THE GROWING THREAT TO MAGNUSON-STEVENS

Now that H.R. 200, a bill that would amend and reauthorize the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act(Magnuson-Stevens), has passed the House of Representatives, it poses an even greater threat to the federal fishery management system.

Much of that threat arises out of the uncertainty that would be introduced by many of the provisions of H.R. 200, which create broad exceptions to the clear conservation and management language of the current law.

Ideally, the law should be worded so clearly that a person without legal training can read it and understand what is and is not allowed. When Magnuson-Stevens unambiguously states that “Conservation and management measures shall prevent overfishing,” its intent is perfectly clear. By using the word “shall,” that law doesn’t give fishery managers any discretion; any measure that allows overfishing is clearly illegal.

Similarly, when Magnuson-Stevens requires that “For a fishery that is overfished, any fishery management plan, amendment, or proposed regulation…shall specify a time period for rebuilding such fishery that shall…not exceed 10 years, except in cases where the biology of the stock of fish, other environmental conditions, or management measures under an international agreement to which the United States is a party dictates otherwise, [emphasis added, internal numbering deleted]” it’s pretty clear what fishery managers have to do when rebuilding a stock.

Unfortunately, that ideal is seldom achieved in the real world; some uncertainty always creeps into legislation, and the courts need to get involved and interpret the law. Whether the courts ultimate carry out the legislators’ intent often depends upon whether that intent is clearly expressed in the law’s language.

Magnuson-Stevens faced such a court challenge, after fishery managers failed to adopt fishery management measures that complied with the conservation provisions that were added to the law in 1996. The challenge arose in 1999, after the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) proposed a summer flounder quota that had only a 17 percent chance of preventing overfishing.

The federal appellate court that issued a decision in that case, Natural Resources Defense Council v. Daley , held that “at the very least…to ‘prevent overfishing’…the [total allowable landings] must have at least a 50% chance” of keeping fishing mortality below the overfishing threshold. It decided that the law meant exactly what it said, that overfishing shall be prevented, and so enabled federal fishery managers to completely rebuild 44 once-overfished stocks over the last eighteen years.

H.R. 200 is dangerous because it destroys that sort of certainty and gives NMFS far too much leeway to allow overfishing and indefinitely delay the recovery of overfished stocks. It does so by creating loosely-worded exceptions to the requirements that the law imposes on fishery managers, and those exceptions render such requirements virtually meaningless.

H.R. 200’s exceptions to the mandatory timelines for rebuilding an overfished stock exemplify this point.

One such exception would delay stock rebuilding for an indeterminate period if “The Secretary determines that the cause of the stock being depleted is outside the jurisdiction of the [relevant fishery management] Council or the rebuilding program cannot be effective only by limiting fishing activities.”

Should such a provision become law, NMFS could avoid setting a final rebuilding deadline for overfished salmon stocks just by finding that the cause of their “depletion” lay in dams and other problems in their natal rivers. Similarly, fish such as winter flounderand many species of grouper , which rely on inshore spawning and or nursery areas, might never be completely rebuilt if NMFS declared that their problems resulted from conditions on such inshore grounds, and not from anything that occurred in federal waters.

Another exception, which would delay rebuilding if “the Secretary determines that one or more components of a mixed-stock fishery is depleted but cannot be rebuilt within [the required] time-frame without significant economic harm to the fishery,” seems designed to prevent the recovery of Atlantic cod stocks in our lifetime.

And an exception that would delay rebuilding if “the Secretary determines that the stock has been affected by unusual events that make rebuilding within the specified time period improbable without significant economic harm to fishing communities” is so broad that it could probably be applicable to any overfished stock.

The problem is made even worse by the deference that courts must give to the decisions of administrative agencies, including NMFS.

Pursuant to Magnuson-Stevens, NMFS’ decisions can only be challenged under very limited circumstances; only decisions that are “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with law” will be overturned by a reviewing court. Courts may not substitute their own findings of fact for those of the agency, or decide which testimony should or should not be believed. Instead, so long as the agency didn’t exceed its Constitutional and statutory authority, a court must affirm any agency decision 

that is supported by “substantial evidence.”

And “substantial evidence” is a legal term of art, that involves far less “substance” than a non-lawyer might expect. Courts have defined it as “such relevant evidence as a reasonable mind might accept as adequate to support a conclusion…When the evidence may rationally be interpreted in more than one way, the court must uphold the [agency] decision.”

As a practical matter, that means that if there was any evidence provided during the rulemaking process that supports an agency’s decision, a court will not overturn that decision, even if far more evidence to the contrary was also provided to the agency.

