LIKELY TO FAIL AS SUCCEED

When a federal appellate court decided Natural Resources Defense Council v. Daley fourteen years ago, the opinion sent a tremor through the fisheries management world.

For the first time, federal fishery management plans had to have at least a 50% chance of achieving their goals.  That was pretty earth-shaking back then, a time when the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council saw nothing wrong with a summer flounder management plan that had only a 17% chance of success—and so gave birth to the lawsuit—and the New England Fishery Management Council’s Northeast Multispecies (Groundfish) plan had less than a 10% chance of recovering some of its component species.

Today, the 50% standard is well-established. 

At least, it is if you’re not Washington Congressman Doc Hastings, whose “Emptly Oceans” bill—H.R. 4742—would again subject some components of multi-species plans to overfishing in order to maximize the economic exploitation of somewhat healthier stocks.

It was pretty much a foregone conclusion that the House Natural Resources Committee, which in recent years has been generally hostile to natural resources of any kind—whether they walked, flew or swam, or even just rooted themselves into the ground and just stood there—was going to vote out bad Magnuson reauthorization bill, so the final form of H.R. 4742 didn’t come as a surprise.

However, what did come as a surprise, yet was not given much publicity, was an effort by Representative Niki Tsongas of Massachusetts, who tried to insert language into the bill that would have required every fishery management plan to have at least a 75% chance of succeeding.

Representative Tsongas had a very good idea, even if it was doomed to fail given the current makeup of the committee.

Because a 50% chance of success also means a 50% chance of failure. 

In reality, the chances of failure are usually higher.  That’s because there are a lot of unknowns in fisheries science.

Those unknowns fall into two broad general categories, “scientific uncertainty” and “management uncertainty”. 

“Scientific uncertainty” is a very broad category that can include a multitude of unknowns relating to the abundance, recruitment and life history of a species.  It can include environmental impacts, predation and the presence—or absence of a species own preferred prey.

“Management uncertainty” addresses the factors that people can theoretically control—fishing mortality and the impact of new regulations—but can be very difficult to assess.  Recreational landings can be very hard to pin down, and for many species, commercial discards can be a statistical black hole.  Illegal harvest, whether recreational or commercial, usually cannot be determined at all.

Such uncertainty leads biologists to hedge their estimates of stock size, recruitment, fishing mortality and other critical values with “confidence intervals” that acknowledge the inevitable errors that creep into such calculations.  Thus, when a regional fishery management council is told that “there is a 50% probability that overfishing will not occur if the annual catch limit is 26 million pounds,” they are only hearing part of the story. 

That 26 million pounds merely represents a “point estimate” that lies near the midpoint of a range of values.  Any value within the range—whether higher or lower than the point estimate—is as likely to be the “right” harvest limit as any other.

Depending on the quality of the available data, the confidence intervals surrounding the point estimate can be fairly narrow, or distressingly large.

And so the dangers of using the 50% standard established by NRDC v. Daley begin to manifest themselves.

Under that standard, fisheries managers start out with a 50% chance of failure; the fate of fish stock may be determined by a statistical coin toss. 

When you add an annual catch limit based on a point estimate, you create another 50-50 chance that the limit will be too high and the management effort will fail. 

Next, compound those two opportunities for failure with a point estimate of recreational harvest, another of commercial discards, a third of recruitment and a fourth of population size…

It’s pretty clear that with all those coins flipped up into the air, there are going to be lots of times when too many come up “tails” and overfishing ensues.

I saw that happen with summer flounder back in 2003, when I sat on the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council.  The stock had been rebuilding nicely for a while, but then seemed to stall. 

Biologists warned that the there might be problems with the model underestimating harvest, but folks still called for the Council to adopt a 50% chance of succeeding, as that let them to kill more fish than any other option. 

During the discussion, one person even lamented the passing of the good old days when a 75% chance of failure was just fine…

The conversation, taken directly from the transcript of the Council meeting, went like this.

PAT KURKUL: … I’ve heard considerable concern over the last few years since the judge’s decision on summer flounder that indicated that we needed to achieve at least a 50 percent probability of attaining the target TACs, that the decision took away the managers’ discretion and prerogative, and I think you’ve heard me argue in the past that in fact it didn’t do that at all. What it did was set a sort of lower bound for the amount of risk that’s appropriate, yet there’s still a considerable range—there are still several different alternatives within a range available to managers where the decisions that we make have to do with the amount of risk we’re willing to assume.

