ASMFC TAKES NOVEL APPROACH TO WEAKFISH MORTALITY

It’s May, and that means that it’s weakfish season here on Long Island. 

Weakfish may not be as popular as striped bass, at least in modern times, but they are arguably the signature species of Long Island’s bays.  Look at angling literature written a century ago, and you’ll find that it is the weakfish, rather than the bass, fluke or blues, that get most of the writers’ attention.

Unfortunately, weakfish have fallen on hard times.  Although the species has always been known for wide swings in abundance, a few years ago the population level dropped to record lows, with the stock retaining only about 3% of its spawning potential.  Since then, it has bounced back a little, but the population still remains at an overfished level.

There has been a lot of debate about what caused weakfish to decline so badly.  A stock assessment performed in 2009 pointed to increased natural mortality that, it noted, was probably due to some sort of interaction between weakfish and other species.  While the assessment never clearly described the nature of such interaction, it shouldn’t be much of a surprise to learn that some folks quickly decided that all of the weakfish were being eaten by striped bass, and offered to remove the offending predator from the ecosystem, so that weakfish might better thrive…

As stated by Patrick Augustine, then New York’s Governor’s Appointee to ASMFC,

“It seems to me that we’re talking about predator/prey relationships…the reality is that it seems to me that we have a whole bunch of fish up here eating on those little critters down here.  Until we point to those fish that [are] doing most of the damage, and either, one, I’ll use the word ‘control’ those quantities or stock sizes—and I’m going to say the nasty [word ‘SB’], striped bass, and now fluke and anything else that predates on juvenile weakfish, it leads me to another question that only—well, it’s this—if we have a minimum threshold for SSB, has anyone determined what the surplus above the SSB has and its effect, and particularly on weakfish?”

Fortunately, fisheries managers didn’t take the bait, and striped bass were not scapegoated for the weakfish’s decline.  However, that didn’t change the fact that the fish’s decline was being attributed to largely natural mortality.  

Hearing that, some members of the fishing community had problems with the notion of reducing weakfish harvest in order to help slow the population’s decline and perhaps initiate a slow rebuilding.

The attitude of “It’s not our fault, so we shouldn’t be punished” prevailed in such discussions.

And although such attitudes were wrong, the fact that management in so many fisheries is focused on fishing mortality makes it pretty clear why some people might think that way.

However, a new benchmark assessment of the weakfish population, which was just released by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, takes a new look at where fishing mortality fits into the greater scheme of things.  Instead of establishing reference points based on fishing mortality alone, the new assessment recommends a more complicated structure, in which overall mortality plays a key role.

And that’s important, because when we talk about the health of the stock, it’s total mortality that matters, and not just the fish killed by anglers.

Usually, natural mortality is pretty constant, so merely addressing fishing mortality works well enough.  However, weakfish are infamous for periods of abundance punctuated by years of scarcity, in which the fish all but disappear.

Over the years, the weakfish’s disappearance has been blamed on an eelgrass blight that impoverished its traditional feeding grounds, overfishing and the aforementioned predation by other species.  The new stock assessment suggests that it may, in fact, be tied to the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, a periodic variation in sea surface temperature that affects the entire North Atlantic basin for extended periods of time.

Such environmentally-driven declines in population are probably too large to be averted by any sort of fishery management measure; at the same time, they make the weakfish particularly vulnerable to overfishing. 

Thus, managers have to craft a management approach that is appropriate for managing weakfish during the good times, when they are abundant, and also provides them adequate protection when natural mortality drives numbers down, so that the stock is in a position to recover once more favorable conditions return.

It’s a challenge that has rarely, if ever, been addressed in any other marine fisheries management plan, and as far as I know, it’s never been done at ASMFC.  However, it appears that the most recent stock assessment has mapped out a path to meet that challenge.

Instead of creating a typical control rule, in which there are targets and threshold levels of biomass and fishing mortality, the stock assessment proposes a more complex, two-part approach.

The first step hinges upon abundance.  The assessment proposes a spawning stock biomass threshold of 6,880 metric tons ( a little over 15 million pounds), which is equivalent to 30% of an unfished stock, assuming average natural mortality.  Any time that the spawning stock biomass is below that threshold (as it is today), fishing mortality should be minimized.

Should spawning stock biomass rise above the threshold, as it hopefully will at some point in the future, managers would then look at total mortality.  That’s when things get a little complicated.

Since the weakfish’s wide population swings seem to be due to natural mortality, and that natural mortality also swings from fairly low to very high levels, managers can’t really sue fishing mortality to control the health of the stock.  Total mortality, (represented by the letter “Z”) is a far more appropriate standard.

Again, a threshold was established, at Z=1.36 (equal to about 75% of the fish being removed from the population each year).  If total mortality exceeds that level, fishing mortality should continue to be minimized. 

Managers also included a mortality target, Z=0.98, which is roughly equivalent to 65% of the fish being removed from the population each year.  Should total mortality fall between threshold and target, a limited amount of fishing would be allowed.  In the event that total mortality was less than the target level, managers would fall back on traditional, fishing mortality-based approaches, with F_target=0.55 (around 42% or 43% of the population could be harvested each year).  Such approach would remain in place until total mortality again rose above the target level.

The new multi-stage control rule, which recognizes that total mortality is the real key to sustainable fisheries, is particularly appropriate to the weakfish’s variable natural mortality.  However, as waters warm and fish are confronted with various environmental stresses, managers may discover that a similar approach will be useful in managing other species.

