"LEGAL" DOES NOT EQUAL "RIGHT"

You hear it all of the time, regardless of the species in question or the health of the stock.

“You shouldn’t criticize someone for keeping a limit of fish.  It’s not illegal, and they have a right to take them.”

The topic came up most recently in a long thread on the 1 @ 32 Pledge Facebook page, after an angler, disgusted with a charter boat captain’s disregard for the resource, posted one of the captain’s kill shots and used it as an example of what not to do.

Immediately, a New Jersey angler leaped to the captain’s defense, asking

“Was something about the above catches illegal?”

Which, of course, was not the case, because—if we believe the latest benchmark striped bass stock assessment and its December 2013 update—the law already allows anglers to kill too many bass.  What was depicted was perfectly legal but, given the current stock, it was also the wrong thing to do.

However, the captain’s defender kept on, arguing that

“It’s not the Capts [sic] job to set the season, bag, or size limits.”

Which is true, although it probably is the captain’s job to educate his customers a bit about sportsmanship and the health of the stock, if for no other reason than to keep some fish in the water so those customers have a reason to charter him next year.

But—and this is really the point of the story—the captain wasn’t merely following the law.  He was fighting very hard to keep a bad law from being changed for the better, and apparently encouraging others to fight changes as well by writing

“It’s all bs.  There’s millions of bass…Our only worry is the tree huggers who think the bass are going extinct.  These govt [profanity deleted] don’t even know one bit about the fishery whatsoever… 

“We all need to send an e-mail!!!!  It takes less than 5 minutes!!!   This can really hurt us full time fishing boats and surely hurt the recreational fisherman as well…

“I am for a status quo option for the Striped Bass Management Regulations…”  

So what we have is a charter boat captain with complete contempt for the science and the regulators, who celebrates killing limits of big, mature fish, being defended because his actions are not illegal and he does not make the laws—although he does try really hard to keep the law from being changed.

Does anyone see a problem here?

With the striped bass population hovering on, or perhaps already sunk below, the threshold defining an overfished stock, most serious anglers would agree that the right thing to do is to kill fewer bass, so that the population might start to rebuild.  So why shouldn’t people criticize folks who do the wrong thing, merely because it is legal?

Let’s think back a few years, to the 1970s and 1980s, when bluefish were everywhere and seemed to drive anglers into a frenzy of killing more intense than anything done by the bluefish themselves.  Far too often, when those anglers returned to the dock with a boat filled with blues, they’d realize that neither they nor anyone else wanted to clean and eat all those fish, so they’d dump them overboard. 

The same thing happened on party boats and charters, as fares killed far more fish than they could ever use, and then left them behind for the crew to sell, if they could, or tossed them into dockside dumpsters.

That waste was all perfectly legal—but does anyone even want to suggest it was right?

Not too many years ago, I was out in Montauk during late summer, in a marina that catered to the charter boat crowd.  The dumpster was filled with false albacore—all perfectly legal, and all perfectly wrong.

Which leads us to the offshore scene, that once saw sharks, billfish and—when the price was still under ten cents per pound—even bluefin tuna killed and hauled in to the scales to be weighed for tournament dollars or maybe just to bulk up someone’s ego, and then tossed on a landfill or dumped back out at sea.  That was legal, too, but was it right?

Today, angling ethics have evolved to the point that for most of us, such blatant waste of a finite resource is just plain unacceptable, even though it’s permitted by law.

So, now that we’ve reached the point when “It’s OK—it’s legal” does not offer cover to those who kill and waste the resource, we need to take the next step, and admit that the argument is also absurd when applied to less blatant abuses.

In other words, we need to start thinking like sportsman.

And what is a sportsman?  I’ve always liked the way the late Robert Ruark, an author, angler and hunter himself, once defined the term.

"A sportsman, is a gentleman first. But a sportsman, basically, is a man who kills what he needs, whether it's fish or bird or animal, or what he wants for a special reason, but he never kills anything just to kill it. And he tries to preserve the very same thing that he kills a little of from time to time. The books call this conservation. It's the same reason why we don't shoot that tame covey of quail down to less'n ten birds."

That pretty well says it all.

It’s fine to take a fish home for dinner.  But you don’t kill a striped bass, or anything else, just because it’s legal to do so, and you “don’t shoot that tame covey of quail down to less’n ten birds”—or take too many striped bass when the stock is declining, or try to catch the last winter flounder in the bay—even though there is no legal penalty if you do.

Because, as a sportsman, you have an obligation “to preserve the very same thing” that you take home and eat once in a while.  Even if that obligation isn’t enshrined in the law.

And that is why I take such exception to those who say that anglers shouldn’t criticize other anglers who’s are merely doing what the law allows.  For the law establishes a very low bar, the bare minimum standard for conduct.

We, as sportsman, can set a higher standard.

And we should.

A lot of the reason that folks post pictures in magazines, on Internet sites and on tackle shop walls is to gain recognition and perhaps admiration from their fellow anglers.  Criticism is the last thing that they want to hear.

So when we let photos of excessive fish kills, dead-and-dumped marlin or any other behavior that shows a lack of respect or concern for the resource involved, go without comment, we are implicitly endorsing such conduct.  We’re giving the angler in question positive reinforcement, and encouraging him or her to do the wrong thing again.

Instead, it is our responsibility to make it clear to such anglers that their behavior falls short of those accepted by the community of sportsmen, and far from giving them the approval they seek, provide measured criticism instead.

This is nothing new.

The phrase “Limit your kill, don’t kill your limit” has been heard on the nation’s fresh waters for years.  Why is still alien to salt water anglers?

