THE FLUKE FAIRNESS ACT: WHY IT IS (BUT SHOULDN'T BE) NEEDED

Scroll through the list of bills introduced in the current session of the Senate, and you’ll come across S 1747, a bill introduced by Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) a little less than a year ago. The legislation is called the “Fluke Fairness Act.”  It’s one of a series of bills with that name, introduced over the past few sessions of Congress, and the fact that Senator Schumer had to introduce it at all is testimony to one of the biggest flaws in the federal fishery management system.

It's stuck in the past.

Think back to the early 1980s, if you were even alive back then.  You might recall the Reagan presidency, the dying days of disco, the first IBM PCs, and Atari gaming systems that hooked up to your TV and play games such as "Space Invaders" and "Pong."  

All of those things are long gone.

But one thing that you might not remember were how many summer flounder were caught by the boats from various states, in both the commercial and recreational fisheries.  Yet when the fluke catch was allocated between the commercial and recreational sectors, and between commercial fisheries in each coastal state, such allocations were based on what happened back in the 1980s—and those forty-year-old landings still govern today.

The Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council, along with the Atlantic States Marine Fishery Commission’s Summer Flounder, Scup, and Black Sea Bass Management Board, has poked at them a little, and spent a lot of time debating reallocation, but in the end, little has changed.

Yet a lot of things have happened since Ronald Reagan handed over the White House to George H. W. Bush, things that include a warming ocean, and the steady movement of summer flounder to the north and east.  Such movement has been so pronounced that a benchmark stock assessment, completed in 2018, noted that

“In recent years the proportion of recruits in the south has declined while the proportion in the middle area has increased.  Spawner biomass is more evenly split between the middle and south regions, but similar to recruits, the proportion of spawner biomass in the south has declined as the proportion in the middle and northern areas has increased.

“…summer flounder are shifting northeast over time, and this shift has continued in recent years…the shift northward is evident even in small fish, indeed, recruits appear to be shifting northward at a faster rate than spawners, suggesting that they are not merely tracking the expansion of spawners northward.  There are apparent changes in spatial distribution of summer flounder over the last four decades with a general shift northward and eastward.  Spatial expansion is more apparent in the years of greater abundance since 2000, although it has continued even with the more recent declines in biomass.”

Yet even if both small and spawning-sized summer flounder “are shifting northeast over time,” and there has been “spatial distribution of summer flounder over the last four decades with a general shift northward and eastward,” one thing remains unchanged:  The greatest part of the commercial summer flounder quota resides with the southern states, where the flounder were, and has not shifted northward and eastward along with the fish.  

The baseline allocation still awards 27% of commercial landings to North Carolina and 21% percent to Virginia, even though the center of summer flounder abundance is probably somewhere south of New York, which only receives 7.5% of such allocation.

In 2019, the allocation was tweaked just a bit, to throw the northern states a few crumbs.  While the baseline allocation remains in effect if the commercial summer flounder catch limit is below 9.55 million pounds, any additional quota will be divided up among the states more evenly, with all states between Massachusetts and North Carolina, except for Delaware, receiving 12.375% of such additional quota.  Under any imaginable scenario, North Carolina and Virginia will still receive the lion’s share of the catch.

Even that modest concession was condemned by southern fishermen, who called any effort to provide more fish for their northern counterparts a

“quota grab,”

argued that

“with any allocation, there are winners and losers…reallocation will bankrupt people in the south…[and that] managers shouldn’t take what people have and give it to other states,”

and complained that

“changing allocations will affect business models and business plans.”

In late 2019, the State of New York filed suit against the U.S. Secretary of Commerce, seeking to challenge the summer flounder allocation; to date, the courts have provided the state no redress.  Thus, Senator Schumer’s Fluke Fairness Act may offer the only chance to bring summer flounder allocations into the 21^st Century.

It is a simple bill, only five sections long,  The heart of the Act is Section 4(a), which reads

“Fishery Management Plan Modification.—Not later than 1 year after the date of enactment of this Act, the Council shall submit to the Secretary, and the Secretary may approve, a fishery management plan for the commercial management of summer flounder under title III of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (16 U.S.C. 1851 et seq) or an amendment to such plan that shall be based on the best scientific information available; establishes commercial quotas in direct proportion to the distribution, abundance, and location of summer flounder as reflected by fishery independent surveys conducted by the National Marine Fisheries Service and State agencies; considers regional, coastwide, or other management measures that comply with the National Standards; and prohibits the establishment of commercial catch quotas for summer flounder on a State-by-State basis using historical landings data that does not reflect the status of the summer flounder stock, based on the most recent scientific information.  [internal numbering and formatting omitted]”

Managing summer flounder based on current distribution and abundance, rather than on what fishermen, many of whom are now undoubtedly retired or dead, caught four decades ago seems a sensible way to proceed.  However, just as Vladimir Putin denies that the Ukraine exists separate from Russia, because of how things stood one hundred or more years ago, the southern fishermen claim a virtually unextinguishable right to a summer flounder quota based on the last century’s landings.  And like Putin, those who hold outdated quotas choose to ignore today’s realities.  

