DUMPING ON THE DATA

I’ve just finished reading the summary of the recent joint meeting of the Mid-Atlantic Fisheries Management Council’s and Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Summer Flounder, Scup and Black Sea Bass Advisory Panels.

The panels are dominated by members of the commercial and for-hire fishing industries, and when recreational measures are being discussed, as was the case at the recent meeting, the for-hire industry dominates the discussion.

That being the case, the summary can almost be written before the meeting takes place.  

Advisors will find that the bag limit needs to be higher, the size limit needs to be lower and the season needs to be longer.  All those changes are justified because the scientists are undercounting the fish in the water and that National Marine Fisheries Service is overcounting the number of fish that are caught.

At least, that’s what the advisors usually say…

The December 2014 Advisory Panel meeting pretty well stuck to the script.  NMFS’ recreational data-gathering program got dumped on again. 

While there’s certainly room for improvement, some of the comments made were so out of line that it seemed like a good time to take a look at the issue.

Complaints fell into two broad categories.  There were those who criticized the Marine Recreational Information Program (“MRIP”) itself, and those who had an issue with the estimates that it produced.

It’s pretty clear that the latter group of critics either attacks any results that they find inconvenient, or just doesn’t understand how the survey works.

Or both.

This comes out in the meeting summary, which notes that

“Advisors agreed that MRIP catch estimates for black sea bass are very problematic, with some comments noting that the numbers are very far from reality and should not be taken seriously or used for management. Specific examples were cited, including MRIP estimates that describe New York and Massachusetts private boats as harvesting 1,250,000 lb of black sea bass through wave 4 in 2014, which is more than all party/charter and commercial landings combined for black sea bass in the entire U.S. fore that same time period. Several advisors agreed that this was highly improbable or impossible…”

If you actually take the time to put the data referred to in context, it doesn’t seem out of the ordinary.  Nor, standing alone, is it particularly relevant.  It must be viewed as part of a whole.

Querying the NMFS data on recreational landings  quickly reveals that there is nothing anomalous about the private boat numbers for either state. 

Preliminary 2014 estimates show that New York’s private boats landed about 455,000 pounds of black sea bass through the end of August 2014.  That’s actually less than the 511,000 pounds that they landed during the same period in 2013; 2012 landings for the same period were a little smaller, about 293,000 pounds. 

However, it should be noted that the “Percent Standard Error” used to measure the precision of the estimate was about 61% in 2012, about twice as high as the 34.7% in 2013 and 30.4% in 2014, meaning that when the error inherent in the calculation is taken into account, the New York private boat landings in 2012, 2013 and 2014 were not very different in  size.

We see about the same thing in Massachusetts, with the 635,000 pounds of black sea bass landed through August 2012 not too much below the 795,000 pounds landed through August 2014.  The 292,000 pounds landed through August 2013 was significantly less.  However, it should also be noted that anglers took significantly fewer trips targeting black sea bass in 2013, which could explain a lot of the difference.

But there is another, bigger reason that some advisors’ efforts to play “Gotcha!” by disputing isolated bits of data should be ignored.  MRIP just isn’t intended to work with such small parts of the whole.  It is designed to provide estimates at a relatively high level, and the more detailed the analysis, the less precise those estimates become. 

Thus, if we examine black sea bass landings in the entire Northeast (Maine through Connecticut) for the years 2012-2014, we find a Percent Standard Error that ranges from 13% to 22%.  A similar examination for the Mid-Atlantic (New York through North Carolina) would return PSEs of 14.7% to 18% (PSEs for the entire Atlantic coast are even lower, between 10% and 12%, but can’t be used in this example, as black sea bass north of Cape Hatteras are managed separately from those farther south). 

Such precision is more than adequate for managing harvest.

But when we try to manage at a finer scale, precision deteriorates pretty quickly. 

Break harvest estimates down from the regional to the state level, and PSEs for the same three years can be as low as 17.1% (Rhode Island, 2013) or as high as 86.4% (New Hampshire, 2012).  PSEs over 50% are generally deemed to be worthless.

Break state landings down into two-month “waves” and the PSEs spread out, from 12.6% (Delaware, November/December, 2013) to 100.2% (Virginia, May/June, 2013).

Try to break that down even farther, into sectors of the angling community, and the precision gets even worse, with PSEs ranging from 11.9% (Rhode Island, September/October, 2013, Party Boats) to 120.9% (Rhode Island, July/August, 2014, Shore Fishermen).

Thus, it is clear that those who try to use very small pieces of data, broken down into state, sector and two-month wave, to impeach a coastwide landing estimate don’t have much of an argument.

Instead of demonstrating that the estimate in question is faulty, all they are proving is that they understand neither how MRIP works nor the statistical framework that MRIP is built on.

Folks will say almost anything to kill a few more fish. 

An advisor who operates a boat out of Maryland is attacking MRIP data from here in New York, even though he doesn’t fish here and doesn’t have a clue about New York’s private boat black sea bass fishery (although I will grant him that the disparity between private boat and for-hire catch might not be as great as MRIP depicts; the for-hire landings could well be undercounted). 

