A SHORTAGE OF COMMON SENSE

A few weeks ago, it appeared that there was some good news coming out of the Gulf of Mexico red snapper fishery.  The red snapper population continues to rebuild, and as a result, managers approved a 30 percent increase in the annual catch limit, raising it all the way from 11 million to 14.3 million pounds.

That’s a pretty clear sign that the current management system is working, and working pretty well.  You would think that it would make anglers happy.

After all, a 30% increase in black sea bass quota would pretty well eliminate the problem facing us in the northeast, and a 30% increase in summer flounder would take us back to seasons and size limits (or maybe bags) that we haven’t seen for a decade or more.

But red snapper anglers are a different breed, and they are not happy at all.

Instead of presenting the increase as good news to their readers, outdoor writers in the region are characterizing the 30% increase as “a few extra crumbs” and complaining about managers creating a buffer between the recreational annual catch limit and anglers’ share of the allowable biological catch—even though such buffer (or other accountability measure) was mandated by a federal district court about a year ago, after anglers repeatedly demonstrated that they could not stay within their annual catch limit if it was not imposed.

And the states are just as bad.

One of the big complaints we keep hearing from red snapper fishermen is that the season in federal waters, where most of the anglers used to fish, is distressingly short.  Last year, it went on for only nine days.  As a result, landings data provided by the National Marine Fisheries Service show that, at least in some states, the catch is shifting inshore.

In 2012, for example, only about 35 percent of Florida’s Gulf red snapper landings came from state waters.  In 2013, the proportion of fish caught in state waters jumped to nearly half (48%).  Last season, the proportion of state-waters fish increased again, to 55 percent.

Thus, if folks are concerned with the length of the federal season, it would seem to make sense for state fisheries managers, in Florida and elsewhere, to freeze the length of their seasons—and thus presumably the number of fish harvested in state waters—so that the entire increase in the annual catch limit could be used to extend the time that people could fish in the federal sea.

But that would make sense, so we could be sure from the start that it’s not what anyone would propose for Gulf red snapper.   

Instead, fisheries managers in Florida and Louisiana, and perhaps other states, are talking about extending their state seasons, moves which can only perpetuate the very short federal season.

Some red snapper anglers understand that the red snapper annual catch limit creates a zero-sum game, in which extending state seasons inevitably means that federal seasons will be shorter.  Martha Bademan, a member of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission who also holds a seat on the Gulf Council, has acknowledged that

“Florida catches a lot of red snapper.  If we have a lot of going on in state waters, you can expect a shorter federal season.”

Even so, the Florida Commission is considering extending the state’s red snapper season, which doesn’t make much sense at all.

But if the decision making process in Florida seems a bit perplexing, what’s going on down in Louisiana is completely confounding.

Louisiana, like Texas, eschews participation in NMFS’ Marine Recreational Information Program, which means that the state’s harvest data isn’t directly comparable to that provided by NMFS, and can be a little difficult to locate.  However, according to information the state has released, roughly three-quarters of Louisiana’s red snapper are caught within state waters.

With a statistic like that, you’d think that Lousiana’s fisheries managers, as well as the state’s anglers, would want to freeze state-waters harvest in order to extend the federal season.  But if you thought that such common sense would prevail, you’re clearly new to the red snapper debate...

Randy Pausina, assistant secretary of the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, has reportedly said that

“…we feel like this year, we’ll start with two fish and go into the federal season, and when we come out of the federal season, we can go up [in bag limit].”

So not only will Louisiana go out of compliance with the federal its season, it’s planning to exceed the federal bag limit, too.  And it is also planning to take over a pretty big piece of the federal ocean, unilaterally extending the state’s management authority out to three nautical leagues—a little over ten miles—when according to federal law, Louisiana’s territorial sea, and thus its authority, peters out three miles from the beach.

Again it doesn’t make too much sense, unless you believe in what Louisiana and the other Gulf states apparently see as their endgame.

“We want complete control of red snapper, for starters, and we want the [federal] money [to pay for it], too.”

Their goal is to strip management authority for red snapper in federal waters from NMFS and the Gulf Council, and hand it over from the states.

And that probably makes the least sense of all.

The five Gulf of Mexico states are asking Congress to create a new entity, which will be called the “Gulf States Red Snapper Management Authority.” 

Such Authority would take the form of a panel composed of the “principal fisheries manager” from each of the five Gulf states.  Each state would be permitted to come up with its own management plan for red snapper in its waters and in the federal waters allocated to each state.  The Authority would then decide, by majority vote, whether each state’s management plan was acceptable.

Overfishing would apparently be frowned upon, although firm annual catch limits need not be established.  Instead,

“The states would be required to ensure overfishing will not occur through the full range of management and assessment strategies available to each state or each group of states acting in concert.  These strategies would not be limited to those based on total allowable catch.”

That’s vague enough to make it unlikely that any state will ever be accused of overfishing, no matter how many snapper its anglers harvest, but it’s an order of magnitude better than the rebuilding language, which reads

“If the status of the fishery in each state is in equilibrium or expanding, no change in management actions may be required.  If the status of the fishery is below equilibrium or declining, the responsible state or states would be required to take appropriate action to revise existing management actions to restore equilibrium…”

I would hate to be the judge who had to interpret that one for the first time…

It seems to say that if you have a lousy fishery, with the fish scarce but not seeming to get any scarcer (think tautog—a/k/a blackfish—here in New York), that’s OK because you have "equilibrium," even if the stock remains overfished.  If it gets any worse, you have to rebuild it, but only until you rebuild it back to the same lousy and still-overfished "equilibrium" level.  You never need to bring it all the way back.