Thus, if one person testified that a fish population was depleted as a result, perhaps, of pollution in inshore nursery areas, and two dozen people testified that the problem was overfishing, NMFS could choose to believe that one person’s word and, if H.R. 200 became law, decide that a rebuilding deadline should not apply. And the courts would let that decision stand.

At this point, someone might object that Magnuson-Stevens requires such management decisions to be supported by “the best scientific information available,” and that such requirement would protect fisheries from such unfortunate results. But H.R. 200 is putting that at risk, too.

Normally, what is or is not deemed “best scientific information” is determined by each regional fishery management council’s science and statistics committee or by experts at NMFS, a process that keeps most bad information from affecting management outcomes. But a provision in H.R. 200 would require that fishery management plans “identify data and analysis, especially concerning recreational fishing” and determine “whether such data and analysis could be provided by fishermen, fishing communities, universities and research institutions.” The identified data and analysis might then be considered “the best scientific information.”

The findings of professional researchers at universities and other institutions are already considered in stock assessments and other management actions, so that much of H.R. 200’s language offers few problems (although issues sometimes arise when “hired guns” working for various organizations seek to steer a stock assessment committee toward a particular conclusion). However, the notion that data, much less analysis, compiled by fishermen with no scientific background, could be considered “the best scientific information” should frighten anyone concerned with the health of fish stocks.

H.R. 200’s language could allow the New England Fishery Management Council to give a fisherman’s comments that “There is so much more cod out there than ever before” the same weight as a comprehensive stock assessment saying that the stock is in serious trouble, by deeming both “the best scientific information” available. And if the council decided to believe the fishermen instead of the assessment, and set harvest levels accordingly, it would be very hard to successfully challenge that decision in court. That would clearly be a bad result.

But then, a lot of bad results would accrue if H.R. 200 became law. And on July 11, it took a big step in that direction.

Thus, it is time to gear up for an all-out fight in the Senate to prevent a bad bill from going any farther.

For if H.R. 200’s supporters win in the Senate as well as the House, our nation’s fish stocks will certainly lose.

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

"...BUT WHERE ARE THE BLUEFISH?"

Here on Long Island, bluefish have always been a big part of the angling scene.

We curse them when they chop up an eel cast for stripers, or destroy carefully-rigged ballyhoo before the tuna even get a chance to sniff them, but it sure feels good to know that, from the beginning of May through the end of November, when other fish decide to ignore you, the bluefish will always be there.

Except, lately, they’re not.

There’s still a big run in the spring, with fish of mixed sizes, including some truly large ones, invading the bays and ripping up bunker outside.  But that run isn’t lasting too long, and once it’s over, bluefish have been hard to find.  

Sure, they show up in pulses, sometimes offshore, sometimes at Montauk, sometimes in Long Island Sound.  But summer blitzes of bluefish have become localized events, few and far between, and not the sort of thing that might erupt anywhere, at any time, the way they did not too many years ago.

Last season, I shark fished from August into October, concentrating my efforts along the 20-fathom line south of Fire Island.  I caught makos.  I caught hammerheads.  I caught sandbar sharks.  I even caught some very nice dolphin (mahi-mahi).  But in all that time, I didn’t have one single bluefish pick up a bait.

I can assure you, that’s pretty strange.  Typically, at that time of year, they swarm in the chum slick, leaving only when a mako begins to draw near. 

It’s the sort of thing you talk about, but you try not to worry when it happens, because drawing a coastwide conclusion from limited, local observations is a very good way to be wrong.  Even so, I was a little shocked when I was in a tackle shop one day last season and an angler who I know—a very good angler, who runs other folks’ boats up and down the coast, and might fish everywhere from Canada to the Caribbean over the course of a season—said “I never thought that I’d say this, but I’m starting to get worried about bluefish.”

I had to agree, although I keep trying to tell myself that I’m overreacting to local conditions, and that the bluefish are doing just fine along most of the coast.  But just this week, I came across an article from The [Nantucket, MA] Inquirer and Mirror, titled “Still plenty of stripers, but where are the bluefish?”    and realized that other folks were asking the same question I was.

The article noted that

“…Our bass fishing is excellent, but our consistent push of bluefish is a ways off.  Most years guys lament the arrival of bluefish, because it often means that bass are on their way out.

“This year we have much bigger concerns.  Are we actually going to get bluefish in the numbers that we are used to?

“Unfortunately, the tale of the bluefish decline is a couple of years in the making.  For the past three years, we’ve seen consecutive declines.  We’ve attributed it to a lack of bait and simply the cyclical nature of bait.

