TIME FOR SOME STRAIGHT TALK ON RED SNAPPER

There’s little question that managing red snapper in the Gulf of Mexico is one of the hot topics in fisheries circles today.  Although it probably hasn’t bumped the perennial New England cod debate out of the top slot for “most contentious issue,” it still gets more than its share of press and much more than its share of political posturing.

At the same time, there’s not much to say.  Snapper were badly overfished, biologists finally got a handle on how to rebuild them, and since then the recovery has been bumpy, but real.  The stock is about halfway to its biomass target which, because of the species’ long life and relatively late maturity, is scheduled for 2032.  Right now, there is no reason to believe that the stock won’t be recovered on time.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is that red snapper have long been a very popular fish, among both anglers—who fish from private and from for-hire vessels—and for diners, who purchase them both in restaurants and for home consumption.

With anglers, party and charter boat captains, commercial fishermen, fish houses and restaurants all interested in consuming a single, finite resource, and it’s pretty easy to understand how red snapper became overfished in the first place.

And with all those folks, plus environmental advocates, recreational and commercial fishing advocates and recreational and commercial fishing lobbyists weighing in on the issue, along with every local, state and federal politician who thinks that they can milk the issue for a few more votes, photo ops and campaign contributions, you can understand why a relatively simple biological exercise has become such a hotly-contested political issue.

You can also understand why most of what you hear is shaped, slanted, targeted, stage-managed and otherwise intended to inflame emotions, satisfy voters or organizations’ members and promote a narrowly-held position, rather than honestly inform the general citizenry and promote the long-term public interest.

This is one of those instances where no one is really to blame for the underlying situation—folks didn’t recognize the essential fragility of the red snapper stock, killed too many fish for too many years and, now that they realize what they did wrong, are going to have to endure a long and painful effort to fix things—but everyone is to blame for chasing short-term fixes and ignoring the concerns of other stakeholders in the fishery.

At any given time, there is so much rhetoric related to red snapper management flying around that it’s hard to decide where to begin.  Maybe Amendment 40 to the Gulf of Mexico Fisheries Management Council’s Fishery Management Plan for the Reef Fish Resources of the Gulf of Mexico is a good place to start, because it illustrates the sort of issues that beset those trying to manage the fishery.

Amendment 40 proposes introducing “sector separation” into the red snapper fishery. 

Currently, 51% of red snapper landings are allocated to the commercial fishery, and 49% to recreational anglers.  Under sector separation, the recreational anglers would be further divided into the charter fishing sector (as defined in 16 U.S.C. 1802 (3)), which includes only party and charter boats, and the recreational fishing sector, composed of anglers who fish from any other platform (in the red snapper context, virtually always private boats).    Depending on the base years referred to when making the allocation, the split could be anywhere from roughly 50% for-hire/50% private vessel (if base years 1986 to 2012 were used) to 41%% for-hire/50% recreational (if base years are limited to 2006-2012).

Needless to say, the debate has been heated to date, and it’s not over yet.

Supporters of sector separation argue that continued recreational overharvest of the stock (which they generally blame on private boat anglers) has harmed not only the red snapper’s chances for recovery, but also the for-hire vessels, which were limited to just a 9-day federal-waters season last year. 

Such advocates contend that, because for-hire vessels are relatively few in number and easily identified, it will be simple to account for their landings, and impose sector-specific management and accountability measures.  On the other hand, the private boat sector is so amorphous and large that its landings cannot be quantified in anything like real time, and are always subject to significant uncertainty.  Thus, mid-season course adjustments are impossible to impose, leading to the recreational overharvest that has plagued the fishery.

Sector separation could also lead to a catch share program for the for-hire vessels, similar in structure to that already successfully used to keep commercial harvest from exceeding its quota. 

That’s all probably true as far as it goes, but…

The draft Amendment 40 notes that

“Since 2004, federal reef fish for-hire permits have been in moratorium.  That means that entrance to participation is capped; no additional federal permits are available…On the other hand, there is no limiting factor to the number of private anglers and recreational vessels which may target reef fish species; it is an open entry fishery…Over time, an increase in the number of private recreational vessels, while federal for-hire vessels have decreased in number, have resulted in private vessels landings representing a greater proportion of the recreational quota as a whole…

That statement inadvertently raises one of the biggest single problems with sector separation—the fact that it freezes each sector’s allocation at a level determined by past fishing activity, without accounting for changes that might naturally occur in the future. 

An ever-higher proportion of anglers are choosing to fish from private boats rather than for-hire vessels (and we should never doubt that it is a matter of choice, since the number of federally-permitted for-hire vessels isn’t remaining at or near the cap but, according to the draft amendment, it is actually decreasing).  

We could easily get into a situation where the onus of conserving red snapper is placed squarely on the private boat anglers’ shoulders, as a decreasing number of for-hire patrons get to share a fixed percentage of a rebuilding stock—providing them the opportunity for higher bag limits, lower minimum sizes and longer seasons—while an increasing number of private anglers must share a similar fixed percentage of fish, forcing them into a descending spiral of ever-shorter seasons, decreased bag limits (although you can't get much lower than two) and increasing minimum sizes.

The problem gets even more intractable when you add in the effects of a fixed commercial quota combined with a catch share program, which makes any possibility of reallocation of the resource, in order to satisfy the demand of a growing number of anglers, a very difficult thing to do. 