Of course, then he goes on to rhapsodize about times gone by when there was only

“a [very small] size limit that forced sea bass to start spawning young and a recreational release ratio that ran about 30%”

which pretty much tells you where the guy is coming from. 

On the other hand, the folks who criticize the recreational data-gathering program do have some very valid points.

NMFS recognizes that, and is working very hard to make sure that the MRIP program is a significant improvement over what went before. 

Anglers who really want to understand how MRIP works, and avoid the kind of foolish mistakes that appear in the Advisory Panel summary, are well advised to visit the NMFS webpage at http://www.st.nmfs.noaa.gov/recreational-fisheries/in-depth/outreach-resources/index, which links to enough information on MRIP, how it works and work still to be done, to keep anglers occupied on many cold winter nights.

Anyone who don’t want to understand, and just wants to make noise and kill fish, need to do nothing at all.

In fact, the less that sort does, the better…

THE FISHERIES MANAGERS' DILEMMA

Managing fish is a tough thing to do.

They live in an alien world that makes them hard to count with any sort of accuracy.  Countless factors, many still unknown, affect their survival, their movements and their spawning success.

Then there are the people who catch those fish, legally and illegally.  Some of their catch is easy to count, particularly that portion attributable to the relatively small number of commercial fishermen, who are generally required to report their harvest in near real time.  But the rest of the catch, the part that’s caught by hundreds of thousands, and often millions, of individual anglers who land only a few fish each, in countless ports scattered along hundreds of miles of coast, can only be estimated.

And once you have some idea who those people are, you have to design regulations  that will keep them from killing too many fish, without knowing exactly how many of them will actually go fishing, how many times they will go or what they will fish for each time they set out.

Add a species of fish with an unusual life history and without a valid stock assessment, and what do you get?

If you manage fish in along the mid-Atlantic coast, you get the black sea bass.

Next week, the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council and the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission will meet in a joint session, to propose regulations governing recreational black sea bass fishing in 2015.

It is likely to be a tense and difficult meeting.

In many ways, black sea bass represent a fisheries management success story.  The stock has been fully recovered, and fishermen have been catching more and larger sea bass than they have caught in a very long time.

That’s good.

But it’s also bad, because it leads to what Dick Brame, a long-time fisheries advocate who works for the Coastal Conservation Association, calls the “Bubba Effect.”

That is, a guy goes out and catches a bunch of fish, and when he comes back from the trip, he tells his buddy Bubba all about it.  So Bubba goes out and catches his own bunch of fish, comes home and calls his friends, and…

In the end, there are a lot more people chasing that kind of fish, just because there are a lot of them around and word of good fishing got out.  Managers didn’t expect such an increase in effort, catches soar far beyond what was expected and overfishing occurs.

So the next year, the managers tighten up the regulations to prevent overfishing from occurring again, and the anglers complain that there are so many fish around that they can’t keep them off their hooks, yet the managers are telling them to throw most of them back.

That’s pretty much what’s been happening with black sea bass for the past couple of years, and it looks like it’s going to happen, perhaps on an even larger scale, once again.  

Black sea bass have become so abundant that party boats that once fished only for fluke all summer long are now regularly scheduling sea bass trips in June, July and August, and private boats are doing much the same thing.

I’ve fished for black sea bass for quite a few years, and often had wrecks all to myself.  Now, I’m just about guaranteed to have company every time I go out, even when I fish on wrecks that lie a long way from the inlet.

The effort shift from fluke to black sea bass is striking and 

real; it probably doesn’t help that a lot of anglers have learned that they can have the best of both worlds if they drift their fluke baits close to the wrecks that the sea bass call home.

The upshot is that, as a result of the black sea bass’ newfound popularity, the National Marine Fisheries Service has estimated that anglers exceeded their Annual Catch Limit by nearly 30 percent in 2014.  All of the overage can be attributed to high landings levels in the states between Massachusetts and New Jersey.

So when the Council and ASMFC meet next week, they’re going to be looking at some pretty restrictive regulations in order to get rid of that overage.  Right now, it appears that regulations won’t change in federal waters or in state waters between Delaware and North Carolina. 

But in the states that contributed to the overage, the 2015 rules are going to hit pretty hard.  Right now, it’s not completely clear what those rules might be, but if the states fail to put in needed reductions, the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council’s Summer Flounder, Scup and Black Sea Bass Monitoring Committee is recommending coastwide rules that include a 3-fish bag limit, 14-inch minimum size and a season that runs only from July 15 to September 15.

That’s harsh, but if it’s any solace, think how much worse things would have been if the party boats had gotten their way last August, and the Council had allowed them to fish for black sea bass in January and February.  Since the catch for that special winter for-hire season was going to be deducted from what we could land during the regular black sea bass season, the rest of us might not have had any black sea bass season at all…

Even so, we can expect the party boats to howl when the new regulations are proposed.