Thus, while Senator Schumer’s bill shouldn’t be necessary, fishermen’s refusal to address the realities of shifting stocks creates no other alternative.

Such intransigence isn’t limited to summer flounder.  Warming waters and shifting stocks have impacted many fisheries, particularly off the upper mid-Atlantic and New England coasts, but the regional fishery management councils, faced with fishermen unwilling to embrace any sort of change, have offered no meaningful relief.

Thus, when Rep. Jared Huffman (D-CA) distributed a discussion draft of the bill that eventually became Sustaining America’s Fisheries for the Futures Act of 2021, that draft included a section that would create a so-called “shifting stocks task force,” which could compel the councils to act on reallocation.  Such task force would have been composed of recognized fishery experts, but would have excluded members of the regional fishery management councils.  It would have been directed to

“develop, in consultation with the Administrator [of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] and Regional Fishery Management Councils, science-based decision-making criteria to make allocation determinations that minimize the risk of overfishing and maximize stock and ecosystem resilience with the effects of climate change, are consistent with the national standards, the other provisions of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act…and any other applicable law.”

And things wouldn’t have stopped there.  The task force would also have made

“recommendations to the Administrators and to the Regional Fishery Management Councils…for the allocation and distribution of fishing privileges based on [the science-based criteria that it had developed].”

 Even more frightening to current quota holders, the discussion draft language provided that

“Any member of the public may present a petition to request the review of potentially shifting stock…

“Upon completion of a review [of such petition] the Task Force shall determine which Regional Fishery Management Council’s or Councils’ geographic area of authority the fishery is located in; and submit to the Administrator, each affected Regional Fishery Management Council, and the petitioner written recommendations for allocation and distribution of fishing privileges within the fishery [internal formatting and numbering omitted]”

Such recommendations could not be ignored.  Instead,

“Upon receipt of a recommendation from the Task Force…the Administrator shall begin consultation with the affected Regional Fishery Management Council regarding necessary changes to fishery management plans; and not later than 180 days after the date of receipt of the Task Force’s recommendation, ensure that a compliant fishery management plan that fully accounts for the best available science on shifting stocks and the recommendations of the Task Force is created, published, and implemented.  [emphasis added; internal formatting and numbering omitted]”

Fishermen are very comfortable keeping allocation decisions within regional fishery management councils, where they have some control over the outcomes, and there are no legally enforceable criteria that might compel them to cede quota to someone else.  To quota holders, few things could seem as threatening as the concept of basing allocation on clear, science-based criteria that reflects the current state and spatial distribution of a stock, rather than on events that happened many decades ago.

Thus, the Standing Stocks Task Force section was, unfortunately, removed from the version of the bill that Rep. Huffman eventually introduced. 

Allocation decisions remain rooted in the past, and legislation such as Sen. Schumer’s Fluke Fairness Act remain the sole vehicle that might yet compel fishery managers to make allocations that reflect present, and perhaps even future, realities.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

UNSEEMLY HASTE: RECREATIONAL REFORM IN THE MID-ATLANTIC

The Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (Magnuson-Stevens) has governed federal fishery management since 1976, but for its first 20 years, it was largely ineffective, encouraging the growth of a large, overcapitalized domestic fishing fleet while doing little or nothing to prevent the decline of once-abundant fish stocks.

 

Recognizing Magnuson-Stevens’ shortcomings, Congress eventually passed the Sustainable Fisheries Act of 1996, which amended federal fisheries law by requiring fishery managers to end overfishing, promptly rebuild overfished stocks, and base management measures on the best scientific information available. With such reforms in place, the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) was compelled to adopt meaningful regulations that produced immediate results. The nation’s fish stocks began to rebuild.

Such rebuilding did not come without short-term costs. The regulations needed to restore fish stocks necessarily limited landings, often resulting in recreational and commercial harvests that were only a fraction of what they had been before. But temporarily reduced harvests let fish populations grow, and led to more generous annual quotas.

The Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council (Council) was one of the first regional fishery management councils to fully embrace Magnuson-Stevens’ new strictures. Under its stewardship, populations of black sea bass and scup increased to more than twice their target levels. That’s when Magnuson-Stevens began to become a victim of its own success, as members of the recreational fishing industry began to complain that, given such abundance, federal regulators were unduly restricting anglers’ catch.

 

Beginning in 2017, after the release of a benchmark stock assessment that found black sea bass spawning stock biomass to be more than twice the biomass target, members of the recreational fishing industry began complaining that sea bass regulations were too restrictive and changed too often in response to annual landings data. By March 2019, such complaints gave rise to something called the “Recreational Reform Initiative,” (Initiative) at the Council and Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC), which eventually addressed not just black sea bass, but recreational fisheries for summer flounder, scup and bluefish as well. It was intended to promote more stability in recreational management measures, add more flexibility to the management process, and increase anglers’ ability to exploit abundant fish stocks.

While those are not unreasonable goals, they are goals that the fishery managers must strive to achieve without increasing the risk to fish stocks, or violating the provisions of Magnuson-Stevens.

Right now, the Initiative is focused on a recreational harvest control rule (control rule), which would place less emphasis on whether recreational landings were kept at or below the recreational harvest limit (RHL) for any given year, while giving greater consideration to other factors such as stock health, trends in abundance, and the recruitment of young fish into the population. As stated in the ASMFC’s Draft Omnibus Addendum to the Summer Flounder, Scup, and Black Sea Bass Fishery Management Plan and Bluefish Fishery Management Plan (Draft Addendum), “The management options aim to rely less on expected fishery performance and instead uses a more holistic approach with greater emphasis on traditional and non-traditional stock status indicators and trends.”

 

The Draft Addendum presents four different control rule options for consideration, along with the status quo. Each would employ a somewhat different set of criteria. The simplest, denoted the “Percent Change” option, is an enhanced version of the current management approach. It still hinges on whether recent recreational landings exceed or fall short of the RHL, but also considers the health of the fish stock, and the uncertainty, or “confidence interval” (CI), inherent in the landings estimate.

 

Today, if recreational landings exceed the RHL, as happened with both scup and black sea bass in 2021, managers must simply adopt more restrictive regulations that are calculated to constrain such landings to or below such limit.

 

Pursuant to the Percent Change option, should such excessive landings occur, managers would first look at the CI of the landings estimate. If, for example, an estimated 1 million scup were landed, and the CI for such landings was 10%, there would be no need to take any action if landings exceeded the limit by 100,000 fish or less, because such amount would be statistically insignificant, as it fell within the estimate’s margin of error.

However, if an over- or under-harvest fell outside of the CI, the next consideration would be the health of the stock. Thus, under one version of the Percent Change approach, if landings exceeded the average RHLs for the two upcoming years, and the stock’s spawning stock biomass was more than 150% of the biomass target, landings would not be reduced at all. If biomass was lower, between the target level and 150% of target, landings would be reduced by 20%; if biomass was below target, landings would be reduced by 40%.

In all three cases, the level of reduction would be predetermined, and not directly related to the amount by which landings exceeded the RHL; in the first instance, landings would not be reduced even if the overage was expected to be very large, while in the latter case, landings would be reduced by 40% even if they were predicted to exceed the average RHL by a far lesser amount.

The other three control rule options are more complex. One, deemed the “Fishery Score Approach,” is “a formulaic method that combines multiple metrics into one value which is used to determine the appropriate management measures.” It would combine biomass, recruitment, fishing mortality, and fishery performance (landings versus the RHL) data to calculate a value that would, in turn, deem stock status to be “Good,” “Moderate,” “Poor,” or “Very Poor,” and use that ranking to apply a set of “Most Liberal,” “Liberal,” “Restrictive,” or “Most Restrictive” management measures, all of which had been established in advance of the scoring process.

 

Another, deemed the “Biological Reference Point Approach,” would create seven separate stock status “bins,” for different combinations of spawning stock biomass and fishing mortality, along with 26 regulatory options that vary according to trends in recruitment and biomass, and how landings relate to both the RHL and annual catch limit. Once again, all possible management measures would be pre-calculated, and not necessarily designed to constrain recreational landings to or below the RHL.

 

Whichever control rule approach is ultimately adopted, it will represent a radical change in the fishery management paradigm, so it’s reasonable to expect the Council and ASMFC to carefully consider all of the issues before effecting such change.

Unfortunately, neither the Council nor the ASMFC seem focused on careful review. Instead, based on events at the February 8, 2022 joint meeting of the Council and ASMFC’s Interstate Fishery Management Program Policy Board (Policy Board), fishery managers are fully committed to getting the control rule in place in time for the 2023 fishing season, whether or not the outstanding issues have been resolved.