Largemouth bass are the most popular gamefish in the country.  They support a multi-billion dollar fishing industry, tournaments and television shows.  And all of the hype is built around catch and release.  Anyone who showed up at a popular bass-fishing lake with a stringer of bigmouths stiff and dead in their cooler would meet a very hostile reception from fellow "bassmasters."  Using “It’s legal” as a defense might lead to an unscheduled swim…

The late Lee Wulff is famous for writhing that “A good gamefish is too valuable to be caught only once,” and spawned a catch-and-release ethic that led to no-kill trout waters all across the United States.  And he did it at a time when filling a bamboo creel was both legal and the accepted norm.

For the standards of the angling community are only as good--or as bad--as the majority of anglers want them to be.

We need to work hard to change fisheries laws so that they will restore our fish stocks and keep those stocks healthy for the benefit not just of us, but of generations yet to be born.

We need to work equally hard to create an angling ethic on America’s coasts that is just as rigorous as the ethic that already thrives along the nation's trout streams and on the lakes where largemouth bass swim. 

And in building that ethic, we must point out what’s wrong, even when the law fails to do so.

"GAMEFISH": CONSERVATION OR CON

The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Striped Bass Management Board met today, and to no one’s surprise, approved “conservation equivalency” measures that are likely to frustrate the goals of the management plan and assure that the stock becomes overfished at some time this year—if it isn’t already.

Members of the Management Board recognized the flaws in conservation equivalency throughout the discussion, but approved the measures anyway.  That included smug representatives of the State of New Jersey, a so-called “gamefish” state that outlawed its commercial fishery but kept its commercial quota, and could use it to increase the “commercial” portion of New Jersey’s striped bass harvest by over 200,000 pounds this year—when we’re supposed to cut back.

To hear the “gamefish” advocates tell it, outlawing commercial harvest and sale is a sound conservation measure, that would assure the health of the resource well into the future.

But when commercial fishermen tell the same tale, they condemn “gamefish” status as nothing more than a “fish grab,” a naked effort to reallocate all of the striped bass resource to the recreational sector,  garbed in a cloak of tattered virtue that anglers call “conservation.”

So who is right?

As an angler, I’m inclined to favor the former argument, but as someone who spends a lot of time working for effective fisheries management—and who tries to tell the truth in these columns I write—I have to admit that both sides go a little too far.

Start with just two basic truths.

ONE:  The easiest way to rebuild an overfished stock is to kill fewer fish.

TWO:  A fish doesn’t care who kills it; a striped bass (or anything else) is just as dead when killed by an angler as it is when killed by a commercial fisherman.

So shutting down commercial fisheries could lead to fewer fish being killed.  So could shutting down recreational fisheries—or letting both recreational and commercial fisheries continue, while placing greater constraints on both of their harvests.

“Gamefish” has proven effective offshore, by ending the commercial harvest of Atlantic-coast sailfish and marlin, and it’s difficult to argue that it didn’t play a big role in the recovery of the Gulf of Mexico’s red drum population.

On the other hand, when it comes to striped bass, “gamefish” has a notably checkered record.

In some states, such as Maine and New Hampshire, it works.  When those states closed their commercial striped bass fisheries, they didn’t reallocate their commercial quota to anglers, but instead allowed the fish “saved” from harvest to remain a part of the spawning stock biomass.  That truly promotes conservation.

On the other hand, in Connecticut and New Jersey, “gamefish” doesn’t look like conservation at all.

New Jersey started the ball rolling many years ago when it initiated it’s “bonus fish” program shortly after ending the state’s commercial fishery.  That program reallocated the state’s commercial quota to the recreational sector, provided that anglers participating in the program buy the requisite “bonus tag.”

The supposed logic behind the program was the sort of warped thinking that you often hear coming out of the Garden State’s fisheries managers—they had to create a mechanism that allowed local anglers to kill “New Jersey’s” striped bass—which represent the state’s commercial bass quota—from being transferred to and killed by commercial fishermen in other jurisdictions. 

For those old enough to remember the Vietnam War, it was akin to the argument that “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.”

And the Jersey boys will tell you that it’s good conservation.

Of course, they won’t tell you that ASMFC’s striped bass management plan assigns each state a commercial quota based on its historical landings, and does not permit the transfer of quota between states.  That would ruin the narrative, and anyway, scare tactics work better...

If they stuck just to the facts, folks might believe that the real motivation behind New Jersey’s “gamefish” law wasn’t conservation at all, and that it was merely a ploy to let New Jersey anglers kill some more stripers.  And that wouldn’t look good in the papers at all…

Connecticut, on the other hand, eased into its misuse of “gamefish” far more slowly.

I think that it may have been the first “gamefish” state on the coast, adopting the measure back in the ‘50s.  I know that I grew up in that state, and never recall at time when selling striped bass was legal. 

Of course, that didn’t stop the “regulars” from selling their fish.  There was a big seafood restaurant in the middle of Cos Cob where they showed up each morning, lining up at the kitchen door to sell the night’s catch before heading off to their day jobs; the place was notorious for buying poached fish, but in all of the time that I lived there, the law never once came around.

And there were plenty of country clubs, markets and such would gladly fence your illegal bass.  There was at least one marina in Stamford that, for a few dollars, would actually ship your illegal bass to the Fulton Fish Market for you.  Fulton was a “family” business back then, that paid folks in cash and didn’t keep perfect records, which pleased everyone at the time.

In those days, there was a 16-inch size limit and no bag limit at all, so an awful lot of “gamefish” were sold.  By comparison, Connecticut’s current rules, which convert the state’s commercial quota into a “voucher” program that let anglers keep a total of 3,018 bass, with a size limit of just 22 inches, probably look pretty benign. 