Whether or not that proves to be true, ASMFC deserves congratulations for designing a rational and, at least in the region, novel approach to resolve a difficult management problem.

THE CHALLENGE: MANAGING RECOVERING FISH STOCKS

When there are lots of fish, they’re easy to manage. The best example might be scup in the northeast. Abundance is twice the biomass target; in recent years, neither the recreational nor the commercial landings have approached the annual catch limit.

Badly depleted stocks can also be easy to manage. Anglers like to catch something when they go fishing. Most target whatever fish are abundant, and ignore the ones that are scarce.

Rebuilding stocks present the greatest management challenge. As abundance increases, fish become more abundant and some older, larger fish become available, and anglers begin to target the recovering species.

The combination of more fish, more fishermen and an increased availability of larger fish results in anglers quickly catching, and then often exceeding, their annual catch limit. Harvest increases faster than the stock can expand, forcing managers to impose more restrictive regulations in an effort to constrain harvest and avoid overfishing. Anglers, in turn, are confounded when they see regulations tightened at a time when fish are growing more abundant.

Spokesmen for the fishing industry, fearing that new restrictions will hurt their businesses, express their discontent by making inflammatory statements in the press. Such statements, intended to stoke anglers’ hostility toward the management process, place fishery managers in a very uncomfortable situation.

Thanks to the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (Magnuson-Stevens), managers have had to face that problem a number of times over the past decade or two.

Summer flounder was probably the first species to create such a conundrum. The population bottomed out in 1989, and then slowly began to rebuild. By the early 2000s, the recovery was well underway. Anglers were bringing home more and larger fish than they had a few years before, and eventually began regularly exceeding their annual catch limit.

Regulations were made more restrictive, but failed to prevent overharvest, beginning a cycle of overfishing, tightened regulations and more overfishing that continued for many years.

Opponents of the new regulations tried to weaken Magnuson-Stevens, and attacked the summer flounder rebuilding plan. Comments made by New Jersey outdoor columnist Al Ristori were typical.

“The [rebuilding] target is an estimate of what fluke stocks were at their maximum in the 1930s, but it’s little more than a guess made without reference to the forage and predation at the time, or the loss of wetlands since then…

“Rep. Jim Saxton (R-3rd Dist.) is putting heat on NMFS to review that target figure and come up with a more realistic goal. It’s not that there’s real overfishing involved in fluke stocks that have been increasing steadily and the spawning stock biomass is in excellent shape. There has been poor recruitment despite the abundance of spawners, but that could be due to many natural factors—including an abundance of spiny dogfish that are eating everything in the ocean…

“Managing fisheries for the best interests of society should be common sense, but that’s not what’s been done under the present Magnuson Act system.

“Saxton is trying to incorporate language that would provide flexibility in management so that the basic concept of the law—public management of marine fisheries through a council system—can become a reality.”

Anyone somewhat familiar with the federal fisheries management system, and with summer flounder management, could easily debunk such statements. However, fishermen who knew only that they were catching more and bigger summer flounder than they had in the past, but that regulations were growing ever more restrictive, unquestioningly accepted them as true.

They found it easier to blame dogfish instead of themselves…

Fortunately, Congress fended off attacks on Magnuson-Stevens while the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) fended off attacks on the summer flounder management plan. New Information on natural mortality led managers to reduce their estimates of the stock size needed to produce maximum sustainable yield. Eventually, NMFS declared that the stock was rebuilt. However, that only shifted the management debate from whether the management plan worked (results showed that it did) to who would enjoy the plan’s benefits.

That moved the problem from the realm of federal fisheries managers to that of the states, which act through the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC). In 2004, ASMFC allocated the recreational summer flounder landings among the states based on such states’ landings in 1998, a year which predated the creation of NMFS’ rebuilding plan. But as the stock rebuilt, it expanded north, with the oldest and largest fish gravitating toward the northeastern end of the range. The 1998 allocation had become obsolete.

Even so, states that benefitted from the earlier allocation were reluctant to yield fish to their northern neighbors. That was particularly true of New Jersey, which received more than 39% of all recreational landings, and enjoyed some of the most liberal regulations on the coast, at the same time that New York, which received just 17.5% of the landings, was forced to adopt the most onerous rules.

After years of bitter debate, the matter was temporarily resolved in 2014, when ASMFC adopted a regional management plan that compelled New Jersey, New York and Connecticut to adopt similar regulations. Summer flounder regulations had finally stabilized, a fact demonstrated late in 2015, after the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council determined that, because of four consecutive years of below-average spawns, 2016 summer flounder landings would have to be decreased by 29%.

Anglers were concerned that they would be facing additional harvest restrictions this year, but it turned out that a combination of fewer fish and reduced angler effort had already sufficiently reduced recreational landings, and allowed the regulations to remain unchanged. The challenge of managing the rebuilt summer flounder stock had finally been mastered.

Today, other fisheries managers are facing similar challenges, most particularly in the case of Gulf of Mexico red snapper, wherepatterns of recreational overharvest and recreational attacks on the management system are similar to what occurred in the mid-Atlantic.