That message came through very clearly in a discussion of the scientific models needed to support the control rule. There are two such models currently in development, the Recreational Economic Demand Model and the Recreational Fleet Dynamics Model, which would be employed in the development of management measures for each of the four species included in the Initiative. Briefing materials prepared for an October 21, 2021 joint meeting of the Council and Policy Board emphasize such models’ importance, saying

 

The Policy Board and Council previously intended to approve a Draft Addendum for public comment and a final range of options for the framework/addendum in October 2021. The [Plan Development Team]/[Fishery Management Action Team] requests additional time to fully develop the options and to further develop two statistical models which can be used to inform the recreational measure-setting process under the framework/addendum process. These two statistical models will be critical for thorough analysis of the options and will greatly improve the process for setting management measures under any of the options. [emphasis added]

 

The Draft Amendment states that neither model will “be complete and available for use for most species until the fall of 2022 or later. The exception is the Recreational Economic Demand Model for summer flounder, which is expected to be completed by June 2022…” Yet, when New Jersey’s Legislative Proxy, Adam Nowalsky, noted that such “critical” models were not yet available, and suggested that both the Council and ASMFC reconsider their timeline, which calls for finalizing the control rule in June, and using it to calculate final management measures for the 2023 season, his suggestion was rebuffed.

In what may have been one of the more remarkable statements ever uttered at a Council meeting, Savannah Lewis, who headed the ASMFC’s Plan Development Team, responded that, in the briefing materials quoted above, “the word is ‘critical,’ not ‘required.'”

Why statistical models “critical for thorough analysis” of the control rule options might not be “required” for its implementation became clear in her follow-up comments, when she freely admitted that the models were, in fact, “critical,” then justified moving forward without them because of “what happened over the last three months,” a clear reference to required recreational landings reductions in the still-healthy scup and black sea bass fisheries, and the controversy engendered when such reductions were made.

It seemed that much of the motivation for moving forward, particularly for state fishery managers sitting on the Council and Policy Board, was a desire to reduce the animus being leveled at such managers by the recreational fishing industry. Such sentiments were clearly expressed by Connecticut’s Dr. Justin Davis, who observed, “Nobody wants to go through the process [of setting recreational measures, and potentially cutting landings] again this year.”

While such sentiments are understandable, before deciding upon a single control rule option and, more to the point, before sending all of the possible options out for public comment, both the Council and Policy Board should, at a minimum, understand how each option might impact fish stocks, and provide the public with such information before soliciting their views. However, the rush to put a control rule in place seems to have overridden such elementary consideration.

Pennsylvania Council member Michelle Duval realized that was a problem, and put a motion on the table that read

Request that the [Scientific and Statistical Committee] provide a qualitative evaluation, in time for final action at the June 2022 Council/Policy Board meeting, regarding the potential effect of each of the five primary alternatives in the Harvest Control Rule Addendum/Framework on the SSC’s assessment and application of risk and uncertainties in determining [acceptable biological catch]. The intent is to provide the Council and Policy Board with information to consider the tradeoffs among the different alternatives with respect to the relative risk of overfishing, increasing uncertainty, fishery stability, and the likelihood of reaching/remaining at [the biomass target] for each approach at different biomass levels (e.g., [when biomass is below target, but the stock is not overfished], the relative risk among alternatives is (highest to lowest) E>C>B>A>D.

Emerson Hasbrouk made the same motion for the Policy Board.

Such motion should not have been needed. Putting management options out for public comment, without first taking the time to determine how such options could affect managers’ ability to prevent overfishing or maintain a healthy fish stock, borders on fishery management malpractice. Yet, the most intense discussion of Ms. Duval’s motion focused on whether, if such information wasn’t provided by June, the Council and Policy Board could still move forward without it.

Whether the Council and Policy Board should move forward without the information was of far less concern.

 

After a long and confused debate, both bodies adopted the motion, although the Policy Board quickly followed up by also approving the Draft Addendum, and sending it out for public comment even though, without the information requested in Ms. Duval’s motion, the public’s ability to provide intelligent comment will be extremely limited.

Even so, at least the ASMFC intends to hold public hearings on the Draft Addendum, something that the Council will not do.

Typically, when the Council proposes an important fishery management measure, it does so in an amendment to a fishery management plan. As part of the amendment process, the Council will first prepare a scoping document, which describes the broad outlines of the management proposal, and then holds public scoping hearings. After analyzing public comment, the Council releases a draft amendment, holds an additional round of hearings, and only then approves the final amendment and passes it on to NMFS.

