WINTER FLOUNDER: MANAGERS WAVE THE WHITE FLAG

 

It’s hard to watch a fishery die, particularly one that you’ve been a part of for virtually all of your life.

I’ve long mourned the demise of the Southern New England/Mid-Atlantic (SNEMA) stock of winter flounder.

I’m not sure when I caught my first flounder, but if I had to guess, I’d say it was sometime during the summer of 1957, when my parents would take me down to a park along the Connecticut shore. There, my father would cast sandworm-baited hooks into the tide and, when something bit, let me reel the fish in. Because of those trips, I was a committed angler by the time I first walked through a kindergarten door, and for that, flounder deserves most of the credit or blame.

Throughout the early 1960s, whether we fished from shore or from our newly purchased used boat, flounder were our usual target. Although they were most abundant during the spring and fall, we caught them throughout the year. Whenever we went fishing, we had faith that at least a few flounder would be around.

And, for decades, they were.

Then, in 1979, things got a little strange. Before then, when we caught a lot of winter flounder, they were generally small. The fish that we kept probably measured somewhere between eight and twelve inches, with most toward the lower end of that range. We released a lot of smaller fish, including quite a few “postage stamps” just three or four inches long, while fish over a pound were rare. Prior to ’79, I never caught a winter flounder that weighed more than a pound and a half.

But in the fall of ’79, we suddenly experienced a flood of larger fish. Many exceeded a pound, and a few two-pounders were caught. There were still smaller fish around, but beginning in ’79, and continuing through the early 1980, large flounder began made up a bigger share of the catch.

In late 1983, I traded Connecticut’s waters for the shallow, sandy expanses of New York’s Great South Bay, where flounder seemed even more abundant than they were in Long Island Sound. The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) estimates show that, in 1984, New York anglers took home about 12.6 million winter flounder, more than they landed in any year before or since. But the trend that we first noticed in Connecticut continued; we were catching more larger flounder, but seeing fewer small fish.

 

In 1988, New York adopted an 8-inch minimum size for recreationally-caught winter flounder; by then, recreational flounder landings had already fallen to 3.8 million pounds, just 30% of what they had been five years before. The fish were clearly experiencing problems, but no one was quite sure what they were, or how to solve them.

Back then, as now, managers recognized three stocks of winter flounder: Southern New England/Mid-Atlantic, Gulf of Maine, and Georges Bank. They believed that the SNEMA stock spent summers in the ocean, entered bays and estuaries in the fall, spawned in late winter, and departed the bays in late spring, although managers recognized that some individuals remained inshore. Recreational and commercial management measures were based on such belief. Both the NMFS and the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) managed the SNEMA stock as a single unit, across a range that stretched from southern Massachusetts to Maryland.

Research conducted in Long Island’s Shinnecock Bay suggests that such broad-scale management may not be appropriate, given the winter flounder’s complex stock structure. The researchers noted that,

 

Winter flounder movements in Shinnecock Bay deviated from the expected behavior for this species south of Cape Cod in terms of inshore residency and response to the seasonal environment. This study provides supporting evidence that winter flounder in Long Island bays exhibit a complex stock structure that warrants further investigation to identify biological traits exhibited by resident and dispersive groups…Complex stock structure may be more common in winter flounder than previously thought…Resolving the stock structure and migratory behavior of Long Island winter flounder is crucial to determine the impacts of local harvest on the sustainability of the species. If resident winter flounder represent a separate genetic population, the seasonally more abundant dispersive population may mask a long-term decline in resident winter flounder that once supported Long Island fisheries and may eventually lead to extirpation of residents. This outcome would require management of each population separately based on population-specific life history variables. On the other hand, if resident and dispersive winter flounder are contingents within a single genetically distinct population that exhibit partial migration, the relative impact of harvest on resident and dispersive individuals can be complex. Management would need to consider the relative abundance of each contingent through habitat or other conservation efforts aimed at a specific contingent.

The management measures that were put in place proved ineffective. The New England Fishery Management Council, which had jurisdiction over the species in federal waters, refused to establish commercial harvest quotas until an amendment to the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act forced it to do so in 2010; the stock was already in such poor condition that such quota was, for a brief while, set to zero. Inshore, winter flounder were such an important part of the recreational fishery for such a long time that state efforts to conserve the species ran into stiff resistance from members of the recreational fishing industry.

 

Natural threats were also increasing. Flounder in their first year of life were facing increased levels of predation from blue crabs as well as summer flounder. Warming inshore waters led to an increased abundance of sand shrimp, a small crustacean that was frequently preyed upon by adult winter flounder, but has now become an important predator of flounder eggs and recently-hatched juveniles.

 

The SNEMA stock spiraled downward, falling so low in some New York bays that genetic diversity was lost and inbreeding began to occur.

 

The last complete assessment of the SNEMA stock, referred to as a “benchmark,” or “research track” stock assessment, was released in 2011. It set the spawning stock biomass (SSB) target at 43,661 metric tons (MT). At the end of 2010, the SNEMA SSB was a mere 7,076 metric tons, far below the SSB target and just 16% of the biomass needed to produce maximum sustainable yield. Rebuilding efforts did not improve the health of the stock. A stock assessment update released in 2015 found that, by the end of 2014, SSB had decreased to 6,151 metric tons, with few young flounder recruiting into the population.

 

SSB continued to decline. A stock assessment update released in 2017 found it had fallen to 4,360 MT, while a third update, released in 2020, saw a further decline to 3,638 MT. Recruitment remained unacceptably low.

 

Updates to the 2011 benchmark stock assessment whittled away at the SSB target. The 2015 update, informed by new data, lowered the target from 43,661 to 26,928 MT; the 2017 update reduced it again, to 24,687 MT. The 2020 assessment then cut the SSB target in half, to 12,261 MT, on the assumption that the low recruitment which had plagued the stock for years would continue well into the future.