The Coastal Conservation Association (CCA), an “anglers’ rights” group that draws most of its membership from the Gulf region,echoed Ristori’s summer flounder remarks when it said

“The red snapper fishery is the healthiest that it has been in decades and it could be the largest the population has ever been, thanks in large part to the expansion of habitat created by offshore oil and gas platforms and limitations on shrimp trawling bycatch. But you would never be able to tell under federal management, which last year limited the recreational season to nine days in federal waters. Such overly restrictive regulations are incongruous with what anglers and many fisheries scientists are seeing on the water, and are negatively impacting the thousands of recreational fishing dependent businesses all along the Gulf coast.”

Once again, anyone even somewhat familiar with the management program could find fault with such comments, particularly the statement that “it could be the largest the population has ever been,” but they nonetheless serve CCA’s purpose of prejudicing anglers against both the federal management system and regulations needed to continue another successful rebuilding effort.

Similar situations will arise whenever stocks are being rebuilt, and anglers seek to enjoy the newfound abundance. It is incumbent upon fisheries managers to rise to the challenge, and not be intimidated by the rhetoric of those who would kill too many fish now and, because of their impatience, delay or completely halt the recovery process.

Human nature will always make managing recovering stocks a difficult job, but benefits that flow from healthy fish stocks makes it a worthwhile job as well.

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This essay first appeared in "From the Waterfront," the blog of the Marine Fish Conservation Network.  "From the Waterfront" may be found at http://www.conservefish.org/blog/

NEEDED--A FIELD GUIDE TO FILLETS

I’m lucky.

I live in a coastal town, I own an offshore-capable boat and I’m a decent enough angler that I can usually find a fish or two when I go out on the water.  That means that when I want to eat fish, I either have something just-caught and fresh sitting on ice, or have enough vacuum-packed memories of previous trips waiting for me in the freezer, so I don’t have to admit defeat and buy fish caught by someone else.

Most folks aren’t quite as fortunate.

They end up buying fish, either in stores or in restaurants.  And their luck doesn’t get too much better there, because labels can be deceptive, and what they think that they’re buying isn’t necessarily what they actually get.

Back in 2012, the conservation group Oceana conducted a study designed to quantify the level of marketing fraud inherent in the retail fish business.  What they discovered came as a shock to many people.  According to Oceana,

“Everywhere seafood is tested, fraud has been found.  In fact, Oceana and others have recently found shocking levels of mislabeling in the Boston (48 percent), Los Angeles (55 percent) and Miami (31 percent) areas.  Oceana also investigated seafood labeling in the  New York City area…Oceana found that 39 percent of the 142 seafood samples collected and DNA tested from grocery stores, restaurants and sushi venues were mislabeled, according to the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) guidelines.”

The mislabeling ranged from a few occasions of merely using a colloquial name not approved by the FDA (e.g., calling tautog “blackfish,” the name that prevails along the waterfront in the New York City metropolitan area) to more egregious examples, such as using the misleading term “white tuna” when marketing escolar, a sort of snake mackerel that is frequently caught as bycatch by pelagic longliners and which, when eaten in any quantity, can cause folks to suffer sudden, unexpected, uncontrollable bouts of projectile diarrhea as orange as Donald Trump’s hair.

You’d probably want to know if you were buying something like that…

The Oceana researchers also found a lot of more mundane dishonesty, where low-priced fish were held out to be more expensive varieties. 

Lesser fish sold as “red snapper” and “wild salmon” provided the most common examples of this sort of scam.  A variety of fish was sold as red snapper, ranging from Pacific rockfish, called “red snapper” in California, to less desirable species of Atlantic snappers to such things as farmed tilapia and various inexpensive bottom fish.  Ersatz “wild salmon” was some sort of farmed salmonid, generally either Atlantic salmon or rainbow trout.

Such dishonesty in labeling has consequences, both to the consumer, who might be getting a lower-quality and perhaps less than wholesome product, and to the resource itself, as mislabeling allows illegally-harvested seafood to be slipped into the chain of commerce.  Unscrupulous fishermen will often pass off a protected species as something else, just to be able to sell it, or find a way to get illegally-harvested fish into the market, where they will be indistinguishable from fish caught by honest harvesters.

Recent law enforcement actions in New York and Massachusetts provide examples of both problems.

On a larger scale, so called “IUU”—illegal, unreported and unregulated—harvests plague fisheries throughout the world.  Fish from dubious sources is “laundered” by unscrupulous dealers and, once integrated into the stream of commerce, is foisted upon an unsuspected public.

Thus, for reasons of both commerce and conservation, it makes sense to track shipments of fish from the ports where it’s landed to the shops and restaurants where it is sold at retail.

That’s why Ocean has followed up its earlier work with a new report.  Entitled “Fish Stories:  Success and Value in Seafood Traceability”, it notes that

“The first step in ensuring that seafood is safe, legally caught and honestly labeled, is traceability.  Traceability increases transparency and accountability in the seafood supply chain by ensuring that information such as how and where fish are caught or farmed follows the fish from boat to plate.”

The report goes on to describe a number of existing traceability programs, including one that I’ve seen in action, the “Gulf Wild” certification developed by the Gulf of Mexico Reef Fish Shareholder’s Alliance.

Not too long ago, I stood on the dock at Katie’s Seafood Market in Galveston, Texas, watching commercial boats land their day’s catch of red snapper.  

As soon as the fish were delivered, each one was marked with a “Gulf Wild” tag, which bore a unique number and scannable QR code.  At any time of the day or night, a consumer who purchased any of those fish could enter the tag’s data into a computer and learn all of the pertinent details, including the species of fish, the captain and boat that landed it and the port where it was landed.

