LESSONS LEARNED: THIS WEEK'S MENHADEN LOSS AT ASMFC

Let’s not try to sugar-coat things.

This week, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Atlantic Menhaden Management Board handed conservation interests a significant defeat, when it bowed to the demands of Omega Protein, supported by the Commonwealth of Virginia, and failed to adopt ecosystem-based reference points for Atlantic menhaden, arguably the single most important forage species on the Atlantic coast.

Adding insult to injury, the Management Board also increased the menhaden quota by 8%, and failed to allocate an equitable share of the menhaden resource to the various coastal states, instead allowing Virginia, and thus Omega, to monopolize about 80% of the menhaden harvest.

It was clear from the debate at the Management Board meeting, and from later observations made by Management Board members and others, that the loss can’t be attributed to just one cause.  

While Omega’s ongoing efforts to preserve and enhance its income stream inspired most of the resistance to the ecosystem-based reference points, that effort was only successful because a number of factors directly or indirectly supported Omega’s position, and helped to undercut the position of the conservation community.

History always repeats itself, and more important debates, involving menhaden and many other species managed by ASMFC, loom in the future.  Thus, it is worth taking some time to dissect the factors underlying this defeat, so that the lessons learned can help conservation advocates achieve better results in the future.

1)  Change is hard

Right now, at ASMFC and at the federal level, single-species management is the norm.  Managers concern themselves solely with whether harvest is maintained at sustainable levels (“overfishing is not taking place”) and whether the stock is large enough to maximize long-term, sustainable yield the stock is not overfished”).  Even though every species is a part of and interacts with its environment, such interactions, including predator/prey relationships, are not explicitly considered.

The proposed adoption of ecosystem reference points for menhaden, whether the interim reference points rejected earlier this week or the menhaden-specific reference points that will hopefully be adopted in 2019, marks a paradigm shift for fishery management.  By placing emphasis on menhaden’s ecosystem role, and not merely focusing on sustainable harvest, ecosystem reference points would have shifted managers’ focus away from maximizing harvest—and thus profits—and toward restoring healthy and fully-functioning coastal food webs.

The possibility of such a shift frightened Omega Protein, by far the biggest player in the menhaden fishery, as it very possibly could have led to reduced landings and reduced income, and at the very least would place a low cap on how far landings could increase (the menhaden industry is alreadycomplaining that the 8% increase was far too low, and that they should havebeen allowed to kill more).  

As normally happens when corporate profits are threatened, the industry carried out an effective last-minute propaganda campaign focused on the possibility of lost jobs, rather than lost income.

No one likes to force people out of work, so that sort of campaign tends to be very effective at defeating conservation initiatives at ASMFC.  Unless the case for reducing landings is completely iron-clad, and sometimes not even then, ASMFC managers tend to avoid taking any actions that might impose economic hardship on the fishing community.  Thus, they were susceptible to Virginia’s/Omega’s arguments that the interim reference points were not menhaden-specific, and imposed inappropriate constraints on the fishery; such arguments were made more credible by an industry-funded study which questioned the need for forage fish management and cast doubt on the science supporting such reference points.

In the end, with the menhaden stock neither overfished nor subject to overfishing, the Management Board felt no urgent need to change its management approach.  

2)  The conservation community asked for too much

The management option most strongly supported by the conservation community would have established an interim fishing mortality rate target low enough to rebuild the population to 75% of the size of an unfished stock, and a fishing mortality threshold that would not have let the population slip below 40% of the size of such virgin stock.

Realistically, there was little to no chance that the Management Board would have actually set a quota that reduced fishing mortality to the proposed target rate.  The economic impact would have been far too high.  With menhaden neither overfished nor subject to overfishing, they would almost certainly have allowed the status quo to prevail, with perhaps even a slight increase in quota, and focused on preventing overfishing by maintaining a fishing mortality rate below the threshold level.  

Everyone sitting on the Management Board was very cognizant of that fact.

But while the proposed target fishing mortality rate would have called for a quota that was, from a political standpoint, unrealistically small, some at the meeting argued that the threshold fishing mortality rate would have permitted the harvest to increase substantially before overfishing occurred. 

The combination of an unrealistically low menhaden quota, if the stock was managed at the target rate, and the threat of an undesirably high menhaden harvest, if the stock was fished near the threshold rate, was enough to convince some Management Board members that the conservationists’ preferred option wasn’t a viable alternative.  An option that set a more realistic interim target mortality rate, and prevented quota from increasing much above the status quo, might have fared better, if it had been available.