“This year we have tons of bait and very few fish…”

So it seems that what we’re experiencing on Long Island is about the same thing that folks are seeing up on Nantucket.  And that may mean something, because one of the excuses that we heard from some fishermen, at a recent hearing on bluefish management held here in New York by the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council, is that there’s nothing wrong with the bluefish population.  They’re not catching too many here on Long Island, they said, because the fish have gone up north and further from shore to escape warming water.

Well, Nantucket is certainly north of us, and as an island, it’s further from shore, but they don’t seem to be seeing too many bluefish either.  So maybe there really is a problem.

That got me even more curious, so I started reading fishing reports from up and down the coast, trying to get a feel for what the bluefish were doing.  One of the things that struck me isn’t that writers were, like the columnist in Nantucket, talking about the absence of bluefish, but instead they weren’t talking about bluefish at all, which is a little strange for the first week of July.

Last Friday, there was no mention of blues in what is probably the most-read angling column on Long Island, which appears in Newsday.  That says a lot in itself; at this point in July, blues should be tearing the hearts out of menhaden schools in every harbor from the Bronx to Peconic Bay.   

But they’re not. 

The only local mention I could find was an article saying that “cocktail blues”—small, one-year-old fish—are abundant in a few East End bays.  

We should be seeing more action than that.

Other articles suggested few bluefish in waters well north and south of Long Island.  

One angling column in a Massachusetts newspaper surveyed the fishing from southern Maine to southern Massachusetts, and only noted abundant bluefish in the southern part of Cape Cod and in a small section of Cape Cod Bay.    

A column in a Baltimore, Maryland paper, the Capital Gazette, chronicled an outdoor writer’s unsuccessful efforts to find blues in Chesapeake Bay.  The writer said

“I was surprised by two things:  That there were no fish, and no sport fishermen.  Clearly I had missed the memo, but surely there had to be a few stragglers, right?  Apparently not.”

So there doesn’t seem to be swarms of bluefish south of us, either.

And when there are just a few fish to the north, a few fish to the south, and a few fish in the middle, maybe it really is time to get just a little concerned.

The last bluefish stock assessment gives no real grounds for worry, telling us that the stock is at about 85% of the target level.  However, that was based on the state of the stock in 2014, before we started hearing anglers complain about a lack of fish; what we don’t know for certain is whether there are fewer bluefish today than there were four years ago.

The assessment also underestimated the recreational bluefish harvest.  

The National Marine Fisheries Service has recently recalculated catch and effort data for recreational fishermen, and found that angling harvest is higher than previously believed.  In the case of bluefish, NMFS data now shows that, for the years 2013-2017, recreational landings were between 2.1 times (2013) and 3.4 times (2017) higher than originally estimated.  

That means that fishing mortality was a lot higher than anyone knew.

Which brings us back to Chris Dollar’s column in the Capital Gazette, because he didn’t just write about a slow day of fishing.  He reminded anglers that the Mid-Atlantic Council, in conjunction with the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, is currently considering a new amendment that would reallocate supposedly “uncaught” recreational quota (although the new NMFS data shows that anglers actually overfished, rather than underfished, their bluefish allocations) to the commercial sector, which will be more than happy to catch and kill it.

With the rising concerns about the health of the stock, that is a particularly bad idea.  As Mr. Dollar notes,

“…As an outdoors writer, professional fishing outfitter and part-time guide, I have an obvious financial stake in a healthy bluefish population, so my opposition to the proposal is a no-brainer.  I think it possible that this action, if approved, could trigger undue hardship down the road for tackle shops, guides and the waterfront communities that support sport fishing.

“The proposal also seems counter-intuitive to me, from a conservation standpoint—why ask recreational anglers to keep only enough blues to eat, and preach the benefits of catch-and-release, both of which do help protect bluefish from overfishing, only to turn around and give that surplus to the commercial sector?”

That makes sense to me, because no, the “missing” bluefish are not swimming out in the Atlantic, somewhere between here and Africa, as one divorced-from-reality party boat captain suggested at the New York hearing.  Nor is the new size limit on mako sharks going to lead to a bluefish shortage, another hare-brained idea that was mentioned that night.

Some writers, like those captains at the hearing, might still conjure up visions of seafaring bluefish, writing things such as

“I’m second-guessing theories that place a massive overwintering biomass of blues no farther away than the Carolinas and a bit southward.  The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission reports, ‘In winter (bluefish) tend to be found offshore between Cape Hatteras and Florida…with schools that can cover tens of square miles of ocean, equivalent to around 10,000 football fields.’