The panel that peer reviewed the 2020 assessment update suggested that even the most recent lowering of the SSB target might have understated the impact of chronically poor recruitment. It wrote,

The Peer Review Panel notes, as had been done in previous reviews, that recruitment had been declining throughout the period and was currently very low. As for several other stocks under the purview of the [Northeast Fisheries Science Center] it would be helpful to evaluate if the previously observed high recruitment are possible; i.e., is it simply a matter of building back [spawning stock biomass] and recruits will follow, or are there other factors at play. If the productivity of the resource(s) has decreased, it would be helpful to adjust reference points accordingly. This would be unlikely to change fisheries yield much but would be more realistic in terms of setting expectations.

A paper published in October 2021, in the journal Marine and Coastal Fisheries, strongly suggested that recruitment could be restored. It observed that “larger, older spawners contribute diverse spawning behaviors and disproportionately more to reproductive output,” and argued that years of overfishing led to a population dominated by smaller, younger fish that could not produce sufficient recruits.

 

The paper noted that

For a species that has failed to recover spawner biomass and consistently displays low annual recruitment despite the recent recovery of age structure and reduced fishing effort, long-term fishing reductions (i.e., a moratorium) may be required to promote full recovery.

In 2009, NMFS declared a moratorium for the SNE/MA stock in federal waters; however, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission allowed commercial and recreational fishing to continue in state waters despite depletion of the stock. For Winter Flounder, which has a generation time of about 10-15 years, a moratorium of 10-15 years may be necessary for the population to reap the benefits of the rebuilt storage effect, whereby periodic production of strong year classes by older, larger individuals in years of favorable conditions could spearhead biomass recovery. [references omitted]

Unfortunately for SNEMA flounder, neither the scientists who update the stock assessment, the administrators at NMFS’ Greater Atlantic Regional Fisheries Office (GARFO), nor the New England Fishery Management Council (Council) shared the researchers’ view. The 2022 stock assessment update, following the guidance provided by the Peer Review Panel two years before, slashed the spawning stock biomass target to just 3,314 metric tons, just slightly below the 3,353 metric ton estimate of SSB.

 

Such assessment update explained,

There was a change to the stanza of recruitment that was used in the projections for this update…This new recruitment stanza uses the last 20 years of estimates (2002-2021) for both short term projections, and to estimate the biomass target (SSBMSY) from a long term (100 yr) projection. Previous estimates have used the entire time-series of recruitment (1981-present). Many of the historical recruitment estimates are overly optimistic, if not impossible, for the current stock size and productivity to achieve. Very early recruitment estimates are 20 times the levels seen in recent years.

As a consequence of the decision to use the truncated recruitment time series, the status of the SNEMA stock, which until then was considered badly overfished, was changed to “not overfished and overfishing is not occurring.” The 2022 assessment update nonetheless warned, “While the stock status has changed, the perception of the stock has not, and recent model estimates and fishery independent survey indices all reveal a poor stock condition for Southern New England winter flounder.”

Despite such warning, with SSB slightly above the new target, GARFO notified the Council that no further rebuilding was needed. That was all the encouragement the Council needed to increase the SNEMA winter flounder quota by 53%, to 441 MT, for the 2023 fishing year.

There is no chance that the Council will consider the moratorium that represents the SNEMA stock’s only possible road to rebuilding.

In 2022, New York’s anglers landed an estimated 119 winter flounder, which works out to about 0.0009% of their landings in 1984 although, as a practical matter, the number landed is now so small that it’s impossible for NMFS surveyors to come up with an accurate approximation.

It is hard to watch a fishery die.

It is harder when you know that fishery managers, had they taken bold action, might well have been able to keep it alive.

-----

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/

STRIPED BASS AT THE ASMFC: "THAT'S THE FASTEST THEY'VE EVER DONE NOTHING"

 

Last Tuesday, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board considered Addendum I to Amendment 7 to the Atlantic Striped Bass Interstate Fishery Management Plan.

Addendum I—which has been around so long that it had originally been designated Addendum VII to Amendment 6 of the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Striped Bass—sort-of addresses an issue that has been kicking around inside the Management Board for a few years:  Some states believe that the current commercial quotas are unfair, based on old data, and should be revised.

The problem, as some Management Board members have freely admitted, is that revising allocations is far easier said than done; reallocation is, without doubt, the most controversial topic that any fisheries management body might address.  Those who currently hold larger allocations see those allocations as set in stone, never to be revised until the would ends.  Those who ended up on the short end of the stick view the same allocation process as a gross inequity that must immediately be addressed.  Debate on allocation matters is typically bitter, extended, and ultimately fruitless.

Thus, Addendum I took a different tack.  Instead of seeking an outright reallocation, it would merely permit the voluntary transfer of unused commercial quota in the ocean fishery for striped bass from one state to another.  The addendum offered four different options, which ranged from unrestricted transfer of quota to only allowing such transfers if approved by the Management Board, and subject to whatever conditions the Management Board chose to impose.

Such approach rescued state fishery managers from the unpleasant prospect of telling their commercial fishermen that they agreed to permanently transfer some small portion of those fishermen’s quota to another state, while still satisfying the primary motivation behind the addendum--providing a few more bass to Delaware, which has long argued that its commercial quota was unreasonably small.

Of course, if transfers were permitted, states other than Delaware might get some share of the unused quota, as well.

Most of the unused quota—295,495 pounds—is tied up in North Carolina, which once had a large commercial striped bass fishery, but has seen that fishery wane after the bass stopped wintering off the state’s beaches, and began spending the cold months in federal waters, where fishing is not allowed.  Another 234,210 pounds is held by four “gamefish states”—Maine, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and New Jersey—which prohibit commercial striped bass fishing.  Of that, the 18,298 pounds held by the three New England states is available for transfer, while New Jersey’s 215,912 pounds have been reallocated to the recreational fishery, and so removed from the potential transfer pool.