In that way, and in many others, the Authority management model seems to be very roughly modeled after that of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission.  Like ASMFC, the Authority would be authorized to invite federal intervention  

“if a Gulf state or a group of Gulf states adopted management measures or regulations significantly inconsistent from the red snapper management framework identified in the Plan when such inconsistent measures could negatively impact the interests of other Gulf states with regard to red snapper management.”

But as anyone familiar with ASMFC’s concept of “conservation equivalency” and the mischief it engenders knows, allowing states to deviate from an established management plan can create a variety of problems, leading to endless debate about whether one state’s deviation causes harm to another.  The history of summer flounder management, along with the current debate over New Jersey’s new striped bass regulations, should give the Gulf states reason for pause.

Even if those Gulf states aren’t familiar with the problems at ASMFC, they certainly know what’s going on in their own region.  So it makes absolutely no sense to read that any federal intervention

“would be limited to the federal waters adjacent to the state(s) that adopted inconsistent management measures or actions.  Under no circumstances would federal authority or action supersede that of an individual state within designated state waters.”

In other words, the Authority would merely perpetuate the problems that exist today, allowing any state to thumb its nose at the feds and/or neighboring states by overharvesting red snapper within its own waters, regardless of the impact on others.

Does that make sense to you?

But then, the whole thing is a conundrum.  

Why replace a system that is working, successfully rebuilding the stock, increasing annual harvest and, at least lately, preventing overfishing, by adopting an untested authority that could halt rebuilding and lead to stagnant landings levels, perpetuate current problems and likely lead to new conflicts between the states?

Nothing about that makes sense at all.

In fact, the only sensible thing that I’ve read about red snapper recently appeared in the Pensacola News-Journal, where a local for-hire captain, Gary Jarvis, wrote

“…there is no avoiding the fact that the health of the Gulf’s red snapper fishery depends on cooperation between federal and state fisheries managers.

“The National Marine Fisheries Service must set sustainable catch limits and must keep Gulf anglers within that sustainable fisheries budget.  If state managers take more than that budget allows or spends at a burn rate that threatens to exceed it, federal managers must act by reducing the federal season to compensate for the state’s overspending…

“Unfortunately, the states often set their spending rates at levels that are not based on sound scientific principles…

“The [states’] non-science-based red snapper management and lack of partnership [with the feds] is unfair.

“As long as Gulf states like Florida and Texas willingly continue to be bad partners with their federal counterparts, Gulf anglers who do not have red snapper in their state waters will have to stand by and watch privatized state-water fisheries devour any chance of a federal-waters season.”

Finally, we find common sense.

It doesn’t require a bill in Congress to extend the federal season.  It doesn’t require a “Red Snapper Management Authority” or a wholesale restructuring of the management system.

It just requires some partnership and cooperation, and the willingness of some states—and their anglers—to take the long view and work with their neighbors to restore the red snapper stock, rather than grabbing what they can for themselves at every opportunity.

It requires everyone involved to think about the future, and not merely the upcoming season.

But given the attitudes that both the states and the anglers have shown up to this date, what it probably requires to get the job done is some sort of miracle.

THANKS

In the fourteen-plus months since I’ve started this blog, I’ve opined and reported, lamented and raved.  But today, it’s time to simply give thanks to the people inside and outside of government who have taken the management process and shaped it to do the right thing.

On Tuesday, at a meeting of New York’s Marine Resources Advisory Council, Jim Gilmore, Director of the Department of Environmental Conservation’s Marine Bureau, announced that New York would adopt a one-fish bag limit and 28-inch minimum size for striped bass caught in the state’s Marine District.

 

In order to protect spawning bass in the Hudson River, the start of the season will be moved back 17 days, from March 15 to April 1.  A slot size limit will protect some of the spawning females; anglers may now take one fish between 18 and 28 inches (most of that size are males) or one over 40 inches in length.

On the same day, similar news was announced in Connecticut.  

A week or so earlier, Massachusetts made 1 @ 28 inches the law in that state as well.  

Today, unless Rhode Island chooses to give in to the tantrums of its for-hire fleet and allows party and charter boat anglers to kill two 32-inch striped bass, the striper will enjoy a one-fish bag limit in every state between New York and Maine and, with one possible exception—Maine may adopt a 24-26 inch slot and prohibit the harvest of bigger fish—the same 28-inch minimum size.

On its face, that does not seem remarkable, as it merely echoes a decision made at the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission last October.  But efforts to undercut ASMFC’s actions threatened to frustrate its efforts to rebuild striped bass, and it took a heroic effort on the part of anglers and state fisheries managers to hold the line at one 28-inch fish.

I live in New York, so when it comes to saying thanks, I’ll start with the people I know.

The first of them must be Jim Gilmore, who is not only Director of the Marine Bureau, but a native son of Great South Bay and no stranger to the striped bass.

He worked hard from the start to do the right thing, conferring with his counterparts in other states and listening to concerns of the stakeholders here in New York.  

Throughout the process, he always seemed focused on the stripers’ best interests and the long-term health of the fishery.