Such a management scheme, which favors the commercial and for-hire industries at the expense of the private citizen, is contrary to the century-old theme of American wildlife management, which emphasizes both decommercialization and the broadest public access consistent with adequately conserving the resource. 

Although it offers a viable short-term solution that may well succeed in ending overharvest and rebuilding the stock, its long-term implications for fishery management, both for red snapper in particular and, more broadly, for other species, are not particularly good, and may reasonably be deemed ominous by private recreational fisherman.

That may be what the Houston-based Coastal Conservation Association, had in mind when it issued a press release saying

“Amendment 40 has only been promoted by commercial fishermen and a very select few charter/for-hire operators. It is a misguided response to a broken federal management system that delivered a nine-day recreational red snapper season in 2014. Rather than fix that system, some are seeking to take advantage of the chaos and grab a private portion of red snapper.

“If Amendment 40 passes, it is likely that up to 75 percent of the entire Gulf red snapper fishery will be privately held by a dfew [sic] individuals, for private profit. If Amendment 40 passes, it will likely become the model to apply to other species under federal management. In response to a broken federal system that does not know how to manage recreational fisheries, the answer cannot be to simply lock anglers out of the fishery altogether and ignore them.”

The overwhelming majority of CCA’s membership is made up of private anglers, so its reaction to Amendment 40 is perfectly understandable.  However, it is spinning its message as fast and as hard as anyone else in the arena, blaming “commercial fishermen and a very select few charter/for hire operators” for Amendment 40, and constantly harping on a “broken federal management” system as the reason for both the recent 9-day federal snapper season, the alleged “chaos” that resulted, etc.

On its website, CCA claims that

“Amendment 40 has the potential to end recreational fishing as we know it in offshore waters. Due to a flawed federal management system, recreational anglers are being systematically managed out of the red snapper fishery and will very likely not be allowed to fish for red snapper in federal waters for the foreseeable future if Amendment 40 is approved and implemented.

“Since the federal government contends that recreational anglers catch their entire allotment of red snapper in state waters, anglers will only be able to access red snapper in federal waters by paying a select few charter/for-hire operators to take them out if Amendment 40 is approved.”

Once again, it’s hard to ignore the finger pointing at the “flawed federal management system [emphasis added]”.  

And it’s easy to skim over the phrase, “the federal government contends that recreational anglers catch their entire allotment of red snapper in state waters” without actually stopping to think about why the feds may, in fact be right.

CCA has made no secret of the fact that it believes that red snapper management should be handled by the states, not by the federal government.  But what if one of the problems doesn’t lie with the feds, but with states, instead?

And what if the biggest problem of all lies in CCA’s home state of Texas?

This season, anglers in federal waters were permitted to land just two red snapper at least 16 inches long, over a season that lasted for just a brief nine days.  But in Texas state waters, which extend out nine nautical miles from shore as a result of an old Spanish land grant, anglers can keep four fish at least 15 inches long, on every day of the year.

That’s right.  In Texas, you can take twice the federal limit, of fish an inch shorter than the feds allow, and in 2014, at least, the season ran more than forty times as long as it did in federal waters.

All the other Gulf states also have more liberal red snapper regulations in their inland waters, but none are as extreme as those in the Lone Star State.

It’s enough to make a man believe that not all the hogs in Texas are out in the fields eating the deer feeders’ corn…

As Florida charter boat captain Gary Jarvis noted

“The state water loophole ignores the simple fact that only so many fish can be caught per year, that it’s all one stock no matter where the fish are caught.  This has culminated in exorbitant state water season fishing opportunities for private vessel anglers and state licensed guides who fish in areas that have a viable state water fishery while federally permitted captains and their angling visitors only got a nine-day red snapper season this past year. Exploitation of the state water loophole and the imbalance it has wrought is really the driving force behind sector separation.”

You never hear CCA, the Recreational Fishing Alliance, the Center for Coastal Conservation or any of the other folks who like to throw stones at the federal managers admit it, but maybe the states share a lot of the blame…

And maybe giving the states more power is just going to make things worse.

It would be refreshing if someone—it doesn’t really matter who—down in the Gulf engaged in a little straight talk.  It would probably sound something like this.

“There are no easy answers.  Nothing is going to be fixed tomorrow.  Red snapper were very badly overfished, and although the recovery is coming along nicely, the population won’t be rebuilt for another fifteen or twenty years.  Even when it is, we are never going back to the kind of regulations—or lack of regulations—that we had in the 1980s and ‘90s, because they’re what caused the stock to decline in the first place.

“Catch share programs and sector separation schemes will help the red snapper’s recovery, because they’ll make it easy to count and regulate about 75% if the harvest.  However, such schemes shift much of the regulatory burden onto the shoulders of the ordinary citizen who fishes from his own boat or that of a friend.  Locking the fastest-growing sector of the fishery into any of the proposed “sector separation” quotas means that an increasingly large number of anglers are going to have to share a pretty small pie.

“You can only kill so many red snapper before the population will again decline.  You can kill them in both state and federal waters, but if you want a healthy stock, the more you kill in one place, the fewer you’ll be able to kill in the other.  So if the states let you kill more, the federal fishery will shrink.  If you want to be able to land more red snapper offshore, don’t complain to the feds that their rules are too strict, complain to the states that their rules are too liberal.

“And don’t fool yourself into believing that, if the states get to manage red snapper, everyone will be able to kill four 15-inch fish every day of the year, the way the Texans do now.  If every state tries that, the stock will collapse and all of your past sacrifice will have been wasted.