States with commercial fisheries rarely utilize all of their quota, and any such unused quota would also be potentially available for transfer; even so, the overall amount of fish available for transfer is very small.  ASMFC staff estimated that if interstate transfers resulted in the entire ocean fishery quota being utilized, overall striped bass removals, by both the commercial and recreational sector, would increase by about one percent.

That’s not very much, but there is also a principle involved, and one that many recreational fishermen, including myself, agree with:  When a stock is overfished, and struggling to recover, fishery managers shouldn’t approve any action that would lead to any increase in fishing mortality.  

As Dennis Abbott, New Hampshire’s Legislative Proxy, reminded the Management Board at Tuesday’s meeting, approving enough seemingly trivial increases in landings, none of which, by themselves, would cause significant harm, can still subject the striped bass stock to the “death of 1,000 cuts.”

Stakeholders generally agreed that increasing fishing mortality at this point was a bad idea; of the more than 2,000 comments that the ASMFC received with respect to Addendum I, more than 98 percent opposed interstate quota transfers.

Thus, the Management Board members sitting around the table last Tuesday faced a bit of a quandary.

Some undoubtedly sympathized with Delaware’s plight, believing that the state got the short end of commercial striped bass allocations.  There is a long tradition of cooperation at the ASMFC; although some states sometimes throw up roadblocks, the ASMFC jurisdictions are generally willing to transfer unused quota of other species, embrace conservation equivalency proposals of somewhat dubious merit, and perhaps even overlook minor compliance violations (or place the deadline for coming into compliance so far out in time that it amounts to the same thing), in the spirit of comity and cooperative management, particularly when, as in this case, the likely impact of any transfers on the striped bass resource would probably be small.

On the other hand, while the impacts of transfers might be small, such impacts would still occur, affecting what is arguably the most important fish stock managed by the ASMFC, a stock which is already overfished and trying to rebuild in the face of poor recruitment.  Striped bass is a high-visibility species, and any Management Board action would be closely scrutinized by stakeholders, particularly after stakeholder sentiment, as evidenced by the 2,000-plus comments, was so heavily skewed against transfers.

With the table so set, the meeting began.  And, once the introductory presentations were done, it began with a bit of surprise.

John Clark, Delaware’s fishery manager, moved that the Board approve Option D, which would permit interstate transfers of quota in any year only if approved by the Management Board, which could also impose additional conditions on such transfers.  It was one of the most conservative of the options included in Addendum I, and Mr. Clark's support was somewhat surprising, as Option D was generally disfavored by Delaware’s commercial fishermen who, at a public hearing, preferred the unrestricted transfers allowed in Option B by a margin of 12 to 2.

The fact that Delaware was proposing that the Board approve Option D, and not Option B, was a tacit admission that Option B would probably be voted down.

Mr. Clark argued that Option D was one of the most conservative options proposed in the addendum, and that he preferred it over Option E, which was substantially similar but also prohibited transfers when the stock is overfished, because the states "know" when the striped bass stock is recovering, and should be allowed to make transfers prior to a formal scientific finding that the bass are no longer overfished.

How the states could “know” that a stock was no longer overfished absent scientific advice was something that Mr. Clark did not even try to explain. 

Even so, the motion received a swift second from Stephen Train, Maine’s Governor’s Appointee.  This was a second surprise, as Maine has traditionally been one of the staunchest supporters of striped bass conservation.  Mr. Train provided a clue to his motivation when he noted that his state had benefitted from quota transfers of other species, a clear reference to Maine receiving significant transfers of menhaden that were badly needed for lobster bait, and so he understood the value of transfers as a management tool.

In response to a question from the Board’s chair, Mr. Clark explained that Delaware was only looking for

“A very small amount of striped bass.”

Fifty or sixty thousand pounds, he said, would suffice.  Roy Miller, Delaware’s Governor’s Appointee, claimed that Delaware deserved such fish, first because the existing state quotas were based on voluntarily reported, 1970s-era landings data that did not represent actual landings, and also because pollution in the Delaware River resulted in very poor recruitment during those years.  Such pollution has since been abated, and the Delaware River spawning stock restored, making more bass available to the state.

It's not clear whether Mr. Clark’s motion would have had any significant support, because the next two Board members recognized by the Chair stated their intent to provide substitute motions.  Dr. Jason McNamee, Rhode Island’s fishery manager, was allowed to speak first.

He offered a substitute motion which tasked the Atlantic Striped Bass Technical Committee with running two population projections, one of which assumed that the entire ocean quota was utilized, and another which assumed utilization of the entire ocean quota except such quota as was granted to New Jersey.  His motion was quickly seconded by Dr. Justin Davis, Connecticut’s fishery manager, and ultimately passed by a margin of 13 to 3, with only Massachusetts, North Carolina, and the Potomac River Fisheries Commission voicing opposition.

From a parliamentary standpoint, the substitute motion was a shrewd move.

Given the public comment, as well as the Striped Bass Advisory Panel’s 14-4 recommendation against approving quota transfers, there was a good chance that, if a straight-up vote was taken, none of the transfer options would have prevailed.  Delaying a definitive vote could only help those who wanted to end the prohibition on transfers; there was no way that delay could weaken their cause.  

Even those who opposed quota transfer would find it difficult to vote against a proposal to develop more, and clearly relevant, information, as anyone who voted against such substitute motion might appear afraid of what the Technical Committee’s projections would reveal.

And we probably already know what the projections will say:  The increase in fishing mortality attributable to quota transfers will be small.  The Technical Committee’s confirmation of that fact will allow transfer advocates to discredit the public testimony as well-meaning, but uninformed, as such transfers won’t materially impact the recovery. 