3)  The Management Board is not engaged in a democratic process

Much was made, both before and after the Management Board meeting, of the fact that about 158,000 people commented on the interim ecological reference points, and that about 99% of those comments favored putting such reference points in place.

Public comment is certainly relevant to ASMFC decisions, and people should be urged to comment on any issue that they care about.  However, it’s not the Management Board’s job to count votes.  They are tasked with reviewing the biological and, yes, the social and economic information available, and making their decision on that basis. 

Hundreds of fishermen, who are active participants in the fishery and take the time to come out to hearings, submit their own comments and perhaps even show up at the management board meeting will sway some commissioners’ decisions, because they speak with some personal knowledge of all three of those factors.  Thousands of preprinted e-mails, sent by folks who have no obvious connection to or knowledge of the menhaden fishery and who failed to make the effort to come out to a hearing and speak for themselves, are a different story.  While not worthless, as a practical matter, they count for a lot less.

When faced with choices that are each supported by some valid data, a management board’s actions are often decided by interpersonal and interstate relationships that extend far beyond the issue in question.  Virginia will always walk in lockstep with Omega Protein, which has long been an economic and political presence in the state.  The current administration in Washington, which controls both the National Marine Fisheries Service’s and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s votes, will always favor short-term profit over healthy natural resources.  Few states are prone to take actions which will cause significant economic dislocation in another jurisdiction, because everyone knows that, one day, the wheel will turn again and they may be the state pleading for a little understanding.

It is clear that the great majority of people wanted to see interim ecological reference points adopted.  However, when commissioners were faced with conflicting data regarding that issue, and realized that  both federal agencies would oppose ecosystem reference points, overwhelming public comment in favor of that outcome was not enough to prevail.

While advocates should never stop seeking public involvement, they would probably do well to spend more time building personal relationships with the commissioners that will make it easier, in the future, to convey the reasons why their positions are the right ones and, in turn, understand the obstacles to those commissioners voting the right way.

4)  Commerce Secretary Ross has done severe harm to the interstate management process

Right now, Wilbur Ross has folks at ASMFC running scared.

Prior to July 2017, ASMFC had a powerful tool to keep states in compliance with its fishery management plans.  The Atlantic Coastal Fisheries Cooperative Management Act provides that, should a state fail to comply with an ASMFC fishery management plan, ASMFC can formally find that state out of compliance and forward that finding to the Secretary of Commerce.  The Secretary must then, provided that he or she both agrees that the state is out of compliance and finds that compliance is necessary for the conservation of the relevant species, shut down the fishery for such species in the noncompliant state until that state complies.

For more than twenty years, that system ensured the integrity and the effectiveness of ASMFC’s fishery management efforts, as the Secretary of Commerce never failed to support ASMFC’s findings.  

Last July, however, things changed.  The current Secretary of Commerce condoned New Jersey’s failure to comply with ASMFC’s summer flounder management plan, and overruled ASMFC’s noncompliance finding.  The precedent established by that action put ASMFC’s authority to manage coastal fish stocks in jeopardy, as states now have reason to believe that, should they decide to go out of compliance, the Secretary of Commerce will again elevate profits over the well-being of coastal resources, and overrule ASMFC.

Virginia, and reportedly New Jersey, played that card at the Management Board meeting this week, making it clear that if ASMFC took an action that they didn’t like, they would ignore it in the belief that they Secretary of Commerce would take their side.  NMFS’ opposition to interim reference points reinforced the perception that the Secretary would not uphold them if adopted by ASMFC.  That sent a message to a number of commissioners, who decided that support for the interim reference points would ultimately be pointless.  It also reportedly concerned some commissioners, primarily state fishery directors, who are concerned for the long-term survival of ASMFC and feared that another incident of the Commerce Secretary overruling an ASMFC action will put a stake through the Commission’s heart.

Faced with the likelihood of a secretarial override, commissioners accepted the inevitable and voted against the conservationists’ preferred option.

The question now is what happens in 2019, or whenever the menhaden-specific ecological reference points are developed, and are considered by the Management Board.

Omega Protein isn’t going anywhere.  There is no reason to suspect that they will endorse any ecological reference points that are adopted.  They will only change the arguments that they use to support the status quo.