“It’s an impressive perception, to be sure, but I’ll beg to moderately differ.  There’s simply no picturing such an AD/HD species just slamming on the brakes to settle down—or even slow down—for a lengthy winter hiatus…anywhere.  It’s just not in their genes.  I’m sure that a beauty of a bluefish biomass annually has a showy gathering right where the commission suggests, but I’ll bet the bay barn that a ton of them are off to party truly unknown…”

But while that sort of evidence-free speculation is fine in a newspaper column, it can become dangerous when it is introduced to fishery management discussions, as it too often is.  There, claims that “the fish are just somewhere else” are interposed for the express purpose of avoided needed regulation, and fish stocks can be hurt quite badly as a result.

Thus, anglers who are concerned about bluefish would be well-advised to get a copy of the Scoping Document for the allocation amendment, read it, and send their comments to Chris Moore, PhD, Executive Director, Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council, North State Street, Suite 201, Dover, DE 19901 soon; all comments must arrive at the Council before July 30.

Comments may also be emailed to mseeley@mafmc.org, with the message line “Bluefish Allocation Amendment Scoping Comments.” 

Whether you send them in by snail mail or email, get them in by the 30^th.  Because if there aren’t a lot of bluefish in Massachusetts, off Long Island or in Chesapeake Bay, the smart money says that there aren’t very many anywhere else. 

And increasing the commercial allocation, to put more bluefish on the dock and keep fewer in the water, will just make that situation worse.

CRUNCH TIME

Barring an unexpected delay, H.R. 200, the Strengthening Fishing Communities and Increasing Flexibility in Fisheries Management Act, will come to the floor of the House of Representatives on Wednesday, where it will be debated for one hour and then put to a vote.

H.R. 200 is a bad bill.  

It will substantially weaken the conservation and management provisions of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, largely by creating numerous vaguely-worded exceptions to Magnuson-Stevens’ prohibition against overfishing, its deadlines for rebuilding overfished stocks and its requirement that annual catch limits be established for nearly all managed species.

H.R. 200 also weakens one of the provisions of Magnuson-Stevens that makes the law work:  The requirement that fishery management actions be based on the best available science.  It does that not by abolishing the requirement itself, but by legislatively determining that observations made by fishermen and other untrained and probably biased observers could be considered “best available science,” rather than leaving it up to scientists to determine what is good science and what is not.

There are a lot of other questionable provisions in the bill that, if it becomes law, will hamper the effectiveness of the federal fishery management system.  A number of those are the so-called “Modern Fish Act” provisions that were once included in a separate bill, H.R 2023, and are intended to hamper the commercial fishing industry, facilitate reallocating commercial quota to anglers in the South Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico regions and allow anglers to escape their share of the burden for conserving and rebuilding fish stocks.

Because those provisions are in there, a coalition of anglers’ rights groups and fishing tackle and marine trades organizations have now orphaned H.R. 2023, the original House Modern Fish Act, have given that appellation to H.R. 200, and are going all-out for H.R. 200’s passage.

The fact that a number of respected conservation groups have taken a look at H.R. 200’s provisions, and appropriately nicknamed it the “Empty Oceans Act” as a result, doesn’t seem to have given the angling/boating industry coalition any pause at all, even though empty oceans aren’t very pleasant places to fish in, and are hardly conducive to boat and fishing tackle sales.

The bill that’s going to come up for a vote on Wednesday won’t be exactly the same as the bill that was originally introduced.  The sponsor, Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska), will introduce an amended version that doesn’t make the changes to the fishery conservation and management any better, but at least deleted language that would have made the National Environmental Policy Act, National Marine Sanctuaries Act, Antiquities Act and Endangered Species Act inapplicable to fishery management actions taken pursuant to Magnuson-Stevens.

But don't let those changes affect your opinion.  H.R. 200 remains a lousy law.

The House Rules Committee has decided that eleven amendments to the bill, including the aforementioned amendment being proposed by Rep. Young, may be presented and debated on Wednesday. 

None of the amendments would materially improve the bill, although one offered by Rep. Jared Huffman (D-California) would require that any fishery management plan, amendment or regulation intended to rebuild a fish stock that was not successfully rebuilt under a previous management action have at least a 75% chance of achieving its goal.  While that’s a worthwhile amendment, it certainly doesn’t make up for all of the bad language in H.R. 200—including language that would largely make the amendment irrelevant by stretching out rebuilding times for indeterminably long periods.  And as a practical matter, Rep. Huffman’s amendment is probably unlikely to pass.