“Now, knowing that—name your poison.”

It would be nice if someone demonstrated that kind of courage.

But since a spokesman for one of the big players down there once told me “Nobody wants to be a dead hero,” I don’t expect it to happen any time soon.

ENVIROS AND ANGLERS

As I’ve noted before in this blog, most anglers like to think of themselves as the good guys.

If you catch them in a moment of honesty, maybe down at the dock in the evening, or standing around the bar before their fishing club meeting convenes, they’ll tell you sure, they want to take fish home, but they’ll be glad to take a few less if that means that their kids and their grandkids will be able to have good fishing, too.

They’ll tell you that they’re a little concerned that there’s not enough bait for the bass to feed on, and that the sewer plant over by Bay Park is doing bad things to the bay.

They understand what “conservation” means, and on the whole, think that it’s a pretty good idea.

So it gets a little puzzling that, when somebody mentions “environmentalists”—folks who, as a whole, want to make sure there are enough fish around for the next generation, protect stocks of the forage fish and try to clean up our waters and protect essential fish habitat—a lot of anglers suddenly start breathing hard, pointing fingers, and calling those folks “the enemy.”

It doesn’t make a lot of sense, because as Ted Williams points out in a recent blog post on Field & Stream magazine’s website, when you get anglers—or any sportsmen—and enviros pulling in the same direction, you get a combination that’s pretty close to unbeatable.

And maybe that’s part of the problem.

Because, while we like to think of ourselves as the good guys, the fact is that the angling community, like most communities, has its less-evolved members, along with our equivalent of the eccentric folks who paint old vans in exotic colors and park in front of post offices handing out flyers that warn of United Nations plots to take over America or let us know—without room for doubt—that the current President is really Osama bin-Laden’s godson.

We probably don’t believe Englishman David Icke when he says that

“Thousands of years ago, the reptilian beings [from the constellations Orion, Sirius, and Draco] intervened on planet Earth and began interbreeding with humans.“

We might be a little skeptical when the “Vigilant Citizen” website tells us that

“Astana [Kazakhstan] is the first capital being built in the 21st century and it perfectly represents where the world is headed…Backed by billions of petrodollars, the city is being built from scratch in a remote and deserted area of the Asian steppes. The result is astonishing: a futuristic occult capital, embracing the New World Order while celebrating the most ancient religion known to man: Sun Worship.”

However, far too many of us believe groups such as the Recreational Fishing Alliance when they publish similarly fictional statements, such as

“the term "ecosystem-based fishery management" is so broad and indefinable that such a requirement under federal law would only lead to vast confusion within the fisheries management process, and eventually pave the way for new environmental lawsuits.

"’Pew Charitable Trusts wants ecosystem protections put into the federal fisheries law, that way they've got a legal argument to sue and settle for increased fisheries restrictions,’ said RFA executive director Jim Donofrio. ‘Under such a nebulous ecosystem definition, Pew and their partners would then have a legal challenge to close down any recreational fishery they choose by claiming the need to protect sea lice, spearing, oyster toads, undersea corals, even jellyfish.’”

and

“Congress reauthorized the federal fisheries law in 2006 by incorporating ridiculous, empty-headed logic pushed by environmentalist organizations…”

But I’ll let you in on a secret that the conspiracy theorists out at the fringe of the angling community don’t want you to know:  Many of the most reviled enviros fish—a lot.  Their love for the sport is what got many of them into the fish-protection business in the first place. 

They know how important healthy fish stocks are to anglers for the very simple reason that they’re anglers themselves.

And that troubles our local Neanderthals, who have spent most of the last decade or two fighting for their imaginary “right” to ignore scientific advice and overfish whatever stocks they might choose.  The sparse gray matter that resides beneath their thick and bony brows is sufficient to make them realize that if anglers and enviros ever got together to make common cause, the days of overfishing and overfished stocks will be over.

So they have tried to poison the waters, and alienate anglers from the environmental community.  And they have met with a lot of success.

At first glance, it seems hard to believe that a very small group of people, with limited financial resources, should have been so successful in turning the angling community against those who should be its most effective allies. 

However, if you look a little closer, you’ll see that the cave-dwellers had help from some very smart people.

And that’s the enviros themselves.

Who, for very bright people, occasionally do some incredibly dumb things, which provide the “more dead fish for us” crowd (yes, another borrowed Ted Williams phrase) all the ammunition they to wage a successful fight for the hearts and minds of the angling community.

It started back in the late ‘90s, when a number of the environmental organizations came up with the concept of marine reserves.  The idea was to close off about 20% of the ocean to consumptive activities, and that included recreational fishing.  Not even catch and release angling would be allowed.

That got a lot of anglers—including myself—pretty upset, particularly because the enviros came out of the box swinging, without giving anglers—who stood to lose quite a bit—a meaningful chance to weigh in on the idea and offer suggestions that would close areas to truly harmful activities without cutting the legs out from under recreational fishermen.

For example, outlawing bottom fishing in selected areas could protect Pacific rockfish without hurting anglers who fish for the billfish and tuna that swim a couple of hundred feet above the bottom that rockfish call home. 

Using rockfish as an excuse to close areas to all fishing—including catch and release for pelagic species—didn’t do anything but piss anglers off.

And that was a foolish and shortsighted thing to do, because it gave the troglodytes a new lease on life.  Instead of sinking quietly into some dustbin of intellectual evolution, they found a new niche that let them continuously crow about environmentalists hating anglers and wanting to force fishermen off of the water.