By deferring the decision on Addendum I to May, the substitute motion also assures that final recreational landings data for 2022 will be available to the Management Board when the debate resumes.  Since, as I noted last month, it appears that the 2022 recreationalcatch—that is, landings and discard mortality combined—will probably exceed 2021 catch by at least 10,000,000 pounds, it will be very easy to argue that, compared to such recreational increase, the 300,000 or so pounds of additional commercial landings attributable that might result from quota transfers would be trivial.

Those two arguments could well stack the deck in favor of the Management Board approving quota transfers.

At the same time, an opportunity for a better outcome remains.  Unless some very surprising information emerges at the May meeting, we should expect the Technical Committee to tell us—regardless of its transfer-related projections— that the fishing mortality rate in 2022 was substantially higher than it was in 2021, and that if such fishing mortality rate continues, the striped bass stock will probably not be able to rebuild by the 2029 deadline.

If that proves to be the case, there will undoubtedly be some members of the Management Board—my money would be on the Massachusetts delegation, but there are plenty of others who might play the role—who will want to initiate a new management action which reduces fishing mortality to a level that will permit timely rebuilding.  While any such action would, of necessity, focus on the recreational sector, commercial landings shouldn’t be exempted, for they have also increased in recent years. 

Reducing the overall commercial quota could render the transfer issue moot; so could an action that the Management Board has so far been loath to take:  Treating the commercial sector the same as anglers, and applying any required reduction not to quota, but to actual landings, which would make it far more likely that the commercial reductions would actually be achieved.

After all, everyone should pay their fair share.

Last Tuesday, we saw the Management Board do one of the things it does best, kick the can down the road, rather than make a decision, when faced with a difficult choice.  At the end of 90 minutes of debate, Addendum I  stood where it had at the start of the meeting:  Unresolved.

On the plus side, at least the meeting was short.  My wife, who has been an unnintentional bystander to the countless, often seemingly endless, Management Board meetings that I stream at home, undoubtedly put everything in the proper perspective when she said,

“That was the fastest they’ve ever done nothing.”

At least this time, doing nothing maintained an acceptable status quo.  That won’t be the case in May, when the Management Board will probably be confronted by a large spike in fishing mortality.  At that point, decisive action will be needed.

If the Management Board plays kick-the-can once again, no one will emerge as a winner.  And the bass will most certainly lose.

MARINE RECREATIONAL FISHERIES: THE NEED FOR MORE WIDESPREAD ABUNDANCE

 

When I look back over the past 68 years, fishing was probably never better than it was in the mid-1970s.

I was in college back then, spending most of the year in Worcester, Massachusetts.  The factories had mostly shut down; old, boarded-up, sometimes burnt-out brick buildings lined the roads outside the school.  Eventually, the tech industry would give new life to the town, but that wasn’t even a dream when I was there; the computers of my college years were big and slow, and still read their data from punchcards.  High-tech was a pocket calculator.

But when school let out in May, I came home to a very different world.  In contrast to the dying city, that saw a few struggling businesses trying to keep their heads above water, Long Island Sound was abuzz with life.  

Winter flounder still thrived in the bays, along with a big population of eels that teemed along the shoreline.  Striped bass were migrating in, both the dark, fin-rotted fish from the Hudson and the bright fish from the south, still speckled with sea lice from their recent migration; size ranged from shorts to a very, very few that weighed over 60 pounds.  Tautog—we called them “blackfish” back then—crowded into the shallows to spawn.  There were weakfish in the coves.  Atlantic mackerel swarmed in the middle of the Sound, and when they disappeared, big weakfish took their place.  Bluefish showed up around Memorial Day, with summer flounder and scup not far behind.

For pure variety, May might have been the best month of the year, but there was no time between April and November when an angler couldn’t go out and have a very good chance of catching something.  Because there were so many options, no one species received too much pressure.  Flounder were hit pretty hard in the spring and  the fall, and the bluefish got a lot of attention  when they blitzed bunker schools in the harbors and creeks, but over the course of a year, effort was well spread out.  

If the bass disappeared for a while, or the blackfish dispersed  as the water warmed, there was always another fish to take up the slack.  I worked in a tackle shop at the time, and could always put the customers on fish, if they were willing to try something new.

It's not that way anymore.  I was thinking of that the other day, while attending a meeting of New York’s Marine Resources Advisory Council, when some folks from the party boat fleet started complaining about more restrictive black sea bass rules.

It’s impossible to deny that black sea bass are very abundant; the last stock assessment update estimates that spawning stock biomass was more than twice the target level at the end of 2019.    

Abundance always drives angling effort; recreational fishermen are drawn to the fish that are easiest to catch.  While sea bass biomass has been high in recent years, there has been a decline in summer flounder abundance, which fell from an estimated 62,137 metric tons in 2010 to 39,516 metric tons at the end of 2017, and has increased to 47,397 metric tons two years later.  While summer flounder are a long way from being overfished, below-average recruitment in all but one of the years between 2011 and 2019 led to a significant decline in biomass, which now sits at 89% of its target level.

In response to such factors, fishermen on both private and for-hire vessels have shifted a significant amount of effort from summer flounder to black sea bass; while current effort estimates record such shift, they may be underestimating the actual numbers, as many boats that are supposedly targeting summer flounder are no longer doing so in the bays and inlets, or on deep-water lumps and other soft-bottom structure, but rather are fishing the edges of wrecks and similar hard-bottom features, where sea bass constitute a substantial incidental catch.

Today, some local party boats might not survive if they lost the summer black sea bass fishery; fifteen years ago, they spent most of the summer fishing closer inshore for summer flounder and, for the most part, only turned to the sea bass later in the fall, after their summer flounder fishing was done.