The Administration in Washington won’t be going anywhere, either, at least not before 2021.  The same shark fin soup-slurping opponent of just about anything that promotes conservation will be sitting in the Oval Office, and if Wilbur Ross is no longer the Secretary of Commerce, it’s pretty certain that someone else at least as hostile to conservative, science-based fishery management, and as friendly to short-term exploitation, will be.

Which makes the menhaden’s future pretty unclear.  All that we can do is learn from this loss, and try to prepare a bit better for next time.

And hope that it pays off.

RUN THE NUMBERS--ABUNDANCE MATTERS

One of the more nonsensical arguments that has been going on in the Mid-Atlantic fishing community is the one about “abundance.”

On one side, there are anglers who acknowledge the fact that fishing is a lot more enjoyable when there are enough fish in the water to provide relatively dependable action.  

They tend to support regulations needed to rebuild and conserve fish stock, although even some of the anglers’ rights and industry trade groups trying that are currently trying to weaken federal fisheries laws are honest enough to admit that, if you’re an angler, abundance is a good thing.

On the other side, there are a handful of loud, aggressive, anti-regulation ideologues who seem to view the concept of “abundance” as an environmentalists’ plot to keep anglers from killing as many fish as they’d like to.  Located primarily in New Jersey, where anglers' hunger never seems to be sated, the anti-abundance crowd generally tries to ridicule the concept of abundance, rather than provide a reasoned and rational explanation of why the opposite of an “abundance” of fish—which Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary suggests would be a “deficiency,” “inadequacy” or “undersupply” of the same—would make things better for anglers.

Such folks tend to actively support management approaches—such as ignoring objective scientific advice in order to adopt bag limits that are too high, size limits that are too low and seasons that are too long—that are likely to make such deficiency a reality.

Since federal fisheries law tends to favor abundance, and has led to a number of successfully rebuilt stocks in the Mid-Atlantic region, the “abundance” argument has largely been conducted on a theoretical level.  However, during the 2017 season, a number of factors came together in the upper Mid-Atlantic and southern New England, which rendered a number of popular species somewhat scarce and gave anglers and fishery managers a look at what a lack of abundance looks like, and how it impacts fishing effort.

The short answer, which shouldn’t come as any surprise to anyone, is that when fish get scarce, fishermen tend to become scarce as well.

The 2017 season played out differently in different places, although there were a lot of common themes. 

Here on the South Shore of Long Island, spring was cold and wet.  Then, the typical summer weather pattern—calm, hazy mornings, mostly dry days and a southwest breeze that begins to blow early in the afternoon—never established itself.  Instead, the prevalent winds came from the northwest, north and northeast, and brought more clouds and rain than we usually see.

In addition, the wind pushed warm surface water farther offshore, allowing cooler water to well up from below.  Warmed by the heat of the sun, the nutrient-loaded bottom water fed an extensive phytoplankton bloom that turned ocean waters green from the beach all the way out to the edge of the continental shelf, and made tuna fishing difficult.  In Great South Bay, the worst brown tide event ever recorded turned the water the color of maple syrup and shut down inshore fisheries.

Fish were generally not abundant. 

The summer flounder population had suffered through six consecutive years of below-average spawns; the years of poor recruitment began to have a real impact on the number of fish available to anglers.  Although the remnants of healthy year classes were still available, allowing some very large fish to be caught, the barely-legal fluke that normally account for most of the landings were difficult to come by.  Many fluke fishermen began targeting black sea bass, which were extremely abundant.  However, most of the sea bass were small; few fish exceeded the 15-inch minimum size.

Striped bass which, along with summer flounder, are one of New York’s most important recreational species, were also hard to find in most places.  The population has declined over the past decade, and currently hovers just above the biomass threshold that defines an overfished stock.  There was a good late-spring bite off western Long Island, and a steady pick of fish off Montauk during the summer, but for the most part, the fish were scarce.  The marina where I dock my boat hosted a tournament in early July, when bass are usually abundant.  About 50 boats and 150 anglers participated, but they barely caught enough fish to claim all of the prizes.  Bluefish, which usually take up the slack when striped bass fishing is slow, were also scarce inshore.

I took a look at the National Marine Fisheries Service’s estimates of anglers’ landings and angling effort for the first eight months of 2017, to see how the lack of fish affected angling activity.  The results were instructive.

