WILL ASMFC MAINTAIN STRIPED BASS RECOVERY?

Last week, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission released two documents important to striped bass fishermen.  One was the Performance Evaluation of Addendum IV Regulatory Measures; the other was an update to the benchmark stock assessment, which described the state of the stock at the end of 2015.

Both documents held some fairly good news for striped bass fishermen.

The Performance Evaluation indicated that, taken as a whole, the Addendum IV measures worked; the goal was to reduce fishing mortality by 25%, and it appears that the actual reduction was almost exactly on target, at 25.9%.

The stock assessment update indicated that the fishing mortality rate in 2015 was 0.16, just below the fishing mortality target of 0.18.  While all such calculations have inherent error, there is a 99% probability that, even if fishing mortality was higher than the target, it was still lower than the overfishing threshold.

The assessment update also indicates that the stock did not become overfished in 2015, as the most recent benchmark assessment had predicted.  Instead, at the close of the year, female spawning stock biomass was estimated to be 58,853 metric tons, about 1,200 metric tons above the overfishing threshold, but still nearly 14,000 metric tons below the female spawning stock biomass target.  However, because of the error inherent in the calculation, there is a 41% chance that the stock is overfished (which falls to a 25% chance when the average retrospective bias over the past five years is taken into account).

If fishermen, both commercial and recreational, remove the same aggregate number of fish from the population in each of 2016, 2017 and 2018 that they removed in 2015, the chance of the stock becoming overfished drops to 20% (just 9% when retrospective bias is considered) by 2018.

At the same time, there is only a 5% chance (12% if retrospective bias is taken into account) that the female spawning stock will increase to target levels by 2018.

Thus, while ASMFC’s recent news is good, things need to get quite a bit better before anyone should start showing signs of relief.  This is a time to stay the course until the stock shows real signs of improvement, not a time to throw in the towel and start killing more fish.

Unfortunately, some members of ASMFC’s Striped Bass Management Board think otherwise.  Last November, while the 2015 fishery was still underway, they were already talking about easing Addendum IV’s restrictions.

The notion of increasing harvest was pushed primarily by the various Chesapeake Bay jurisdictions. 

It began with Michael Luisi, representing the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, who asked

“I would like to have it on the record, Mr. Chairman, in your opinion when will stakeholders have an opportunity and when will this board have an opportunity to look at making management change for the future or are we just expecting to hold the line where we are indefinitely into the future?”

It was a strange question, as the harvest reductions incorporated into Addendum IV to Amendment 6 oif the Atlantic Striped Bass Interstate Fishery Management Plan were intended to reduce fishing mortality to or below the target of 0.18, which the recent benchmark assessment set as a sustainable fishing mortality level; no rational fisheries manager would think it’s OK to reduce fishing mortality to the target level for only one year, and then start killing too many stripers again.

Management Board Chairman Doug Grout, Marine Fisheries Director for the State of New Hampshire, confirmed that in his reply, saying

“this was not a one-year reduction.  It was clear that this would be in place until we made an assessment of whether we had accomplished our goals of the addendum or not…The next stock assessment is scheduled to be in 2018; and that was at the point that we were going to be evaluating what the impacts of our management measures were in obtaining our goals and objectives here…”

That didn’t go over well with the folks from Chesapeake Bay, with Mr. Luisi proclaiming

“...Personally that is unacceptable.  It is unacceptable to me that we have to wait that long.

“…When we took those reductions, the coast-wide reduction of 25 percent was expected to return fishing mortality to target in one year.  This board gave us the opportunity in the Chesapeake Bay to seek a lesser reduction of 20.5 percent.  We implemented measures to achieve that 20.5 percent.  What we’ve been hearing through Wave 4 on the recreational harvest indicates that we’re grossly over that 20.5 percent.”

After using overwrought words such as “extreme,” “crisis” and “suffering greatly,” Mr. Luisi went on to make a motion that Addendum IV’s harvest restrictions be “reconsidered.”

That motion was quickly seconded by Rob O’Reilly, proxy for the Virginia Marine Resources Commission, who gave support to the motion by saying

“I don’t recall being told that a benchmark assessment would take us to the next management regime.  I don’t understand why it would…Management can certainly take place without a benchmark.

“I really don’t understand where the benchmark is coming from…I know within the Chesapeake Bay we were to a point where we all thought—I did not think one year.  I thought we adopted a plan for a two-year approach to be reevaluated and go from there.

“…We always stayed within the guidelines that the board had; and quite frankly, there has been opportunities missed already on the 2011 year class, if everyone doesn’t know that…  [emphasis added]”

I attended the October 2014 Management Board meeting, where Addendum IV was adopted, and listened very hard to what was said, and just can’t understand where Mr. Luisi or Mr. O’Reilly might have gotten the idea that the Addendum IV restrictions would last for only one or two years.  

After all, Amendment 5’s recreational bag limit of 2 fish, and its 28-inch minimum size, was in force for twenty years, surviving the creation of Amendment 6 and a number of addendums.

The only mention of one year was in the context of the time it should take Addendum IV’s changes to reduce fishing mortality to target, and two years only came up in a compromise motion that failed to find majority support (and which I opposed on the record at the time).