But at least in years past, the state tried to conserve a few fish.  Today, its regulations encourage anglers to kill the entire commercial quota, making Connecticut’s “gamefish” law a sham effort at conservation.

“Gamefish” for billfish works because regulations governing anglers catch are actually far more restrictive today than they were when the sale of Atlantic-coast sailfish and marlin was outlawed.

“Gamefish” for Gulf red drum is also effective, because no one—including recreational fishermen—can kill the big spawners when they school up in the EEZ, where they spend most of their time.

But when we talk about “gamefish” being the striped bass’ salvation, we must keep Connecticut and New Jersey in mind.  There’s not much salvation to be found in their waters…

Close to a decade ago, Pat Murray, then the Vice President (and currently the President) of the Coastal Conservation Association summed it all up in an elegant and eloquent little essay that he called “The Last Fish,” where he wrote

“It has often been said that commercial fishermen want to catch the last fish.  But are we recreational fishermen trying to stop them simply because we want to catch the last fish?”

That really gets to the heart of the “gamefish” debate.

Ending the commercial harvest of striped bass would help the stock, IF—and only IF—the fish saved from commercial exploitation are “reinvested” into the stock, to reduce fishing mortality and allow more older and larger—and more fecund—striped bass to remain a part of the spawning stock biomass.

If we merely turn the bass “saved” from commercial harvest into “trophy fish,” “bonus fish,” “voucher” fish or anything else that can be legally killed, then “gamefish” status has no conservation value at all,  and becomes just a con used to justify snatching fish from the commercials and giving them to the anglers to kill.

So let’s try to be honest.  

There might be economic and policy arguments that justify reallocating the kill.

But if the kill’s only reallocated, and not materially reduced, it’s not, in any way, conservation.

HOW MANAGEMENT DECISIONS ARE MADE

Regular readers of this blog know that I have a lot of respect for professional fisheries scientists.  On the whole, they are dedicated, underpaid, overworked public servants who generally try to do the right thing.

On the state level, where there is no Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act to set legal standards and guidance, fisheries managers often find themselves sandwiched between biological and political realities, with the former demanding conservative approaches that assure the long-term health of state fisheries, while the latter demands that fish stocks be managed for maximum exploitation to assure the short-term profit of those having the ear of elected officials.

And since one of those elected officials is usually the fisheries managers’ boss, that means that politics win over science a good part of the time.

Even so, sometimes we come across management decisions that are so divorced from the realities that we see on the water that we have to wonder just how they were made.

Consider “Fish X”.

“Fish X” is a real species that lives in our waters here in New York.  I’m not naming it just yet because, in this context, it’s more than a fish, but a greater symbol of how things ought not to be done.  Thus, it has relevance to all of us at one point or another, and I don’t want to turn off any readers—who are perhaps most of my readers—who fish in those waters where Fish X never swam.

Fish X was once one of the most popular and abundant recreational fish in New York.  Thirty years ago, anglers took home almost 6.8 million pounds of them.  However, Fish X has since fallen on hard times, and only 0.03 million pounds were landed last year; the recreational harvest has fallen by more than 99 percent.

And that’s because the population has just fallen through the floor.  

The number of fish has fallen so far that researchers at Stony Brook University’s School of Marine and Atmospheric Science have found that inbreeding now threatens the population, and that they can now estimate the number of Fish X in New York’s bays by examining the genomes of a few individuals that are caught there.

To make matters worse, other research done at Stony Brook suggests that the overall population of Fish X is composed of two subpopulations, one of which migrates to deeper ocean waters, and one of which remains inside coastal bays during the summer and may be at risk of extirpation.  A relevant paper written by scientists at the university recognizes the vulnerability of such resident fish and notes that

”Resolving the stock structure and migratory behavior of Long Island [Fish X] is crucial to determine the impacts of local harvest on the sustainability of the species. If resident [Fish X] represent a separate genetic population, the seasonally more abundant dispersive population may mask a long-term decline in resident [Fish X] that once supported Long Island fisheries and may eventually lead to extirpation of residents. This outcome would require management of each population separately based on population-specific life history variables. On the other hand, if resident and dispersive [Fish X] are contingents within a single genetically distinct population that exhibit partial migration, the relative impact of harvest on resident and dispersive individuals can be complex. Management would need to consider the relative abundance of each contingent through habitat or other conservation efforts aimed at a specific contingent.  [emphasis added]”

New York State’s Department of Environmental Conservation knows that Fish X is in dire straits. 

An October 2014 memo from the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s [Fish X] Technical Committee notes that

“Nearly all the survey indices are near time-series lows.  The [Technical Committee] concludes that the [Fish X] biomass remains near time-series low.  Young of year indices generally remain low, although a few indices have improved in recent years.  Rebuilding is likely to be slow (if at all) especially if recruitment remains poor…”

In December 2014, NY DEC issued a proposed revision of its list of “New York Species of Greatest Conservation Need”.   It noted that

“The status of these species is known and conservation action is urgent in the next ten years.  These species are declining and must receive timely management intervention or they are likely to reach critical population levels in New York.  [emphasis added]”

Fish X is a part of that list.

Thus it seems inexplicable that the New York Department of Environmental Conservation would move to increase the number of Fish X that are killed by anglers each year, and would open the fishing season in a way that would directly jeopardize the vulnerable resident fish and increase the likelihood that they would be extirpated.

Yet that is just what the agency is planning to do.

In a notice of proposed rulemaking released just last week, the State of New York announced that it would be extending the fishing season for Fish X, which currently runs for just 60 days in the spring, to a full 10 months.  For much of that added time—perhaps mid-June through early October—all of the angling pressure would fall on the few remnant resident fish, since the larger body of migratory individuals would be out of reach in deep ocean waters.