It turns out that New York’s salt water anglers took about 1.586 million trips between March 1 and August 31, 2017, compared to 2.958 million trips during the same period in 2016—a reduction of about 46%.  During the first eight months of 2017, New York anglers harvested 73% fewer summer flounder, 77% fewer striped bass, 78% fewer black sea bass and 59% fewer bluefish.

Looking at those numbers, it seems clear that a lack of fish—whether due to depressed populations, mere local scarcity or regulations that restricted harvest—impacted angler activity.  If the percentage declines for both effort and landings were close to the same, it would be easy to argue that there was no direct link between abundance and angler effort; instead, one might contend, landings were lower solely because people fished less, and not because fish were harder to catch (to oversimplify, landings estimates are devised by multiplying the average number of fish counted in the coolers of people interviewed by NMFS’ surveyors by the average number of trips taken by people contacted in a telephone survey of households in coastal counties; thus, if landings varied in direct proportion to effort, abundance would probably not play a decisive role).

However, the decline in effort coupled with a much greater decline in the number of fish landed is exactly what you would expect to see if abundance had a meaningful influence on angling activity.  Fishermen would still go fishing, because that’s what they enjoy doing in their spare time.  However, when fish are scarce, anglers will grow tired of catching little or nothing, and will go fishing less often, because fishing in a sparsely-populated ocean isn’t all that much fun.

The estimates of effort and landings for particular species further supports the idea that abundance impacts effort.  

Both summer flounder and striped bass support very popular directed fisheries, and both saw similar declines in directed trips, 46% and 42% respectively, as well as similar, 75%-ish declines in landings.  Both species also suffered from relatively low population levels, which means that anglers caught relatively few fish, of any size, during the course of a day.

Black sea bass, on the other hand, exhibited a different pattern.  Although black sea bass landings for the first eight months of 2017 were 78% lower than they were for the same period in 2016, the number of directed black sea bass trips fell by only 20%.  That’s easily explained by black sea bass’ abundance.  While the 15-inch minimum size kept anglers from keeping many fish, smaller black sea bass were very abundant; I frequently came across stacks of them rising 30 or 40 feet above offshore wrecks.  Thus, anglers could catch and release a lot of small fish while waiting to land a few big enough to take home; that made black sea bass fishing a lot more entertaining than fishing for much scarcer fluke, striped bass and bluefish.

In New Jersey, the decline in summer flounder effort almost paralleled the decline in summer flounder landings, 32% and 34% respectively, leaving the door open to the argument that effort and abundance were not closely related.  However, further analysis shows something else: substantial evidence of effort shift.

While, in New York, the decline in overall effort and the decline in directed summer flounder trips was almost the same, both about 46%, in New Jersey overall effort only declined by 17%, roughly half of the decline seen in trips targeting summer flounder.  That difference appears to be attributable largely to black sea bass; New Jersey’s 12 ½-inch size limit is fully 2 ½-inches less than any other northeastern state with a significant black sea bass fishery, and allows New Jersey anglers to harvest fish that have to be released in neighboring New York.  As a result, New Jersey black sea bass landings were nearly 200% higher in 2017, and the number of directed black sea bass trips was nearly 150% higher as well.  (Again, there is not a linear relationship between landings and effort, as the ability to harvest more fish isn’t the only thing motivating anglers to go fishing.)

The anti-regulation crowd might use New Jersey black sea bass as an example of why laxer rules, rather than abundance, drives angling effort.  However, it is important to note that what New Jersey gains in a lower size limit, it gives up in a shorter fishing season, so that its regulations will have “conservation equivalency”with the other northeastern states.  As a result, its overall set of regulations is no less stringent than those in other states.  It’s also important to note that absent regulations adequate to conserve the stock at current levels, the ability to harvest even 12 ½-inch fish would quickly become impaired.

If a fisherman is honest with himself, he’ll admit that he’ll want to fish more often when he’s catching fish, and that he’ll test the waters less frequently when fish are scarce.  The numbers from New York merely provide some objective confirmation of that obvious truth.

But they should provide something else, as well:  A warning to a regulation-averse angling industry that, without abundant fish, they’re not likely to see abundant fishermen—or abundant customers—for very long.

GETTING SERIOUS ABOUT BLACK SEA BASS

It’s long been said that “familiarity breeds contempt.”