After anglers heard enough of such comments, they began to accept them as true.

Even though the throwbacks only spoke for themselves, and not for the greater angling community, the enviros made few serious efforts to reach out to the mainstream angler.   A few years ago, Josh Reichert, head of all environmental programs at the Pew Charitable Trusts, agreed to an interview with Sport Fishing Magazine.  When asked how he viewed the angling community, Reichert said simply

“I would assume that most [anglers] are [conservationists] and, if asked, the majority of weekend anglers would say that the resource should be managed in ways that keep it healthy. In that sense, I think there is a conservation ethic among a large percent of recreational fishermen.

“…There are certainly large numbers of anglers who, if organized effectively, could be a significant force for conservation.“

Yet, although he acknowledged that anglers could be “a significant force for conservation,” when asked about efforts to do outreach to improve his organization’s image in the angling community, he effectively dismissed the notion, saying

“There are a few people and organizations that have a vested  interest in creating these false perceptions and are likely to continue to do so no matter what we do or say. If  anyone takes the trouble to read the materials we make available, which go to great pains to explain what we're doing in the world, it will become very clear what we are doing and what we are not…

We have staff members in numerous places around the United States who interact constantly with both recreational and commercial fishermen. There's a lot of contact on the ground, and our positions on these issues have been published in hundreds of opinion editorials, letters to the editor and responses to media questions over the years. I don't think the problem is lack of outreach. Rather, it is the concerted effort of some fishing organizations to simply distort what we do…

“There's only so much we can do to set the record straight. If some people want to continue to insist that there's something Machiavellian going on about what we're doing or that we're trying to disguise our "real intentions," the best we can do is to be absolutely transparent about our work and then get on with the job of preventing overfishing and rebuilding populations that are so critical to both the commercial and recreational fishing industries.”

At the time, that struck me as a pretty foolish position, and it still does.  If you stop and think about it few, if any, major environmental laws have ever been passed without the support of at least some sector of the sporting community.  And that includes the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act.

So if you’re involved in salt water fisheries management, and you want to see a strong Magnuson Act, it would make sense to reach out to sportsmen--which means recreational fishermen.

The enviros were finally starting to do a little bit better job on outreach—when another incredibly dumb move down in the Gulf of Mexico made things worse than they had been before.

Anyone who follows salt water fisheries issues knows knows that red snapper management down in the Gulf is a mess.  It’s nobody’s fault, really—managing recovering stocks is a tough thing to do, unpopular restrictions are needed to get the job done and anglers—egged on by the primitives—tend to criticize management before they understand it.

The stock was overfished, and continued overfishing was hampering recovery.  So when the enviros decided to favor the commercial and charter fishing sectors—which have relatively few members and thus are fairly easy to manage—over the private recreational fishermen, it probably made sense in the red snapper context.

However, from the perspective of broad, long-term strategy, alienating the largest, wealthiest and most politically active sector in the Gulf of Mexico made no sense at all.  Neither did giving the cave-dwellers another reason to beat the “anti-angling” drum.  But the enviros did it anyway…

In the end, both anglers and enviros have failed to deal with one another rationally.

It’s time for all of us to clean up our acts.

Anglers have to start using the brains they were born with, and abandon knee-jerk reactions every time the enviros tell them to kill fewer fish.

And the enviros have to realize, at the policymaking level, that the size, passion and political influence of the angling community makes us both valuable allies and dangerous enemies.  Too valuable—and too dangerous—to ignore.

Both sides can only profit from sincere efforts to reach out to one another and build a meaningful alliance.

We’re always going to disagree about some things, but that’s OK.  I’ve been married for nearly 33 years, and love my wife more today than on our wedding day, if any such thing is possible.  Yet, at times, we don’t see eye to eye.  We even exchange sharp words.  But we remain inextricably bound.

So anglers and enviros can probably share the occasional harsh word, too…

Last fall, I had the chance to fish with a couple of folks from Pew’s U.S. ocean program, aboard the boat of a mutual friend.  They were enthusiastic, capable anglers, who would never want to abandon their sport. 

Enviros can be hardcase anglers.  I have spent time with them, and know this to be true.

A couple of years ago Rich Landers, an outdoor editor for the The [Spokane] Spokesman-Review said

“Now, more than ever, a sportsman who is not an environmentalist is a fool.”

I have looked out onto the landscape, and then into my heart, and know this, too, to be true.

Because in the end, most anglers are enviros, although they usually won't admit it, not even to themselves.

We want healthy fish stocks, clean water, enough forage fish and adequate habitat, both for ourselves and for generations yet unborn, people who we will never know, but who deserve them all the same.

What enviro wants anything more—or will settle for anything less?

Ted Williams ended his Field & Stream piece by observing

“Winston Churchill’s hatred of communism was virtually unrivaled in Europe or America. He defined communists as the lowest ‘criminal class’ and ‘baboons’ who pursued ‘sub-human goals.’ So all who love fish and wildlife should recall Churchill’s words when he was scolded about England’s alliance with Stalin: ‘I have only one purpose, the destruction of Hitler, and my life is much simplified thereby. If Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.’’

He suggested that if Churchill and Stalin could set aside their differences to promote the common good, sportsmen and enviros should be able to do the same.

It’s hard to disagree.

WAVE 1 WOES

There’s a lot going on in the fisheries management world these days.

Some things, such as the collapse of Gulf of Maine cod or the reauthorization of the Magnuson Act, are truly important events which will resonate well into the future.