Another amendment, offered by Rep. Jim Langevin (D-Rhode Island), would give Rhode Island a seat on the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council, something that is arguably needed given the number of Mid-Atlantic fish stocks that are now following—or being chased by—warmer waters into southern New England.  A third, offered by Rep. William Keating (D-Massachusetts) would require the National Marine Fisheries Service to adopt final standards for electronic monitoring of the New England groundfish fleet, which could be a big positive, but would also set a short, 180-day timeline for getting it done, and require NMFS to pay for the purchase and installation of the monitoring gear, neither of which appears very practical.

Beyond those, the rest of the amendments only make 

a bad bill worse.

Striped bass anglers will probably take particular offense to an amendment offered by Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-New York).  Zeldin has already been working hard to maintain, or perhaps even lower, his League of Conservation Voters lifetime rating of 10 (his 2017 rating was 9)—and yes, that’s out of 100—by being a staunch supporter of H.R. 200, a bill that the League strongly opposes.  He’s now seeking to lower his rating with northeastern striped bass anglers as well, with an amendment that would allow striped bass fishing in the exclusive economic zone around Block Island, and thus increase striped bass harvest at a time when the bass population is hovering just above the threshold that marks an overfished stock.

Another amendment, offered by Rep. Joe Courtney (D-Connecticut) would create a “pilot research trawl survey” employing commercial fishermen in the New England and Mid-Atlantic regions, which would operate independently from the NMFS trawl surveys.  While boats participating in such survey would be required to use “a peer-reviewed net configuration” supplied by NMFS, there is no similar requirement that a peer-reviewed survey methodology be employed, raising the risk, particularly given the weakened “best available science” language of H.R. 200, that participating fishermen would target areas known to hold concentrations of fish, and thus bias the survey, which would then be used to impeach (or, in the language of the amendment, “enhance and provide improvements to”) the data collected by NMFS.

Among other amendments, there is one that would relieve several south Atlantic states of their obligation to mitigate damage to aquatic vegetation caused by maintenance dredging of navigation channels in an inland waterway (Rep. Lois Frankel, D-Florida), one that would mandate a report that would, among other things, propose ways that “resource rent” from catch share program participants in the South Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico regions (but, very noticeably, not in the North Pacific, where the volume of such rents would be very, very much higher) could be “reclaimed” by the U.S. Treasury (Rep. Garret Graves, R-Louisiana), and yet another, dramatically titled the “Reef Assassin Act,” that would create a bounty on lionfish that would be paid in transferrable tags that would allow a commercial or recreational fishermen to catch red snapper, gag grouper, greater amberjack or gray triggerfish out of season or in excess of the prevailing bag limit or annual catch limit (Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Florida).

That’s all on the table for Wednesday.

If you don’t like the idea of H.R. 200 becoming law, I strongly suggest that you contact your House representative and ask that he or she vote against the bill, and against any specific amendment that you don’t like.

I’ve never tried to mislead my readers and I’m not going to begin now:  No matter how much of a fuss we manage to make—and, combined with everyone else opposing this bill, I hope that we make a big one—the odds are very high that H.R. 200 will pass in the House.  The very similar H.R. 1335 passed there three years ago, and that was before all of the Modern Fish Act hoopla began.  Right now, there are just too many people holding seats in the House that are hostile to the very concept of conservation; the pro-exploitation H.R. 200 is a perfect reflection of their philosophy of putting short-term profit on a pedestal, and disregarding other concerns.

But even if H.R. 200 passes, it’s important to keep its margin of victory as narrow as possible.

The real fight will be in the Senate, where currently undecided senators may well make or break the vote on a companion bill.  If H.R. 200 passes by a wide margin, such senators may well be convinced to support S. 1520 and send both bills to conference, where something truly ugly is likely to emerge.  

But if enough concerned and thoughtful legislators oppose the bill in the House, and supporters of fishery conservation make a determined goal-line stand, it may be possible to push any reauthorization of Magnuson-Stevens back until after the mid-term elections and into the next session of Congress, by which time some seats may have fallen into more conservation-friendly hands, and a bill as bad as H.R. 200 won’t be likely to pass again.

So it’s crunch time, right now.

Time to pick up the phone one more time.  Time to let your House representative know that you think H.R. 200 is bad for fish, bad for fishermen, and bad for the future.

Because, quite simply, it is.

TRUST, THEN VERIFY

A day or two ago, I was perusing an Internet discussion on the state of the striped bass fishery, when I came across a comment from someone who explained that the reason that anglers aren’t seeing many striped bass inshore is because the fish are all out in federal waters, where there is more bait to hold them.

I found that a bit curious, because once the weakfish are gone from the bay, I do most of my fishing out in the EEZ, either sitting on wrecks for black sea bass and such, chumming for sharks or trolling for tuna.  And I haven’t seen the big concentrations of bass that he seemed to suggest were out there. 