We can only surmise what things would be like if all fisheries were subject to a similar system.

Certainly, the antics of the “Codfather” up in New Bedford, who was recently arrested for allegedly shipping illegal New England groundfish, could not have occurred.  As described in the Boston Globe,

“He called all the fish haddock, even if they weren’t.  The dab fish.  The gray sole.

“If the fish inspectors weren’t watching when his boats came into the docks at New Bedford, according to the authorities, fish mogul Carlos Rafael labeled every species of the fish he caught as the cheaper, more common haddock—while secretly trading hundreds of pounds of more coveted species for bags of cash.

“The goal:  evade the federal quota on the more coveted fish.”

Closer to home, I can only think how such a catch-tracing system would benefit our local tautog population.  The fish used to be common on every rockpile, wreck and reef off Long Island; they supported a relatively small, yet active, recreational fishery, but had little commercial value.  Then, perhaps 35 years ago, live blackfish began being sold in urban ethnic markets; prices for live fish spiked, and spawned an active illicit fishery that quickly decimated the population.

Ever since, law enforcement has been fighting a largely unsuccessful battle to rein in the illegal tautog harvest.  Recently, the Atlantic States Marine FisheriesCommission has begun seriously considering a program that would requirefishermen to tag their tautog when caught.  Such tags, if made part of a broader traceability program, might well prove the critical first step to rebuilding the stock.

Traceability is an idea whose time has definitely come.  It has no downside for honest fishermen or fish dealers, and can provide some real benefits to both consumers and the resource itself.

WHAT SALTWATER FISHERMEN NEED

Ever since the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership published its paper, “A Vision for Managing America’s Saltwater Recreational Fisheries” in early 2014, and since the National Marine Fisheries Service held its Recreational Saltwater Fishing Summit, where TRCP’s vision was widely discussed, a couple months later, the question of a saltwater recreational fishing policy has remained in the news.

Much of the discussion has centered around the allegation, raised in the TRCP report, that federal fisheries managers concentrate on optimizing commercial fisheries, and ignore recreational fishing needs.

That charge was taken seriously enough that NMFS has since spent substantial time and effort to produce a specific recreational fishing policy, which was released a few months ago.

The policy states, in broad terms, concerns that had been expressed to NMFS by some representatives of the recreational fishing community over the years.  It probably represents a helpful base from which to proceed when dealing with recreational fishing issues, but it doesn’t really address the core question:

What do saltwater recreational anglers need?

The TRCP report actually lays those needs out quite nicely when it says that

“Recreational fishing is founded on conservation, sustainability and opportunity…

”What recreational anglers want and need is wide-ranging, dependable access to healthy and abundant fish stocks.”

Unfortunately, a lot of the people who claim to speak on behalf of recreational anglers, including the majority of the organizations that contributed to the TRCP report, haven’t heeded those wise words too closely, subordinating “conservation, sustainability and…access to healthy and abundant fish stocks” to increased harvest in the short term.

Now, federal fisheries managers are getting their chance to address saltwater anglers needs.  Last week, in furtherance of its recreational fishing policy, NMFS issued a series of Regional Saltwater Recreational Fisheries Policy Implementation Plans.

At first glance, they look pretty good, and seem to recognize what the recreational saltwater fishery needs if it is to thrive.

It needs fish.

Yes, there are other things that have to be considered, too, but of all of the fishery’s needs, fish stand at the head of the list.  Nothing else comes close.  Without fish, in some abundance, everything else is just the confetti that blows through the streets after the parade has gone by.

NMFS seems to get that.

I didn’t read through all of the regional plans.  Instead, I only read the two that encompass my typical fishing activities, the plans for Atlantic Highly Migratory Species and for the Greater Atlantic Region.  I also read the plan for the Southeast Region, as I find myself chasing fish down in Florida and in various places in the Gulf of Mexico on a semi-regular basis.

In all three of those plans, the need to

“Promote public access to quality recreational fishing opportunities”

is clearly spelled out.

The means of doing that differs a bit from plan to plan, but the cornerstone remains conserving, rebuilding and maintaining fish stocks.  The exact approach differs from place to place.  In the Greater Atlantic Region, where the long-term depletion of New England’s groundfish stocks remains a seemingly intractable problem, NMFS is intent on developing

“management measures that are consistent with scientifically sound limits that are designed to maximize recreational opportunity within catch limits.”

“Maximizing” recreational opportunity is still going to mean that, for a while, a lot of folks in New England are going to be disappointed in the amount of fish they bring home, because rebuilding stocks of cod and winter flounder is going to be a long, painful and difficult process.  Success is not assured.  Yet, unless appropriate, science-based measures are put in place, recovery will never happen, and the recreational fishery will, for most persons, become merely a memory.

The Mid-Atlantic, which also falls within the Greater Atlantic Region, is in far better shape, but there are still species such as black sea bass that will cause managers heartburn as they try to maximize the recreational opportunities within the limits of what good science allows.  That’s why

“Support development of a benchmark black sea bass stock assessment”

is also a stated goal (although in a different section of the report which deals with fisheries science).

In the Southeast Region, fish are in better shape than they are in New England, but the problems typical of managing recovered stocks—most particularly recreational landings that increase at a rate faster than the population can grow—trouble a number of fisheries, most particularly Gulf of Mexico red snapper.  