But lost between them and some slightly lesser 

proceedings, such as the fight to rebuild the flagging striped bass stock or the ongoing red snapper debate in the Gulf of Mexico, lies a largely overlooked effort to change the black sea bass season in the Mid-Atlantic.

Although the matter has largely flown beneath the radar, going unnoticed by those not personally involved in the fishery, it has implications that could affect us all.

The Mid-Atlantic black sea bass fishery isn’t very large.  

Anglers were allotted 2.26 million pounds of fish this year, to be shared by fishermen in every state between Massachusetts and North Carolina.  That’s not really a lot of fish, less than one-third of the 7 million pounds of both scup and summer flounder that is doled out to anglers in the same group of states.

The stock, once badly overfished, now sits right at its biomass target, and anglers generally land about all of the fish they are given.  Landings were around 71% of the recreational harvest limit in 2011, more than double—250% of the limit—in 2012 and 108% of the limit in 2013.

So it’s pretty clear that any new angling effort is going to have an impact on those already harvesting the stock.

Federal managers have imposed seemingly reasonable harvest restrictions, with a 15-fish bag limit, 12 ½-inch minimum size and a split season that runs from May 15 to September 18, closes for a month, and then runs from October 18 through the end of the year.  However, fishing effort and landings are not distributed evenly along the coast; black sea bass are a more important fish toward the northern end of their range, so the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission has imposed state-specific restrictions that keep one region from dominating the fishery.

Here in New York, our season doesn’t begin until July 15, and runs for the rest of the year.  Our bag limit is only 8 fish and they must meet a larger-than-federal 13-inch minimum size.  And at that, we’re sort of fortunate; neighboring Connecticut’s season get’s off to an earlier start, on June 21, and also lasts ‘til the end of the year, but in exchange, Connecticut anglers may only take 3 13-inch fish home on any one trip between June 21 and August 31.

On the other hand, New York’s regulations aren’t as good as they seem.  Although the regular season doesn’t begin until July 15, party boats participating in the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council’s Research Set-Aside Program can begin fishing whenever they want to, which as a practical matter seems to be the beginning of May, and they hit Long Island’s artificial reefs pretty hard.  By the time that the taxpayers who shelled out the cash for those reefs get a shot at the fish in July, the party boats have already been fishing for more than two months and have cleaned off most of the large fish—and most of the merely legal ones—forcing anglers who want to seriously target sea bass out into federal waters, where some of the wrecks and patches of natural hard bottom still hold good concentrations of fish.

Of course, fishing in federal waters mean that federal rules apply, so the same anglers who had to wait until July 15 to start fishing also lose another month in September and October.  Yes, they could fish on the state reefs but…the same party boats that looted them in the spring are still there, gathering up whatever remains.

Now, the same party boats, cooperating with their counterparts elsewhere on the coast, are trying to convince the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council to open the black sea bass season in “Wave 1”—that’s January and February—and it appears that they’re going to get their way.

That’s not a good thing.

To begin with, nobody knows what people catch at that time of year.  Neither the old Marine Recreational Fishing Statistical Survey, nor its modern replacement, the Marine Recreational Information Program, samples landings in the mid-Atlantic states at that time of year. 

So we have no idea what was landed in the past, when the winter fishery was open before, and we will have no idea what will be landed in the future, if the fishery is opened again.

The Mid-Atlantic Council is trying to get around that problem by requiring all participants in the fishery to electronically report their catch, but there’s a nasty rumor out there—you may have even heard it—that fishermen sometimes lie. 

And given that the only boats allowed to participate in the fishery will be for-hire vessels, who have a clear economic interest in keeping the winter fishery open while not seeing their traditional summer/fall fishery affected at all—well, the incentive to underreport the size and number of their catch is certainly there.

Penalties for improper reporting may not prove effective.  

Here in New York, we recently saw participants in the Mid-Atlantic Council’s Research Set-Aside Program—another program that grants special harvest privileges, not available to the general public, to a handful of participating boats—plead guilty to using RSA as a cover while illegally landing hundreds of pounds of summer flounder, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, to equally larcenous dealers.  They did so for years, even though electronic reporting was required for fishermen and dealers alike.

And just a couple of years ago, on February 18. 2012, we saw 38 passengers on the Jamaica, a party boat operating out of Brielle, New Jersey, given summonses for harvesting a total of 819 out-of-season black sea bass.  The Jamaica’s captain said that he knew that passengers were keeping a few illegal fish, but also said that

“I didn’t think it was that many. And I’m not getting paid by the state of New Jersey to take fish out of people’s buckets.“

If captains have that sort of attitude, how can we believe that their trip reports will be reliable?

And that’s just one of the issues.

The biologists who make up the Council’s Summer Flounder, Scup and Black Sea Bass Monitoring Committee noted that

“With a limited quota however, the higher Wave 1 catch will have to be balanced by less catch later in the year.“

Which, from a management standpoint, is the way it should be, but as anglers, it means that we, in the recreational sector, are going to have to pay—in terms of season, bag limit and size limit—for the fish caught by the charter sector during Wave 1.  The Monitoring Committee addressed that by saying

“While the recreational specifications package will analyze the question in greater detail, the approximate range of impacts can be estimated.  The 2013 annual average weight for black sea bass was 1.91 pounds.  Assuming that weight for landings and half that weight for discards, and a 15% discard mortality rate, the mortality rate in pounds was approximately 139,000 pounds.  If the assumed weight was higher for an offshore fishery (50%), then the mortality rate in pounds was approximately 208,000 pounds.  Given the current recreational harvest limit (2,259,715 pounds), this would mean that a 6%-9% reduction would be needed later in the year to offset this additional catch.  Using the catch reduction tables used for recent specifications, this could translate into reducing the season during Wave 5 for example by approximately 10-15 days.“

Here in New York, if the Monitoring Committee is right, that could tear another half-month out of the heart of our season.  In reality, it could be much worse, because the boats fishing in Wave 1 often limit out—15 fish per person—and catch a lot of the really big males, fish that might weigh anywhere between 3 and over 7 pounds (compared to the average fish we catch, that weigh less than two).