That’s the path that the Council followed with its recently-completed Summer Flounder, Scup, and Black Sea Bass Commercial/Recreational Allocation Amendment which, when finally approved, resulted in relatively minor changes to the allocations for all three species. Yet, in the case of the control rule which, if approved, will represent the biggest change in mid-Atlantic recreational fisheries management since Magnuson-Stevens was amended by the SFA, the Council chose not to initiate a new amendment, but instead to fast-track action through the framework process, which does not call for any public hearings at all, and provides for minimal written public comment.

 

The decision to framework the control rule strongly suggests that the Council is far more concerned with haste than with meaningful public input.

Despite such desire for haste, too much remains unclear.

Magnuson-Stevens contains 10 National Standards for Fishery Conservation and Management. National Standard 1 reads, “Conservation and management measures shall prevent overfishing while achieving, on a continuing basis, the optimum yield from each fishery for the United States fishing industry.” In 2000, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, in deciding the case of Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. v. Daley, interpreted such language to mean that, in order to pass legal muster, any fishery management measure must have at least a 50% probability of preventing overfishing.

 

Can all, or even any, of the control rule options guarantee that such legal standard is met?

So far, we lack the information needed to know.

National Standard 2 requires that “Conservation and management measures shall be based on the best scientific information available.”

Does moving forward with the control rule, before the “critical” statistical models are available, meet that legal standard?

So far, we lack the information to know.

The control rule approach to recreational fishery management represents a new and untried way to set recreational management measures. Given the many respected scientists and fishery managers collaborating on the project, it may well prove to be a significant improvement over current management approaches. It also could be a step backward, that makes overfishing more likely and/or leads to decreased fish abundance. Which will it prove to be?

So far, we lack the information to know.

Yet, despite the lack of information, both the Council and Policy Board are rushing, full speed ahead, to put the control rule in place in time for the 2023 season.

During the February 8 meeting, Policy Board member Eric Reid, Rhode Island’s Legislative Proxy, asked a key question, “What is more critical, timing or making an informed decision?”

New York Council member Paul Risi, recognizing the need for more information observed a few minutes later, “It would be nice to get this right.”

But doing things right, and doing things quickly, often lead to much different outcomes.

Right now, both the Council and Management Board seem to be focused solely on speed.

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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/

AQUACULTURE VS. NATIVE FISH STOCKS: WHO GETS TO EAT?

Wild fish stocks are not inexhaustible.  Just as agriculture has largely replaced market hunting, at least in the developed world, aquaculture will almost surely be needed to provide enough seafood to satisfy growing demand.

Yet agriculture didn’t come without costs.  The vast areas cleared to provide croplands and ranches destroyed almost all of the prairie ecosystem, which once stretched from the banks of the Mississippi River to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.  Millions of bison no longer roam the Great Plains.  Grassland birds are, on the whole, in deep decline.  Prairie dogs, ecosystem engineers that create “towns” that might cover many square miles, have been extensively poisoned by ranchers who see them as competitors for grass needed to raise cattle; as a result, their networks of complex burrows, which serve as homes for an array of other animals, have been lost in much of the West. 

We would be naïve to believe that a growing aquaculture industry won’t cause similar harm to marine and coastal habitats.  While the ocean may be vast, the most productive sections of coast—our estuaries, marshes, coral reefs, and hard bottom—are a very small and vulnerable part of the whole, and can easily harmed by the infrastructure needed to support a burgeoning aquaculture industry. 

Apart from changes to the physical environment, we can expect changes to ecosystems and food webs, as aquaculture operations introduce alien species to coastal waters, increase nutrient loads in sheltered bays, and concentrate parasites harmful to wild fish in the vicinity of fish pens.

One of the biggest questions is what the penned fish, which are farmed in concentrations far denser than would exist naturally, are going to eat, and just where that food will come from.  Should there not be enough forage available to support both a growing and increasingly powerful aquaculture industry and wild fish stocks, which will prevail, and which will be forced to make do with less?

The answer might not be good news for the wild stocks.

A study was done in Finland, where scientists began looking for reasons why Atlantic salmon in the River Teno seemed to be getting smaller and spawning at younger ages.

Typically, when that sort of thing happens, fishing is the most likely cause, as high harvest levels limit fish growth and favors those that spawn at younger ages.  