Thus, the Southeast Region’s goals are worded a little differently, with NMFS seeking to

“Collect and employ sound data to support management decisions which may allow for increased public access by anglers. [emphasis added]”

To accomplish that goal, the agency hopes to

“Continue to conduct and support stock assessments for federally managed species, including red snapper, gag grouper, black sea bass, and other recreational target species in the South Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico, and Caribbean,”

and to

“Use the best available science to create consistent and predictable open seasons, while preventing catch limit overages, to allow recreational anglers to plan and pursue various species of fish throughout the year.”

Highly Migratory Species present a very different set of problems, as both the stock assessments and the management measures are conducted by the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, a body that actually does emphasize commercial exploitation and frequently ignores the wants and needs of the recreational sector.  

So in that case, NMFS’ priority shifts, and it must

“Seek to expand U.S. recreational fishing opportunities on internationally managed fish stocks, where feasible and appropriate, and promote the legitimacy and recognition of the economic importance of recreational fisheries within international fishery management bodies.”

Of course, human nature being what it is, there are plenty of anglers who won’t be happy waiting for NMFS to restore depleted fish stocks, or to be limited to scientifically-justified seasons and catch limits.  They want to catch their fish now, regardless of what science or ICCAT may say about the matter, and they find NMFS a convenient whipping boy when they want to demonstrate their discontent.

Thus, part of NMFS regional plans must include outreach to the greater angling community, something that can be particularly difficult to do when fishing organizations that should be exercising responsible leadership and educating their members instead find it easier and perhaps more profitable to feed red meat to those members by publicly and repeatedly excoriating federal fisheries managers.

That sort of outreach is important on every coast, but is particularly necessary where such regional fishing organizations, in an attempt to achieve their own ends, seek to turn angler opinion against the federal fishery management process.  

The plan for the Southeast Region sets forth additional efforts needed to set that situation to rights.  Among other things, it intends to

“Work with interested shareholder groups to host regular roundtable discussions to strengthen relationships and share information,

“Work with and encourage fishermen and others to participate productively in the fisheries management process, to improve cooperation and trust among fishermen, scientists, and fishery managers [emphasis added],

“Communicate the scientific rationale for management actions to stakeholders by explaining the scientific methods and findings that support the resulting management decisions,

and

“Communicate legal obligations and process limitations to establish accurate expectations about potential agency action.”

Hopefully, those efforts will bear some fruit, despite the people and organizations that will do their best to throw sand in the gears and try to sabotage such initiatives.

But even if some success does accrue, we can be certain that there will be discontent.  People will always be people, and although anglers need healthy fish stocks if their sport is to thrive, they will also want to take more fish today than prudence allows.

If that wasn’t true, we wouldn’t need regulations.

Thus, as NMFS begins to develop concrete measures designed to implement each regional plan, perhaps anglers unhappy with the pace of NMFS' progress or the steps that it takes should seek some modicum of solace in the words of an old song, popular back when I was in my teens.

“You can’t always get what you want,

You can’t always get what you want,

You can’t always get what you want,

But if you try sometime you just might find

You get what you need…”

RED SNAPPER, RED HERRINGS

Red snapper management in the Gulf of Mexico is probably the most contentions fisheries issue being debated today.  To say that the rhetoric gets heated is a gross understatement.

Like most fisheries debates, it includes a little truth, a lot of emotion and quite a bit of information that doesn’t quite line up with the known facts.

The debate also includes a lot of folks who tend to spin the “facts” (both those that are true and those that are created to fill a particular need) to serve their own purposes and shape public opinion to conform to their own.

So, before going any further, it probably makes sense to set forth a dozen truths that you can verify for yourself by clicking on each one and linking to reliable sources.

1.      In 1990, Gulf red snapper were badly overfished; the stock’s spawning potential was only 2.6% of the spawning potential of an unfished stock.

2.       The annual red snapper catch limit is split into sector-specific catch limits that give 51.5% of all landings to anglers and 48.5% to commercial fishermen.

3.       Historically, both commercial and recreational fishermen had been overfishing the stock.

4.       Commercial overfishing ended in 2007, when commercial fishermen began fishing under a catch share system.

5.       Unlike commercial fishermen, recreational fishermen continued to chronically overfish the red snapper stock, with the situation growing so severe that a federal district court finally had to order the National Marine Fisheries Service to hold anglers accountable.

6.       High recreational harvest rates, that include larger fish, have forced fisheries managers to shorten the season in federal waters.

7.       State waters remain open to recreational fishing for at least part of the time when federal waters are closed; in Texas, the season never closes at all.

8.       Party and charter boats that have federal fisheries permits can’t fish in state waters when the federal season is closed, although anglers fishing from private boats can.

9.       Party and charter boats with federal fisheries permits have successfully petitioned NMFS to create a special annual catch limit applicable only to them, so that they might have a longer season that isn’t affected by private boats’ high harvest rates.

10.   The federal fisheries management plan is working, and has already increased red snapper abundance to about half of the target level.

11.   Because all red snapper in the Gulf of Mexico are managed as a single stock, fish caught in state waters are included in the federal annual catch limit, and have an impact on the length of the season in federal waters.