It doesn’t seem to make any sense, although the state tries to justify its actions by saying

“These regulations are necessary for New York to maximize [Fish X] fishing opportunities for its marine recreational anglers while remaining in compliance with the Interstate Fishery Management Plan (FMP) adopted by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC). The proposed rule will extend the current 60 day open season (April 1 - May 30) to 306 days (March 1 - December 31) without altering the current 12 inch minimum size limit or the 2 fish possession limit. This regulatory change will provide New York marine recreational anglers with similar access to [Fish X] as anglers in NY's neighboring states of Rhode Island, Connecticut and New Jersey. The proposed season will provide additional fishing opportunities during periods of the year when there are few other species to fish for. It is hoped that these relaxed regulations will increase interest and fishing activity, resulting in economic benefits to a number of different types of associated businesses.”

You might have noted that the health of the Fish X stock was never mentioned, not even once.  It was all about business, and fishing opportunities for a species that, in these times, is not even there.  (I can’t go on without noting that the “when there are few other species to fish for” line is purest fiction, as the summer and fall months, which account for most of the extension, are when New York’s anglers enjoy their waters’ greatest abundance.)

The poor health of the stock is considered briefly when the DEC discusses closing the Fish X season altogether, although it was quickly dismissed in comments that said

“Some stakeholders have said that the [Fish X] fishery should be closed or more restrictive than it is currently managed to eliminate fishing mortality on these fish. However, neighboring states have already decided to extend the [Fish X] season. This alternative was rejected because such a closure would deny New York State anglers fishing opportunities made available to anglers in neighboring states and because a closure may adversely impact the incomes of New York State recreational fishery businesses.”

Not too much mention of how many “fishing opportunities” New York anglers might have or how good “recreational fishery businesses” would do if Fish X was wiped out, but that doesn’t seem to matter to folks.  At the March 2014 meeting of New York’s Marine Resources Advisory Council, representatives of the recreational fishing industry strongly endorsed an increased kill, as always elevating short-term profits over the long-term health of the stock

No, it doesn’t make any sense, but it is being done nonetheless.

And so it is probably time to end the charade.  If you live in New York, if you know me personally or if you have read this blog for very long—or if you clicked on one of the hyperlinks above—you know that “Fish X” is New York’s winter flounder.  

And knowing that, you realize that the proposal to extend the season makes no sense at all.

Perhaps the best explanation comes from an e-mail that was forwarded to me soon after the proposed rule became public.  It was written by an angler in Moriches Bay (I won’t mention his name), who may have finally figured out how and why fishery management decisions such as this one are made. 

He noted that

“Now we can catch no flounder for 306 days rather than just for 60 days.  (The last one being caught in Moriches bay in February 1992 by a bayman towing a scallop dredge in an uncertified area. The uncaring lout carried that fish around to all the local seedy gin mills, comparing himself to the last of the buffalo hunters and trying to pick up loose women…)

“Anyway, being a master of several manly sports, namely hunting, I cleverly figured out why fisheries managers would expand a season on a species of fish nearly extinct on Long Island. Let me slowly explain it to you so that you may possibly grasp this ingenious management concept.

“Every fall, happy little ducks migrate south from the North Pole, after saying goodbye to Santa to spend their winters in the relatively warm southern climes of New England and Long Island. These gullible naive birds believe they have hit the duck lottery coming to our shores eating everything in sight. Heck, a flock of geese was seen trying to eat a local golf course the other day. Their wanton feeding gets them killed off by local hunters. (I actually got one last week after a season of trying, their numbers really not much more than flounders but that's not the point.) The ducks are stupid when they get here, and smarten up as the season progresses as sportsman send lead projectiles at them and try to shoot their asses off.

“Now take flounder. The fish that sees those flounder rigs in the early season is young, dumb, and full of milt. Eager to take a bait. This is dangerous to the species. Sometimes they swarm to the chum slick. During one tide twenty years ago I spotted three in a span of four hours! 

"With the proliferation of party boats on Moriches bay it has been determined with telemetry studies the biggest threat to flounder is actually not by catching but by head injury. Frustrated fisherman violently jigging their rods, rumored to work by flounder fisherman 100 years ago, send lead weights crashing to the bottom in an effort to get the flounders attention. These inexperienced flounder swim up to these boats are many are simply knocked unconscious and eaten by crabs or seals.

“The current sixty day season is too short for the flounders little brain to register that chums slicks mean missiles of death and flying corn beads. Now 306 days of pure mayhem, party boats throwing clams, mussels, corn and thousands of hours of sports pounding the bottom with lead weights will indoctrinate even the dumbest flounder to equate dancing corn beads and twister tails with death from above and will most surely save the species from imminent destruction. A rather brilliant strategy by fisheries managers that may even convince the most skeptical amongst us…”

I have to admit that it makes more sense than any of the reasons that I’ve heard coming out of ASMFC, MRAC or the DEC.

Which probably tells us all that we need to know about the proposal.

NOTE:

If the effort to extend New York’s winter flounder season disgusts you as much as it does me, please make a comment to the Department of Environmental Conservation and tell them so.  Comments should be sent to

Stephen W. Heins
NYSDEC
205 North Belle Mead Road, Suite 1
East Setauket, NY 11733

or e-mail comments to: Proposed Rulemaking Part 40 - Marine Fish - Open Seasons, Size and Catch Limits (Winter Flounder)

I’d really thank you if you did.

 

MOVING FORWARD WITH MENHADEN MANAGEMENT

Just about two years ago, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Atlantic Menhaden Management Board adopted Amendment 2 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Menhaden, which for the first time established biological reference points for managing the menhaden fishery.