The relatively recent increase in black sea bass trips has led to higher landings, which frequently exceed the recreational harvest limit and even the recreational sector's annual catch limit; while such higher landings probably won’t create an immediate problem for the stock, given its high abundance, they will allow anglers to chip away at that abundance more quickly, and eventually drop it down to levels where even more restrictive restrictions must be imposed.

We see something similar happening with scup, which also enjoy a spawning stock biomass at about twice the target level, but which, because of low recruitment, has been declining quickly in recent years.  However scup, unlike black sea bass, have a built-in buffer against overfishing, as commercial landings have typically fallen well below the commercial quota in recent years.

Other traditional nearshore bottom fish have also fallen on hard times in recent years, with cod abundance near all-time lows, red hake—better known as “ling” in the New York Bight—undergoing rebuilding, and tautog limited to a very restrictive season that doesn’t permit harvest during the summer, when most recreational fishermen are on the water.

That shifts even more effort onto black sea bass and scup.

It’s even worse inside the bay, where the collapse of the winter flounder stock removed a dependably available species.  Couple the lack of winter flounder with the ban on summer tautog harvest and high size limits for summer flounder, scup, and black sea bass that make finding a legal fish inside the bay problematic, and it becomes all too clear why protected-waters anglers find themselves with little to target during the height of the summer, when most of them are on the water.  

The situation has gotten bad enough that New York’s Marine Resources Advisory Council is looking at placing restrictions on blowfish—a/k/a “northern puffer”—one of the few species, along with northern kingfish, that have been readily available to anglers fishing within the bay.

We see the same pattern in fisheries for the larger inshore predators.  When striped bass, bluefish, and weakfish are all available in reasonable numbers, they split the fishing pressure among them.  Some anglers prefer the challenge of fishing for bass, while others enjoy the fast action provided by bluefish.  Weakfish, rarely as abundant as the other two species, still absorb substantial fishing effort, particularly in the spring.  But in today’s environment, which sees bass and weakfish overfished and bluefish in the midst of rebuilding (a research track stock assessment recently found that bluefish are now at 60% of the biomass target, but no longer overfished), that sort of flexibility no longer exists.

Instead, anglers concentrate on whatever species is locally abundant at any given time; recreational landings of striped bass in 2022 were roughly twice what they were the year before, just because bass belonging to the large 2015 year class—fish that are badly needed to rebuild the stock—have now entered the 28- to 35-inch recreational slot size limit, and so are vulnerable to harvest.  Bluefish numbers have been low enough in most places that they can’t provide the bass with any sort of escape valve to mitigate the angling effort.

Back in the mid-1970s, the region’s recreational fishing industry wasn't dependent upon a couple species of fish.  Party boats could find plenty of winter flounder, summer flounder, bluefish, and scup.  Weekend warriors trying to catch a few hours of relaxation—and maybe some dinner—aboard their own boats had easy access to the same species, with the odd tautog or blowfish spicing up the catch.  More serious anglers haunted the hours between dusk and dawn in search of striped bass, fished the harbor blitzes for blues, or trolled Rebels and Redfins in the thin light before sunrise, hunting for tiderunner weakfish.

Today, with winter flounder gone, striped bass and weakfish overfished, bluefish and blackfish still being rebuilt, and summer flounder below its target levels, that sort of variety no longer exists.  Black sea bass, scup, and even the overfished striped bass bear the brunt of recreational fishing effort.  People complain about restrictive management measures, but the truth is that just those three species can’t long endure the effects of the many hundreds of thousands of angler trips taken each year.

To support the recreational fishery, the full panoply of recreational species must be restored.

That won’t be easy.  It won’t come without cost.  But, nonetheless, it needs to be done.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MARINE FISHERIES: MANAGING FOR THE LONG TERM

 

I’ve been involved with fisheries management long enough to know that, whatever issue arises, fishermen tend to focus on what new management measures will mean for their next trip or for the next season.  Long-term impacts, for good or ill, are just about always ignored.

In my grumpier moments, which occur with some frequency, I’ve been known to comment that, where fisheries are concerned, anyone looking as much as one year ahead ought to be viewed as a visionary.

In my more reflective moments, I know that’s a little unfair, because such short-term focus isn’t limited to fisheries issues.  I spent just about all of my professional life on Wall Street, as in-house counsel at several large banks and brokers.  The short-term mindset was just as prevalent there.    

A thousand or more people might lose their jobs after a bad year, just so management could show investors that it was cutting expenses and so—at least in theory—increasing profits; the fact that the same managers might have to pay 25% more to replace those people once the business cycle turned around was never a part of the conversation.  And given that managers’ bonuses are usually based on the current year’s bottom line, and not on positioning their company for future success, perhaps that’s understandable.

But in fisheries, things are different—or at least they should be.  The key metric is maximum sustainable yield, not a maximum current yield that impoverishes the future.

Yet, while maintaining healthy, sustainable fisheries is the theoretical long-term goal, in practice, things aren’t that simple.  Short-term thinking often impinges on long-term goals.

We see that in current management actions.

The so-called “Harvest Control Rule” adopted by the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council and Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission is supposedly intended to

“ensure that [management] measures prevent overfishing, are reflective of stock status, appropriately account for uncertainty in the recreational data, take into consideration angler preferences, and provide an appropriate level of stability and predictability in changes from year to year.”

Yet the control rule wasn’t needed to achieve most of those goals.  The method previously used to set recreational management measures, which largely compared past fishery performance with the recreational harvest limit for the upcoming year, was already very successful at preventing overfishing (the notable exception was bluefish, which did become overfished, largely because recreational fishing effort and the resultant fishing mortality had been grossly underestimated prior to 2018, as had the spawning stock biomass needed to produce maximum sustainable yield).  