That’s not fair.  And, according to the Magnuson Act, fairness matters.

It says so in National Standard Four, which states

“(4) Conservation and management measures shall not discriminate between residents of different States. If it becomes necessary to allocate or assign fishing privileges among various United States fishermen, such allocation shall be (A) fair and equitable to all such fishermen; (B) reasonably calculated to promote conservation; and (C) carried out in such manner that no particular individual, corporation, or other entity acquires an excessive share of such privileges.  [emphasis added]”

I’d hate to be the one to explain to a judge how granting special harvest privileges to the charter fishing sector, and making the recreational fishing sector shoulder the lion’s share of the conservation burden—in terms of shorter seasons and, perhaps, smaller and less abundant black sea bass during the regular season is “fair and equitable,” but let’s be honest here—no one is going to sue.  There’s not a single organization in the northeast—defined as anything  north of Delaware Bay—that will place the interests of the individual angler above those of the for-hire fleet.

Which means that we’re going to get screwed…

That’s not good, but the bigger and more important question is whether the black sea bass are going to take it on the chin, and what the implications might be for other stocks.

The Monitoring Committee report isn’t very reassuring in that regard, as it seems that it came to the conclusion that a Wave 1 opening wouldn’t hurt the stock based on very little hard data and a lot of best case assumptions.

For example, it noted that

“…anecdotal reports (there is no Wave 1 size information since only numbers of fish are recorded on recreational for-hire VTRs) suggest that black sea bass caught offshore during Wave 1 are relatively large fish that might be the primary spawning males once they come inshore. “

What if the concerns about killing the big males are valid?  

Given the lack of reliable data with respect to Wave 1 landings, and the fact that black sea bass are a data-poor species without a valid stock assessment, isn’t at least a little precaution a good idea?

If you’re the Monitoring Committee, the answer is “probably not,” as they brushed off this concern by saying

“ While it is theoretically possible that this could have an impact on spawning behavior, there is no available information to suggest that previous Wave 1 fisheries had a detrimental impact on spawning…“

Of course, “there is no available information to suggest that” the Wave 1 fishery is benign, either…

The Monitoring Committee also brushed off concerns about high levels of dead discards occurring in the winter fishery, which is prosecuted in deep water where barotrauma is—or at least should be—a real concern

“If the anecdotal reports of the fish being larger offshore are correct, then discarding may be lower during offshore fishing.  While most recreational discard information is self-reported  and therefore data quality concerns exist, in 2013 the overall black sea bass discard rate was 87% (MRIP query), while Table 8 (VTR data) suggests that Wave 1 discard rates in the for-hire fishery are much lower when Wave 1 is open to black sea bass fishing…”

You’ll note that they’re depending on VTRs—Vessel Trip Reports—for estimates of Wave 1 discards.  When you read that, never forget that discards aren’t closely counted on a busy black sea bass trip, and that the numbers in the VTRs are supplied by the party boat captains, including captains like the one on  the Jamaica, who wasn’t aware that his passengers had killed 819 illegal black sea bass on a single trip.

I’m not a trained biologist, but that doesn’t sound like reliable data to me…

Anyway, on this coming Tuesday, the Mid-Atlantic Council will decide whether a relative handful of party boat operators, belonging to one sector of the fishery, can be granted special harvest privileges and pass most of the burdens associated with that grant to another sector who will get nothing but heartburn out of the deal.

The Council will decide whether to allow the harvest of a data-poor species, which has not been successfully assessed, at a time of year when there is no objective survey of recreational harvest.

In a meat-oriented fishery where breaking the rules is far from unknown.

I’ve praised the Mid-Atlantic Council more than once in this blog, because they usually do the right thing.

But in this case, they’re maddeningly wrong, and making little effort to question whether opening the winter fishery is the right thing to do.

And that’s a scary thing.

Because doing the wrong thing the first time is hard, but it gets easier as you go along.

I’d hate to see the most successful regional fishery management council in the country develop bad habits.

But with black sea bass, they’re certainly headed in that direction.

GULF OF MAINE COD--WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

About a week ago, the National Marine Fisheries Service’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center came out with a report that shocked just about everyone. 

After conducting an unscheduled assessment of the Gulf of Maine cod stock—the next assessment had been planned for 2015—biologists at the Science Center have determined that the cod stock has continued to decline, despite the massive harvest cuts imposed a couple of years ago.

Cod have been in bad straits for a while now, with the 2011 stock assessment finding the total abundance between 13% and 18% of the number needed for a healthy and sustainable stock.

That’s pretty bad.

But the most recent assessment—which has not yet been peer-reviewed—suggests that Gulf of Maine cod have fallen to 3%--maybe 4%--of sustainable levels.  And since that supposedly sustainable level is just 40% of the size of an unfished stock, the current population is probably less than 2% of what it was when John Cabot explored the coast around the year 1500.