We can already imagine what the complaints will be as the for-hires, their lawyers and the organizations that shill for the recreational fishing industry attack the science, the scientists and federal fisheries laws, claim that catch data is “fatally flawed” and, most particularly, ask why regulations need to be so restrictive when, out on the water, black sea bass seem to be everywhere.

The truth is, there really are a lot of black sea bass out there.

More particularly, there are a lot of black sea bass from the dominant 2011 year class out there, and those fish are going to be fully recruited into the fishery in 2015.

Not too long ago, I spoke with a biologist who was a member of the Monitoring Committee.  We were talking about black sea bass, and he told me that, in any year, the biggest factor that determines whether a big year class will be produced isn’t the initial spawning success, but rather whether water conditions out on the edge of the continental shelf, where the young-of-the-year fish spend their first winter, are conducive to the young fish’s survival.

In the warm winter of 2011-2012, conditions must have been pretty good, because 2011 produced a dominant year class.  

However, the Monitoring Committee report includes the following language

“The Committee notes that the 2011 year class of black sea bass is much larger than any other recent year class, and is contributing significantly to high availability in the northern states.  There has been no indication of high recruitment after 2011, and the Committee expects the 2011 year class to be fully recruited to the fishery by the spring of 2015.  The Committee noted that this year class is currently being fished down quickly, with no similarly large year classes coming in behind it.  [emphasis added]”

That leaves fishery managers impaled on the horns of a very large dilemma once the complaints start coming in.

Managers could yield to the folks who seek to increase short-term landings.  They can approach the Council’s Science and Statistics Committee, which sets the upper limit on harvest, and ask the SSC to consider replacing its current “constant harvest” management approach with something that will permit more of the 2011 year class to be killed. 

If the SSC agrees, 2015 regulations need not be as severe.

However, since the stock hasn’t produced a large year class since 2011, killing more fish now will merely be putting off the pain for a few years; if the 2011 year class is fished down, and no new year class comes in from behind to replace it, harsh regulations are going to be imposed anyway.  

And, by that time, the 2011 year class may be reduced so far that, even with strict regulation, the stock may struggle a while before it can recover.

On the other hand, managers can opt to protect the future of the fishery, and impose tough regulations today in the hope that there will still be enough fish remaining to produce a strong new year class a few years from now.  

However, if managers take that route, there’s no doubt that they will be subject to considerable vitriol by those people and organizations that consider large current harvests more important than the long-term health of fish populations.

It’s a no-win situation for fishery managers. 

Someone will criticize them no matter what they decide.

But I suspect that criticism will be a lot easier to take if they know in their hearts that they did the right thing, and guaranteed the black sea bass’ future.

NEXT STEPS FOR STRIPED BASS

It’s looking ever more likely that what once seemed like a modest yet meaningful win—the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s vote to reduce striped bass harvest last October—was even more modest than it first appeared.

ASMFC’s Striped Bass Management Board seemed to be acceding to public demands that landings be cut and a 1-fish bag limit be adopted.  However, it is now clear that at least some of those who voted that way were merely blowing smoke in the public’s face.  Now that the smoke has cleared a bit, they are ignoring the overwhelming public sentiment for a single-fish bag, and seeking ways to let folks kill additional fish, at least when those folks are fishing from for-hire vessels.

I discussed the matter at length in a recent post, and don’t intend to rehash it all here. 

It’s now time to start thinking of the next steps in the dance—where we go and what we do when Addendum IV to Amendment 6 of the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Striped Bass proves to be another failed state management effort, and we have to step in again to try to recover the striped bass population.

I know that a lot of folks are thinking about just throwing up their hands and leaving the fight.  After all, if the big angler turnout and overwhelming call for a 1-fish bag didn’t move mountains this time, why is there any hope that the next time will be any better?

I know that feeling pretty well.

After being involved in the fishery management process for a few decades, I know what it feels like to lose.

But, first of all, remember that anglers didn’t lose this round at ASMFC.  Its Striped Bass Management Board did what we wanted.  It’s the states’ management systems that are letting us down.

We are looking at new fishing mortality reference points that, in the long term, should do the bass good.

We defeated the Chesapeake Bay jurisdictions’ efforts to draw out the harvest cut over three years.

A lot of the Management Board members were and still are concerned with the integrity of the management plan and the management process.

And if our greatest worry does come to pass, and the striped bass stock fails to recover, we still have a good leg to stand on.

Right now, we need to be looking at Amendment 6 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Striped Bass, and more particularly, at Management Trigger 2, which reads

“If the Management Board determines that the biomass has fallen below the threshold in any given year, the board must adjust the striped bass management program to rebuild the biomass to the target level within [ten years].”

Because it is very likely that trigger will be tripped in a very few years.

Let’s start with a simple truth.

The biomass is probably below the threshold right now.

That’s a sobering thought, but the Draft Addendum IV to Amendment 6 to the Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Striped Bass included a chart (on page 11) which projected that the biomass would fall below threshold—that the stock would be technically overfished—this year.