Maybe the black sea bass has been suffering from some of that contempt lately.

They’ve always been a popular saltwater panfish, offering wonderful, flaky white flesh that is particularly prized in East Asian recipes.  For many years, black sea bass were overfished; more recently, federal fishery managers armed with the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act and helped by good wintering conditions at the edge of the continental shelf have restored the species not just to abundance, but to ubiquity, along most of the coast between New Jersey and Massachusetts.

A benchmark stock assessment completed in 2016 indicated that the spawning stock biomass at the close of 2015 was about 230% of the target level.  Such abundance was readily confirmed by fishermen, who were catching black sea bass in greater numbers than they had previously experienced, and in places where they had never seen them before.

Much of that abundance was due to a huge 2011 year class, nearly three times the average year class size, which benefitted from unusually favorable oceanographic conditions during the extraordinarily mild winter of 2011-2012.

The explosion of black sea bass abundance came at just the right time, since in 2016 summer flounder, the traditional mainstay of thesummer small boat fleet in southern New England and the upper Mid-Atlantic, hadjust experienced six consecutive years of below-average spawning success.  Lacking a reliable summer flounder fishery anglers, and in particular the party boat fleet, shifted much of their effort from the often-scarce fluke onto black sea bass.

The party boats often still advertised to their fares that they were fishing for summer flounder, and they did catch a few; however, instead of fishing on the open sand bottoms of the bays, inlets and nearshore ocean, they began spending more time fishing around wrecks and artificial reefs, where anglers had a chance of hooking some big summer flounder, but were virtually certain of putting a few black sea bass into their pails even if the fluke didn’t show.

Farther from shore, wrecks that had historically seen only modest fishing pressure were crowded with private and foir-hire boats seeking black sea bass; even hard-to-find, low-profile pieces were frequently visited.

As a result of the increased effort, even as black sea bass abundance increased, regulations grew more restrictive.

Changing regulations here in New York illustrate that very well.  In 2012, well before the 2011 year class recruited into the fishery and, due to the lack of an acceptable stock assessment, at a time when the annual catch limit was still very low, New York anglers could retain 15 black sea bass per day; each had to be no less than 13 inches long, and the season ran from June 15 through December 31.  By 2017, despite the fact that the 2016 stock assessment led to a sharp increase in the annual quota, the bag limit had been decreased from 15 fish to 3 (increasing to 8 in September and October and 10 in November and December) and the size limit had been increased from 13 to 15 inches.  The season was also modestly shortened, and now runs from June 27 through the end of the year.

It seemed to be a counterintuitive change, since it would be logical to assume that growing abundance and increased annual catch limits would lead to relaxed, rather than more stringent, regulations.  And regulations probably would have been relaxed, if it hadn’t been for the effort shift.

The National Marine Fisheries Service’s recreational harvest estimates show that New York anglers harvested about 275,000 black sea bass, weighing roughly 400,000  pounds, in 2011.  By 2016, the number of black sea bass harvested by recreational fishermen in New York had nearly quadrupled, to slightly over 1,000,000, while the total weight of the fish landed was more than five times what it was in 2011, increasing to a little more than 2,200,000 pounds.

Viewed in that light, it’s pretty clear why regulations had to be tightened.

Members of the recreational fishing industry, however, didn’t see things quite that way.  Instead of considering the increased fishing effort being directed at black sea bass, as well as the increased abundance, they focus solely on the abundance, and thus complain that regulations are too stringent.  That was well exemplified in the summary of the comments made at a recent meeting of the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council’s Summer Flounder, Scup and Black Sea Bass Advisory Panel, where it was noted that

“the size limit should be decreased because we are in a downward spiral where fish get larger and it takes fewer fish to reach the [recreational harvest limit] even when it is higher.  This flies in the face of the premise that ‘if you cut back today, you will be allowed more tomorrow’ because regulations get tighter with higher abundance.  Because people see this now, they have lost faith in management and are more prone to totally disregard any regulation as they feel they have sacrificed size, season, and bag limit for too long.  If you are allowed fewer fish when the stock is at 2.4x target then when will things liberalize?  If fishermen never get any ‘real’ relief that they can see in their buckets or time allowed to fish then this exercise of management has failed.  The more disconnected that regulations get from reality the less people will be inclined to follow them.  For example, there would be a lot of cars speeding on I-95 if the limit was 40 miles per hour the whole way, it is just how it is.”