It wasn’t easy, as anglers seeking a reduced harvest and for-hires trying to maintain their kill flooded his office with calls and e-mails, each promoting their side.  At one point, e-mail traffic grew so heavy that he had to have additional memory added to his computer in order to archive it all.

Gilmore could have taken the easy route, adopting the 2-fish “slot and trophy” recommended by the Marine Resources Advisory Council.  But he did not, and his brief explanation of why he supported 1 @ 28” demonstrates the sort of logic a fisheries manager should use when considering such questions.

As he told the Advisory Council on Tuesday,

1)      1 @ 28” only provided a 50% chance of attaining the needed harvest reductions, and that was already a risky approach;

2)      Reducing commercial quotas, rather than actual landings, by 25% amounted to only a 16% reduction in real-world mortality, which added to the chances of failure;

3)      Conservation equivalency should be used to address particular problems that arise from time to time in particular states, and should not be seen as a way for everyone to evade the intent of management board actions;

4)      The various conservation equivalency options being presented turned the process into a kind of mathematical exercise, rather than a real effort to manage the stock;

5)      With a new stock assessment coming up in 2017, it is better to impose some relatively mild restrictions on harvest now, and begin to rebuild the stock, rather than have the next assessment find that the stock is in need of far more restrictive regulation;

6)      ASMFC’s Law Enforcement Committee recommended uniform regional regulations; and

7)      A one-fish bag limit will still support a robust for-hire fishery.

I may have missed a point or two, but you get the drift.  The guy knows just how fisheries management ought to be done.

I can’t mention Jim Gilmore without mentioning a few other folks on his team.  Steve Heins, who runs the Bureau’s Finfish and Shellfish unit, did plenty of work on the bass rules and intercepted his share of the complaints and the calls.  And biologists Carol Hoffman in the Marine District and Kathy Hatala up on the Hudson, assembled and analyzed the data needed to make the decisions, took part in the Technical Committee discussions and had to endure plenty of inquiries from myself and others.  They were always wonderfully responsive despite their significant workloads.

There were certainly others in the Marine Bureau and at higher management levels within the DEC--reaching up to the Commissioner and very probably to the Governor himself—who had input on this issue.  They, too, deserve thanks from us all.

In the other states, there were other folks, including Paul Diodati of the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, who had been calling for ASMFC’s Striped Bass Management Board to reduce harvest for years.  He was the first fisheries director of a major northeastern striped bass state to support a limit of one 28-inch bass for every angler.  

David Simpson of Connecticut’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection was another consistent advocate for conservative management. 

And we can’t forget Pat Kelliher of Maine’s Department of Marine Resources or Doug Grout of New Hampshire’s Fish and Game Department—in fact, the entire Maine and New Hampshire ASMFC delegations—who never stopped urging the Management Board to do the right thing.

Yet conservation is always controversial and, as a purely political matter, managers often find it difficult to do the right thing unless it’s clear that the public supports them.  Money talks, and when faced with strong opposition from the for-hires or other elements of the fishing industry, managers can find it difficult to make the right policy decisions without a clear public mandate.

Thus, thanks have to go out to the hundreds of New York anglers—along with other states’ anglers, numbering into the thousands coastwide—who came out to hearings or sent in their comments in support of striped bass conservation.  

New York’s fishermen can take special pride in the fact that the largest hearing held anywhere on the coast occurred when close to two hundred souls filled the auditorium at Stony Brook University.  

But whether a hearing was big or small, everyone who showed up deserves thanks, just because they were there.

Particular recognition should go to the people who worked at the grassroots level to keep volunteers informed and active.  Ross Squire, founder of the 1 @ 32” Pledge, took it upon himself to organize and mobilize fishermen not only here in New York, but elsewhere on the coast.  Willie Young and the New York Coalition for Recreational Fishing also did an outstanding job; and we should be grateful that the New York Sportfishing Federation clearly called for a one-fish bag.

Farther afield, Capt. Dave Pecci and his “Save Our Stripers” folks came all the way from Maine to the ASMFC meeting in Mystic, Connecticut, while to our south, Coastal Conservation Association Maryland’s “My Limit Is One” campaign set a standard for the entire coast to follow. 

Thank you one and all.

And thanks to a couple of outspoken captains.  Capt. John McMurray of One More Cast Charters serves as New York’s recreational representative to ASMFC’s Striped Bass Advisory Panel.  He fought hard to make 1 @ 28 inches happen, so hard that when the Chairman of the Advisory Panel gave his report at the October Management Board meeting, he repeatedly referred to John’s constant fight for strong conservation measures.  

And Capt. Steve Witthuhn, of Top Hook Charters in Montauk, demonstrated leadership—and cojones—when he told a Newsday reporter that 1 @ 28 inches was the right thing to do, even though a lot of his fellow Montauk captains did not agree.

I’m proud to call them both friends.

In the end, there is plenty of thanks to go around.  Thanks to the state fisheries managers, to the grassroots organizers, to the anglers and captains who gave up their time and made the effort to come out to the hearings, provide testimony, and write comments to ASMFC.

This victory belongs to all of them.

I wish them the joy of success.

They earned it.

PANDORA'S BOX

Salt water fish are a public resource, held in trust by the nation on behalf of all of its citizens.

But as a practical matter, fisheries management has long been the province of a chosen few, with fishermen and representatives of the fishing industry dominating state, regional and national fisheries management bodies.  