While fishing probably made some contribution to the changes in River Tano salmon, overfishing was not an issue; instead, fish size is probaby affected by the selectivity of the nets most used by commercial fishermen.  The researchers chose to dig deeper into why the salmon are shrinking.  An article on the phys.org website quotes one of the scientists, Dr. Yann Czorlich, who described what they did:

“The previous research couldn’t tell us what environmental or human influences might be linked with the evolutionary changes.  To understand this, we needed to link the yearly changes in the salmon DNA variation with environmental and human-linked factors.  We gathered literally millions of data-points about factors, including yearly water temperature, salmon fishing effort, and commercial fisheries catches of the fish salmon eat in the ocean, and compared them with our data on DNA changes in our 40 year time series.”

The data suggested that the declining size of the River Tano salmon might be linked to high commercial landings of capelin, a small, oily fish that is important forage for wild salmon, but is also heavily fished to provide feed for aquaculture operations.  The article notes that, globally, 18 million tons of capelin and other forage species are removed from the ocean each year for use as animal feed.

That’s a number that will only get larger as aquaculture operations expand.

And it’s not only fish food that is being used to support aquaculture operations.  An article published last Tuesday in the journal PLOS Sustainability and Transformation, titled “Maximising sustainable nutrient production from coupled fisheries-aquaculture systems,” notes that

“Aquaculture expansion is expected to meet growing demand for sustainable animal-source foods.  Yet marine-fed species already require millions of tonnes of wild-caught fish for feed, over 90% of which are nutritious food-grade species.”

Using fish that could be eaten by people to feed aquacultured fish instead, so that people can then eat the aquacultured product, is hardly an efficient way to support increasing demand for seafood.  The researchers, which focused on the Scots salmon aquaculture industry, found that only between 1% and 49% of the “essential dietary minerals and fatty acids available in wild fish are found in farmed salmon,” and concluded that

“reducing marine feeds in salmon production and allocating wild-caught feed for human consumption could produce more nutritious seafood and leave 66-82% of feed fish in the sea.  Using global data on marine-fed aquaculture production, we show that removing wild-caught fish from salmonid production could leave 3.7 [million metric tons] fish in the sea while increasing seafood production by 6.1 [million metric tons].”

In other words, limiting the use of forage fish as aquaculture feed, and diverting a portion of those forage fish for human consumption, would benefit both people and the environment, which is as big a win/win as we are ever likely to see. 

Of course, things are never quite that easy.

While the researchers conclude that

“marine-fed farmed salmon is an inefficient way to produce nutritious seafood,”

it is nonetheless true that a lot of people like to buy farmed salmon, in part because of its taste, but also because it has been heavily promoted as a healthy food choice.  The fish currently being used for salmon feed include herring and related species, such as anchovies and sardines, which are not nearly as popular as table fare, particularly in the United States, where people are used to being able to buy a variety of wild seafood.

Yet that probably doesn’t justify fishing down wild forage fish stocks, perhaps to the detriment of wild species, in order to support fish farms.  The purpose of aquaculture, like agriculture, is to provide a reliable source of nutritious food, not to provide an endless variety of food options.

A few years ago, the New York Times published an article describing a fantasy Thanksgiving menu that Mark Twain wrote while visiting Italy.  As the Times observed,

“he surrounded the traditional holiday dishes with roast wild turkey, frogs and woodcock.

“Along with hot biscuits, broiled chicken and stewed tomatoes, Twain wanted turtle soup, possum and canvasback ducks fattened by Chesapeake Bay wild celery.  In Twain’s day, New York City markets still sold raccoons, a profusion of wild ducks and bear.”

These days, New York markets no longer routinely carry frogs (although a few do), woodcock, possums, raccoons, or bear, nor do they carry other truly wild game.  Instead, markets carry the meat of creatures most amenable to efficient, high-intensity farming:  chicken, beef, pork, lamb, and turkey, with some duck, goose, and goat occasionally thrown in.

In order to provide adequate feed for the future, we should not allow aquaculture to deprive natural ecosystems of many of their forage fish in order to provide a host of different seafood offerings, but instead to concentrate on species that can be efficiently and sustainably farmed:  tilapia, catfish, carp, oysters, mussels and such—perhaps even kelp—in order to maximize human nutrition while minimizing ecosystem damage.

Only thus can human nutrition be provided in a sustainable manner.

 

 

 

IS ANY FISH THAT DIES OF OLD AGE REALLY WASTED?

The philosophy behind salt water fishery management has changed over the years.

One hundred and fifty years ago, people questioned whether such management was needed at all.  Professor Thomas Huxley provided the opening remarks for the 1882 London Fisheries Exhibition, when he stated, in part, that

“A salmon fishery then (and the same reasoning applies to all river fisheries) can be exhausted by man because man is, under ordinary circumstances, one of the chief agents of destruction; and, for the same reason, its exhaustion can usually be prevented, because man’s operations can be controlled and reduced to any extent that may be desired by force of law.