The local angling press bears a lot of the blame for such attitudes, because they never take the time to educate their readers about the impacts of increased effort on harvest and, consequently, on regulations.  Instead, they quote individuals such as Jim Donofrio of the Recreational Fishing Alliance, who wrote a semi-hysterical letter to the White House that said, in part,

“At this time, the Atlantic black sea bass population is at the highest level recorded in fisheries’ management history.  It’s more than double its rebuilding target and we have a shut down.  Currently, arbitrary and non-scientific provisions that were implemented in the last Magnuson Act are keeping fishermen and our for hire boats (party and charter boats) from accessing this completely healthy fishery.  They will be losing over a month of business facing this closure.”

Donofrio, of course, never mentions the sharply increased effort going into the black sea bass fishery, effort that could also conceivably be “the highest level…in fisheries management history,” nor does he mention that one of the big reasons that New Jersey anglers were facing a closed black sea bass season at that time is because the state chose to adopt regulations that included a 12 ½-inch size limit—fully 2 ½ inches smaller than the minimum size in any other northeastern state with a significant fishery—and that the closed season was necessary to compensate for the large number of smaller fish harvested as a result.

But anglers usually aren’t told all of those critical details; instead of understanding the facts that lead to fisheries regulations, they become enraged by writers who try to stir up uninformed indignation, and the management process suffers as a result.

That is particularly true in the for-hire industry, where black sea bass have been receiving particularly shabby treatment.

Many responsible anglers were outraged a few years ago, when word got out that New Jersey law enforcement agents boarded a party boat out of Brielle, New Jersey, to find 819 illegal black sea bass on board.  Their outrage was further fueled when the vessel’s captain seemed to show little contrition for allowing his passengers to kill all of those illegal fish, instead acknowledging the illegal landings while saying

“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.”

Rumors—perhaps better deemed to be descriptions—of blatant disregard of the black sea bass regulations have been steadily trickling out of the party boat fleet ever since.  

Those rumors were confirmed this fall out in Montauk, New York, where two different party boats were boarded by law enforcement officers on two different days this fall, and thousands of illegal black sea bass were discovered.

Readers will have to decide for themselves whether those were the only times the people involved broke the law, and whether they were the only boats in the fleet that dabbled in illegality…

But people are finally noticing, and starting to take some action. 

At its October meeting, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Summer Flounder, Scup and Black Sea Bass Management Board considered adding a provision to the management plan that would hold for-hire captains and crew legally responsible for such illegal harvest by their passengers.  ASMFC’s Law Enforcement Committee also considered the matter, where

“several members observed that repeated abuse of size and bag limits on certain for-hire vessels has been an ongoing problem.  If all states could implement the needed measures to charge and prosecute captains or operators (along with customers), it would help in putting a stop to these illegal practices.”

Unfortunately, no immediate action will be taken.  Instead, the Black Sea Bass Recreational Working Group has been asked to develop options designed to improve for-hire compliance in the fishery.

Even as such ongoing violations of the black sea bass regulations were being discussed, both the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council and ASMFC moved forward with an  operationally incomplete proposal to allow black sea bass fishing during Wave 1—January and February—when it is currently closed. 

The proposed open season would run for the full month of February, with a 15-fish bag limit and 12 ½-inch minimum size.  Despite the fact that, at least in the northern half of the Mid-Atlantic region, the February fishery would be prosecuted primarily by for-hire vessels, the recreational harvest limit for the main summer/fall season would be reduced by 100,000 pounds to account for what was caught in February, making the entire angling community pay for a privilege enjoyed by relatively few.

The 100,000 pound harvest would be just a rough estimate of what might be caught during a February season, since the Marine Recreational Information Program does not sample anglers north of the Carolinas during the first two months of the year.

States will have to decide whether or not to opt into the February season before it begins.

Not many years ago, such a proposal would have been automatically approved by the states.  However, problems related to noncompliance, accurately counting the fish caught during the first two months of the year and even fairly distributing the benefits and burdens of the open season are making people think twice.

In New Jersey, the Marine Fisheries Commission decided to defer action on a February season, until they could get a better idea of what restrictions might be placed on the 2018 black sea bass fishery.  