Although there have been some notable exceptions, most particularly the recovery of species managed by the Mid-Atlantic Fisheries Management Council, such a fox-guarding-the-henhouse approach has hindered efforts to rebuild and conserve important fish stocks, as various user groups maneuver to protect their share of the harvest and avoid bearing the brunt of needed conservation measures.

I have held a seat on a federal fisheries management council, currently serve as a recreational adviser to the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission and also sit on New York’s Marine Resources Advisory Council, and so watched the dance play out at every level, where members of the fishing industry (recreational and commercial) do their best to avoid short-term economic reverses, even at the long-term health of various fish stocks.

As a result, a number of species, such as Atlantic cod, winter flounder and tautog have been badly depleted, while efforts to recover others have been made more difficult than they needed to be.

Sacrificing the health of a public resource for the short-term benefit of a relative handful of industry members is clearly bad policy, but it has been going on for a very long time.  However, there have been a lot of recent signs that the public is getting tired of the fishing industry stonewalling conservation efforts.

More importantly, both for those doing the stonewalling and for the remainder of the fishing community, who support needed conservation measures, people capable of affecting the process are beginning to move into activist roles.

That’s a good thing, when we see folks such as Ross Squire starting up the 1 @ 32” Pledge to help rebuild the striped bass population, or the hard work being done by more established groups such as Coastal Conservation Association Maryland, which is striving very hard down in the Chesapeake to do the same thing.  Fishermen, working in their own enlightened self-interest, have long been the most dedicated and most effective advocates for conserving our fisheries, and when they step into the arena, they bring with them not only a deep dedication to achieving their goals, but a real understanding of both the fish and the fisheries that they support.

Unfortunately, other fishermen’s opposition to conservation has had a very different effect.  They have created problems so intractable that they are beginning to attract people with little connection to either the fish or the fisheries involved, and led to solutions which may prove effective in the short term, but in the long term could end up severing the connection between the fish stocks and the folks with the greatest interest in keeping them healthy.

Once again it began, as most bad things do, up in New England.

For decades, the New England Fishery Management Council had done its best to maximize harvest and frustrate the spirit, if not the letter, of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, refusing to put hard caps on landings and relying on input controls such as days at sea that had proven ineffective at constraining harvest.  

Not surprisingly, most fish stocks had failed to respond to such cavalier management, and languished at overfished levels.

Finally, the latest reauthorization of the Magnuson Act, approved in the closing hours of Congress’ 2006 session, required that annual catch limits be placed on every species, including those caught in New England.  Not much later, a Groundfish Assessment and Review Meeting, generally referred to as “GARM III,” reported out a comprehensive assessment of northeastern groundfish stocks, finding that of all of the stocks assessed, only one—Gulf of Maine haddock—was neither overfished nor experiencing overfishing.

Rebuilding New England groundfish appeared to be an impossible problem; after thirty years, fisheries managers were probably farther from solving it than they had been when they started.  In such an extreme situation, non-traditional solutions proposed by non-traditional stakeholders are often tried.

Such was the case in New England, where a national conservation group, the Environmental Defense Fund, began actively promoting the idea of “catch shares,” which would assign a portion of the harvest of each species to particular boats, which would have to stop fishing—or buy other boats’ shares—once their own quota was caught.

Catch shares can go a long way to assure fishermen’s accountability and help to keep them from exceeding annual catch limits, but in multispecies stocks such as those in New England, where fishermen using various gears, fishing from very different-sized boats, switch in and out of fisheries as the local abundance of various species change, there is also little question that the system can cause at least temporary hardships.

Fishermen fought it, claiming that it would put many of the smaller operators out of business due to insufficient quotas of certain key stocks.  When some sort of catch share program appeared inevitable, they put their own particular, non-conformist New England spin on the system by first dividing up the overall quotas into multiple “sectors” before assigning them to the boats, and allowing fishermen to opt out of catch shares entirely if they’re willing to accept the resultant limits. 

But the bottom line is that catch shares are now the rule in New England.  That probably would not be the case had the New England fishermen, and their representatives on the New England Fishery Management Council, not refused to respond responsibly to the decline in groundfish populations.  

Had they adopted hard quotas a couple of decades ago, set at levels recommended by NMFS’ biologists, there is a very good chance that the stocks would have responded, making it easier for managers to reject new approaches such as catch shares.

So commercial fishermen in New England effectively opened Pandora’s Box when they let groundfish stocks crash, and then stubbornly refused to rebuild them.  It’s not surprising that they didn’t like what flew out; what is surprising is that down in the Gulf of Mexico, recreational red snapper fishermen didn’t learn from what happened up north.

The red snapper situation wasn’t quite analogous; the stock had been badly overfished, but was responding to management and rebuilding nicely.  A catch share program had successfully ended commercial overfishing, but the recreational harvest was still out of control.

As often happens with rebuilding stocks, increasing abundance made it easier for anglers to catch a lot more fish, and led to the counterintuitive situation where regulations grow more restrictive as fish become more abundant, and poundage-based quotas fill more quickly as fish are allowed to live long enough to grow larger, and thus weigh more when caught. 

That’s an old story here in the Mid-Atlantic; we went through a decade of struggle with summer flounder before finally reaching a sort of equilibrium perhaps two years ago, and we’re in the middle of the same sort of conundrum with black sea bass right now.  