There was nothing in the debate which suggested that the new regulations shouldn’t last as long as those adopted in 1995, although there was also nothing that said that they couldn’t be changes somewhat sooner.

But most certainly not in just a year or two…

Patrick Keliher, fisheries director for the State of Maine, understood the need for a prolonged period of conservative management and opposed the motion, noting

“Our tackle shops have gone out of business, guides have gone out of business.  The amount of recreational fishing activity on the coast of Maine has been slashed.  Mr. O’Reilly talked about a trickle of fish coming to the coast.  It is going to take a lot more than a trickle to positively impact the State of Maine.”

And thus the battle was joined, with coastal states generally opposing the motion (with the exception of Delaware and, of course, New Jersey, which is almost always on the wrong side of conservation debates) and the Chesapeake states in support.  Ultimately, a compromise was reached, in which the stock assessment would be updated as of the end of 2015, and the vote on Mr. Luisi’s motion (along with Delaware’s motion to extend the reconsideration of Addendum IV’s provisions to the coastal states as well) was indefinitely postponed.

So the big question is, what happens when the Management Board meets later this month?

The information contained in the Performance Evaluation and stock assessment update was moderately positive, but certainly suggested that managers need to stay the course and try to fully recover the stock, rather than settling for a spawning stock that falls far short of target abundance.

Will the dissidents from last November agree?

It’s hard to know.

Hopefully, Mr. Luisi, who claimed that his fishery was in “crisis” and that the reduction in Maryland’s recreational landings was “grossly over that 20.5%,” along with Mr. O’Reilly, who claimed that Virginia “always stayed within the guidelines” were sufficiently embarrassed to learn that their states didn’t reduce harvest at all, but were in fact produced substantially increased recreational landings—up 58.4% for the Bay as a whole—that they won’t continue to push for a bigger kill.

On the other hand, some folks in fisheries management don’t embarrass easily, particularly those who are trying to increase the harvest.  

Thus, anglers concerned with the striper’s future ought to watch the events of this month’s Management Board meeting very carefully, and be prepared to mount stiff opposition should initiate any plan to increase the kill.

RULES AND CATCH LIMITS LIMIT THE HARM

Summer flounder, more commonly known as “fluke” at the northern end of their range, were at the center of fisheries debates throughout the first eight or ten years of this century.

It was the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council’s (MAFMC) failure to take the conservation and rebuilding provisions of theMagnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (Magnuson-Stevens) seriously that led to the landmark court decision in Natural Resources Defense Council v. Daley, which found that federal fishery management plans must have at least a 50% chance of preventing overfishing and timely rebuilding overfished stocks.

The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) application of that rule to various fisheries, not the least of which was summer flounder, led to the rebuilding of at least 39 once-overfished stocks.

The harvest reductions needed to rebuild such stocks also led to some fishermen’s calls for “flexibility” in fisheries management, and led politicians to introduce bills such as the current “Strengthening Fishing Communities and Increasing Flexibility in Fisheries Management Act” (H.R. 1335) which would allow federal managers to permit overfishing to continue for an extended time, and delay the rebuilding of overfished populations.

Once the summer flounder stock was rebuilt to near-target levels, the fishery fell out of the spotlight as the management of other species, elsewhere on the coast, became far more controversial. Now, it appears that summer flounder will be back in the spotlight, forthe stock is declining again.

This time, the primary cause is not overfishing, but rather six consecutive years of below-average spawning success.

No one is sure why fewer fluke are recruiting into the population, but as the size of the population shrinks, managers must reduce annual catch limits, to avoid running afoul of Magnuson-Stevens’ mandate against overfishing.

In 2015, biologists initially told the MAFMC that it would have to reduce the 2016 annual catch limit by 43% in order to avoid a further decline in the stock. The MAFMC’s Science and Statistics Committee (SSC) later decided that, because the available data was good, a 29% reduction was enough to avoid any harm.

Unfortunately, that turned out to be untrue, so in August 2016 the MAFMC reduced the 2017 annual catch limit by an additional 30% in an attempt to stabilize the stock. The additional reduction will undoubtedly cause controversy, particularly at, and after, the December joint meeting of the MAFMC and the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s (ASMFC) Summer Flounder, Scup and Black Sea Bass Management Board, when the recreational specifications for the 2017 summer flounder fishery will be set.

Despite inevitable objections, there is no doubt that the reduction will take place, for the MAFMC’s Science and Statistics Committee (SSC) has determined that “the stock biomass is dangerously close to being overfished, which could happen as early as next year if increased efforts to curb fishing mortality are not undertaken.”

Should the summer flounder stock ever become overfished, Magnuson-Stevens requires that “action be taken to end overfishing in the fishery and to implement conservation and management measures to rebuild” the stock within a time period that does not exceed ten years.

Such rebuilding measures would probably be much more restrictive than those needed to keep the stock from becoming overfished in the first place, so both fishermen and managers have an incentive to halt the stock’s decline now.

Both harvest restrictions and rebuilding plans are anathema to critics of Magnuson-Stevens, who generally support H.R. 1335. They argue that fish stocks should be managed “flexibly,” in a manner that tolerates some overfishing and delays the rebuilding of overfished stocks, in order to minimize short-term economic harm to fishermen.