It was a landmark action that was achieved only through a lot of hard work, with anglers and the broader fisheries conservation community working together. 

At the beginning, it was a struggle to bring menhaden management out of its version of the Dark Ages, when the initial Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Menhaden contemplated an Atlantic Menhaden Management Board and an Atlantic Menhaden Advisory Committee dominated by representatives of the menhaden reduction industry and officials from reduction industry states.

Once the first, most difficult battle to drive the foxes out of the henhouse was won, the fight became an incremental grind to improve the science and put menhaden management on a par with that of other species.

How long did it take?

Let’s put it this way.

The Coastal Conservation Association was one of the organizations at the forefront of the menhaden battle from the beginning.  When I joined CCA’s Board of Directors in 1996, and became Chairman of its Atlantic States Fisheries Committee a or so year later, CCA had already been involved in with the issue for about half a decade.  And when I resigned from CCA’s board in 2013, the fight to manage menhaden the right way was—IS—still going on.

Because Amendment 2 was a big step, but not the conclusion.

Amendment 2 set “interim” biological reference points that are, for practical purposes, based on the spawning potential of the stock.  But those reference points were derived from a stock assessment that seemed to have its share of problems, and everyone recognized that, with the interim reference points in place, it was time to produce a new benchmark stock assessment that would better guide menhaden management in the future.

That assessment process is now nearing completion. An Atlantic Menhaden Benchmark Stock Assessment has been completed, and has passed through the peer review process with only slight revisions.  As a result, it looks as if menhaden management is going to change once again.

Some folks might wonder why so much fuss is being made over a fish that nobody eats (at least intentionally), tends to die by the thousands in summer and stink up the shorelines where wealthy folks live and, to be honest, doesn’t smell all that good even when it’s still alive.

Bruce Franklin tried to answer that question in his book, The Most Important Fish in the Sea.  While his title is a bit of an overreach—the sea is pretty big, and in some of its corners, herring, pilchards, sardines, anchovies or other such critters might contend for the title—menhaden are certainly the most important fish along the U.S. East Coast, for the simple reason that, at some point in their lives, just about everything eats it.

When I was a kid—six or seven years old—I recall the flash of diminutive “snappers”, which are young of the year bluefish, tearing through schools of “peanut bunker”, which are young-of-the-year menhaden.  And just this past summer, I saw great humpback whales off western Long Island, swimming in as little as 40 feet of water to come up under big schools of menhaden with vast jaws agape.

And that pretty well tells us where menhaden management should be headed next.

The benchmark assessment suggests that the stock is in much better shape than we previously thought.  

But the next big step isn’t just to rebuild menhaden to securely sustainable levels.  We’re already about there now, with the stock assessment declaring that

“The menhaden stock is unlikely to experience unsustainable harvest rates or drop to depleted biomass levels in the short term under the current management plan.”

Larger, older fish are becoming a bigger part of the population, and the fishing mortality rate is the lowest in sixty years.

Yet menhaden management isn’t just about limiting harvest.  It’s also about providing an abundance of menhaden in the nearshore ocean, so that the whales, the sharks and the seals, along with fish of all kinds and a host of fish-eating birds, have a rich and dependable forage base.

Managers aren’t quite sure how to guarantee menhaden abundance—the link between stock size and recruitment is deemed “weak at best.”

Even so, the next great frontier for menhaden management is the development of “ecological based reference points” that don’t merely consider the size of the stock and the limits on harvest needed to provide a sustainable fishery, but rather the size of the stock needed to fulfill the menhaden’s most important role as forage fish of first resort.

Under such a management plan, the primary concern of fisheries managers won’t be how many menhaden may be safely netted, reduced into fish meal and shipped off to China, but rather how many menhaden will be needed to sustain a striped bass stock restored to target levels, with enough left over for the bluefish and the seals.

And yes, that sort of thinking is needed, because at October’s Striped Bass Management Board meeting, one of the arguments used by conservation’s opponents was that there was not enough forage in Chesapeake Bay—home of the last remaining menhaden reduction plant on the East Coast—to support a bigger striped bass population.  (Yet, curiously, those same watermen and their enablers who raised such objections were remarkably silent when a Pennsylvania commissioner asked whether they’d be willing to kill fewer menhaden to provide forage for bass.)

We have already learned how to restore fish stocks one at a time, although some folks—particularly up in New England and down in the Gulf of Mexico—seem dysfunctionally slow in absorbing those lessons.  Now, we need to learn how to use that knowledge to heal entire ecosystems, and make them function in ways that haven’t been seen in decades, or perhaps for close to a century.

We are getting our first taste of what such a healed system would look like off the coast of Long Island, as striped bass follow the menhaden schools and the slashing tails of thresher sharks churn the surface to foam less than a mile from the Fire Island Inlet sea buoy.

As we enter the new world of ecosystem management, menhaden are one of the fish that have the real potential to show us the way.

If they indeed fulfill that role, we will have maybe the best reason of all to call them, “the most important fish in the sea.”

WE JUST DON'T KNOW WHAT WE'RE MISSING...

Last week, I was reading a blog called “Phenomena:  Laelaps” which appears on the National Geographic website.

It usually deals with fossils and such, but this week, it drifted out of character just a bit, with a post called “The Mediterranean’s Missing Sawfishes.” It described how sawfish had been extirpated from the Mediterranean Sea, and also how, although they were clearly documented there in historical times, some scientists doubted that the Mediterranean ever hosted a breeding population, because its water can grow too cold and reports were so few.