As Julia Beatty, the Mid-Atlantic Council staff member who led the Fishery Management Action Team responsible for overseeing the development of such control rule noted in a memo to the Mid-Atlantic Council, the models used to consider angler preferences in the specification-setting process could readily be employed outside of the control rule context. 

And questions of uncertainty in recreational data, as well as those of regulatory stability and predictability, could easily be addressed by considering management uncertainty when setting annual recreational specifications, as is recommended in the National Marine Fisheries Service’s published guidelines.

Of course, adopting a management uncertainty buffer would reduce landings somewhat, and that could conflict with the final purported goal of management measures that are “reflective of stock status.”  And therein lies the problem, because we all should be perfectly clear about one thing—the motivation behind the Harvest Control Rule was far less a desire to improve the management process than it was to find a way to let anglers harvest greater amounts of currently abundant scup and black sea bass. 

That becomes very apparent when one reads the letter that Michael Pentony, regional director of the National Marine Fisheries Service’s Greater Atlantic Regional Fisheries Office, wrote to the Mid-Atlantic Council’s chair in support of the control rule.

“A consistent theme in the discussions about recreational management over the last few years, from both Council and Board members as well as public comments, is that we should explicitly consider stock status when making recommendations about recreational management measures…The current regulations, which the staff recommends remain the same, require us to propose measures that achieve the recreational annual catch limit (ACL), irrespective of stock status…

“The staff recommendation references recent improvements in the management process, including the use of multi-year averages and outlier identification.  As you know, these measures are not new, and even when used while considering recreational measures for 2022, they resulted in the need for a 20.7-percent reduction for black sea bass harvest and a 56-percent reduction for scup; reductions that many around the Council/Board table argued were unnecessary given the stock status and trend of these stocks…

“It is my strong opinion that the Council/Board outcomes for 2022 clearly demonstrate that status quo recreational management for these fisheries is not an acceptable way to move forward.  This should be particularly clear given that the Council and Board have explicitly asked us, as recently as this year, to disregard the current regulations by implementing measures that do not meet the requirements of the status quo regulations…”

Which all boils down to, “We need to change the rules, in order to let recreational kill more fish,” which, in all honestly, might not be an unreasonable position when stocks are at the levels of abundance currently enjoyed by scup and black sea bass.  

The problem is that the control rule will be in place when the stocks begin their next decline, when it may make it difficult to halt the decline before it gets out of hand.

After all, the Mid-Atlantic Council’s Scientific and Statistical Committee hardly gave the control rule a strong vote of confidence, while the Council itself admits that thecontrol rule

“cannot be demonstrated to proactively prevent overfishing every year in all circumstances,”

and that

“even at high biomass levels, exceeding the [recreational harvest limit] overages can result in overfishing,”

so it is pretty clear that exceeding the annual recreational catch limit can only up the odds that overfishing will occur.

It is also pretty clear that the Harvest Control Rule is closely focused on an immediate goal, increasing the harvest of abundant scup and black sea bass, while paying far less attention to the long-term health of fish stocks.

The southern New England/mid-Atlantic stock of winter flounder has long been the victim of the same sort of thinking.

That stock began declining in the 1980s, and has been on the skids ever since, but fishery managers never really took actions needed to stop the decline.  

For many years, the New England Fishery Management Council, which is responsible for managing winter flounder in federal waters, refused to set an annual harvest quota for the commercial fishery, instead choosing to manage the stock with “input controls” such as restricting a vessel’s days at sea. 

Such tentative actions never got overfishing under control, although they did keep short-term landings higher than they ought to have been.

At the end of 2006, Congress passed the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Reauthorization Act, which required regional fishery management councils to specify hard-poundage annual catch limits for every managed species.  In response, the New England Council eventually set a quota for the southern stock of flounder; they waited until 2010 to do so, and by then, the flounder’s plight was dire enough that the quota was set at zero; a moratorium on landings had been imposed.

Unfortunately, that moratorium only applied to vessels fishing in, or at least licensed to fish in, federal waters.  State-waters fishing, both recreational and commercial, was governed by actions of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, which did not adopt the federal moratorium, but instead adopted management measures intended to reduce inshore landings of southern New England/mid-Atlantic flounder by 46%, while permitting a limited fishery to continue. 

Even that imperfect management scenario didn’t last very long.  The federal moratorium was lifted in 2013, giving it far too little time to make a meaningful difference in the health of the southern winter flounder stock.  And in 2014, despite their acknowledgement that the southern New England/mid-Atlantic winter stock was “in such a desperate situation,” the ASMFC’s Winter Flounder Management Board increased the recreational fishing season from 60 days to 10 full months, and doubled the commercial trip limit from 50 to 100 pounds, largely accepting an argument that boiled down to “if federal-waters fishermen are allowed a large winter flounder bycatch, it’s only fair to let state-waters anglers kill more fish, too.”

Tom Fote, the Governor’s Appointee from New Jersey, also made the argument that

“when winter flounder starts doing it, it gets traffic into the tackle stores, the bait shops, the rowboats and things like that.”

Both arguments focused on short-term concerns, not the long-term health of the flounder, which is now in a more perilous state than ever.

In October 2021, the academic journal Marine and Coastal Fisheries published a paper titled “The Relative Influence of Age Structure, Predation, and Temperature on Stock-Recruitment Dynamics:  A Case Study of Southern New England/Mid-Atlantic Winter Flounder,” which suggested that, after suffering years of overfishing, the southern stock of winter flounder lacked the older, larger females needed to provide strong year classes when favorable conditions occur, and further suggested that given the current condition of the stock, a 10 to 15 year moratorium might be required to rebuild it.