“And now to the question, Does the same reasoning apply to the sea fisheries?  Are there any sea fisheries which are exhaustible, and, if so, are the circumstances of the case such that they can be efficiently protected?  I believe that it may be affirmed with confidence that, in relation to our present modes of fishing, a number of the most important sea fisheries, such as the cod fishery, the herring fishery, and the mackerel fishery, are inexhaustible.  And I base this conviction on two grounds, first, that the multitude of these fishes is so inconceivably great the number that we catch is relatively insignificant; and, secondly, that the magnitude of the destructive agencies at work upon them is so prodigious, that the destruction effected by the fisherman cannot sensibly increase the death-rate.”

Professor Huxley’s opinions were demonstrably false. Today, on the western side of the Atlantic, stocks of Gulf of Maine cod, Georges Bank cod, Atlantic herring, and Atlantic mackerel are all overfished, and are subject to restrictive rebuilding plans, although in the case of the cod, rebuilding efforts are showing no signs of success; mackerel, too, have proven resistant to rebuilding, with a follow-on rebuilding plan put into place after the initial plan failed to achieve its goals.

To be fair to the late professor, he did say that such fisheries were inexhaustible “in relation to our present modes of fishing,” and in 1882, those modes were still fairly crude.

The fishermen who drove stocks of cod, herring, and mackerel down to their current levels primarily fish with otter trawls—large, efficient nets made out of tough, synthetic twine.  When Professor Huxley spoke in 1882, such trawls had not yet been invented, nor had the steel-hulled, steam-powered trawlers that tow them yet come to dominate the fishing fleet.  Synthetic nets would not be imagined, much less widely used, until the middle of the following century; until then, nets were made out of cotton, making them susceptible to rot and much more visible to the fish.

So from the perspective of someone speaking in 1882, marine fishery management might have appeared unnecessary.  But the arrival of new, more efficient gear on the fishing grounds immediately began to impact fish stocks.  In the North Sea, the fishing mortality rate for plaice, a type of flatfish, doubled in the early 1900s; in 1937, an international agreement established a minimum size for the species, as well as a minimum mesh size for nets used in the fishery.

Thus, the need for some sort of fishery management measures was recognized.

However, there was still no general agreement on how such measures should be established, or precisely what such measures should achieve.  In 1918, Russian marine engineer Fedor Ilyich Baranov published “On the question of the biological basis of fisheries,” a paper which set the stage for modern fishery management, and the concept of maximum sustainable yield.

However, just how maximum sustainable yield, defined as

“the highest average catch that can be continuously taken from an exploited population under average environmental conditions,:

ought to be calculated was still up for debate.

In the mid-20^th Century, fishery managers concentrated on harvesting every possible fish that they could without collapsing the stock.  Some prominent scientists of the time scorned doing anything less.  Kevin M. Bailey, in his book Billion-Dollar Fish, wrote that

“One of the principal designers of US fishing policy was Wilbert Chapman.  He was the director of the School of Fisheries at the University of Washington, and in 1948 became the Undersecretary of State for Fisheries in the Department of State.  Later he worked closely with the tuna fishing industry as an advisor.  Chapman pushed the concept of maximum sustainable yield (MSY) as a policy rather than a scientific approach.  He said, ‘Less fishing is wasteful, for the surplus of fish dies from natural causes without benefit to mankind.’”

Since Dr. Chapman made that comment, most managers’ views have changed.  The Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, which governs all fishing in federal waters, directs that federal fishery management plans shouldn’t necessarily achieve maximum sustainably yield, but instead must achieve “optimum yield,” which is defined as

“the amount of fish which will provide the greatest overall benefit to the Nation, particularly with respect to food production and recreational opportunities, and taking into account the protection of marine ecosystems; is prescribed as such on the basis of maximum sustainable yield from the fishery, as reduced by any relevant economic, social, or ecological factor; and in the case of an overfished fishery, provides for rebuilding to a level consistent with producing the maximum sustainable yield from such fishery.  [internal formatting omitted]”

Such definition recognizes that there may be economic and social benefits to killing fewer fish than fishing at maximum sustainable yield would allow, a concept particularly relevant to fisheries dominated by anglers, rather than commercial fishermen.  It also opens the door to managing fish in a way that allows them to fulfill their historical role in the ecosystem, a consideration particularly relevant in the case of forage fish—those species which fill a particularly large place in the food web, as food for not only other fish, but for aquatic birds, marine mammals, etc.—where high but sustainable harvests of such species might deprive other animals of their customary prey.