As for next year, the Update of the Striped Bass Stock Assessment using Final 2012 Data noted that

“If the current fully-recruited [fishing mortality] (0.200) is maintained during 2013-2017, the probability of being below the [spawning stock biomass] reference point increases to 0.86 by 2015.  After 2016, the probability is expected to decline slightly…If the fully-recruited [fishing mortality] decreases to the current F_target (0.180) and is maintained during 2013-2017, the probability of being below the [spawning stock biomass] reference point reaches 0.77 by 2015 and declines thereafter… [emphasis added]”

Based on that finding, the striped bass is already behind the eight ball.

Regulations in place during 2012 will not change until 2015; although we don’t have fishing mortality rates for 2013 and 2014, there is no reason to assume that, absent regulatory changes, those rates will be at least equal to the F=0.200 of 2012. 

In practice, fishing mortality was almost certainly higher in 2013 than it was in 2012; total landings in 2012 were estimated at a little over 19,500,000 pounds, while in 2013, that estimate jumped to more than 24,300,000.  Taking a more fish from a decreasing biomass will inevitably cause the fishing mortality rate to spike. 

We don’t have final figures for 2014 yet, but preliminary numbers show even more reason to be concerned.  In the first eight months of 2012, anglers landed about 14,000,000 pounds of striped bass.  That number jumped to over 17,000,000 pounds in the first eight years of 2013, and increased again to nearly 18,500,000 in the first eight months of 2014. 

The greater part of the 2014 increase can be attributed to a big kill of the immature and barely legal 2011 year class down in Chesapeake Bay, but it’s still bad news, and very possibly takes us to the third scenario envisioned in the Update,

“If the current fully-recruited [fishing mortality] increases to F_threshold (0.219) and is maintained during 2013-2017, the probability of being below the [spawning stock biomass reference point reaches 0.93 by 2015 and declines thereafter.”

So given the trends in 2013 and 2014, there is an overwhelming likelihood that the stock will be overfished—below the spawning stock biomass threshold—next year.

Then, the only thing that needs to happen is for ASMFC to formally determine that there is a problem.

That may not happen right away.

Complete, benchmark striped bass stock assessments take place every five years.  Thus, we won’t see another one until late 2018, based on 2017 data.  That gives Addendum IV a long time to fail and adversely affect striped bass numbers.

However, ASMFC’s Striped Bass Technical Committee has historically conducted interim “turn-crank” assessments in nearly every year.  Such assessments are far less formal and detailed than the benchmark, and merely plug annual harvest data into the model from the benchmark assessment, in order to update the results.

ASMFC’s striped bass website page shows some sort of assessment, benchmark or interim, for the years 2000-2005, 2008, 2009, 2011 and 2013.  However, due to a demand that the Technical Committee produce biological reference points unique to Chesapeake Bay, there will probably not be sufficient manpower available to do one in 2015.

Thus, we should begin petitioning our ASMFC representatives and demanding that an interim, “turn-crank” assessment be done in 2016.  

We won’t be asking for great detail, just an estimate of the size of the spawning stock biomass (although an estimate of 2015 fishing mortality, with the new regulations in place, would also be useful). 

And if the Technical Committee determines that the spawning stock biomass has dropped below threshold, and that Management Trigger 2 has tripped, we must insist that managers put in place a rebuilding plan that will restore the spawning stock to target levels within ten years.

Such a rebuilding plan will not allow the maneuvering and loopholes that we see today.

Because in order to have mature, spawning fish in the biomass, you have to have small fish first, and they’ve been lacking lately.  The average for the Maryland young-of-the-year index over the past 10 years was 10.4, below the long-term average of 11.7.  

Management measures sufficient to restore the striped bass stock to target levels, and not merely prevent current overfishing, will probably have to be a lot stronger than what we’re seeing today.

The question, of course, is whether the states and ASMFC’s state-based management system is up to the task of putting such measures in place.

As we come to the end of the Addendum IV process, we already see it failing the resource and the public, as the politically-connected for-hire fleet in New Jersey, Rhode Island and elsewhere seeks to undo, at the state level, conservation gains won by the public at ASMFC.

At the state level, there is nothing like the federal Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act to assure that overfishing is really prevented, or overfished stocks timely rebuilt.

In the end, there is only us, anglers with a burning desire to preserve and restore the fish that we seek, and to hand them down as our legacy to the next generations.

That will have to be enough.

And if we only hold firm, and don’t lose our faith, it can be.

  

SHARKS IN THE SPOTLIGHT

Sharks are living in interesting times.

Few fish in the ocean mature more slowly or produce as few young, making them particularly vulnerable to overfishing.

None have been as historically feared and reviled.

And perhaps none have received quite as much attention, on a worldwide basis, in 2014.

Four populations of scalloped hammerhead represent the first sharks ever to gain protection under the United States’ Endangered Species Act.

The scalloped hammerhead, along with the closely related great and smooth hammerheads, the oceanic whitetip and the porbeagle shark were listed under Appendix II of CITES, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora.  Such listing will require that, for the first time, any international shipments of meat or other parts of such species must be accompanied by permits and certificates attesting that the sharks were taken as part of a sustainable and legal harvest.

That’s all good news, but all of the news is not good.