Anglers and party boat operators who don’t sail for black sea bass during the winter seemed generally opposed to the new season, as they didn’t want to see the primary summer/fall season shortened; the only way that they would support the February season would be if the primary season wasn’t affected at all.  Owners and operators of vessels who want to participate in the winter fishery, on the other hand, want to see it established.

The same sort of discussion played out at New York’s Marine Resources Advisory Council meeting last Tuesday.  

While no one was opposed to the concept of a winter season, the majority of the Council wanted to see such a season done right, with little or no impact on the primary summer/fall season and observers on board the vessels to get an accurate count of the fish caught.  

I attended the meeting, and noted that, given the acknowledged abuses taking place in the party boat fishery, the ability to assure regulatory compliance was also an important issue.  

In the end, a motion recommending that the Department of Environmental Conservation adopt a February season in 2018 received only two affirmative votes, and was defeated—although the Council left open the possibility that a well-regulated season could be adopted in 2019.

Such concerns about the black sea bass fishery are a good thing.

Because sure, there are a lot of black sea bass around right now, and the 2015 year class looks very strong.

But then, 200 years ago, between three and five billionpassenger pigeons flew through America’s skies.  One hundred years later, they were all gone.

And 200 years ago, at least 50,000,000 American bison roamed across North America, from what is now North Carolina into the Pacific Northwest.  While they (barely) escaped extinction, only about 15,000 wild, free-range bison live on the continent today.

When you think about that for a minute, it shouldn’t seem unreasonable for fishery managers to try to take good care of black sea bass today, despite its current abundance.

Because in the end, the best time to conserve any species is when it’s still plentiful, and not when it’s mostly gone.

STRIPED BASS--SAME FIGHT, DIFFERENT DECADE

At the dawn of the 21^st Century, anglers and fishery managers were fighting over striped bass. 

More particularly, they were fighting over how the fish should be managed—for maximum yield, which suggested some level of growth overfishing and a spawning stock that lacked most of the older, larger and most fecund females, or for a larger, stable, sustainable population that included a wide range of ages and sizes, but yielded a somewhat smaller annual harvest.

A large number of anglers, many of whom had fished for striped bass before and during the stock collapse of the late 1970s and early 1980s, argued that the latter approach would, in the end, be best for both fish and fishermen.  

Joining together under the slogan

“The job’s not done until we bring back the big bass,”

they pointed to research such as that referenced in a joint National Marine Fisheries Service/United States Fish and Wildlife Service report, which noted, in part, that

“The distribution of age classes in a population has important implications for stock productivity and stability.  Studies on striped bass have shown that larger fish produce larger eggs and larvae, and larger individuals of these life stages have a greater chance of survival.”   

At the time that debate was going on, fishery managers were generally focused on obtaining maximum sustainable yield from fish populations.  Managing for MSY generally results in a population that, while able to maintain itself under normal circumstances, is fairly small and made up primarily of smaller individuals; the relatively high annual harvest rate assures that most fish will be removed from the population well before they attain a large size or older age.  

Although the smaller individuals each contribute relatively little to the spawning stock, they make up for low individual fecundity with high levels of abundance, and collectively produce enough spawn to produce average recruitment over the long term.

However, a spawning stock that is comprised of just a few age classes, and is subject to relatively high levels of fishing mortality, is vulnerable to recruitment failure.  Should it experience consecutive years of below-average spawning success, while mature adults are steadily removed from the population, the size of the spawning stock can quickly decline.  With few larger, older fish in the population to provide a reserve of fecund females, the spawning potential of the stock will plummet and the stock can easily collapse.

That is essentially what happened to striped bass during the late 1970s and 1980s, when recruitment in the critically important Maryland spawning areas tanked for 14 years, beginning in 1975.  Such poor recruitment, coupled with excessive harvest, caused the stock to collapse, and required heroic measures on the part of fishery managers to nurse it back to health.

Not wanting to see history repeat itself, the anglers argued for lower harvest levels that would lead to a more resilient stock in which the older age classes were well-represented.

In more recent years, the need for such a well-stratified stock—one which includes substantial numbers of what biologists now sometimes refer to as “big, old, fat, fertile female fish”—has become well-accepted among mainstream fisheries scientists.  But fifteen or twenty years ago, the anglers who sought to elevate the long-term health of the striped bass stock above the opportunity for a large near-term harvest were staking out a seemingly radical and certainly controversial position.