That’s very bad.

Let’s put this in context.

When South Atlantic red snapper abundance fell to 3% of unfished levels, the folks at the South Atlantic Fishery Management Council shut down the whole fishery.  Then they proposed closing all waters between 98 and 300 feet in depth, from North Carolina to Florida, to all bottom fishing—recreational and commercial—because red snapper bycatch alone would have risked overfishing the stock.  (A later assessment indicated that the snapper’s situation wasn’t quite so dire, so the closure never happened and a very small directed fishery actually reopened this summer.)

That’s for a fish at 3% of its potential abundance.

What do you do for a fish at less than 2% of its potential abundance?

After all, the only numbers smaller than 2% are one percent and zero…

No other important fish stock in the United States has sunk so far, so the obvious question is:  Where will we go from here?

Predictably, one of the first reactions of the New England fishermen was to deny reality.  The bad news came out last Friday, and early this week, Vito Giacolone, the policy director for the Northeast Seafood Coalition, was already telling the New England Fishery Management Council that

‘“This is BS”

He was pretty upset that the Science Center would actually show initiative and investigate the health of the stock without getting instructions from the Council, and told the assembled members that

“Nobody looked at what you wanted them to look at.  They looked at what they wanted to look at.“

That kind of attitude may help to explain how the stock got into bad shape in the first place…

Since the new assessment hasn’t been peer-reviewed yet, it’s just possible that its critics are right, and Gulf of Maine cod are only severely overfished, and not teetering on the brink of commercial extinction.

But let’s be cautious for once, and consider the possibility that the folks from the Science Center are right.

Should the fishery be closed?

Pure logic says that it should be.  There aren’t many adult cod left, and very few young fish are recruiting into the stock, so it’s not clear where the next generation of spawners will come from. 

All indicators of abundance are at historic lows.

Russell Brown, deputy science and research director of the Northeast Fisheries Science Center, has already called the situation “dire” and noted that

“I think our findings would lead to recommendations that we need to be very careful about subjecting the stock to any additional fishing mortality.”

When Newfoundland’s cod stock found itself in the same dismal place back in 1992, that fishery was shut down.  It has only recently begun to show some signs of rebuilding.  

Twenty years after that fishery was closed, abundance is just 10% of what it was in the 1980s, which was already well below where it was in Cabot’s time.

And there is no indication of when, or if, the Newfoundland fishery will ever open again.

So it appears that the New England fishermen have dug themselves a pretty deep hole.  The question now is whether—and how—they can climb out of it.

Just shutting down the cod fishery—a major step in itself—may not be enough.

New England groundfish comprise a “mixed-stock” fishery in which cod, haddock, various hakes and a plethora of flatfish species—along with some other creatures such as Acadian redfish—can sometimes all be caught in just a few tows of a net.  In such a situation, some cod bycatch is inevitable.

Given how low cod stocks seem to have fallen, could that bycatch alone be enough to doom a recovery?

If the answer is yes, can both the cod and the New England trawl fishery survive?  

Or must one be sacrificed if either is to endure into the next decade?

And if the latter proves true, which one are we more willing to lose?

Larger closed areas might give managers a chance to salvage both the cod and the groundfish fishery.  If the use of trawls—and all other gear that might catch a codfish—is banned in areas where cod reside, the stock might get a chance to rebuild, while allowing fishermen to still target scallops, lobster, redfish and anything else that might be caught without killing significant numbers of cod.  (Although they shouldn’t be permitted to switch effort to herring; they’re the cod’s preferred forage, and we want to have codfish, they have to be able to eat.)

Unfortunately, as fellow blogger Rip Cunningham noted a couple of weeks ago, fishermen have already convinced the New England Fishery Management Council to seriously consider opening the current closed areas, precisely because they host decent numbers of fish. 

Based on New England’s long history of mismanaging all of its fisheries, we have to wonder whether any semblance of rationality will prevail.

Will the fishermen finally admit the need to protect a dwindling resource, or will they engage in one last buffalo hunt?

Will they finally realize that their only chance at salvation lies in embracing the science and protecting the remnants of the fish that gave birth to New England?  Or will they seek the hollow promises of Doc Hastings’ “Empty Oceans Act,” and drive the cod, and probably themselves, into the hell of commercial extinction?

Only time will tell.

As a boy, I grew up in New England.  I hooked my first cod 54 years ago.  Since then, I’ve caught my share of fish, drained my share of beers in fishermen’s bars, and talked with my share of fishermen.

I’m no stranger to cod, or the people who catch them.

And so I harbor grave doubts about the futures of both.

SEDUCTIVE--BUT NOT SATISFACTORY

A few weeks ago, I attended a New York Marine Resources Advisory Council meeting.  Striped bass were on the agenda.  Quite a few anglers were in the audience, and a number of them chose to address the Council, to let them know that they were concerned about the steady decline of the bass population.

One older gentleman, who has been haunting the striper coast for a decade or two longer than I have, suggested that along with reducing harvest, fisheries managers should consider raising bass in hatcheries, so that there would be more for anglers to catch.

I didn’t say anything, but inside, I started to cringe.

It doesn’t really matter what the species is, or what coast you’re on.  When fish run into problems someone, somewhere, is going to talk about supplementing natural reproduction with hatchery fish.

Here on Long Island, out in the town of East Hampton, they wanted to open a winter flounder hatchery to augment that crashed.  The state Department of Environmental Conservation wisely kiboshed the idea.