Unfortunately, we still see occasions where fishery managers seem to cling to Dr. Chapman’s outdated philosophy, and adopt management measures intended to harvest every possible fish, even when such high levels of management might not accurately represent optimum yield.

The best example of that might be the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council’s Bluefish Fishery Management Plan.

The bluefish fishery is predominantly recreational.  When Amendment 1 to the Bluefish Fishery Management Plan was adopted in 2000, it allocated 83% of bluefish landings to the recreational sector and 17% to commercial fishermen, based on historical landings.  However, it also included a provision that authorized the transfer of supposedly unused recreational quota to the commercial fishery.

Such reallocation might seem logical on its face.  However, the recreational bluefish fishery is predominantly a catch-and-release fishery, with about two-thirds of all bluefish caught returned to the water each year.  And in such a recreational fishery, the greatest economic and social benefits aren’t derived from yield, but from maintaining a high abundance of fish, that makes it more likely that anglers will encounter them when they go fishing, and thus encourage people to fish and to fish more often.

Thus, the unharvested recreational quota isn’t truly unused, and transferring unfilled recreational quota to the relatively low-value commercial bluefish fishery does not necessarily meet the injunction to manage for optimum yield.

Nonetheless, when a new Bluefish Allocation and Rebuilding Amendment was adopted in 2021, such amendment maintained the quota transfer provision.

There are other, practical reasons not to kill every available fish.

One of my undergraduate degrees is in History, where I concentrated on modern East-Central Europe.  When you study that region and time, when revolutions occurred on a regular basis, it doesn’t take long before you come across the axiom that

“Revolutions aren’t caused by continued poor conditions, but by dashed expectations.”

 In a fisheries context, that translates to

“It’s always easier to give people more fish than to cut back on their landings,”

and certainly has real-world application.

Consider the scup fishery.

Scup produced a very large year class in 2015, causing biomass to soar well above the biomass target.  So in December 2017, at a combined meeting of the Mid-Atlantic Council and the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Summer Flounder, Scup, and Black Sea Bass Management Board, fishery managers decided to allow states—including the northeastern states of New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts, which account for over 95% of annual recreational scup catch—to increase their bag limit from 40 to 50 fish for anglers fishing from for-hire vessels during the two-month “bonus season”, while decreasing the size limit for all anglers from 10 to 9 inches, in order to take advantage of the transient abundance of the 2015 year class of scup.

The problem was that, after 2015, recruitment didn’t only drop back to more normal levels, but fell further, with 2019 recruitment being the lowest in the entire time series used to assess the stock.  At the same time, partly because the relaxed recreational management measures adopted in 2017, recreational catch remained high; in 2021, it was far above the recreational catch limit, so high that a 56% reduction would be required to prevent 2022 landings from exceeding the limit again.

Such a steep reduction was extremely controversial; not only the Council and Management Board, but the majority of the biologists on the Summer Flounder, Scup, and Black Sea Bass Monitoring Committee as well, felt that a 56% reduction was excessive, even though, for the Council, it was legally required.  The Monitoring Committee expressed concerns about the “socioeconomic repercussions” of a catch reduction of such magnitude, and instead recommended a rollback of the lower size limit adopted after the December 2017 meeting, which would achieve only a 33% catch reduction.  

The Regional Director of the National Marine Fisheries Service’s Greater Atlantic Fisheries Office stated that, should the Management Board not adopt the full 56% reduction, NMFS would probably have to adopt other measures, up to and including a complete shutdown of the scup fishery in federal waters, in order to achieve a reduction closer to the legally required 56%.

Such controversy could have been avoided had the Council and Management Board not insisted on trying to harvest as many scup as possible at the December 2017 meeting.

Given the unusually large size of the 2015 year class, there was little doubt that the liberal management measures adopted in 2017 would have to be abandoned in a very few years, after the stock began to return to more typical levels of abundance.  And very few anglers were unhappy with the 10-inch minimum size and 40-fish “bonus season” bag limit that was in force prior to the 2018 season; there was little pressure from fishermen to either reduce the minimum size or increase the bonus season bag.

Thus, other than a desire to let anglers catch every possible fish, there was little reason to make any changes to the scup regulations in 2017.  If managers were only willing to let a few more fish die of natural causes, there would have been no need for the 2022 catch reductions that caused considerable controversy and angler discontent.

Yet the ghost of Wilbert Chapman still haunts our fishery management bodies, and sometimes drives managers to find ways to harvest as many fish as possible, even when such levels of harvest don’t make too much sense from a scientific, economic, or human perspective.

It is time for such ghost to be exorcised, and to realize that, at times, not harvesting every last fish does, indeed, benefit mankind.