Yes, every now and then there will be one or two on a wreck, or a bass will pick up a fluke bait drifted over squid-rich deep structure.   And sometimes you’ll come across striped bass chasing bait well offshore, particularly during the spring and fall migrations.  But while such forays do occur, and there are some small areas where bass regularly feed more than three miles from shore, there's no real evidence that a substantial percentage of the bass population is spending time offshore these days.

So I asked the poster where he was seeing the offshore bass, and his answer was enlightening.  He said that he hadn’t seen them himself, but since he sometimes has some good nights in the surf, when he puts a couple of dozen stripers on the sand, he guessed that when people aren’t catching bass elsewhere on the coast, it means the fish must be out in deep water, where federal law keeps them off-limits to anglers.

Apparently, the possibility that he’s just getting into a local concentration of fish once in a while, and that bass aren’t being caught by a lot of other folks because they’re just not that abundant never entered his mind.

As far as I can tell, he made his comment in good faith, but if he hadn’t been questioned, folks reading them might have accepted his views without digging any deeper.

And failing to dig is always a mistake.

That’s particularly true in the Internet age, when “alternative facts” can be spread with just a few strokes on a keyboard.

For example, about two weeks ago, I learned, to my great surprise, that I wanted to cut the bluefish bag limit by two-thirds.

I had no idea that I was planning to do that.  

But someone sent me a Facebook post warning that “environmental lobbyists” involved in the fishery management process were planning to cut the bluefish bag limit from 15 fish to 5, and when I got to the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council’s New York bluefish hearing a day or so later, a representative of New York’s party boat industry made it abundantly clear that one of the “environmental lobbyists” that the post mentioned was me.

I’m still not sure where the notion that folks, including myself, were trying to slash the bluefish bag limit came from.  When state fishery managers noted that no such plans were in place, they were quickly told that it was “all over social media,” and thus, apparently, had to be true. 

The party boat folks also seemed to buy into the oft-heard notion that fishermen (including themselves) weren’t seeing as many bluefish as they once not because the population declined, but because the fish just went somewhere else.  

One captain from Huntington, New York even suggested where that “someplace else” might be, noting that bluefish were found off Africa as well, so that the fish absent from North American shores could be somewhere in the middle of the ocean that divides the two continents.

Of course, scientists tell us that the western and eastern Atlantic bluefish populations are isolated from one another, and that there is no interchange of fish between the two, but why let science get in the way of the story you want to tell?  

That would be like letting the truth get in the way of a provocative Facebook post…

So when you hear someone say anything that seems hard to believe or, perhaps more importantly, when they say anything that you want very hard to believe, some fact-checking is always in order. 

The cases related above described folks with no real authority talking about fishery issues.  That  might be excusable.  There is less excuse when people that other folks trust fail to do enough fact-checking before making equally baseless claims.  

Some members of the angling press are particularly bad about passing inaccurate information on to their readers. 

That has certainly been true in the case of black sea bass management, which has been a particularly contentious issue this year.  The population is in very good shape, and some members of the fishing community, who believe that bag limits should be higher, have aggressively attacked fishery managers. 

Unfortunately, some fishing writers have been throwing gasoline on what is already a very hot fire by perpetuating the myth that black sea bass abundance is at 240% of the biomass target.

It’s true that, back in 2015, the black sea bass biomass was estimated to be at 230% of the biomass target.  But that was in 2015.  Since then, because of the decline of the formerly large 2011 year class, black sea bass numbers have been in steady decline.  The stock is still very healthy, with spawning stock biomass probably somewhere between 123% and 160% of target, but the 240% number hasn’t been valid for at least three years.

By reprinting what they should know is a bad number, writers inflame anglers’ emotions and lead them, without real reason, to lose faith in the management system.  The fact that they write in trusted publications makes their failure to adequately fact-check the information that they pass along an even more egregious problem, and makes it more important that anglers retain a healthy skepticism about everything they read and hear, and fact-check information relating to all important issues for themselves.

Unfortunately, that need to fact-check extends not only to publications, but even to organizations that anglers supposedly join to protect their interests and give them the straight scoop about what’s going on.

Nothing demonstrates that more clearly than the current debate over the Modernizing Recreational Fisheries Management Act, better known as the “Modern Fish Act.” 

Anglers are being told that the Modern Fish Act will improve recreational fishing; what they’re not being clearly told—although sometimes it’s buried in some of the promotional materials that are released—is that the bill the House of Representatives will be voting on, H.R. 200, is not the Modern Fish Act.  