But when fisheries managers adopt a “flexible” approach, stocks are rarely, if ever, completely rebuilt.

The current debate over striped bass management at ASMFC clearly illustrates the problem.

In 2013, ASMFC’s Striped Bass Management Board received a benchmark stock assessment (Benchmark Assessment), which indicated that the stock was declining steadily, had experienced overfishing for most of the past decade, and would probably become overfished by 2015. If ASMFC was governed by Magnuson-Stevens, that would have been enough to require a rebuilding plan.

But ASMFC is not governed by Magnuson-Stevens, and was guided solely by its striped bass management plan.

Amendment 6 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Striped Bass (Amendment 6) requires ASMFC to adopt measures to end overfishing within one year, at any time that the fishing mortality rate (F) exceeds the mortality target for two consecutive years and the female spawning stock biomass (SSB) falls below the SSB target in at least one of those years.

Amendment 6 also requires ASMFC to draft a plan to rebuild the striped bass stock within 10 years should the SSB fall below its target in any two consecutive years and F exceed its target in at least one of those years.

The Benchmark Assessment demonstrated that both of those triggers had been tripped.

After a full year of debate, ASMFC adopted Addendum IV to Amendment 6 (Addendum IV), which had slightly less than a 50-50 chance of reducing F to target within one year. Addendum IV was adopted only after a number of jurisdictions bordering Chesapeake Bayunsuccessfully argued that the harvest reduction should be phased-in over a three-year period, despite the clear language of Amendment 6.

And despite the clear language of Amendment 6, no rebuilding plan was drafted at all.

Because ASMFC is not subject to Magnuson-Stevens, and because an appellate court decision effectively insulated ASMFC actions from judicial review, its failure to follow its own stock rebuilding rules was not subject to legal challenge.

Things headed downhill from there.

When ASMFC’s Striped Bass Management Board met in November 2015, representatives from the Chesapeake Bay jurisdictions tried to weaken the measures adopted in Addendum IV, even though the SSB was nowhere near the SSB target.

Michael Luisi, representing the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, argued that there was a bias in the stock assessment. Due to such bias, which could produce overestimates of mortality and underestimates of the size of the SSB, he said that the SSB was somewhat higher than believed, and harvest could be increased.

He maintained that position even after Charlton Godwin, the Chair of ASMFC’s Striped Bass Technical Committee, clearly stated that “there is no way to accurately predict what that bias is going to be and then to account for it…there is still no guarantee as to whether the direction is going to be the same or the magnitude.”

In other words, while there was a recognized bias in the assessment, such bias could either overestimate or underestimate F and SSB, and do so by differing amounts each year.

Mr. Luisi asserted that Amendment IV’s harvest reductions caused real harm to Maryland, saying “we’ve made the argument before we felt that these reductions were extreme. I’ve heard the word ‘crisis’ from my stakeholders. The charter, the recreational and the commercial industry are suffering greatly as a result of the reductions that we’ve taken.”

A few months later, despite Mr. Luisi’s claims of “crisis” and “suffering,” NMFS’ recreational landings estimates showed that anglers in Chesapeake Bay hadn’t taken any real-world reductions at all. In fact, both Maryland and Virginia anglers landed about 150% more striped bass in 2015 than they had in the base year of 2012….

Even so, Mr. Luisi made a motion to “initiate an addendum to reconsider the reduction options in Addendum IV for the 2016 fishing season in the Chesapeake Bay based on the results of the 2015 assessment update and retrospective projections.”

That motion never came to a vote. However, ASMFC’s Striped Bass Technical Committee was asked to prepare another update to the stock assessment, which would be presented at the October 2016 Striped Bass Management Board meeting.

Should that update show an increase in the SSB, there will undoubtedly be another effort to increase the harvest, even though the SSB was nowhere near its target level. Such effort could be successful.

And that, in a nutshell, is why fisheries need cast-in-stone limits, and fisheries managers need hard-and-fast rules, not “flexibility.”

Under a “flexible” management system, managers are faced with too many temptations, and too much pressure from their constituencies, to see a recovery through to its end, and to fully enforce the provisions of a fishery management plan.

As a result, flexibly-managed stocks are seldom, if ever, fully restored. Instead, they languish in a perilous netherworld, never completely healthy and vital, and always just one or two poor year classes—or one or two excessive harvests—away from the brink of collapse.

That’s not a good place for fish stocks to be, and explains why such stocks should be managed like summer flounder, harvest cuts and all, and not like the striped bass, which faces a far more uncertain future.

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

WHITHER RIVER HERRING AND SHAD

By now, anyone who follows fisheries issues probably knows that, last week, the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council decided not to designate shad or river herring as “stocks in the fishery” under the Council’s Fishery Management Plan for the Atlantic Mackerel, Squid and Butterfish Fisheries.

That disappointed a number of recreational fishing and conservation organizations, who were pressing the Council to take a more active role in shad and river herring management. 

Both shad and river herring are anadromous species, which means that they spend most of their lives in salt water, but ascend freshwater streams and rivers to spawn.  A couple of years ago, John Waldman wrote the book Running Silver, its title meant to convey how streams looked when the shad and river herring filled them from bank to bank as they made their annual spring spawning runs.