A number of important shark-fishing nations, including Japan, Denmark, Canada, Iceland and Yemen, entered a “reservation” to the CITES listing, meaning that they will not be bound by the documentation requirements or other restrictions imposed by the treaty.

We can only surmise why a nation would oppose a requirement that its sharks be sustainably and legally caught…

In addition, when it held its annual meeting earlier this month, the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (which doesn’t just manage tunas, but also other highly migratory species such as swordfish, marlin and, sharks) once again failed to adopt annual             quotas for either the shortfin mako or porbeagle shark, even though its own stock assessments show that both species could be hurt by an increase in harvest.

It doesn’t make sense, because as noted above, sharks are probably more easily harmed by overfishing than any of the other species managed by ICCAT.

Both the shortfin mako and the porbeagle swim off the U.S. coast.  They belong to the family Lamnidae, commonly known as “mackerel sharks”; as that name suggests, they are open-ocean predators that feed mainly on fish.

Of the two, the sleek, cobalt-blue mako is by far the better known.  It is the primary target of recreational shark fishermen in the New England and upper mid-Atlantic states, both because of its flashy and aggressive fight—there is something savagely beautiful about a 400-pound-plus fish cartwheeling a dozen feet into the air almost within touching distance, and something that makes your breath catch, just for a moment, as you wonder whether it will crash back into the water or land, vital and angry, next to you inside the boat—and because of its flavorful meat.

That meat also makes the mako a valuable commercial catch.  As a result of decades of fishing pressure, ICCAT scientists believe that the North Atlantic population has declined since 1970.  Although the species is not believed to be overfished, and overfishing may or may not be occurring (depending on the model that scientists use), the scientific panel’s recommendation to ICCAT is that

“Taking into consideration results from the modeling approaches used in the assessment, the associated uncertainty, and the relatively low productivity of shortfin mako sharks, the Working Group recommends, as a precautionary approach, that the fishing mortality of shortfin mako sharks should not be increased until more reliable stock assessment results are available for both the northern and southern stocks.”

How an increase in fishing mortality can be prevented without an internationally-recognized quota isn’t completely clear, but despite that, ICCAT rejected such quota a few weeks ago.

Porbeagles present an even more compelling case for firm international quotas.

Superficially, a porbeagle looks a lot like a chunky mako, and the ranges of the fish do overlap, but porbeagles generally prefer colder water.  They are, or at least were, one of the more common sharks on the banks off New England and Canada, although they were also encountered in the mid-Atlantic region.

The late Capt. Frank Mundus of Montauk, NY devoted an entire chapter to porbeagles in his book Sportfishing for Sharks, which was first published in 1969.  In that chapter, he noted that

“When porbeagles show there are respectable numbers of 200- and 300-pounders.  You shouldn’t have trouble latching onto some of these…

“In numbers, porbeagles exceed makos and maneaters [i.e., great whites] and they appear to have a greater tendency to group more than most other sharks.  In that respect they may be second only to the blues.  When they’re visiting a region therefore, it’s possible to contact them with frequency.  The Cricket II [Mundus’ charter boat] has docked with as many as six or eight caught during a single sailing.”

Yet, although I’ve been an active shark fishermen for nearly 40 years, fishing off Rhode Island, Montauk and the South Shore of Long Island—waters close to, and in some cases identical to, those fished by Capt. Mundus—the porbeagle is the only local shark that I have not caught or, at least (in the case of great whites), have seen at close range in my chum slick.

A lot of the blame for that can be placed squarely at the feet of the Norwegian longline fleet which, beginning in 1961, engaged in a directed porbeagle fishery off Canada and New England.  

The Norwegians overfished the porbeagles so badly that the entire fishery collapsed in only six years.

The Norwegian longliners left long ago, but they took most of the porbeagles with them; the shark has never recovered from their onslaught.  However, it is still caught as bycatch in the pelagic longline fishery, and is targeted in a Canadian porbeagle fishery that, in recent years, has landed less than 100 metric tons per year.

ICCAT scientists have found that the Northwest Atlantic stock—the one that swims off American shores—is overfished, although overfishing is not currently occurring.  The Northeast Atlantic stock, which is taken off Europe, is in even worse condition.

As a result, the ICCAT stock assessment warns

“High-seas fisheries should not target porbeagle…

“Increased effort on the high seas within the stock area could compromise stock recovery efforts.”

But, once again, ICCAT has refused to adopt a quota that would compel fishing nations to avoid such an increase.

Here in the United States, regulators have taken a somewhat more enlightened approach.

There are quotas.

The National Marine Fisheries Service’s Highly Migratory Species Fishery Management Plan includes both makos and porbeagles, along with blue sharks and threshers, in the “Pelagic” shark category.  Shortfin makos and common threshers are part of the general “Pelagic” commercial quota of 273 metric tons (dressed weight).  In recognition of the porbeagle’s precarious status, NMFS has given that species a separate commercial quota of just 1.7 metric tons.

Yet there are some folks who believe that even that low quota provides insufficient protection.