Instead, H.R. 200 is a bill that has long been sought by the most conservation-hostile members of the recreational and commercial fishing industries, who want to cripple the conservation and management provisions of current law in the name of a “flexibility” that will allow them to overfish and delay the rebuilding of overfished stocks.

If it does that, it certainly won’t promote marine resources conservation, as Modern Fish Act supporters constantly claim.

Yet there are likely plenty of anglers who take the organizations’ words at face value, and think that the Modern Fish Act is a good thing.

That’s unfortunate.  For whether anglers are discussing the health of a single fish stock or a law that could place the health of many fish stocks in danger, they shouldn’t take anything they’re told on faith.

Instead, they should take the advice of angler Joey Sikorski, who was quoted in an article that appeared on the Internet site Fish Rap.

“Take 5-10 minutes to actually read about it and the repercussions of it for the long haul.  It’s not all buttery sweet as it sounds.  I want to keep a sustainable resource.”

As President Ronald Reagan once noted, it's perfectly fine to trust.  

As long as you verify, too.

LEARNING THE LANGUAGE OF FISHERIES

When I was a senior in high school, my German class trekked into Manhattan to attend a play based on the Franz Kafka novel, Der Prozess.

I didn’t have a clue about what was going on. Kafka’s work can be difficult enough to understand, even in translation. I had been taking high-school German for less than two years; my vocabulary was far too limited to follow the action on stage.

I suspect that many fishermen experience something similar when they attend a management meeting.

They’ll hear the scientists talking about “biomass,” “spawning potential ratios” and “fishing mortality thresholds,” and struggle to understand what’s going on. When agency staffers join in, and start referring to “rebuilding deadlines,” “frameworks” and the “scoping process,” they might just toss in the towel and go home, believing the process to be too arcane to comprehend.

That’s unfortunate, because their input is needed. Fishery management, like any other activity, relies on a unique vocabulary, words that precisely express concepts needed to make the management process work. To understand fishery management, a fisherman must understand that vocabulary, along with some basic fishery management principles.

The best place to start is with Understanding Fisheries Management, a guide prepared by the Auburn University Marine Extension & Research Center and the Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant Legal Program.

Understanding Fisheries Management is somewhat dated. It does not address any changes to the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (Magnuson-Stevens) that were made after 1996. Even so, it remains the clearest guide to the language and process of fishery management process that is readily available to fishermen.

Fishermen need such a guide, and they need to become better informed if they are to provide meaningful input to fishery managers. Because so many are not better informed, the same comments and criticisms always arise at fisheries meetings, no matter where they are held or what species are involved:

“How do you count recreational catch? I don’t believe your numbers, because I’ve been fishing for forty years, you never counted mine.”

“How can the scientists really know how many fish are out there?”

“The fish aren’t getter scarcer; it just takes a fisherman to know where to find them.”

“There are more fish out there, but recruitment isn’t increasing. The population must be as big as it can get, so we don’t need more rules.”

By reading Understanding Fisheries Management, fishermen could find answers to many of their questions, and shed many of their misconceptions, before they ever enter a meeting room.

Still, it’s impossible to learn everything about the management process from a 50-page booklet. Those who want to become seriously involved in fisheries issues, as well as those who merely want a better idea of how the management process works, ought to dive in a little deeper, to expand their knowledge beyond the basics.

The same general principles of limiting harvest to sustainable levels and maintaining or, if necessary, restoring healthy fish stocks are equally applicable to both commercial and recreational fishermen, but the methods used to estimate commercial and recreational catch are sharply different.

Commercial fishermen in federal fisheries, and in most state fisheries as well, are required to report their landings within a very short time after returning to port. The fish houses that buy their catch are often also required to file independent reports that corroborate, or sometimes question, the fishermen’s filings. Thus, commercial landings estimates are generally both accurate and timely.

Things aren’t that neat in the recreational fishery. There are far more recreational anglers than commercial fishermen, they sail out of far more ports, and they normally have no reporting requirements. Even when mandatory requirements are imposed, they are often ignored.

People working for the National Marine Fisheries Service’s Highly Migratory Species office have told me that only about 20% of recreational Atlantic bluefin tuna landings are reported, a figure that has been confirmed by other writers. Yet that 20% reporting level, while disconcertingly low, dwarfs reporting compliance in Alabama’s recreational red snapper fishery, where a mere 7% of anglers reported their catch during the 2016 state season.

Fishery managers, unable to depend on anglers to consistently and reliably report their catch, must rely on an angler survey to estimate landings. The accuracy of such surveys, including the current Marine Recreational Information Program (MRIP), are consistently questioned at fishery meetings, as anglers predictably claim that regulations are too strict because MRIP consistently overestimates anglers’ catch.