12.   Some recreational fishing organizations, unhappy with the regulations that NMFS has adopted to rebuild the stock, are seeking federal legislation that would strip NMFS of its authority to manage red snapper, and would hand that authority over to the states, which aren’t bound by federal laws prohibiting overfishing and requiring management to be based on the best available science.

In short, what we’re dealing with is a successful fishery management plan that is well on its way to rebuilding what had been a badly overfished red snapper stock.  The adoption of a catch share system ended commercial overharvest, but until a court imposed accountability measures on the recreational sector, anglers continued to overfish on a regular basis.  Instead of trying to get their overfishing under control, anglers escape federal regulations by fishing within state waters, where the federal rules do not apply.  Recently, they have taken that effort one step further by asking Congress to turn red snapper management over to the states, where harvest does not have to be maintained at sustainable levels.

That means that the same folks who have been failing to live up to their obligations to conserve the stock are trying to paint themselves as victims, so that they can convince federal lawmakers to let them kill even more.

That’s not an easy thing to accomplish, so the angling groups needed to come up with a little creative misdirection.

It’s the same thing that’s done in a staged magic show; in order to create the desired illusion, a magician must divert the audience’s attention away from his right hand, that’s performing the trick, and convince them to watch his left hand, his hat or his bespangled assistant, so that they can’t perceive what’s really going on.

If, along the way, they can invoke a base emotion—jealousy, say, or maybe greed—to help sell the illusion, well, then they’ll try that, too.

Thus, we see Ted Venker, the “Conservation Director” of the Coastal Conservation Association attacking federal red snapper managers by arguing

“The end result of catch share programs is what we are seeing in the Gulf of Mexico today, with a very few, select commercial shareholders wielding a disproportionate level of power and enjoying a year-round red snapper season while the public is left with just an 11-day season to pursue this abundant and popular fish.

“Proponents of catch shares argue that the system presents the best way to manage marine resources.  Left unsaid is that anyone who wants to enjoy that resource will have to buy it from a shareholder who paid nothing to own it in the first place.  In the red snapper program, less than 400 commercial shareholders “own” more than 50 percent of all the red snapper harvested in the Gulf of Mexico, and yet they don’t pay enough in administrative fees to even cover the cost of managing their own program…

“What kind of a fishery are we creating with this system for our grandkids, our kids or even for us?  The federal government is creating a situation in which the public is paying to give away our marine resources, and then forcing us to pay again and again to access those resources in the future.”

Reading that piece, it’s hard not to get angry at federal managers, who seem to be giving away the public’s ability to fish to red snapper, and hand permanent ownership of what had been a public resource to just a few hundred commercial fishermen.  Once you’re angry enough, it’s easy for you to accept the conclusion of the piece, which is that

“the states have never felt it necessary to hand over ownership of redfish or speckled trout, for example, to achieve good management…

“There are many problems with federal fisheries management and the primary one is that the feds have almost no idea how to manage recreational fisheries.  Embracing flawed programs to give those marine resources away for someone else to manage for their own benefit is not the answer.

“If you have a freight train running out of control sometimes the only solution is to cut the fuel line…”

And thus, the illusionist set the stage to end federal management of red snapper, and hand responsibility over to the states.

The only problem is that just about everything that Mr. Venker wrote, which led up to that conclusion, was at best misdirection, and at the worst, untrue.  But his words might get you so angry at (and perhaps jealous of) the commercial fleet, that you didn’t stop and think about the facts.

Like the fact that the catch share program only affects the commercial red snapper quota, and has nothing to do with the recreational quota at all.  Yes, you might be mad about the short federal red snapper season.  But the length of the recreational season isn’t caused by the existence of commercial catch shares; it would be just as short if the commercial fleet fished under a “derby” system, when every boat rushes out to catch as much of the overall quota as they can land during a relatively short season.  Either way, the commercial fleet would have the very same quota, regardless of how it was caught.

Mr. Venker contrasts a year-round commercial season with the 11-day recreational season, in an attempt to anger recreational fishermen; in fact, the comparison in meaningless.  Whether the commercial fishery is managed as a derby or through catch shares, the recreational season—and the recreational quota—will remain exactly the same.

Moving from mere misdirection to falsehood, CCA’s statement that “anyone who wants to enjoy [the red snapper] resource will have to buy it from a shareholder” is just plain untrue.  As mentioned earlier, the catch share system only impacts the commercial fishery.  You have to buy shares from someone (if you don’t have them already) if you intend to sell your catch.  If you fish recreationally, your fishery remains a “derby,” which is why the season must be so short (although at one time, CCA proposed that anglers buy tags at auction in order to fish for red snapper). 

It’s possible that the party and charter boat fishery will one day be governed by a catch share system, too, but anglers are already paying to go out on such vessels, so it’s not like paying to fish on a for-hire isn’t already the status quo.

The notion that commercial fisherman “own” any red snapper is equally false.  What they own is a share of whatever commercial harvest NMFS permits in any given year.  In theory, that’s a good thing, because it incentivizes commercial fishermen to be good stewards of the resource; as the stock grows, their share of the harvest remains the same, but represents a greater quantity of fish (and, it should be noted again, the commercial sector hasn’t overfished since 2007, the year that the catch share program became effective).

The fact that commercial fishermen own a share of the harvest doesn’t even prevent NMFS from shifting allocation away from their sector and to recreational fishermen.  Since Mr. Venker wrote the piece quoted here, the allocation changed from 49% recreational/51% commercial to 51.5% recreational/48.5% commercial, meaning that the catch shares will now all come out of a proportionally smaller pool.