But here, despite the inevitable howls of complaint from both fishermen and fishing-related businesses, fisheries managers have managed, and are still managing, to work through the issues and find reasonable solutions.

In the Gulf, angling interests who once positioned themselves as champions of conservation looked just like groundfishermen up in New England, working at the Council level to remove any semblance of precaution from fishery management plans in order to maximize the recreational kill.  The upshot was a court decision in a lawsuit brought by commercial fishing interests which required NMFS to require effective accountability measures for recreational red snapper fishermen.   

Unfortunately, recreational anglers didn’t take the court decision as a signal to support more conservative management.  Instead, they somehow translated their overfishing of their recreational allocation (which constituted 49% of all red snapper landings, and was effectively at parity with the commercial allocation) as evidence that they were being picked on, with Bill Bird, then Vice Chairman of the Coastal Conservation Association’s Government Relations Committee, complaining that the decision demonstrated that

“Recreational angling is simply not on equal footing in federal fisheries.  The focus of management there has developed into private ownership for profit, and counting every fish.  It’s a no-win situation for us.  As a country, we must consider if keeping the recreational fishing public off the water is the desired outcome for our federal fisheries policy because, honestly, that is exactly what this is leading to.”

Although, honestly, it was not leading to that at all.  There were, and still are, plenty of other fish in the Gulf for anglers to pursue; no one was chasing anglers off the water.  Those anglers could even still pursue red snapper in state waters, where federal rules did not apply.

And, of course, anglers did pursue red snapper in state waters.  In Texas, they could fish for snapper all year, and kill more and smaller fish than the feds allowed.  In other states, anglers successfully lobbied their fisheries managers to extend their seasons and go out of compliance with federal rules.

That was all well and good as far as the anglers went, but those fish killed in state waters were counted against the overall quota, and led to ever more restrictive federal regulations.  That hit for-hire vessels disproportionately hard, because they held federal fishing permits and had to abide by the federal rules, even within state waters.  As a result, when the feds imposed a 9-day season last year, the for-hires were badly hurt.

Once again, we had an extreme situation that led to extreme solutions.

Just like the New England trawlers, the Gulf red snapper anglers wouldn’t voluntarily clean up their act.  So again, in stepped EDF, which supported “sector separation”—creating separate subquotas for private boat anglers and the for-hire fleet—that would better assure accountability for at least part of the recreational community.

And predictably, the private boat anglers rebelled, but they couldn’t—or perhaps more correctly, wouldn’t—come up with ideas that would constrain their harvest without splitting the recreational quota.  They were still intent on killing more fish. 

So in the end, the Gulf Council came up with what is generally referred to as “Amendment 40.”

Amendment 40 would split the total recreational allocation, giving private boats nearly 58% of the landings and reserving the rest for the for-hires, which could then fish under their own regulations and not be hindered by overfishing in the private boat sector. 

Predictably, the private boat folks railed against the amendment, but given their unwillingness to support meaningful measures to constrain their harvest, what choice did managers have?

Once again, they forced Pandora to open her box, with the predictable results.

More and more, we are seeing such things happening all along the coast.

In previous posts, I have written about New York’s proposed regulation to extend its winter flounder season fivefold, even though that could well extirpate some local populations.  It appears that I was not the only person concerned with the flounder’s fate; since I wrote that post, a coalition composed of a number of national conservation groups have expressed its concern to the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation, and have gone so far as to file a Freedom of Information request seeking a rational basis for such proposed regulation.

It’s not hard to imagine that the same people might choose to file a lawsuit if the proposed regulation is adopted; if that occurs, it could completely change the paradigm of how fish are managed in New York waters.

Once again, the box will be opened, and folks might not be pleased with what flies out.

And last week, there were two events that should have caught everyone’s notice.

A coalition of conservation organizations headed by the Center for Biological Diversity, an organization not normally seen in council-level fisheries debates, has filed a petition with the National Marine Fisheries Service, requesting that the Service shut down the Gulf of Maine cod fishery in order to best assure the survival of the stock.

It appears that in rejecting the 200 metric ton quota recommended by biologists, and instead setting the 2015 quota at 386 metric tons, the highest quota that the law might possibly allow, the New England Fisheries Management Council attracted unexpected attention, and caused Pandora’s Box to open again.

Failure to comply with the petition could easily result in a lawsuit, and no one knows where that might lead. 

However, the action that should really get fishermen worried is NMFS’ issuance, just last Tuesday, of a “90-day finding” that a petition to list the common thresher shark under the Endangered Species Act is entitled to additional consideration.

A 90-day finding doesn’t mean that the shark would be listed, but it does mean that further research leading to a formal decision on whether or not to list the shark is appropriate.  If, by chance, the thresher is listed, the impact on both commercial longline fisheries and recreational shark fisheries could be substantial, perhaps crippling.

Even so, it’s not the proposed listing that should have fishermen worried, but who filed it.  Because it wasn’t filed by one of the mainstream conservation groups that have worked in the fisheries arena for years, groups that know the fish, the fisheries and the fishermen themselves.  It wasn’t one of the smaller conservation groups that pops up from time to time.