Today, such runs have dwindled, and some have disappeared completely.  Restoring runs of river herring and shad is one of the greatest tasks facing state fisheries managers all along the East Coast.

I can appreciate that, for when I was young, the tidal reaches of the Mianus River, a western Connecticut stream, “ran silver” with river herring from sometime around Easter until well into May.  Schools of fish flooded the river at high tide while, at the low, some actually turned on their sides and tried to wiggle over and around the exposed stones and mussel beds, using tiny trickles of water to reach the base of the dam that stymied most herring’s efforts to spawn.

Such dams caused problems for a lot of shad and river herring runs, and explain, in part, why the Council decided not to take action—because so much of the fish’s problems were tied to the shore, and thus outside the jurisdiction of the National Marine Fisheries Service.

The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Service, after a long stretch of largely ineffective actions, finally adopted meaningful measures to regulate shad in 2010, and river herring in 2012.  However, such measures apply mostly to state-waters fisheries, and perhaps to some directed fisheries a short distance offshore.  Conservation groups are quick to point out that the shad and river herring are running into serious problems out in the open ocean, too. 

As The Pew Charitable Trusts noted in a recent release,

“river herring and shad spend most of their lives in the ocean, where they school with other fish species, including those targeted by fishermen in federal waters, which start three miles from shore.  Recent genetic analysis shows that river herring originating in mid-Atlantic rivers are being swept up in federal waters by trawlers seeking Atlantic herring, mackerel, butterfish, longfin squid and whiting.”

Preventing such bycatch, and minimizing the resultant discard mortality, is the responsibility of federal fisheries managers which regulate all of the fisheries involved.

The problem is, there isn’t much hard science available to guide federal actions.  Pew points out that

“The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission is planning stock assessments for river herring and shad for 2017 and 2018, a NOAA technical expert working group for river herring is compiling information; a River Herring and Shad Committee and Advisory Panel serves the Mid-Atlantic Council; and council staff members have compiled significant work analyzing river herring and staff issues.”   

That is all true, but at the same time, there is no information on hand today, and no guarantee that there will be information on hand next year or the year after, that will allow NMFS to determine reasonably accurate reference points that could be used to set biomass and fishing mortality thresholds for the various shad and river herring stocks.

Thus, given ASMFC’s current involvement, the lack of reliable data and the amount of work that would be required to devise a shad and river herring management plan, the Council voted overwhelmingly against putting such a plan in place at this time.

But that doesn’t mean that NMFS hasn’t addressed shad and river herring issues at all.

In Amendment 14 to the squid, mackerel and butterfish plan, NMFS adopted rules that allow closer monitoring of major participants in those fisheries, which will better allow federal observers and port samplers to check for shad and river herring bycatch in such fisheries.  In addition, unless the safety of the vessel is at risk, or the net is filled with spiny dogfish (which are extremely difficult to handle, and can have their own conservation issues), trawlers are not allowed to dump netfuls of fish at sea, so that they might conceal instances of high river herring bycatch from onboard observers.

Amendment 14 also provided for the establishment of a bycatch cap, which would shut down the mackerel fishery once a preset poundage of shad and river herring were caught.

That all sounds fine, but the effectiveness of such regulations depends upon the good will of fishermen and the availability of fisheries observers, to factors which, when taken together, comprise a very fragile structure on which to base the health of already overstressed stocks.

Although members of the Council originally sought observer coverage as high as 100% on trawlers in the mackerel fishery, and at lower but still significant levels in the case of other fisheries covered by the management plan, such requirements were ultimately not adopted by NMFS. 

Instead, the great majority of vessels will sail without observers, and when unobserved fishermen are faced with the choice of either 1) taking nets filled with shad and/or river herring on board so that such fish will be counted and included in a cap that could easily shut down their fishery, or 2) dump the fish dead at sea and not recall them at all, thus better insuring that the fishery, and their personal incomes, will not be impeded,  it’s probably safe to assume that in most cases, human nature, and the second option, will prevail.

That means that shad and river herring’s recovery may hinge on the continued involvement of ASMFC, and the continued efforts of state fisheries managers to rebuild the stocks.  

Again, that creates a perilous situation for the fish to be in, for while state fisheries managers, on the whole, are dedicated professionals who want to do the right thing, they often find themselves in constant battle against legislators who fail to appropriate enough funds to cover the basic requirements of a fishery management program, and also against pressure from higher-ups in the state capitol who place short-term political, economic or public relations considerations above the biological needs of fish stocks.

That fact was recognized by at least one advocate for better shad and river herring management, David Sikorski, who represented the Coastal Conservation Association’s Maryland chapter.  Mr. Sikorski and the anglers who he represented wanted to see the fish brought under federal management because

“It’s where we have legal protections on species that can guarantee conservation.”

He recognized that state fisheries managers don’t operate under the same legal framework and, when politics intervene, conservation considerations can, and too often do, fall by the wayside.

Michael Luisi, a marine fisheries manager from Maryland, amply illustrated why advocates such as Mr. Sikorski should be concerned.  He expressed concern that imposing hard caps on shad and river herring bycatch, and presumably implementing a federal rebuilding plan for shad and/or river herring, could in fact shut down the squid, mackerel or butterfish fisheries, and called such shutdown a “big deal.”