Instead, relying upon a recent stock assessment update which included the assumption that current low recruitment will continue into the foreseeable future, and that given such recruitment, the stock is currently about as large as it is ever going to be, the New England Council recently decided to up the southern New England/mid-Atlantic stock quota by 53%, forestalling any possibility of a recovery.

The chance of rebuilding the stock in the long term, however good or slim such chance might be, was subordinated to a short-term increase in landings that, because of the poor condition of the stock, might not even occur.

Shortsighted management actions don’t always have to involve major regulatory changes, nor doom a stock to a permanently depleted state.  Others—undoubtedly most—are far more limited in scope and effect.

In 2019, New York’s commercial fishermen were having a very difficult time finding striped bass that fell within the state’s 28- to 38-inch commercial size limit, and ended up landing only 45% of the state’s quota.  In itself, that wasn’t surprising, as the striped bass stock was overfished, and neither commercial nor recreational fishermen were encountering as many bass as they had a few years before.  However, Maryland produced a strong year class of bass in 2015, which would hopefully help fishery managers rebuild the stock.

The 28-inch minimum size was originally adopted because it marked a point when most female striped bass matured (although some females do not mature until 34 inches in length).  On average, a 28-inch striped bass is seven years old.  But commercial fishermen were complaining that there were a lot of small striped bass around, and asked New York to lower the minimum slot size to 26 inches, so that such smaller, and more probably immature fish, could be landed.  The state complied, changing its slot to 26- to 38 inches in 2020; in doing so, they made at least some of the 2015s vulnerable to the fishery.

As a result, New York’s commercial fishermen landed 83% of their quota in 2020 and 98% in 2021, which increased their landings in the short term, but also removed immature fish from the spawning stock before they had an opportunity to reproduce.  New York’s commercial quota was supposedly reduced to offset such loss of production, but still—the 2015s would have eventually grown into the 28- to 38-inch slot; was the need to increase commercial landings so imperative that it justified prematurely removing females from the spawning stock?

Personally, I tend to doubt it,.

It is said that when the Haudenosaunee Nation—the people better known in New York and southern Canada as the Iroquois—formed the five- (and eventually six-) nation confederacy that became the Haudenosaunee, a leader known to history as the “Peacemaker” instructed

“when you sit in council for the welfare of the people, you must think not of yourself or of your family, not even of your generation…make your decision on behalf of the seven generations coming, so that they might enjoy what you have today.”

While there is no hard evidence as to when such injunction was handed down—speculation dates it to somewhere between 1142 and 1500—and the precise language may have been unintentionally altered a little over the years, the concept remains valid today.  When setting policy, focus should be on long-term outcomes, and not on the benefits or harms that might immediately accrue.

If managers could stop concerning themselves with who might lose some business, or forfeit some landings, in the short term, and work to guarantee the long-term sustainability of fisheries resources, both the public and the resources themselves would benefit.  While I’m not suggesting a multi-generational outlook, and recognize that the inherent uncertainties in the data would make such an outlook impossible, I do suggest that the focus should be at least five years out, as concentrating on nearer-term consequences only serves to stall management efforts and make it more likely that any such efforts will fail.

Looking out five years is not too much to ask.

As someone who has nearly completed seven decades on Earth, I can say with some certainty that five years passes quickly.  You hardly notice it passing at all.

 

 

 

 

STAKEHOLDERS OVERWHELMINGLY OPPOSE INTERSTATE TRANSFERS OF STRIPED BASS QUOTA

 

On Wednesday, February 1, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board will decide whether the interstate transfer of unused commercial striped bass quota will be permitted, when it contemplates the Draft Addendum I to Amendment 7 to the Atlantic Striped Bass Interstate Fishery Management Plan.

Every time the question has been addressed before, the Management Board has decided that such transfers would be a bad idea.

At the August 2021 Management Board meeting, Robert Beal, the ASMFC’s executive director, remarked

“my recollection is that [such transfers] were not allowed while we were, even before my time the Board was trying to rebuild the striped bass stock.  Then once it was rebuilt, the Board sort of felt comfortable with not allowing transfers.  Part of it had to do with where those fish came from.

“If you move fish from North Carolina to Maine, well North Carolina to Massachusetts, that’s probably the farthest commercial quotas.  You know with that impact differentially, where those fish came from and the spawning populations and that sort of thing.  But again, most of it is a holdover from the rebuilding days of the early ‘90s.”

Unfortunately, his comment didn’t convince the Management Board to cease work on Addendum I, even though the striped bass stock is currently overfished, is hopefully in the midst of rebuilding, and the same logic would seem to apply.

We could also go back to the Management Board’s October 2014 meeting, when the same issue arose with respect to Addendum IV to Amendment 6 to the Atlantic Striped Bass Interstate Fishery Management Plan, and Charlton Godwin, then the Chair of the ASMFC’s Atlantic Striped Bass Technical Committee, advised the Board that

“The technical committee recommends taking the harvest reductions from the 2013 total commercial harvest and let the board reallocate as they see fit.  Relative to the relative to the [sic] commercial quota transfer, the technical committee is concerned that at a time when we’re needing to take reductions, if the present reductions are taken from Amendment 6 quota instead of the 2013 level of harvest, allowing commercial transfers in conjunction with that could have to potential to increase harvest.  The technical committee also wants to point out that if transfers are used, conservation equivalency would need to be maintained between states if they have different size limits.  [emphasis added]”

Although the same concerns are valid today, the current Management Board has, so far, refused to accept the wisdom of the past, and may well decide to allow interstate quota transfers despite the near certainty that fishing mortality will increase, and without any meaningful consideration for the effects of transferring fish from one state to another regardless of where such fish were spawned or the commercial regulations that each state has in place.

It’s not clear why the Management Board would want to do so; the states that host coastal commercial striped bass fisheries, other than the State of Delaware, have expressed no discontent with their current quotas and have often failed to land their existing quotas in recent years, although the aging 2011 and 2015 year classes are now leading to higher harvests.  