Three percent of the price for each red snapper sold is deducted from the commercial fishermen’s earnings, and used to fund the cash share program.  CCA complains that such revenues don’t cover the program’s costs, which may be true (I haven’t checked), but whatever the commercials are paying to manage the fishery, it is infinitely more than what red snapper anglers pay into the federal management system, which the last time I checked was something resembling $0.00 (federal excise taxes on fishing tackle are distributed to the states, not to NMFS), despite all of the expense angling organizations have cost the feds due to questionable lawsuits and such.

It’s actually hard not to wonder what the state of red snapper management might be if the many hundreds of thousands of dollars in member donations that the various anglers’ rights organizations poured into unsuccessful lawsuits, public relations and lobbying state and federal legislators had instead been invested in peer-reviewed science that could have cleared up some of the unknowns in snapper biology.

Of course, resolving some of those unknowns might not have helped the militant anglers’ cause…

For the problem with science is that it deals with fact, and leaves little room for misdirection.  Anyone who says that the federal management system will be “forcing us to pay again and again to access those [red snapper] resources in the future” probably wants to leave fact strictly alone because—and I’ll say this again—the catch share program doesn’t apply to private recreational anglers.

The only people who have to pay for access to the red snapper resource are commercial fishermen seeking additional quota, those who buy their fish at a store and maybe, at some point in the future, those who fish from party and charter boats.  The latter two groups would be paying for their access anyway, even in a derby fishery, so the only group with a right to complain are the commercial fishermen—and most of them seem to like things just as they are.

So it’s pretty clear that the people complaining the loudest about catch shares—the anglers’ rights community—in the end have the least to complain about.  And that’s why their whining gets so annoying.

I hear it time and again, the same organizations grinding out the same lines in an effort to attract more supporters and, it seems clear, in an effort to keep everyone from noticing that it is their members, and not those holding catch shares, that keep overfishing the stock.

It’s really time for the noise to cease and for people to speak with some honesty.  Allocations, and whether to change them, are legitimate policy issues.  If that’s what they want to talk about—in fact, if they want to abandon allocation completely and claim all of the fish for themselves—let them be men about it, and say so right out loud, instead of hiding behind these deceptions.

Let them put out their own list of facts, confirmed by links to objective sources.

If they can.  Which isn’t too likely.

The truth is a powerful spokesman. 

And when someone avoids the plain truth, or tries to reshape it?  Well, that speaks pretty powerfully, too.

RIGHT HEADLINE, WRONG STORY

There was a recent editorial in the Newburyport (MA) Daily News titled “U.S. Needs to Protect Lobster Fishery.”

That such protection is needed is undoubtedly true.

However, the sort of protection that the editorial is seeking is a bit off the mark.

Apparently, Sweden is afraid of American lobsters invading its waters and outcompeting their European relatives, and is thus asking the European Union to ban the import of the New World crustaceans.

That has some of the good folks of Newburyport alarmed, causing their local paper to say that

“U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and the Massachusetts congressional delegation need to make their voices heard in the deepening dispute between Sweden and the American lobster industry.”

Concerns have apparently arisen because the American lobster, Homarus americanus, and the European lobster, Homarus gammerus, are closely related; in addition, the American lobster is larger.  One spokesman for the Swedish Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science expressed concern that the American lobster

“pose several potential risks for native species, competing for space and resources, they can interbreed with local species and produce hybrid species, which we don’t know will be viable or not.”

It’s hard to tell whether such concerns are valid or not.  Richard Wahle, a professor at the University of Maine, is not buying in, arguing

“Attempts to introduce American lobster elsewhere have failed.  A newly introduced lobster would face a gauntlet of different species that it has no experience with.”

Given the similarities between the ecosystems on both sides of the North Atlantic, it’s not clear how many truly different species an American lobster would encounter while visiting Swedish shores. 

While the species might be different, many would certainly be merely local variations on a very similar theme; the European pollack, Pollachius pollachius, and the American pollock, Pollachius virens, for example, may be different species, but perform about the same role in the ecosystem, and could be expected to react to lobster in about the same way.

On the other hand, a lobster would probably be in greater danger of being eaten by an Atlantic cod or Atlantic halibut in European waters than off New England, simply because European fisheries managers have done a better job of protecting such species in their local waters than New England fishery managers have done in waters under its jurisdiction.

The same thing that motivated folks in New England to turn a blind eye to declining cod and halibut stocks—the opportunity to make a good short-term profit—is motivating folks in New England to call for federal intervention in the lobster dispute today.  Exporting lobster to Europe is a big-money business; Canadian and United States fishermen ship over about $200 million in lobster each year.

Massachusetts is second only to Maine in the size of its lobster fishery, so right at this moment, it has a real interest in using federal leverage to keep European markets open to Bay State lobstermen.

Unfortunately, in the long term, there may be a far more compelling reason to get the federal government involved in the lobster fishery.  In southern New England, that fishery isn’t doing too well.

Right now, that’s probably too much of a concern for the lobstermen of Newburyport.  They’re fishing on lobster that belong to the recently consolidated Georges Bank and Gulf of Maine stock, which is neither overfished nor subject to overfishing, and is at record-high abundance levels.

The southern New England stock, on the other hand, isn’t doing very well. 