Apparently, he doesn’t consider a collapse of shad or river herring stocks, which wouldn’t take any money out of the pockets of the big industrial trawlers, a “big deal” at all…

Roger Fleming, an attorney for Earthjustice, a conservation group specializing in litigation, which has already beat NMFS in a shad and river herring-related lawsuit, announced

“There’s no question that we’re going back to court to challenge this.”

He seemingly acknowledged and dismissed Mr. Luisi’s comment with two simple, reasonable sentences, saying

“But that’s the point.    You design measures that don’t let them fish at the same rate that they’re killing [shad and river herring] now.

Advocates for shad and river herring conservation certainly hope that Earthjustice will prevail.  However, even if it doesn’t, it is likely that NMFS, at the request of the Council, will take additional incremental actions, similar to those that they have already put in place, in order to further reduce shad and river herring bycatch.

If NMFS doesn’t take such actions, and if the stocks continue to decline, anglers and conservationists are likely to push for the “stocks in the fishery” designation to be considered once again.

OTHER FISH

I write about striped bass quite often, perhaps more than I do about anything else, although red snapper is also a frequent topic.  There are also fish that I don’t write about at all.

Recently, I started thinking about why that is.  My thoughts were spurred by reports that a single angler, fishing in my local waters, killed over 200 blowfish over the course of just two trips onto Great South Bay.

People complain about the way striped bass and red snapper are managed, but maybe it’s time to complain about how blowfish, and some other species, aren’t managed at all.

Blowfish, for anyone not familiar with the name, are more properly called northern puffer or, if you’re a biologist, Sphoeroides maculatus.  Unlike many of the puffer tribe, blowfish have organs that are only trivially toxic; no matter how badly they might be prepared, blowfish will never give anyone a numb-lipped fugu high, and eating the flesh will never, under any circumstances, prove fatal.

On the other hand, they taste very good, and are ridiculously easy to clean.  Make one cut behind the head, shuck the meat out of its skin, and you end up with two boneless fillets, separated by a single, fused length of vertebrae.

If you wanted to call them the perfect saltwater panfish, you won’t get an argument from me.  I’ve been eating—and cleaning—blowfish since I was about six years old.

The problem is, a lot of other people were eating them, too.  

All of the waters abutting New York were filled with blowfish decades ago, but the fish started to disappear in the mid-1960s, and became very scarce for much of the time since.

But every now and again, all the stars align just right, and a big year class erupts in the bay.  And every time one does, it gets wiped out about as soon as it arrives.

Because, as I mentioned, blowfish taste really good.  And without any restrictions on harvest…

Anglers go out and catch them by the pailful, and far too often, they don’t pay much attention to size.  Commercial fishermen pound on them as well, setting pots throughout the bay, for at $5 per pound (dressed weight), blowfish can generate pretty nice profits, so long as they last.

People rarely sit down and think about how nice it is to have a good population of blowfish around.

They’re a great fish for children, easy to catch and fascinating when they swell up in their typical defensive display.  In these days when far too many erstwhile young anglers abandon the sport because it seems boring and dull compared to other, electronic distractions, having a fish around that kids actually find kind of interesting is a big plus.

It’s an even bigger plus for angling-related businesses, because if kids don’t want to go out on the water, families tend to find alternate ways to spend their weekends, and such businesses wilt on the vine.  Blowfish provide a sort of gateway into the world of angling that can capture young imaginations and help to get children interested in the outdoors.

But for that to happen, there must be enough blowfish around.

The same sort of thing can be said for triggerfish.

They’re not a traditional fish of Long Island’s waters.  If you read older books, you won’t see them mentioned at all, as they were considered a strictly southern species.  But at some point during the late 20^th Century, triggerfish began to become a fairly regular catch in local waters, and are really appreciated when fishing for other things is slow.

A few summers ago, fluke fishing was awful, and there wasn’t much happening offshore.  Even bluefish were scarce.  Charter boats were searching for anything that their custom

ers could catch.  But some of those charters took things to extremes; one boat pulled over 150 triggers off the wreck of the Roda in the course of a single tide.

Sure, triggerfish can be pretty tasty, once you remove their leathery hides, but that’s still a lot of fish for one boat to take in one day. 

It might not have hurt the population at all, because triggers come up from the south.  I have no idea of how many—if any—survive the trip home once waters turn cold in late fall.  

But taking that many fish off a wreck in one day will certainly hurt the fishing for the next boat that comes along.

That’s when regulations can help.  Even though they might not be needed to protect the fish stock, they can help to spread the catch out among more anglers, rather than than letting a few hungry early birds take it all.  New York’s original, 14-inch size limit on summer flounder wasn’t adopted by biologists to protect the spawning stock, but rather recommended by the party boat industry, to assure that enough fish remained in the bay to keep their customers interested all summer long.

That was a pretty good idea, and probably ahead of its time.  It would be nice to see more of that kind of thinking coming from the recreational fishing industry today.

Such precautionary regulations could benefit a lot of fish, maybe even sea robins.

Once, they were everyone’s nemesis, seen as bait stealers that got in the way while people were fishing for fluke.  