In 2011, two organizations, the Humane Society of the United States and Wild Earth Guardians, filed petitions with the National Marine Fisheries Service, requesting that the Northwest Atlantic stock of porbeagle sharks be listed under the Endangered Species Act.  The law required NMFS to determine, within 90 days after receiving the petition, whether there was sufficient evidence that such listing might be justified, in which case a more comprehensive listing proceeding would begin.

NMFS denied the petition, and the organizations sued.  Their lawsuits were consolidated into a single case, Humane Society of the United States v. Pritzker.

Just two weeks ago, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia handed down its decision, in which it found that

“A 90-day determination under the Endangered Species Act constitutes a ‘threshold determination,’ and Plaintiffs need only provide ‘that amount of information that would lead a reasonable person to believe that the measure proposed in the petition may be warranted.’  While the Court must give APA deference to NMFS's determination regarding whether Plaintiffs have met this low evidentiary bar, the Court nevertheless has found that Defendants acted arbitrarily and capriciously in applying an incorrectly stringent evidentiary standard at the 90-day finding stage.”

At this point, it’s impossible to say whether NMFS will ultimately decide that a listing is warranted, and it’s impossible to say whether such listing would be a good thing.

But what is perfectly clear is that, of all of the highly migratory species managed on an international scale, sharks get the least attention and the least protection.

That needs to change.

OCEAN POUT AND WINDOWPANES

When I was growing up along Long Island Sound, there was a fish that we called a “sundial.”

It was a sort of toothless but large-mouthed flounder.  Very aggressive despite its lack of dental equipment, we’d catch them on sandworms while fishing for winter flounder, on bucktails and soft-plastic shrimp cast for weakfish and stripers and on the small killies that we’d fish for smelt around this time of year.

Sundials are, proportionately, the thinnest fish that I have ever seen.  The dark side provided a decent fillet, but the white side was nothing but skin and bones; on a bright day, you could hold up the fish and easily make out its skeleton.

The dearth of meat, back in the days when far more robust winter flounder were everywhere, might have been why sundials were held in contempt.  It just wasn’t worth cleaning them, although their flesh was as good, and perhaps even better, than the flounder and fluke we all prized.

But we just tossed the sundials back. 

The one exception to that came one fall in the late 1960s, when a lobsterman tied up his boat to the North Dock at the town marina in Cos Cob, right when the smelt run was strong.  If you know anything about lobstermen, it’s that they always need bait, and this guy asked all of the smelt fishermen to just toss their sundials into his boat, where he’d retrieve them in the morning.

All went well until one evening, when the usual crowd was lining the docks, cane poles and light spinning rods in hand, their eyes glued to the bobbers that floated in the rings of light thrown by a dozen or more Coleman lanterns.  It was a cold night, so many of the anglers drained needed warmth from the insides of convenient flat bottles.

It might be that those warming fluids affected their aim just a bit, because when one of those worthies, let’s just call him “Bill,” backhanded his sundial into the boat, he didn’t quite make it past one of his neighbors, who was just then bending over to get a fresh piece of bait.

The sundial hit the other guy full in the face, making a slime-muffled slap that the 12-year-old kid that I was at the time thought was completely hilarious.  The recipient of the sundial’s affections didn’t quite see the humor, and we almost had an impromptu version of the Friday Night Fights break out there on the dock until folks managed to stop laughing long enough to cool the offended party down.

That may have been the most entertainment a sundial ever provided.   Otherwise, they mainly served as lobster bait, although a few anglers ate them and they were sometimes sold as “brill” to a few fish markets in low-income areas.

As time went on, I learned that “sundials” were properly called “windowpane flounder,” that they were managed by the New England Fishery Management Council as part of its Northeast Multispecies Fishery Management Plan and that, from the early 1970s through the late 1990s, they supported a significant commercial fishery, with over 9 million pounds landed in 1985. 

I also learned that the last Groundfish Assessment Review Meeting found that the northern Gulf of Maine-Georges Bank stock was both overfished and subject to overfishing, with a rebuilding target of 2017.  The Southern New England-Mid-Atlantic Bight stock was found to be in better shape, and was fully recovered by 2012.

Even though the health of the stocks is better than it was, federal regulations still prohibit both recreational fishermen and commercial “common pool” groundfish boats (that is, those not fishing under sector catch share programs) from landing any at all.

It seems that not only high-visibility species such as cod are getting hit hard up off of New England.  Even species that we rarely think of are overfished, too.

The ocean pout certainly provides a good example of that.

There’s a good chance that you never saw one, either alive or cooked on a plate, although they used to be very common on the wrecks and ledges off New England and the upper mid-Atlantic coast.

Pout are one of those fish that suffered not for its meat, which is small-grained, mild and nearly snow-white, but for its appearance, with a stout, vaguely eel-like body, blunt head and broad mouth that brought inevitable comparisons with the mid-20^th Century actor, Joe E. Brown. 

I first ran into them aboard party boats sailing for cod in the mid-1960s, when mates normally dealt with them by stomping on them, hard, right behind their heads, taking the hook out and tossing the soon-to-die animal back over the side. 