But the blog’s author, after examining the arguments and the evidence, came to a very different conclusion.  After observing that the sawfish and humans had shared the Mediterranean Sea for a very long time, and that such sharing didn’t work out too well for the sawfish, he said

“Our species only started keeping track of what was ‘natural’ when the sawfishes were already in decline.  Marine biologists know this as ‘shifting baselines’, and it’s the same reason why many don’t feel the absence of ground sloths and mastodons in North American forests.  The megamammals were already gone by the time naturalists started paying attention to the woods, and we don’t consider how empty the landscape is.  We just don’t know what we’re missing.”

I have to admit that, when I read those words, they gave me a chill that took me back to the waters right here off Long Island.  To thoughts of how, in just the past 50 years, those waters that I came to know as a child were already all but empty of some of the life that had thrived there before.

My first thoughts went, as they always do, to the ignored winter flounder. 

I can’t look out on the early-spring bay and not recall the way it once was, when boats dotted the water as far as you could see, and in each boat, anglers were filling buckets, baskets or burlap bags with the same sort of flounder that were taken, firm and cold, out of every bay, sound and canal from New Jersey up through New England.

I can recall growing up on the water, catching flounder off beaches and piers on days off from school, and spending weekends on a boat with my parents, when we fished for flounder right through the year, from April well into November.

There is a sad stillness in today’s springtime bay that only we older folks know.  The kids and new anglers embrace a new normal in which flounder are scarce, and it isn’t unlikely that in another few years, the next generation will fish in a bay that doesn’t hold flounder at all.

And the saddest part is, they will not miss them a bit.

Nor, down at the West End, will they miss whiting, which used to swarm when the weather turned cold.  Party boats ran trips day and night, taking their fares not far from the harbor, but just far enough that they could fill up their sacks with whiting that ran from a foot or so long to “baseball bat” size.

Those who chose not to pay for a place on a boat could go down, at night, to places such as the Coney Island pier, and catch whiting that swam into the glare of the overhead lights.  

On cold winter nights, one didn’t even need a hook and line; “frostfish,” as whiting were called at the time, would become disoriented while feeding right up in the wasy, and it was very possible to collect enough fish for a family meal by walking the shore in the darkness, and gathering the frozen bodies of fish that had beached themselves on the sand.

It’s been a long time since that has happened, of course; the whiting left New York Bight a long generation ago.  “Frostfish” have become legend since then.

Some fish slip through our fingers without any fanfare, and don’t become legends at all.

Speak with anyone younger than forty or so, and mention the spring pollock run that occurred off Block Island, and they’ll throw you a quizzical stare.  It was one of those things that, for whatever reason, got far less publicity than it deserved.  But for those of us who lived in Connecticut, Rhode Island or eastern Long Island, and who chased groundfish back in those days, the pollock run was spectacular.

Imagine catching fish the size of striped bass—well, there were no 40s or 50s involved, but fish between 15 and 30—that pulled as hard as bluefish, and doing that throughout the day, and you can get an feel for what it was like.  If you wanted a few fish for dinner, you could catch them on bait rigs or jigs; if you were really hungry, you could troll umbrella rigs on downriggers and come close to sinking your boat with the things.

Yet today, that run is long gone.

It’s as dead as the mackerel in Long Island Sound, which once filled the water in such abundance that we caught them five at a time.  That run used to stretch out over four weeks in May; it dwindled to nothing two decades ago. 

On the South Shore of Long Island, the story is almost the same.  A run that once lasted for weeks—a shoal of silvered abundance that sometimes seemed to extend, nearly unbroken, from Manasquan, New Jersey to Montauk, New York for weeks during the spring, is now mostly gone.  You might find a few pods of mackerel in winter, moving inshore with the cold, and if you’re extremely lucky, you could hit a school swimming east during April, but it won’t stay for more than a day.

The days of the big schools are past.

Such things have disappeared just in my lifetime.

If we want to go back further, we need to seek written words.

In Heartbeats in the Muck, a natural history of New York Harbor, John Waldman recalls when red drum, sheepshead and salt water catfish swam in local waters.  He talks of

“…the regular presence until the middle of the nineteenth century of sharks along Manhattan’s commercial waterfront, particularly the East River.  Not little sharks, but eight- and twelve-footers, drawn to the shallows by the raw refuse of the markets and common enough that one market worker, well known for overpowering sharks with the customary tug-of-war gear of handheld rope tied to chain, landed seven in one day.”

Today, a shark in the harbor makes the network news.  We don't think of how common they were.

But perhaps his most relevant recollection for anglers is when he points out that

“Black drum, absent for a century, were the scourge of Staten Island oyster planters and were commonly caught around Manhattan to weights of seventy pounds, the Harlem River and the Battery being prime locations.”

If most New York anglers ran into a black drum today—and every once in a great while, somebody does—the odds are good that they’d have no idea what it was.

Should an angler ever catch a black drum, an old provision of New York’s Environmental Conservation Law would require that angler to kill it rather than set it free, helping to assure that the drum would forever remain a stranger in waters that it once called home.

So a hole remains off our coastlines, that only the black drum could fill.  There is another hole nearly empty of flounder, and a hole where the whiting once swam.

And just as I know nothing of black drum, there is a new generation of anglers, some already old enough to have fishing-age children themselves, who know little of flounder or mackerel or pollock, and nothing of whiting at all.  

We can only ask ourselves what their grandkids will know of tautog (blackfish), of tomcod, of American shad and American eels, of dusky sharks and bluefin tuna, and maybe if all goes completely wrong, even of such Long Island icons as striped bass and weakfish.