Most of the fishermen making such comments have no knowledge of how MRIP works, and it is that lack of knowledge that gives rise to their criticism. They owe it to themselves to read the Marine Recreational Information Program Data User Handbook(Handbook), available online.

There, they would learn that “The size of sampling error depends upon the sample size, the sample design and the natural variability within the population. As a general rule, increasing the sample size reduces the sampling error.” That might help them realize that when fishermen ask managers to adopt regulations that differ from state to state, and from month to month within the waters of a single state, they are increasing the likelihood of error. That in turn, could lead to the understanding that many inaccuracies that do appear in the data are not the fault of MRIP, but of the fishermen themselves, for seeking regulations that inject greater uncertainty into the system.

The Handbook also provides information on how MRIP is structured, how survey locations are selected, and why relatively small samples can provide reliable catch estimates for the entire coast, all topics that frequently cause confusion when anglers address management issues.

Yet MRIP is only a very small part of fisheries management, and comprehending the rest of the process requires a bit of work. I regularly buy various texts, used to teach college and graduate-school courses, when they become available on outlets such as ebay.com, in an effort to gain a greater understanding of the science side of the process. They’re not easy reading, and I’ll be the first to admit that some of the math presented is well beyond me, but it’s not necessary to solve the equations to get a better understanding of how the process works.

For those looking for their first book on the management process, I recommend Marine Fisheries Ecology, by Simon Jennings, Michel J. Kaiser and John D. Reynolds. While not the most recent work in its field, the text is easy to read, and provides a broad survey of the topic, including socioeconomic issues, surveys, fishing gear, fish biology, stock assessments and related matters.

Marine Fisheries Ecology casts light on the survey processes used to estimate the size of fish stocks. In addressing the error that inevitably affects any estimate, the text notes that “the precision needed is generally better than [plus or minus] 20% rather than an order of magnitude,” and explains that greater precision, while theoretically desirable, is often not a practical goal due to the level of labor and expense involved, because “the reduction in error is proportional to the square root of sample size, meaning that a fourfold increase in sample size is necessary to reduce the error by half.”

Thus, it teaches that when fishermen ask, “How can scientists know exactly how many fish are out there?” the answer is that “They don’t know, exactly, but they can come reasonably close. And that’s why they need to be cautious; stocks might be smaller than they believe.”

It also explains why trawl surveys often reveal a depleted population even when fishermen are still landing large numbers of fish, noting that “fishers target ‘hot spots’ where abundance remains high regardless of overall stock size,” while biologists sample a larger and more randomly selected expanse of ocean that provides a more accurate estimate of fish abundance.

Marine Fisheries Ecology gives readers similar insights across a broad spectrum of management measures.

For more technical information on fisheries management, my go-to reference is Fisheries Ecology and Management, by Carl J. Walters and Steven J.D. Martell. It’s more advanced than Marine Fisheries Ecology, and places a lot of emphasis on various forms of population modeling and its relation to fisheries management strategies. I won’t say that it’s an easy read, but the text is readily understandable with a little effort.

Because Fisheries Ecology and Management places such emphasis on modeling approaches, it also serves to dispel many of the false notions that fishermen hold with respect to how fish populations respond to various conditions.

It makes it clear that in the case of most species, under most conditions, spawning success is not directly linked to the size of the spawning stock. Instead, “spawning stock is generally a very poor predictor of recruitment (recruitment being independent of parental abundance) except at relatively low parental stock sizes,” because juvenile survival is usually “strongly density-dependent (there is a decrease in juvenile survival with increasing abundance) despite the fact that the net resultant recruitment is independent of parental abundance.” In other words, juvenile survival is usually higher when the initial size of the year class is small, and lower when the year class is large.

If fishermen, and those who write about management issues in the angling press, had a better grasp of that basic principle, summer flounder managers might have been spared a lot of criticism from those who have claimed that the current size limits remove too many females from the spawning stock, and so limit spawning success.

And that’s why gaining an understanding of the language and principles of fishery management can be so important to anglers. Reading a few books won’t make you a biologist, any more than watching a few reruns of This Old House or New Yankee Workshop will make you a master finish carpenter. It takes years of intense training, and then years of working out in the world, to do that.

But it will, at least, give you enough background to speak intelligently to fisheries managers, know what questions to ask, and to understand their replies.

And perhaps more important, it will let you know when a writer, an organization, or another fisherman begins promoting an agenda that just makes no sense.

For that reason alone, learning the language and the process can be a good thing.

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