Instead, it was filed by the Friends of Animals, an out-there-on-the-fringe “animal rights” outift that opposes hunting, fishing and trapping—and even your local butcher shop—and has declared that

“We at Friends of Animals oppose the use of animals for human consumption.  Campaigns to make the public believe that the grisly business of turning fish, birds, and mammals into food can be done in a “humane” fashion send the wrong message…”

These are certainly not the people who we want engaged, in any way, in the fisheries management process…

Yet when we fishermen—recreational or commercial—fail to fulfill our responsibility to rebuild, conserve and properly manage our living marine resources, we open the door to the outsiders, including the crazies who truly would push us all off the water if they could.

So in the end, whether we like it or not, we have a choice.  

We can  work with each other, with fisheries managers and with responsible conservation organizations to manage our fish for abundance, and to keep our ecosystems intact and healthy.

Or we can keep going the way that we’re heading in many places, and throw wide the lid on Pandora’s Box, letting who knows what troubles out into our world.

Maybe you’re willing to take that chance because you recall that the first time that box opened, Hope remained inside.  

But if you could speak with Pandora I think she’d tell you that, overall, opening the box at all was a pretty bad idea.

BAD SEEDS

Last Tuesday morning,. I received the unwelcome news that the Rhode Island Marine Fisheries Council had voted 5-3 to to limit surfcasters' and private-boat anglers’ striped bass harvest to just one fish, no less than 28 inches long, per day, while allowing those fishing from party and charter boats to kill two bass each day in exchange for a slightly higher, 32-inch minimum size.

The news was not unexpected.

Although Rhode Island’s striped bass anglers, like striped bass anglers up and down the Atlantic coast, were overwhelmingly in favor of a one-fish bag limit for everyone, and although they had the emphatic support of many tackle shops and even a portion of the for-hire community, the one-fish bag was adamantly opposed by the Rhode Island Party and Charter Boat Association and its president, Captain Rick Bellevance, who campaigned relentlessly within and without Rhode Island, seeking special harvest privileges for his customers and for the customers of other for-hire boats.

Thus, it was no surprise that when the Council vote was tallied, both anglers' representatives voted for one fish, but the for-hire representative voted for two, and carried most of the commercial and other reps with him.

That Council vote wasn’t the final step in the process.  The Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management can reject Council advice and adopt different rules.  Some optimists think that may happen, but those on the ground in Rhode Island who have been at the heart of the fight disagree.  They say it’s a done—if ill-conceived—deal.

But that’s not the end of the story.

Rhode Island’s for-hire bass landings are low, estimated by NMFS at 4,974 fish in 2013 and 10,348 fish in 2014, about 1% and 3%, respectively, of coastwide for-hire striped bass landings.  So looking at the situation objectively, it wouldn’t seem that Rhode Island going to two fish would have very much of an impact on the population.

However, looking at Rhode Island alone doesn’t tell the whole story.  Fisheries managers in the northeast, and more importantly, the politicians who are those fisheries managers’ bosses, are trying to put uniform regulations in place, so that one area’s anglers and for-hire fisheries are not “disadvantaged” (read that “must kill fewer fish”) than their counterparts in neighboring states.

Massachusetts has adopted regulations allowing everyone to keep just one 28-inch fish.  Up until this week, it looked as if Connecticut would do the same, and there was real hope that New York would go the same way.  However, if Rhode Island adopts “split mode” regulations that favor the for-hire industry, there is a very good chance that at least New York, and perhaps Connecticut, too, will fall in line under the regional equality theory.

If that happens, Rhode Island’s decision could lead to real adverse impacts, as New York’s for-hires landed 234,650 fish in 2013 and 125,558 fish, last year, 49% and 32% of the overall for-hire landings.

Thus, the planting of one bad seed—a few for-hire captains up in Rhode Island who put their bank accounts ahead of the bass—could well result in anglers all along the striper coast reaping bitter fruit in upcoming seasons.  

It only takes the actions of a few insistent folks to ruin the fishing for all.

The striped bass situation is unfortunate, but at least it has the dubious virtue of being limited to only one species along one section of coast.  But earlier this week, we saw another bad seed take root, and that one has the potential to sow wild weeds throughout our national fisheries management system.

That story begins sometime in the mid- to late-1990s, when an organization called the Recreational Fishing Alliance was born down in southern New Jersey. 

I wasn’t around for that birth, but because it was roughly coincident with the creation of the Coastal Conservation Association’s New York state chapter—something I was intimately involved in—I watched the then-nascent organization grow through its bratty childhood and petulant adolescent years to mature into the bully of the recreational fisheries management community.

In other circumstances, the organization could have been grist for a sitcom, with an Executive Director who was involved—simultaneously—with two sexual harassment suits (in fairness, I can’t say whether such suits were—or were not—groundless, as I neither saw the evidence nor spoke to the parties), a “research scientist” and “chief of policy” who had convicted on federal charges after faking 59 reports of observations he was paid to make as a federal fisheries observer and a deputy director of legislative affairs who allegedly threatened an environmental lobbyist at a legislative meeting in Delaware (my own experience with that worthy individual came when, as a representative of CCA, I tried to call the RFA office to speak with the Executive Director, but never got through because said individual, who had answered the phone, kept screaming “F*** YOU!” “F*** YOU!!!” at me until I finally hung up in disgust…)

Or maybe, rather than a sitcom, it was more like the tawdry morality plays perfected by the World Wrestling Federation, where a black-hat character who represents everything bad—in this case, killing more fish than biologists believe to be prudent, and attacking anyone who disagrees with that effort in press releases and Internet rants—is pitted against a purported model of virtue; a role long played by the Coastal Conservation Association, which was regularly assaulted by RFA for its policy of “putting the fish first.”