I’m concerned that the tendency has become that we’re going to automatically just adopt the riskiest alternative without consideration of those other alternatives and whether those might be appropriate in different situations. And this is one of them. If you look at the special comments…in the Advisory Report it says given the persistent retroactive underestimation of fishing mortality, managers should consider adopting a lower TAL than that implied by the current overfishing threshold…

What might be a more reasonable way to deal with these fisheries is to look at a controlled expansion…If you look at the 75 percent probability, for example, the TAL would be…26.2 million pounds. So even at a 75 percent probability level, you’re still talking about a significant increase in the quota, and close to the highest TAL since this fishery management plan was implemented.

BOARD CHAIR DAVID BORDEN: Tom Fote.

TOM FOTE: I have very great difficulty with that, the fact that we were taking away from our job and our experience as managers and required to go to 50 percent, we’ll be looking at a fishery that we know there’s a lot more fish out there than we’re basically estimating. Most of us feel that way. Most of the data we see, most of the hook and release mortality shows the same thing. We are forced because of a lawsuit to go to this—well, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission wasn’t, but NMFS and the Council was, to go to 50 percent.

That 50 percent has provided a buffer. At 25 percent we made estimates years ago, we rebuilt the stock, it was going along fine. It was rebuilding, if you look at the graph and the chart as years progressed…

Just a year later, the Council recognized the error of their ways, and adopted an annual catch limit that had a 75% chance of success. 

The resultant spectacular recovery of the summer flounder stock is now history.

Unfortunately, not everyone has gotten the message.

Down at the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, a new stock assessment determined that striped bass had been subject to overfishing for five of the last ten years, and warned that the stock was about to become overfished.

In response, ASMFC’s Striped Bass Technical Committee came up with a plan that had just a 50% chance of ending overfishing by the end of 2016.

As far as anyone can determine, the proposed plan includes no buffers at all for scientific or management uncertainty.

No plans that proposed a 60%, 70% or even 80% chance of success were considered; all of the chips are being bet on a maximum-risk strategy that is as likely to fail as succeed.  (Although, speaking technically, it’s not correct to call the Technical Committee’s proposal to end overfishing a “maximum risk” plan; NRDC v. Daley is not binding on ASMFC, so it could adopt a plan with a 2% chance of success—or one with no chance at all—and still remain within the law.)

Just this week, I learned that the Technical Committee has reexamined commercial striped bass discards—which are nearly impossible to quantify—and decided that they may be smaller than previously thought.  Thus, when the Striped Bass Management Board meets again in August, it is likely that the technical committee will recommend a smaller harvest reduction than they had recommended last May.  

Such recommendation will ignore the uncertainty inherent in the commercial discard estimate, making it more likely that the effort to end overfishing will fail.

So we have to cheer on folks like Representative Tsongas, who realizes that fishery management plans that are as likely to fail as succeed are only marginally better than no management plans at all.

And until the political climate changes, and again makes it possible for folks such as Rep. Tsongas to improve and strengthen federal fisheries law, we have to try—at every opportunity—to convince managers that fishery management plans with a 50% chance of failure just aren’t good enough. 

THE TUNNEL

Fisheries conservation can often seem to be a long, frustrating and unrewarding process.

First, you have to get fisheries managers to admit that there’s a problem.  Then the biologists have to figure out how to fix it.  And then, even with a potential solution in hand, you have to convince and rally and cajole policymakers, in an effort to convince them to find the political will to make meaningful change.

And, of course, the fish have to cooperate.  Even though folks do everything that they think that they have to do to recover a stock, nothing guarantees that the fish will respond right away.

The population may have been depleted so badly that it takes a long time before it begins to respond.  Other factors—some biological, some environmental and some in the form of people who ignore needed rules—can also come into play to delay rebuilding.

Whatever the fish, though, one thing is inevitable:  In order to recover a stock, folks are going to have to kill fewer fish.

And that’s where the problems come in.

There are a lot of people out there who don’t like to be told what to do.

Such people come in all shapes and sizes, and from all walks of life.  About the only sort of people who don’t object to imposing more effective rules are fisheries scientists (except for those who are in the employ of someone who wants to kill fish), since they know what needs to be done.  

Collectively, such people can raise a pretty big fuss, and when that happens, politicians tend to take notice.

At that point, fish become “political animals” and restoring fish stocks changes from a biological exercise to a political confrontation.  

The problem largely arises from the fact that politicians treat their constituents like spoiled children, always telling them what they want to hear and giving them what they want to have, whether or not it is good for them in the long term.

But the sad fact is that most politicians will support anything that makes voters happy and docile and likely to support the status quo.

We see that in the fisheries arena all of the time.

We saw that back in 2000, after the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council, complying with a federal appellate court’s order, drafted the first really meaningful and effective summer flounder regulations, and there was a sharp backlash from the recreational fishing community.