And what makes that picture more frightening is the likelihood that no one will care; that such fish will fall into legend, and that even such legends will fade.  That future generations will view an empty ocean as normal, and never look out over the rips at Montauk and remember a time when they pulsed bright with striped bass chasing rainbait, just as too many anglers today can look out over an empty Great South Bay without saying, “I recall when the flounders were in…”

TUNNEL VISION

I recently perused an editorial in The Seafood News, that discussed the upcoming reauthorization of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, which governs the harvest of fish in federal waters.

The article, written for a commercial fishing audience, warned readers that they might lose ground to recreational fishing interests in the upcoming reauthorization of the Magnuson Act.

But perhaps because it was written for a commercial fishing audience, the editorial took a very one-dimensional view of fisheries management and the fisheries themselves.  And that sort of approach, looking out through a tunnel that doesn’t open up enough to permit you to view anyone’s thoughts and concerns but your own is a very dangerous and self-deceptive thing to do, particularly when dealing with a publicly owned resource.

For example, the editorial noted that

“For many years, the precepts…were fixed.  Fisheries must be managed on the basis of the best available science to create the optimum yield in national benefits, defined as both commercial and recreational opportunities.  Yet since most fisheries in the 200 mile federal waters were commercial, and producing seafood for public consumption was deemed a national interest, the most visible work of the councils has been in managing the commercial fishery…

“But as some catches were ratcheted down and quotas reduced, suddenly the recreational fishery which had been less visible reacted to being caught by these limits…

“For the Magnuson reauthorization that is currently on the table, the recreational groups want to explicitly change the allocation formulas based on historical share of the catch, and instead go to a formula based on expanding the share going to the recreational industry i.e. those making the outboards, guides, charter businesses and others who support lobbying to gain additional economic advantage…”

Those statements are unquestionably true.  In fact, the “recreational industry”, as represented by the organizations that contributed to the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership’s report, A Vision for Managing America’s Salt Water Recreational Fisheries, clearly state, in only slightly different words, that “the most visible work of the councils has been in managing the commercial fishery,” and that’s why they’re looking for change.

I don't belittle the editorial’s concerns with respect to shifting allocations from commercial to recreational users.  No one wants to give up anything that they already have, and it’s only human to want a little more.  Allocation of resources is a zero-sum game, and when someone else is given a little more, that means that someone else is going to be getting a little less than they’re used to.

Reallocation shouldn’t be done casually, or used to cover up some other, perhaps deeper flaw in the fishery management system.

And yet…things change over time.

The editorial laments that “the recreational groups want to explicitly change the allocation formulas based on historical share of the catch” in favor of a newer approach.  But that can only lead to the question, “Why should the fish caught today, in the second decade of the 21^st Century, be distributed in the same manner that they were in the closing decades of a century already gone?”

The number of fishermen—both recreational and commercial—have changed, the number of fish available to those fishermen have changed and the laws governing how those fish may be harvested has changed.  The temperature of the ocean itself has changed, along with the makeup of the biotic communities that dwell there.  So why should allocation remain the only unchangeable constant?

A few years ago, at the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council, managers were discussing the possible reallocation of scup, a small marine panfish.  Managers had been wildly successful in restoring the stock, and the commercial fleet was unable to land its entire quota; if it ever did so, it would have pushed prices for scup straight through the floor.  Yet recreational regulations were still quite restrictive (they have since been substantially relaxed).  The commercial boats received nearly 80% of the allocation, and a good argument could be made for moving some of the unused commercial fish over to the recreational side.  Yet the very idea met with strong commercial opposition, with one of the arguments being that, if the commercials could ever expand their market for scup, they’d need the currently unused fish to fill new demand.

That’s just pigheaded, in more ways than one…

On the other hand, if you look at the red snapper fishery down in the Gulf of Mexico, you see the recreational community attempting to use reallocation as a way to compensate for the consequences of their own chronic overfishing and their support of state regulations which allow them to harvest far more snapper than federal rules—or the accepted science—would allow. 

Which just proves that anglers can be pigheaded, too.

In fact, anglers will fight about allocation even among themselves.  At the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, there was a long and acrimonious battle about allocating the recreational summer flounder quota among the various states.  For many years, ASMFC used an allocation scheme based on harvest in 1998, when the stock was still rebuilding.  That resulted in New Jersey getting the lion’s share of the harvest—nearly 40 percent of all recreational landings—at the expense of every other state.  As the stock became fully recovered, summer flounder, including some of the largest individuals in the population, began recolonizing waters at the northern end of their range; at that point, “allocations based on historic share of the catch” no longer reflected the reality on the water.  Even so, it took managers nearly a decade to shake off their fascination with the past and come up with new and creative approaches to allocation that were appropriate to the conditions that exist today, and not at the end of the last century. 

And predictably, the folks that lost fish were not pleased.

But fisheries management should not be about pleasing everyone, or maintaining the status quo.  It should be about doing what is in the best interests of the public as a whole.  

To that end, a couple of years ago the National Marine Fisheries Service commissioned a report on allocation that looks at the issue from multiple perspectives and makes a lot of sense, and helps to explain why “allocations based on historic share of the catch” may—or may not—need to be changed.

But allocation wasn't the editorial's only concern.  It opined that

“NOAA sometimes shows very poor and biased understanding of recreational vs. commercial interests.

“For example, in a MAFAC white paper on recreational interests they state

“The recreational sector is fundamentally different from the commercial sector in several ways, including their motivations for participating in the fishery.  Commercial fishermen prosecute the fishery primarily for personal economic gain.  They want to catch as many fish as possible, as efficiently as possible, in order to maximize profit.  Conversely, recreational fishermen fish for enjoyment, to provide fish for their families, for the challenge of catching specific species, and for spending quality time with family and friends.