Ten years later, I noticed that the mates had changed their tune, and were collecting the pout that there fares didn’t want and putting them on ice along with their own catch.  Curious, I took a few of the “trash fish” home, filleted them out and that folks had been foolish over the years.

Of course, back when cod were abundant, you could afford to be picky…

Pout followed about the same trajectory as windowpanes, a relatively ignored fish that suddenly saw landings spike, remain high for a couple of decades, and then crash.  

However, pout were never as popular as windowpanes.  Landings peaked in 1987, at 4.8 million pounds, but the fish were never worth much back at the dock.  They usually sold for about 10 cents per pound, far less even then windowpanes, which usually sold for about twenty-five cents per pound, and sometimes brought over sixty.

But in the end, that didn't matter, and the ocean pout stock was driven so low that fishing was halted.

And that may be the saddest, and most significant, thing about New England’s fishery.

We hear about the destruction of cod stocks that fed western Europe and eastern North America for half a millennium, and are shocked by the loss.

We mourn for the Atlantic halibut, overfished so badly more than a century ago that it has never come close to recovery.

We watch the winter flounder collapse all around us, say our requiems for the lost whiting fishery in New York Bight, tell stories of spring pollock we once caught off Block Island.

We hope that the recovery of haddock is real.

But what we don’t see, and for the most part don’t miss, are the ocean pouts of this world. 

When the cod stock collapses, we hear about it on the nightly news and maybe read stories in The New York Times.  But when the trawler fleet drives a “minor” species such as ocean pout into near-oblivion for a dime a pound, nobody reads or hears anything at all.

That is the real tragedy of New England groundfish. 

The failure to properly manage the fishery, and to rein in excessive harvest hasn’t just driven Gulf of Maine cod stocks down to the point that that, in some quarters, the word “moratorium” is occasionally whispered.   

The trawl fleet, in its recalcitrant greed, hasn’t merely destroyed one iconic fish stock and one iconic fishery.  It has disrupted and degraded an ecosystem that includes not just the stars we see in the restaurants and on shows on TV—the cod and the halibut and the yellowtail flounder—but the poorly known supporting players such as ocean pout, spotted wolfish and windowpanes.

Now, the depressed stocks need not only survive fishing pressure, but a warming ocean that is changing the very environment that they live in and provides new challenges to managers trying to recover the stocks.

Hopefully, such challenges won’t be insurmountable.

Managers will undoubtedly try to recover the codfish.  But let’s hope that, in their efforts, they spare a little time for less well-known species.

Ignored and unloved for generations, ocean pout and windowpanes have their niche in the system, and  deserve some attention, too.

STRIPED BASS BAIT-AND-SWITCH

I wish that I didn’t have to write this at all.

But things need to be said, and maybe it’s right that I’m saying them now, in November, with the big Christmas shopping spree poised to begin.

In one more week, Black Friday shoppers will descend on the malls, some lured by ads promising wonderful deals on clothes, smartphones and TVs.

And when a lot of those shoppers get to those malls, they will find the sale items gone, and learn that the deals that had drawn them were “limited to items in stock.”

But, ever helpful, the stores will be willing to sell them all something else, even if it is far less attractive and comes at high cost.

When that sort of thing happens in shopping centers and malls it’s called “bait and switch.”  It gets consumer advocates riled, and is just plain illegal in many states.

When that sort of thing happens at the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, it’s called “conservation equivalency.”  It pleases the fish hogs, and is clearly endorsed in the ASMFC Charter.

Striped bass fishermen are learning about the ASMFC’s version of bait-and-switch right now, and they’re learning the hard way.

Those striped bass fishermen have long been complaining about a decline in the striped bass population, and, most particularly, in the number of big female spawners.  They have been asking ASMFC to cut back on landings to let the bass stock rebuild.

Those pleas fell on mostly deaf ears until, a little over a year ago, ASMFC received a benchmark stock assessment that confirmed what the anglers were saying.  The fishing mortality target and the threshold that defined overfishing were both set too high.  Landings needed to come down.  And even under the best possible conditions, the stock is almost certain to be overfished in 2015, and for some years thereafter.

Finally, ASMFC’s Striped Bass Management Board began to take action.

It was grudging action, to be sure, but things slowly ground forward.

There were public hearings, and chances for comments to be mailed in.  Anglers responded in droves.  Thousands of anglers made themselves heard, and the overwhelming majority called for a one-fish bag limit, and a minimum size somewhere between 28 and 32 inches.

On October 24, the Management Board voted to adopt new striped bass regulations, maintaining the 28-inch minimum size and dropping the bag limit to a single fish.

Anglers went to bed happy that night, believing that they had won a victory.  I have to admit that I was quite pleased.

But…

And it was a big but…

The Management Board also said that states could adopt alternate regulations that provided “conservation equivalency.”  Moreover, that conservation equivalency didn’t have to equal a 31% harvest reduction, as the 1 fish at 28 inches did; it merely had to equal the 25% reduction that would supposedly be enough to reduce fishing mortality back to the target.