It was largely driven by party/charter boat operators in the upper mid-Atlantic region, which depended on summer flounder for a lot of their business, along with other members of the recreational fishing industry.  However, many recreational anglers, who had long been used to keeping summer flounder just 14 inches long, also voiced discontent.

The outcry was particularly loud in New Jersey, where various organizations including the Recreational Fishing Alliance, the Jersey Coast Anglers’ Association, the United Boatmen‘s Association and a new startup called the Save the Summer Flounder Fishery Fund (some of which organizations also had a significant portion of their membership in New York and elsewhere) complained loudly about efforts to rebuild the summer flounder stock by, among other things, reducing recreational harvest.

To their credit, those associations did fund research which suggested that the size of the summer flounder population that would be needed to achieve maximum sustainable yield was smaller than previously believed.  However, their other efforts to derail the rebuilding process, which generally took the form of casting aspersions on the scientific data in order to convince managers to adopt less restrictive regulations, fortunately did not succeed.

However, they did gain the attention of various federal legislators, including New Jersey's Congressman Frank Pallone, who at the request of such organizations has perennially offered some variation of a bill to weaken federal managers’ ability to conserve and rebuild marine fish populations. His Flexibility in Rebuilding America’s Fisheries Act of 2007 is just one example of that sort of effort.

Fortunately, all efforts to derail summer flounder management ultimately failed, and the stock has been declared fully restored.  

Because fisheries managers hung tough, and didn’t allow themselves to be cowed by those who somehow believed that you could restore the fishery to health without meaningfully reducing harvest, anglers in the southern mid-Atlantic now actually have more summer flounder than they can use and so, for the past two seasons, have been willing to shift some of their harvest to states farther north, where the species is of critical importance to the local angling community.

For summer flounder anglers in New York and New Jersey, and everywhere else along the coast, life is now pretty good, but that is only the case because managers compelled them to accept quite a bit of pain in previous years.

Today, the effort to restore stocks without imposing--or accepting--such pain has shifted both north and south of the mid-Atlantic.

Up in New England, groundfishermen, particularly in the commercial fishery, still try to question scientific data that requires the cod harvest to be sharply reduced.  

However, John Bullard, regional director for the National Marine Fisheries Service’s Greater Atlantic Regional Office, notes that

“Science is something that is always challenged, especially when scientists are giving people news they don't want to hear. Last year, fishermen caught 60 percent of their quota that they were given. So the fisherman couldn't find the cod either.”

He voiced a clear directive that

“The first thing we have to do is put denial behind us.”

Based on those statements, and assuming that the politicians don’t get in the way (Congressman Doc Hastings’ H.R. 4742, the so-called “Empty Oceans Act,” is of particular concern in that regard), New England groundfish might have the same opportunity for recovery that summer flounder enjoyed.

However, down South, things don’t look quite so good, for in the Gulf of Mexico, politicians are falling all over themselves trying to appease recreational anglers who don’t want to be responsible for their overharvest of red snapper.

They have introduced the Gulf of Mexico Red Snapper Conservation Act of 2013, which would purport to “conserve” red snapper by taking responsibility of the species away from federal fisheries managers, who have to comply with the conservation and rebuilding provisions of the Magnuson Act, and hand such responsibility over to state managers, who report to political bosses and aren’t legally bound to restore or conserve anything at all.

That way, state managers could assure anglers that they really can restore fish stocks while not cutting recreational harvest to the point that it causes any pain or inconvenience.

That will make the anglers happy, at least so long as the red snapper last (and when they’re gone, there’s little doubt that the anglers will blame their disappearance on commercial harvest, environmental shifts, the removal of oil rigs on one hand, and the damage caused by oil spills on the other—pretty much on any factor that prevents them for accepting any responsibility themselves).

 In other words, they’d behave just like the summer flounder anglers in the mid-Atlantic and the commercial groundfishermen up in New England would have liked to behave—if the federal regulators would have let them.

But, as long-time summer flounder fishermen know and New England groundfishermen hope, despite the pain and inconvenience that is inevitably imposed when a stock is rebuilt, there is light at the end of the tunnel.

It is possible to enjoy the benefits that a fully-restored fishery provides.

But to get to that light, you have to go through the tunnel.  You can’t stay on the other side.

That tunnel is cramped, dark and damp.  Inside, it’s a little bit scary, because you can’t be sure what the next step will bring.

But relief lies only at the other end.

So up in New England, down in the Gulf, and on every other coast where restoring depleted fisheries is going to cause pain, folks really don’t have much of a choice.

They can struggle through the tunnel, and enjoy the restored stocks that lie just beyond its far side end.

Or they can stay where they are, avoiding one transient pain, and take the chance that they will never know anything but the agony imposed by a half-empty ocean, should the tunnel ever close.