American lobster are managed by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Service.  In 2015, ASMFC accepted the most recent American Lobster Benchmark Stock Assessment and Peer Review Report for management purposes.  The following quote from that document just how dire the state of the southern New England stock of American lobster actually is.

“Closer scrutiny reveals the inshore portion of the SNE stock has clearly collapsed.  The SNE stock is clearly overfished according to both the model and the stock indicators.  Fishing mortality does not appear to be extremely high and this supports the conclusion that biological factors have contributed to bringing the stock to this point.  It is believed that offshore areas of SNE depends on nearshore settlement as a source of recruits.  Therefore, the offshore is also in jeopardy and the Technical Committee and Review Panel believe the stock has little chance of recovering unless fishing effort is curtailed…It is noted that pre-recruits are not measured in the offshore surveys, so the effects of recruitment failure in the inshore would not be seen in the offshore until years later when the lobsters become available to the fishery and to surveys.  Hence, by any reasonable standard, it is necessary to protect the offshore component of the stock until increased recruitment can be observed.  [emphasis added]”

As mentioned, American lobster are managed by ASMFC, through its American Lobster Management Board.  So, when faced with the above scientific advice, how did ASMFC’s Management Board react?

Certainly, not with urgency.  

Although the verbatim transcripts for Management Board meetings occurring after the benchmark stock assessment was released are not available at this time, perhaps due to recent problems with ASMFC’s website, a quick look at press releases issued by ASMFC since last August suggests that most of the Management Board’s time was spent drafting a new management plan for Jonah crab, a species frequently caught as bycatch in the offshore lobster fishery, rather than addressing the collapse of the southern New England stock.

In fact, the only mention of that imperiled stock comes in an August press release, which states that

“In response to the findings regarding the status of the SNE stock, the Board established a working group of Board and Technical Committee members to review the assessment and peer review findings and develop recommendations for Board consideration.”

Given the dearth of announcements since that point, one can safely assume that either the working group is still working, that it is still reviewing the assessment and/or developing recommendations, or that the Board is still considering any recommendations made.

And, one can also safely assume that as time ticks on while all that is happening, the southern New England stock of American lobster is continuing to collapse.

That shouldn’t surprise anyone, because the current state of the stock is also no surprise. 

All the way back in April, 2010, ASMFC’s American Lobster Technical Committee issued the report “Recruitment Failure in The Southern New England Lobster Stock.”  It warned that

“The southern New England stock is critically depleted and well below the minimum threshold abundance.  Abundance indices are at or near time series lows, and the condition has persisted.”

It advised that

“Given additional evidence of recruitment failure in [the southern New England stock] and the impediments to stock rebuilding, the Technical Committee now recommends a 5 year moratorium on harvest in the [southern New England] stock area…”

Provided with such dire advice, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission did…

Nothing.

As usual.

Well, that’s not completely true, because it did decide to reduce harvest by 10%.  However, it didn’t do so by such reliable means as, for example, a hard-poundage quota that would keep boats tied up to the dock, and away from the lobsters, once that quota was landed.

Doing that might hurt someone’s profits.

Instead, as ASMFC explains,

“Given the critically depleted condition of the SNE stock, the American Lobster Board approved Addenda XVII – XXII, which implement a suite of measures to reduce exploitation and allow the SNE stock to rebuild.  These measures include a v-notching program, trap reductions, closed seasons for certain areas, and a trap consolidation/transferability program.  Throughout 2014, the American Lobster Board monitored the monitored the progress of the SNE [Lobster Conservation Management Areas] in achieving the required 10% reduction in exploitation in order to address rebuilding…”

Some of the LCMA’s achieved the reduction and some did not, but even for those that succeeded, “success” was meaningless, because a 10% reduction in landings is a very different thing than a 5-year moratorium.  As the 2015 benchmark stock assessment showed, ASMFC’s minimal actions did nothing to improve the health of the stock.

And that’s why the Newburyport Daily Times got the story wrong, but the headline right, when it declared “U.S. Needs to Protect Lobster Fishery.”

For the states have demonstrated that they lack the ability and/or the will to protect it themselves.

If the southern New England stock of American lobster is to be rebuilt, at least to the extent that oceanographic conditions allow, a federal fisheries management plan will be needed.

Unlike ASMFC, federal fisheries managers, acting pursuant to the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, are required by law to rebuild overfished stocks promptly, and within a time certain.  Federal fisheries managers must base their management measures on hard science, not merely on the fear of lost income.

There would have to be a hard annual catch limit, and not merely “soft” restrictions on landings based on reducing the number of traps or v-notching females.

And should a federal Science and Statistics Committee, the equivalent of an ASMFC technical committee, say that a moratorium is required to rebuild the stock, that annual catch limit will be set at zero, for as long as is necessary to get the job done.  Any effort to impose a token 10% reduction, which may or may not actually be achieved, would be clearly illegal, and subject to a review in the courts.

Such factors explain why federal fisheries managers have been successful in rebuilding a number of overfished stocks, when ASMFC’s more “flexible” management measures have resulted only in failure.

They also explain why some in the fishing industry—regrettably, including the recreational fishing industry—are pushing so hard to amend Magnuson-Stevens, to make it look more like the ASMFC model of management.  

For if ASMFC’s flexible approach doesn’t do much to build fish populations, it does a good job of building folks’ profits, at least until the fish stocks collapse.

And for a lot of the industry voices, profit is their sole concern.