It was a little strange, because states that opted for conservation equivalency would be able to kill more fish than those who stuck with the regulations that were actually adopted.

And yes, it was an omen.

Because last Monday, representatives of the coastal states between Massachusetts and Delaware held a conference call to discuss adopting the same regulations throughout the region and to discuss conservation equivalency.

All of a sudden, striped bass managers were pulling their own bait-and-switch.

A good chunk of the states that voted at the Management Board meeting, and acted as if they had heeded anglers’ calls for a one-fish bag, were having second thoughts.  Now that all of the excitement had ebbed, and few were paying attention, they were talking about conservation equivalency and continuing to kill two fish per man.

To be fair, not all were on board.  The push for two fish is being driven by New Jersey and Rhode Island.  From all that I hear, New York doesn’t like the idea, and the other states fall somewhere in between.

New Jersey opposed one fish all along, and was one of only two states (the other was Delaware) to vote against one 28-inch bass.  And since, regardless of species, New Jersey is always conniving for ways to let its anglers kill more and smaller fish, it’s position was hardly unexpected.

Up north, Rhode Island is driving the action.  Apparently, it couldn’t care less that its anglers asked for  one bass.  Rhode Island’s sole concern seems to be its for-hire fleet which, like so many such fleets, is still struck in troglodyte times when only dead fish are a gauge of success.

Unfortunately, greed is a metastatic disease, no less so than cancer, and when one state kills more fish, everyone else wants to kill more fish, too.  If Rhode Island gives its for-hires two bass, New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts are likely to do the same.

There are so few for-hire operators and so many anglers, that you might be wondering why such a short, stubby tail would be wagging the whole recreational dog.  Well, I understand your confusion, because I’m wondering, too…

But what I’m not wondering about is how much those for-hire boats kill.

Last year, in my home state of New York, anglers made about 950,000 trips in search of striped bass, and killed about 375,000 fish.  About half of those trips—more than 450,000—were made by surfcasters, while fewer than a quarter—just 191,000—were made on party and charter boats.

But when you look at the landings, nearly two-thirds of the fish—235,000 out of 375,000—were killed by the for-hires.

Giving the for-hires two fish when other anglers only get one will only make that disparity worse.

And that’s the good news…

The bad news is that “conservation equivalency” is largely a myth, and giving the for-hires (or even worse, everyone) two bigger fish rather than one at 28 inches, isn’t going to reduce the kill very much.

That’s because, to calculate conservation equivalency, ASMFC’s Striped Bass Technical Committee looked backwards, to what people caught in 2013.  They assumed that the size and age structure of the striped bass stock will be the same in 2015 and beyond, and that’s just wrong.

We can never forget (as the Technical Committee apparently did) that the striped bass stock is shrinking because spawning has been poor.  Compared to a healthy population, there are relatively few smaller fish, and a disproportionate number of big ones.

Based on 2013 figures, allowing anglers to keep one 28-inch bass has about the same conservation impact as allowing folks to keep two 33-inch fish.  Here in New York, about 44% of the bass landed in 2013 were between 28 and 33 inches long, with fish from the above-average 2005 and 2007 year classes accounting for more than half of the total.

But if we look ahead to 2015, the 2005 year class will average about 35 inches long, and all of the other above-average year classes in the fishery, except for 2007 (which was only slightly above average) will be even larger.  With very few fish between 28 and 33 inches long, raising the size limit to 33 inches won’t make that much of a difference.

 

It will be better than two fish at 28 inches, but not by much.

To suggest that it will reduce 2015 and 2016 harvest by at least 25%, and have “conservation equivalency” to one 28-inch fish in those years is ludicrous. 

Thanks to conservation equivalency, ASMFC once again finds itself with a management plan that is more likely to fail than succeed.

Even under the best assumptions, the proposed 25% harvest reduction had only a 50-50 chance to cut harvest to target levels by the end of next year.

After the Management Board decided to base commercial harvest on the Amendment 6 quota rather than on actual landings, those chances got smaller.

They shrunk a little more after the decision to cut Chesapeake Bay landings by just 20.5%, instead of the full 25.

Now, if the states adopt one of the conservation equivalency proposals, the chances of getting harvest back down to target will become even slimmer.  Maybe, if we’re lucky, they’ll be one in three.

Our fish—and, in the long term, our fishermen—deserve better than that.

In the short term, we can hope that folks from New York and the other rational states can convince their recalcitrant colleagues to reject conservation equivalency.

In the long term, as I’ve repeated before, we need a long-lasting solution.

We need to end ASMFC’s tolerance of “conservation equivalent” measures that allow states to game the system and kill more fish than the stocks can withstand. 

We need to set some limits on management boards’ discretion, and force them to adopt plans that are more likely to succeed than to fail.

We need to compel ASMFC to end overfishing and timely rebuild overfished stocks.

In short, we need legislation that will compel ASMFC’s fishery management plans to adhere to the same standards that currently bind federal fisheries managers.

Call it a consumer protection act for the fish stocks, that will stop bait-and-switch in its tracks.