The climax of that morality play seemed to occur in 2006, when RFA squared off against CCA and its allies (the most prominent of which was the American Sportfishing Association) over reauthorization of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act.  RFA, in its traditional black-hat role, was fighting to weaken conservation and management measures to allow more fish to be killed, while CCA stood tall and proud, fighting for conservation and virtue and, in the best WWF tradition, prevailed.

But the RFA folks, like wrestling-ring baddies, were not giving in.  They kept hammering away at the other “good” organizations for their conservation ethic, attacking them in the Mid-Atlantic for saying that killing fish was necessary to enjoy the angling experience, in the Gulf of Mexico for exploring new ways to manage red snapper and anywhere else opportunities happened to arise.  

Compared to CCA and allied organizations, RFA had few members and little money (copies of all of the organizations’ IRS Form 990s, which report membership dues, overall assets, cash flows, etc. may be found on the website www.guidestar.com), but they fought like pit bulls, always on the attack.

And RFA started to win.

That didn't happen because they were better funded, or because they had better people or even because their ideas had more worth.  They started to win because, in their constant, harrying message, they made their opponents tired and scared, and reluctant to fight any more.

The "good guys" suffered a crisis of faith, no longer seeming to believe in themselves, and seemed to worry more about losing members and membership dollars than maintaining their former conservation ideals.

And slowly, very slowly, those erstwhile "good guys" started putting out press releases and making statements that sounded more and more as if they came from RFA.

That crisis of faith finally culminated in what is being informally called the “Morris-Deal report,” but is formally entitled A Vision for Managing America’s Salt Water Recreational Fisheries.  In that document, a coalition of groups, including CCA and the American Sportfishing Association, effectively repudiated the very things that they fought for in the 2006 reauthorization of the Magnuson Act.

This week, RFA formally acknowledged its success in capturing the hearts and minds of the  national organizations who purport to represent America’s salt water fishermen when it proclaimed

“The RFA is pleased to support the tenets developed by the Morris-Deal vision.”

Which wasn’t much of a surprise, since the “Vision” pretty much supported the fishery management approach that RFA had been seeking for years.

“For the first time in many years, the industry and angler groups are united behind a common-sense framework that addresses many of the policy issues that remain after the last reauthorization of the Magnuson-Stevens Act in 2007.”

RFA always called weakening the conservation and rebuilding provisions of Magnuson a “common-sense issue," although, in the long run, it makes no sense at all.

And now the folks who had fought RFA for so long were suddenly embracing the group with open arms, with Jeff Angers, who I had known and worked with for years at CCA (when he was not a big fan of RFA), now saying in his relatively new role as President of the Center for Coastal Conservation

“Everyone welcomes RFA’s formal embrace of the Morris-Deal vision.  Morris-Deal continues to gain momentum, and we look forward to additional endorsements of the Vision as it works its way through the Congress.”

More bad seeds had borne fruit, and another minor organization had won a victory that will end up hurting us all, just because it was more stubborn and more determined to win than those it had always opposed.

And this is a tragedy, for management of our marine resources is far too important to be usurped by small numbers of people who are less concerned with the long-term health of our fisheries than in the short-term health of their wallets, simply because no one seems to have the courage, the time or the will to stand in their way.

But at the same time, it gives reason for hope, because it demonstrates that a small group of people, if they fight hard enough, really can effect change.  That means that if anglers can pull together, and use our numbers and passion to put things to rights, we can stamp out the fruits of the bad seeds before they begin to grow.  

It will never be an easy job, for the fruits of those bad seeds have thorns.

But it is a necessary and worthwhile fight, and something that we must do if we are to pass down healthy fisheries to the folks who are yet unborn, but deserve healthy fisheries at least as much as we do.

TRUST, BUT VERIFY

“Trust, but verify.”

It was one of the iconic phrases of the waning Cold War, uttered by President Ronald Reagan as he negotiated an arms control deal with the Soviet Union.

The phrase wasn’t actually coined by Reagan; it was an old Russian saying that the President used against the Soviets when it served his needs, but it’s still good advice.

It’s something that’s important to remember, because more and more, we’re seeing states and various industry groups trying to augment, or even replace, the National Marine Fisheries Service’s Marine Recreational Information Program with self-reporting programs of various sorts that rely on anglers and for-hire operators to do the right thing every time they go out.

The effort seems to be particularly popular in the case of fisheries that are subject to strict federal regulations that require short fishing seasons, small bag limits or other similar, unpopular measures.

The federal-waters red snapper fishery in the Gulf of Mexico is arguably the most heavily-restricted recreational fishery on any of America’s coasts.  Thus, it is hardly surprising that, last year, the State of Alabama initiated a mandatory self-reporting program intended provide better (from a snapper fisherman’s standpoint, if not necessarily from a biologist’s, that translates to “smaller”) estimates of recreational red snapper landings.

Alabama states that it initiated the program because

“The credibility of the current federal surveys used to estimate recreational red snapper harvests among private and charter anglers has been under ever increasing scrutiny…recent changes to the federal law that governs how red snapper are managed have led to the imposition of stricter regulations each year with slim hopes for improvement.  A timely and accurate method of counting fish such as the mandatory reporting program could improve the predicament that we face in this fishery.”