“The description is a total myth.  First, the ‘recreational sector’ is as business oriented as any in our society, and the money and lobbying from these organizations comes from the businesses – from boat and motor manufacturers to guides and lodge operators – who are as profit oriented as anyone else.

Once again, we see the author of the editorial viewing the world through a tunnel constructed out of his personal biases, the greatest of which appears to be an inability to distinguish between recreational fishermen and the recreational fishing industry, which are really two very different beasts.

To argue that recreational fishermen are not “fundamentally different” from commercial fishermen is nothing less than inane.  

By the simple virtue of their occupation, commercial fishermen intend to come away from any trip on the water with more money in their pockets than they had before.  The faster that they can catch their annual quota (market conditions permitting), and in doing so minimize their expenses for fuel, ice and other expenses, the more money that they will have.  Recreational fishermen, on the other hand, must spend money to go out on the water, and often engage in catch and release to extend the time that it takes to harvest their catch limit, thus intentionally increasing the cost of any fish that they bring home. 

That is a pretty big difference, and makes it pretty clear that recreational fishermen are not “profit oriented” at all.

On the other hand, members of the recreational fishing industry, just like members of the commercial fishing industry, are in it for the money.  And because of that, they often find themselves in conflict with recreational, as well as commercial, fishermen.

That’s certainly true in the case of striped bass management today where, in many of the states (including here in New York), the primary conflict isn’t between recreational and commercial fishermen, but between recreational fishermen, who are seeking to conserve striped bass and advocate conservative size and bag limits, and the recreational fishing industry—primarily in the form of headboats and “six-pack” charters—who believe that they can make more money if the regulations allow them to kill more striped bass, regardless of the impact of that on the stock.

And still, the editorial goes on.

“Secondly, most fishermen are not simply there for a paycheck.  They could earn more money elsewhere.  Instead, they are devoted to a way of life that is satisfying, independent, and deeply connected to the ocean.  There is no difference between an individual recreational and commercial fisherman’s love for the outdoors.”

Maybe there’s no difference between some “individual recreational and commercial fisherman’s love for the outdoors,” but there can be a real difference between the way recreational and commercial fishermen look at the resources that live there.  

To most commercial fishermen—here on the East Coast, at least—fish are “product” to be caught, processed and turned into money.  They tend to lack any sense of precaution, and instead seek to harvest right up to—and sometimes (particularly in New England) beyond—prudent limits, without providing any sort of buffer for scientific or management uncertainty.  That is a trait that they share with members of the recreational industry, who are also trying to monetize public resources and generally support the highest possible kill.

Recreational fishermen, on the other hand, tend to place more value on living marine resources and, depending on the species involved, may release far more than they kill.  

Individual fish are more valued—sometimes even romanticized just a bit—and shown more respect.  That’s not true of every recreational fisherman; we have, regrettably our fish hogs and our slobs.  However, anglers typically show more reverence for their quarry than those that put a price on its head.

That’s why, in most cases, it is the anglers and not the commercial fishermen (or the recreational fishing industry) who are at the forefront of conservation efforts.

On the other hand, some fish can be eaten, too.  The editorial gets that part right, but seems somewhat confused about the details when it says

“Third, the public benefit of the United States seafood resources is in providing an import [sic] and unique source of food to the American people, and even though commercial operations have to be profitable to exist, they use a public resource for a larger public purpose:  providing fish and seafood to eat.

“It is this aspect of the commercial recreational divide that is so often overlooked.  Why should a few hundred thousand people lock up access to striped bass along the Atlantic coast and prevent the 100 million Americans living near the coast from eating that fish at restaurants.  A national resource should be available to most Americans.“

Although I believe that the editorial meant to say that seafood is an “important and unique” source of food for Americans, perhaps the author made an unconscious slip when he stated that seafood eaten in this country was “import and unique” because, in fact, about 90% of the seafood eaten in the United States is imported.  

In the overall scheme of things, the amount of fish eaten by Americans that it actually caught by American commercial fishermen isn’t really all that important at all—although it’s pretty important to American commercial fishermen that somebody buys and hopefully eats what they catch.

And the editorial seems to completely ignore the fact that fish harvested by recreational anglers are used for food, too.

Not to mention the fact that the comment about “a few hundred thousand people [locking] up access to striped bass along the Atlantic coast and [preventing] the 100 million Americans living near the coast from eating that fish” is a complete non sequitur.

Although there are people and organizations who seek to end the commercial striped bass fishery on the entire Atlantic coast, to date, they have not succeeded.  

In 2013, 6,042,022 pounds of wild striped bass were landed by fishermen on the Atlantic coast.  That’s not an inconsiderable number of fish, and while it (as well as recreational landings) are going to be reduced a bit going forward, it’s about as much, when combined with recreational landings, that can be safely killed without endangering the long-term health of the stock.

That means that each of those “100 million Americans” would be able to eat about 0.06 pounds—a little under one ounce—of striped bass every year, if the fish was evenly distributed, which pretty well explains why everyone can’t go out and buy some wild striped bass for themselves—even if they all wanted to do so.

Sometimes, managing a scarce resource for those who choose to harvest it for their own use just makes sense, from both and economic and a management perspective.  Although in the case of striped bass, the commercial folks get to sell some fish too.

All that I've written above is just a long way of saying that when we look at fisheries issues, we must always try to take an inclusive view.  No matter whether we’re commercial fishermen, anglers, fisheries managers or conservation advocates—or some combination of such folks—it’s always a mistake to think that our interests are the only ones that matter, and our viewpoints the only ones that hold any validity.

Fish are a public resource, and should be managed for the overall public good.

Which usually means that we should start by doing what’s right for the fish themselves.

For healthy stocks benefit all of us.