Delaware may have a legitimate argument that, pursuant to Amendment 6 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Striped Bass, it was the only coastal state not allowed to resume the commercial harvest of striped bass at historical levels, but if that is the case, the Management Board should, as Mr. Godwin suggested back in 2014, merely readjust the commercial allocations to provide Delaware with the fish that it was denied under Amendment 6.

Until the striped bass stock is fully restored, the Management Board should not be considering any management action likely to increase fishing mortality.  (At this point, some may point out that 2022's substantially increased recreational landings far overshadow any increase in commercial landings attributable to Addendum I; while such point is valid, such increase in recreational landings does not justify further compounding the damage by adopting Addendum I.  Instead, once the full magnitude of the recreational landings have been determined later this spring, the Management Board must initiate another action to reduce recreational fishing mortality to a level that will allow the stock to rebuild by the 2029 deadline, and do so as quickly as possible.)

The Management Board held hearings and invited public comment on Addendum I, and it is clear that the vast majority of stakeholders agree with that proposition.

Although the comment period only closed on January 13, Emilie Franke, the ASMFC’s Fishery Management Plan Coordinator for Atlantic Striped Bass, had all of the comments tabulated and summarized by the 17^th.  That was a remarkably quick turnaround, for Ms. Franke had received 2,147 individual comments addressing Addendum I, along with 18 other comments that addressed striped bass, but were irrelevant to the addendum’s core issues.

Of the relevant comments, 186 were made at one of the hearings held, either live or online, in states between North Carolina and Maine, while 1,961 were provided in writing.  Of all of those comments, 2,105—a little over 98 percent—opposed any form of commercial quota transfer.

Breaking the numbers down a little more, of the 741 written comments sent in by individuals who addressed the core issues of Addendum I (another 18 individual comments did not address such issues), 731—98.65 percent—opposed commercial quota transfers, as did 29 out of the 30 letters submitted by organizations and 100% of the 1,190 comments sent in via any of the six form letters that were circulated by various organizations.  155 out of the 186 people commenting at the various hearings—83.33 percent—also opposed quota transfers, although that percentage was skewed downward by the 12 Delaware commercial fishermen who, quite naturally, favored virtually unrestricted transfers of quota.

Those who favored some sort of quota transfer had four options to choose from.  Option B allowed unrestricted transfer of unused quota, although it did impose a 5 percent “conservation tax” when the stock was overfished, while Option C would not allow any transfers under such circumstances, but placed no restrictions on them otherwise.  Options D and E called for the Management Board to determine whether transfers would be allowed in any given year, and gave the Board full discretion to impose any restrictions on transfers that it deemed appropriate; like the previous pair of options, when the stock was overfished, Option D would impose a 5% conservation tax while Option E would permit no transfers at all.

Of the 42 comments favoring commercial transfers, a clear majority of 25 persons—59.5 percent—favored Option B, the most permissive choice; once again, the 12 Delaware commercial fishermen skewed that result.  Option E, the least permissive, scored a distant second place, being the choice of just 8, or 19 percent, of transfer supporters.

So what will the Management Board do?

Right now, it’s difficult to say.  Given that most Management Board members don’t stand to benefit from quota transfers of any kind—Maine, New Hampshire, Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and the District of Columbia don’t permit commercial striped bass fishing, the Potomac River Fisheries Commission has no coastal commercial fishery, North Carolina has a coastal commercial fishery but has had no commercial landings in recent years, and the United States Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service do not directly oversee commercial striped bass fishing—it would seem logical that the overwhelming stakeholder response would seal the fate of commercial quota transfers before the Management Board meeting was called to order.

Unfortunately, the Management Board doesn’t always operate on logic.  There are interpersonal dynamics going on, that make it difficult to handicap many issues.  Some state fishery managers might feel sympathy for their Delaware counterpart, knowing how much they’d hate being in his position, with an inequitably small share of the quota and fishermen calling for more.  That sort of sympathy can easily lead to such managers approving one of the transfer options, justifying it to themselves by thinking “We allow transfer quotas for other species,” and “It’s a quota we’ve already approved,” while doing their best not to think about the effects of any fishing mortality increase on the striped bass recovery effort.

Cooperative considerations play a role, too.  What happens in the Delaware River and Delaware Bay directly impacts three states:  New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware, which often work together to resolve issues impacting the estuary.  If increasing its commercial striped bass harvest is sufficiently important to Delaware—and Delaware has made it very clear that it is—will neighboring states support quota transfers as a way of strengthening interstate partnerships?

It's possible that they will.

Stakeholders often view the public hearing process as a sort of referendum, in which the option that gets the most votes ought to win, but that’s not exactly how it works.  Public comment can be, and often is, very important—it played a critical role in winning a favorable outcome on Amendment 7 to the striped bass management plan—but it is not always the decisive factor.

And that’s not always a bad thing.  We wouldn’t, for example, want the Management Board to ignore scientific advice, just because a majority of the comments called for them to do so.

However, that’s not the issue here.  The science, if anything, calls for keeping striped bass mortality as low as practicable, in order to facilitate a timely recovery.  What we’re dealing with in Addendum I is, for the most part, not science, but policy.  And when it comes to setting policy, public opinion should be at the forefront of managers’ minds.

For striped bass, like other marine resources, are public resources; although the ASMFC isn’t bound by the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, one key tenet of Magnuson-Stevens should arguably guide every fishery management decision, no matter who makes it or where it is made:  Such decisions should promote the greatest overall benefit to the nation as a whole, rather than to any particular user group.

Right now, the public, and the nation, are more likely to suffer harm, rather than enjoy any benefit, if striped bass fishing mortality increases.  

Thus, the Management Board’s duty is clear.