In other words, the program was put in place with the hopes that it would produce lower harvest estimates than the method used by the feds.

And in its first year, that’s exactly what happened.

Last June, when the federal red snapper season was open, NMFS estimated that Alabama anglers landed about 1,041,000 pounds of such fish, while the Alabama survey estimated that harvest to be a mere 418,000 pounds. 

The question, of course, is “Which number is right?”

The federal MRIP estimates were derived from a program intended to improve upon the admittedly flawed Marine Recreational Fishing Statistical Survey; however, MRIP remains a work in progress that is still transitioning from the MRFSS format into its final form.  

It is based on a rigorously analyzed statistical format, and consists of both physical surveys of angler catch and telephone and/or mail surveys used to estimate angler effort.

To implement the Alabama survey,

“Representatives from recreational vessels with red snapper on board are required to report red snapper prior to landing fish in Alabama.”

They may make such reports through

“…smartphone app for IOS and Android devices found under the Official Outdoor Alabama App…at respective app stores, online…, or on paper forms found at select coastal public boat launches...”

It’s not clear how a vessel is supposed to report red snapper “prior to landing fish in Alabama” through the use of paper forms (perhaps fold them into airplanes and toss them toward shore?), or how many anglers without the required app take the trouble to get such paper forms if they don’t happen to return to one of the “select coastal public boat launches.”

With a system like that, it might be that a few red snapper fall through the cracks and aren’t counted, either because there isn’t a paper form close at hand, or because anglers, hungry and tired at the end of a long day offshore, just don’t get around to reporting, electronically or otherwise, despite the new requirements.

After all, NMFS requires all bluefin tuna caught by anglers to be reported, too, but when I spoke with one of the NMFS staffers responsible for managing bluefin at NMFS' Recreational Fishing Summit held down in Alexandria last April, he lamented that anglers actually reported only about one out of every five bluefin caught.

If Alabama snapper anglers are no more conscientious than their bluefin-catching counterparts elsewhere on the coast, it’s not surprising that the state survey figures come in a little bit low…

But recreational underreporting isn’t just a tuna or red snapper problem.

Here in New York, and throughout the northeast, party and charter boats are supposed to fill out Vessel Trip Reports setting forth all of their landings.  New York may have the strictest requirements, using a VTR that is essentially identical to the federal form.

Yet when we look at striped bass, we seem to find problems.

NMFS estimates that anglers fishing from for-hire boats in the State of New York landed 234,650 striped bass in 2014.  At the same time, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation reports that Vessel Trip Reports filled out by the state’s party and charter boats say that just 12,309 striped bass—a mere five percent of the landings estimated by NMFS—were landed by their customers in that year.

Comparable numbers for last year were similar; NMFS said that the for-hires landed 125,558 fish, while the for-hires themselves claimed just 6,477—again, just 5% of the NMFS number.

It’s impossible to say for certain which number is right, or even which is closer to the truth.  But just think about this:

Last July, Montauk experienced a spectacular run of big striped bass.  During that run, passengers on Montauk party and charter boats had no problem limiting out with bass weighing from 20 to more than 50 pounds.  

If just three party boats, carrying only 30 passengers each and making just one trip each day, limited out for a week, they would have landed 1,260 stripers—landing, in just one week, nearly one-fifth of all striped bass reported on all vessel trip reports filed by all of the state’s party and charter boats for the entire year.

Given that the run lasted for much more than one week, and that the 1,260-bass estimate was for only three party boats, didn’t include any fish caught by Montauk’s large and active charter boat fleet, and didn’t include striped bass caught by for-hire vessels running out of any other New York port at any other time of the year—including South Shore ports which, from Staten Island to Shinnecock, also enjoyed an excellent spring run of big bass feeding on menhaden—the notion that New York’s for-hires killed fewer than 6,500 striped bass all season just doesn’t seem credible.

That’s why VTR data, and any other self-reported information, should always be viewed with a jaundiced eye.

Many captains just don’t feel that it’s in their interests to diligently report every fish killed on their boat.

Consider the infamous case of a New Jersey party boat that came into port a few years ago with 819 illegal (out-of-season) black sea bass on board.  When a local paper asked the captain whether he knew that the fish were there, he said that he knew that a few were being kept, but

“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.”

So what do you think his Vessel Trip Report would have included?  Perhaps 5% of the fish that were actually killed?

And yet, in their thankfully-defeated effort to open January and February, when NMFS data is not collected in the northeast, to black sea bass fishing, the party boats argued that a lack of harvest data should not hinder the opening, because NMFS could rely on the data reported in their VTRs.

The for-hire fleet loves to question NMFS’ data, which everyone has to admit falls short of perfection.  However, the accuracy of the for-hires’ data, provided on VTRs and elsewhere, is also open to question.

At least the NMFS data, with all of its flaws, is collected by objective surveyors, with no interest in how it is used; there will always be a temptation for anglers and for-hire captains to “accidently” misreport landings in an attempt to engineer a desired result.

Which means that managers should always be leery of accepting electronic catch reports and other data provided by for-hires and anglers, unless there is a protocol in place to objectively ground-truth that data and assure that no creative accounting appears.

For whether we’re talking about nuclear fission or party boat fishing, “Trust, but verify” remains good advice.