Lately, though, more and more anglers have learned that beneath the sea robin’s spiny and somewhat bizarre exterior lay fillets of fine white meat, which are prized by French seafood chefs, who refer to the fish as “gurnard.”  Should the trend of eating sea robins accelerate, harvest could increase sharply, although no one has any idea how mush fishing pressure the sea robin population can stand.

But perhaps more importantly, despite the fact that sea robins provide perfectly good food, far too many are wasted by benighted anglers who still don’t understand that it’s wrong to just toss an unwanted fish up on the beach and leave it to die.

Placing some regulations on sea robin landings would both provide a buffer against excessive harvest and lend the fish some protection against unconscionable waste.

There is no question that state fishery departments in New York and other coastal states already have plenty to do, and probably lack the time and resources needed to develop science-based management programs for blowfish, sea robins or anything else.  At the same time, it would probably be wise to adopt precautionary regulations, which would help to avert overharvest of any of the less-studied species, and perhaps help to rebuild those populations which, like blowfish, have already begun to decline.

I can hear folks scoffing now, saying that such humble fish aren’t worth our attention.

But the precedent is already set.  When oyster toadfish began to disappear from New York’s bays, due to a newfound popularity in the live fish market and a resultant spike in commercial harvest, New York adopted regulations to protect them (for anglers, a 3-fish bag, 10-inch minimum size and a season that’s closed between May 15 and July 15).

If the lowly toadfish deserves state protection, it’s hard to argue that blowfish, triggerfish, kingfish and even sea robins should not be given some protection as well.

FORGOTTEN VOICES

The crisis that faces New England’s commercial fishing fleet did not come on suddenly.  It was not the proverbial lightning bolt out of the blue, that brought devastation in the moment that it was first perceived.  It did not spread through the fleet as a plague does, when a pathogen explodes within a vulnerable population.

Instead, it came as a cancer, slowly growing and gnawing away at the body of the fleet over many years.  And like so many cancers, it did not come completely unbidden; the fleet, through its actions, undermined its own health and created the conditions that malignancy needed to thrive.

When we see the news coming out of New England today, stories that tell of the collapse of Georges Bank cod and slashed quotas for yellowtail flounder, we tend to think that this problem is something new, a creation of this 21^st Century or, if you believe some fishermen’s stories, an unanticipated consequence of the conservation mandates that lie at the center of federal fisheries law.

That isn’t so.

Recently, a short film called “Draggerman’s Haul” appeared on YouTube.  The film is an elegy to Stonington, Connecticut’s dying commercial fishing fleet.

But even though the film didn’t appear on YouTube until this year, it is not a recent production.  “Draggerman’s Haul” was filmed in 1975, a full year before the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act was signed into law.

That was forty years ago, yet if you close your eyes as the film plays, and just listen to the fishermen’s words, it would be easy to believe that the film was shot just yesterday.

Declining stocks were already a concern.  One captain says that

“Now, 200 horsepower in a dragger, to catch the same amount of fish we caught with 5 horsepower in 1920.  Figure it out.  Forty times as much power, see, that’s how the fishing’s gone.  And if they keep building bigger boats with more power, it’s just a big circle. 

“Spawning season for most fish is in March and early April, and if they’d only have sense enough to make a regulation, to tie up for two months in March and one month in April [sic], that would save the fish.  If you went down to New Bedford or Boston or Gloucester, and see all the fish brought in, in March and April, with big spawns [i.e., roe sacs] on them bulging out, and if that hadn’t happened, there’d still be plenty of fish.  But they had no restrictions, you know; every man wants to go out and fish…

When the Fishery Conservation and Management Act of 1976 (the original, badly flawed version of Magnuson-Stevens) was originally passed, it gave much lip service to conservation, but contained no language requiring that the spawning stock of New England groundfish or anything else, be protected. 

A fisherman noted that

“You’ve got to make a few regulations.  You’re got to, not really, as one man says, replace it with bigger gear like the Russians.  That would be, I think that would be a mistake.  It’s investing too much more money, it’s ganging up on the fish again.  It’s more modern equipment, and I don’t think that’s the answer.  I think the answer is to push the Russians a little farther offshore if you can.”

In fact, the 1976 law’s primary purpose was to push foreign vessels, which had been fishing as close as 12 miles off the coast of the United States, off grounds claimed by American fishermen.  But other federal programs provided financing for purchasing new or upgrading existing fishing vessels.  

With foreign fleets pushed 200 miles offshore, fishermen quickly took advantage of the opportunities such programs offered.  Soon, an overcapitalized, under-regulated fleet, which included many larger, more powerful boats, was soon pursuing the declining fish stocks off New England.

Today, many fish stocks are still suffering as a result.

Yet even in 1975, fishermen knew that you couldn’t blame the foreign fleets—the “Russians”—for all of the problems they faced in New England’s waters.  As one observed,

“If you’re going to push the 200 mile limit, to stop the foreigners from coming in, you’ve only made half a step.  You still have the stuff that fishermen right here in this country are using, the small twine, and hurting themselves…

“Now we have these industrial fish plants in Point Judith [Rhode Island], New Bedford [Massachusetts], we had them on Long Island [New York], and you have them up and down the coast.  They use it for fish meal, they use it for fertilizer, they use it for cat and dog food. Now we use that, in order to catch that fish, we have to use the small mesh also.  So we’re killing as much or more of that small stuff ourselves, as what the foreigners are, but the people here just don’t look at it that way…

“You figure an inch-and-a-half mesh, there is cases where they use one-inch, and you’ve got to be killing that small stuff, whether it’s edible fish or not.  It all goes into the hold, into these plants to be processed, for this purpose. 