Down in the Gulf of Mexico, hatcheries are an accepted means of augmenting numbers of red drum and speckled trout, to spare anglers from the burden of regulations needed to conserve a natural population when spawning success declines.

It sounds like a wonderful idea.  Replace—or at least supplement—natural reproduction with hatchery fish, and we won’t have to worry about such things as overfishing, biomass thresholds or the state of the spawning stock.  We can just keep killing a bunch of fish, and if they start to get scarce, we can just dump another load from the hatchery truck, just like folks dump trout into the warm and weedy (and generally unsuitable) ponds on Long Island, where most are caught by anglers before they can succumb to the conditions and die.

Hatchery fish could relieve us of our obligation to be responsible stewards of the resource and, after all, who doesn’t want to be relieved of responsibility?

We could go out and kill fish without guilt.

And that is, from a philosophical and ethical standpoint, why hatcheries are a bad thing.  Hatcheries represent a failure of fisheries management; they evidence the abandonment of the traditional concepts of stewardship in favor of the artificial production of what Ted Williams—my favorite conservation writer—refers to as “rubber fish.”

Hatchery fish are a poor substitute for native fish.  More than anything else, they remind us of what we have lost.

In fresh water, we have degraded so many waters through pollution, impoundment, taking out water for irrigation, introducing non-native species, “flood-control” projects, etc. that many native species can no longer successfully reproduce and compete in the lakes and rivers where they once thrived.  In such cases, where the damage is so severe that it is practically irreversible, hatcheries may represent the only opportunity to have anything to fish for at all.

In salt water, though, robust, wild-spawned fish are still generally the rule, and native fish stocks have not slipped below the point of no return.  There, hatcheries are the serpent in the garden, who whispers seductively in our ears, telling us that virtue and responsibility are not really needed; accept the hatcheries, and we can escape regulation and indulge our desire to kill ‘til the cooler is full.

So far—mostly—we’ve rejected such blandishments on the Atlantic.  They have had only a limited impact the Gulf.  However, on the Pacific coast, where impoundments, irrigation and overfishing have combined to destroy native fish populations for the better part of a century, hatcheries have long been a fact of life, pumping out many, many billions (yes, billions) of “rubber” trout and salmon.

Folks concerned with the resource have long criticized such programs for diluting genetic lines that had suited particular “runs” of salmon for their natal rivers, but now it appears that even using local broodstock is no substitute for natural reproduction.

A recent study, which resulted from a collaboration of biologists from Oregon State University and from NOAA Fisheries’ Northwest Fisheries Science Center, has determined that even when the broodstock are local fish, the hatchery-produced offspring have only half the reproductive success of truly wild fish when they attempt to spawn in a natural setting.

That doesn’t matter in a strict put-and-take fishery, such as we find in many urban and suburban trout waters, because the man-made fish (usually rainbow trout) that are dumped into such troubled ponds and creeks aren’t expected to reproduce.  However, in a salt water situation—or in Pacific salmon rivers and healthy freshwater streams—hatchery fish will survive until spawning season, when they will compete with naturally spawned fish for spawning sites, mates and other resources.

In such situations, the reduced reproductive success of hatchery fish can impact the productivity of the stock.

The Oregon study said

“Our analyses clearly show that even hatcheries using local- and predominantly wild-origin broodstocks create fish with lower reproductive success than their wild-born counterparts…The reduced fitness of hatchery fish was consistently documented despite differences in geographic location, study species, hatchery practices, and analytical approaches. Therefore, the reduced [relative reproductive success] of early-generation hatchery fish is likely a general phenomenon...”

Even before that study was completed, hatchery fish were recognized as a potential threat to wild stocks.  Early this year, a federal judge in Oregon decided that hatchery fish in the Sandy River posed a threat to endangered native salmon and steelhead, and limited their introduction.  Similar lawsuits have been brought elsewhere, with various degrees of success.

To date, most of the studies, and most of the lawsuits, related to hatchery fish have dealt with salmon and trout.  However, there is no reason to believe that other fish would be immune from similar effects.

The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, on the other hand, believes that stocking red drum is a good thing, saying that

“All evidence in Texas at this stage weighs heavily in favor of the fact that stocking hatchery fish has enhanced Texas red drum.”

However, it also notes that such stocking

“serves as a tool used by TPWD to manage the marine fishery along the Texas coast to ensure that harvest levels are sustained and stocks are replenished.”

Apparently there, as in too many fresh waters, stocking is merely a way to let people keep killing fish, and assuring that “harvest levels are sustained” without the need for burdensome regulations.

There’s no evidence that the Texas folks did a comprehensive study on the impact of the hatchery drum on the reproductive success of native fish.

Personally, I have no desire to catch “rubber stripers,” “rubber flounder” or “rubber” anything else.

Here on the coast, even our weaker stocks can be restored, with a little sacrifice and a lot of good management.  We don’t need stainless steel tanks and piped-in water.

We can still bring fish populations back the old-fashioned way—by giving fish a chance to do what they’ve done for millennia—producing young which have been tested by predators, prey and the ocean itself from the moment they left the egg behind.

 

We can still hold a bit of wildness in our hands every time we venture out to the shore, a creature of flesh and blood and bone that has proved its ability to survive the worst that nature can throw its way.

Something that brings us back a step closer to what we once were, and reminds us of what we traded away for the comforts and security of civilization.

We should never let hatcheries seduce us and take that away.