Another fisherman confirmed that

“Baby flounders and cod and haddock got killed, went to market, millions of them, tens of millions, they didn’t live to grow up…I don’t know if legislation is coming too late…”

Virtually all of those industrial processing plants have shut down, and New York State even passed a law that makes it illegal to “render food fish into fertilizer.”   Virtually all food fish are subject to size and landings limits that make industrial processing impossible.

Still, the largest commercial fishery on the east coast, Atlantic menhaden, which saw over 380 million pounds of fish landed in 2014, is an industrial fishery that processes one of the coast’s most important forage species into fish meal, animal feeds and other products at a single plant in Reedville, Virginia.

Small-mesh fisheries also continue in the northeast, and continue to do damage.

Mid-water trawls used to catch Atlantic herring in multi-ton lots sweep up unknown numbers of depleted river herring as well.  A similar problem exists in the Mid-Atlantic’s squid and mackerel fisheries, a problem that the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council will debate on October 4.

Such offshore bycatch only adds to the difficulties that anadromous species, such as river herring and shad, faced and still face in their natal rivers.  As one fisherman in the film said,

“At the time that they approach the mouth of a river to go up it for spawning, if the pollution in the river is bad enough, they will eventually—the ones that do go up it will die—and pretty soon there’s none to return, so they don’t return to the river because the cycle’s been broken.”

That was said forty years ago, but managers only began to seriously address the problems of New England’s river herring and shad in the past decade, with the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission not placing its first real restrictions on the shad fishery until 2010; problems in the states’ river herring fisheries weren’t fully addressed until 2012, two years later.

To be fair, prior to passage of the Clean Water Act in 1972, nothing that ASMFC could have done would have given anadromous fish too much help; pollution was just too prevalent in many New England rivers.  However, water quality had generally improved enough over the following couple of decades that ASMFC could have made a meaningful difference prior to 2010. 

It seems, all too often, that making a meaningful difference is hard, even though, if we had listened to the quiet voices in “Draggerman’s Haul,” when they first were recorded nearly two generations ago, New England’s fisheries would be in much better shape than they are today.

Anyone interested in those fisheries would do well to click on the link near the top of this essay, and watch “Draggerman’s Haul” for themselves.

When they do, they should pay particular heed to the opening caption:

“A hungry world is looking to the sea as well as the land for food.  This film is made in the hope that food will be there when we need it.”

That could have been written today.

NOTE:  While writing the above essay, I quoted a number of times from fishermen speaking in “Draggerman’s Haul”.  I have tried hard to accurately reflect what they said, but at times, someone’s speech was a little bit garbled, and in transcribing it, I may have misheard what was said.  In any event, such errors will be minor and will not distort the meaning of what the speaker said.  However, I still urge everyone to click on the link and see the full “Draggerman’s Haul” for themselves.

WHO GETS THE FISH?

Of all the issues that face fisheries managers, probably none are as controversial as reallocating harvest.

It’s a no-win issue for regulators. The need to establish annual catch limits makes fisheries management a zero-sum game. The only way to increase the landings of one group of fishermen is to decrease the landings of another.

Managers can base reallocation decisions on many different factors, which range from historic patterns of harvest to recent, climate-driven changes in fish abundance. They know that any criteria they decide to use will be deemed “unfair” by those forced to land fewer fish, and “perfectly appropriate” by those who will get to land more.

Thus, managers are understandably reluctant to develop reallocation plans that they know will be loudly and bitterly condemned by many fishermen.

In an effort to provide some guidance, the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) issued a Fishery Allocation Review Policy (Policy) and accompanying Recommended Practices and Factors to Consider when Reviewing and Making Allocation Decisions (Practices) in July 2016.

The NMFS actions, however well-intentioned, didn’t add much clarity to the process.

The Practices note, “Several recommended practices would improve the allocation process by increasing transparency and reducing conflict.” It goes on to suggest that, when facing allocation issues, regional fishery management councils should “Evaluate and Update Council and Fishery Management Plan Objectives,” “Identify User Needs,” “Minimize Speculative Behavior” and “Plan for Future Conditions.”

That seems to be a reasonable, if obvious, approach to allocation issues, but even so, the Practices hedge, saying that the four specified criteria “should not be considered comprehensive and may not be applicable to all circumstances.”

Viewed in light of such warning, the criteria do little, if anything, to help resolve allocation issues.

If one continues to read the Practices, things don’t become any clearer. The document advises that

“Typically allocation decisions are closely aligned with the historical use of the resource because the government is hesitant to limit historically established privileges and access. While historical use may (or in some instances, shall) be taken into consideration when reviewing and making an allocation decision, the [Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act] requires achieving on a continuing basis the optimum yield (OY) from each fishery, which encompasses a broader range of considerations.”

It then sets out such considerations, which include “Ecological Factors,” “Economic Factors,” “Social Factors” and “Indicators of Performance and Change,” and describes various permutations of each. Then, the Practices hedge again, saying

“The list of factors is not all-inclusive, as there may be other important factors to consider. The factors do not prescribe any particular outcome with respect to allocation, but rather, are intended to provide a framework for the allocation analysis. Factors should be considered compared between groups for which an allocation decision is relevant. The priority and weight afforded each factor will vary depending on the time horizon of the decision, the objectives of the allocation decision, the objectives of the [fishery management plan], and the overarching Council goals…”

In the end, the Practices are filled with such ambiguity that they provide no meaningful guidance at all.

Since the Policy relies heavily on the Practices to determine whether a reallocation decision should be made, it doesn’t provide much useful guidance, either.

The commercial summer flounder fishery illustrates the difficulty of making reallocation decisions, even with the Practices and Policy in place.

There managers face the seemingly simple question of whether state allocations, which currently favor a few Mid-Atlantic states, should be changed to reflect the steady northern expansion of the stock into New England waters.

Summer flounder are managed by the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council (MAFMC), which represents states between New York and North Carolina. Thus, New England fishermen have little say in how they are managed, and that makes them feel as if the deck is stacked against them.

David Simpson, the marine fisheries director from Connecticut’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, gave voice to the frustration felt by New England fishermen, saying, “We have these allocations state by state that are fixed in yesteryear. How do you convince four people with a vote on the Mid-Atlantic Council from North Carolina that they should acknowledge all the fish are 20 miles south of Montauk now and that New York, Connecticut and Rhode Island now should have a bigger share than them?”

To be fair, the MAFMC is currently considering a comprehensive amendment to its Summer Flounder, Scup and Black Sea Bass Fishery Management Plan, and reallocation of the commercial quota is one of the issues being discussed. However, comments made at a June 2016 advisory panel meeting make it clear that Mid-Atlantic fishermen are not sympathetic to Mr. Simpson’s arguments.

A commercial fisherman from the lower Mid-Atlantic said, “Infrastructure was put in place for distribution purposes, based on historical numbers. Fishermen knew the allocations when they were getting into the fishery.”

Of course, fishermen didn’t know that the center of summer flounder abundance would shift well to the north of where it was when the original allocations were made. But that wouldn’t change the mind of another Mid-Atlantic fisherman, who said

“I don’t think that [a reallocation] is justifiable. Even if all the fluke moved off of Connecticut and Massachusetts, I don’t think that would be a compelling reason to re-evaluate the quotas…Have the people who have made the complaints bought permits in other states? Have they done something to help themselves? Many fishermen went other places, re-invested to make it work. For those people who have not done that—I don’t think it’s fair for them to ask for more quota…Allocation changes would have to be very severe to make a difference. The reduction to North Carolina and New Jersey fishermen would be massive.”

That view was echoed by a North Carolina waterman, who argued, “Infrastructure and coastal economies were built on that allocation. North Carolina fishermen created the lion’s share of quota up and down the east coast. Most northern fishermen fished on groundfish, and didn’t care about fluke.”

Yet another fisherman insisted that today’s allocations must continue to reflect the landings patterns established three decades ago. “We used 1980-1989 [as base years], setting regulations in 1993. That’s 20+ years build around that…People are seeing that there’s money in this fishery and now they want to get into it. But people that are in it have worked hard to get it where it is. And it’s one of the only major fisheries we have in Virginia and North Carolina. We don’t need to change it.”

Thus, the scene is set. One group of fishermen calls for a new allocation that takes changing environmental conditions into account. Another believes that allocations based on past landings patterns should be forever cast in stone.

Is any reallocation justified? If so, who should prevail?

The Policy advises, “If the trigger [for reallocation] is based on public input to the Councils, then a check for changes in social, ecological or economic criteria is required.”

The change in summer flounder distribution certainly meets the “ecological” criterion, so the next step is to refer to the Practices for guidance.

They paint a mixed picture.

One could easily argue that the changes currently impacting the summer flounder fishery will continue, and that the fishery’s future lies in northern waters. One could also make the case that northeastern fishermen, suffering from sharp declines in their traditional cod and flounder fisheries, need a larger allocation of summer flounder to stave off the collapse of their fishery and the socio-economic damage that any such collapse would cause.

On the other hand, as the advisory panel comments show, Mid-Atlantic fishermen are more than willing to sail north to catch their quota of summer flounder. If some of their fish were reallocated to New England fishermen, they would suffer a significant loss of income that couldn’t be readily replaced by switching effort onto other species. And coastal communities along the Mid-Atlantic coast could also suffer socio-economic harm as more summer flounder are landed in northern ports, and jobs and infrastructure are lost in states such as Virginia and North Carolina.

Thus, despite NMFS’ Policy and Practices, it still comes down to a judgment call by the MAFMC, and a reallocation decision that no one sitting around the table is particularly eager to make.

An allocation decision that impoverishes one group of fishermen in order to enrich others will never solve the ultimate problem, which cannot be resolved so long as everyone insists on squabbling over the biggest piece of a small and oft-times shrinking pie.

If every fisherman is to land enough fish to survive, managers and fishermen must work together to make the summer flounder pie bigger, so that each such fisherman can enjoy a larger slice of that pie than they have today.

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