The depth of the controversy was illustrated by the differing opinions held by various members of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Striped Bass Management Board; the split didn’t merely divide different state delegations, but separated representatives sent to ASMFC from a single state.  

For example, at the Management Board’s December 2002 meeting, Pat Augustine, the Governor’s Appointee from New York, put forward a motion that would maintain the target fishing mortality rate at 0.30, a level that would allow about 26% of the adult population to be harvested each year.

In response, Gordon Colvin, who represented the New York Department of Environmental Conservation’s Marine Bureau, argued for a more conservative harvest level, saying

“as stated by some of the advisors, there is a clear indication in this amendment of an objective that would accelerate, to the extent that it’s reasonable to do so, the aging of the population, and it will accelerate faster at a lower mortality rate.

“Our own analysis show that consistent with the stated objective of the plan…”

The end result was Amendment 6 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Striped Bass, a management document that managed to satisfy neither side.  While the new Amendment, adopted in 2003, acknowledged that

“1)  There is growing concern that the management program contained in Amendment 5 may not be appropriate to prevent the exploitation target in Amendment 5 from being exceeded.

[and]

2)  Over the past few years many members of the fishing community have raised the concern that the availability or abundance of large striped bass in the coastal migratory population has decreased,”

a goal

“To perpetuate, through cooperative interstate fishery management, migratory stocks of striped bass; to allow commercial and recreational fishing consistent with the long-term maintenance of a broad age structure, a self-sustaining spawning stock; and also to provide for the restoration and management of their essential habitat, [emphasis added]”

and clear objectives to

“Manage striped bass fisheries under a control rule designed to maintain stock size at or above the target female spawning stock biomass level and a level of fishing mortality at or below the target exploitation rate”

and

“Manage fishing mortality to maintain an age structure that provides adequate spawning potential to sustain long-term abundance of striped bass populations,”

it also failed to reduce the target mortality rate, which made the Amendment’s acknowledgements, goal and objectives ring somewhat hollow. 

Unfortunately, those who sought to reduce fishing mortality ultimately found themselves justified, for the female spawning stock biomass peaked in 2003, the same year that Amendment 6 was approved, and then began a long slide from which it has not yet recovered.  

A new benchmark stock assessment, released in 2013, not only documented the decline, but advised that the Amendment 6 reference points were, as some of us had warned a decade before, far too high.

New, lower fishing mortality reference points—a target of 0.18 and a threshold of 0.219—were adopted in 2014.  An update to the stock assessment indicated that, at the end of the 2015 fishing season, the female spawning stock biomass stood at 58,853 metric tons, well below the 72,032 metric ton target and just slightly above the 57,626 metric ton target that denotes an overfished stock.

Those are the sort of numbers that should make fishery managers realize that that health of the striped bass stock is not as robust as it should be, and cause them to act in a very conservative and precautionary manner until spawning stock biomass shows a material increase. 

Unfortunately, some managers want to act in a very different manner.  At the Striped Bass Management Board meeting held last October, representatives of the Chesapeake Bay jurisdictions, led by the Maryland delegation, along with the usually conservation-averse representatives from New Jersey and Delaware sought to increase striped bass mortality by convincing the rest of the Management Board to consider reference points that take into account not only the biological needs of the striped bass, but also various “socio-economic” considerations.

As explained by ASMFC,

“Current [fishing mortality] target and threshold are those that will maintain the populations at [spawning stock biomass] target and threshold.

“There is a trade-off between preserving [spawning stock biomass] and allowing fishing.

“The Board has raised concerns that the current [biological reference points] are too conservative for various biological, ecological, and socio-economic reasons, and may be restricting fishing unnecessarily.”

The Management Board has appointed a working group to look into the issue and make a recommendation, which the Management Board can either adopt or reject.

In other words, here we go again.  The same arguments that we faced when Amendment 6 was being drafted are, like a B-movie monster, coming back to life just when we thought they were finally dead.

Except this time we know that the striped bass stock slid downhill when fished at higher levels, and that bass are far less abundant than they were just ten years ago. 

When it comes to fisheries issues, those who expect the worst are seldom disappointed, so it’s probably time to get ready for another fight.  This one will likely be short and sharp, and focused on ASMFC’s February meeting, when the reference point issue will probably be decided.

If the decision favors socio-economic factors instead of biology, that decision will almost certainly infect the next stock assessment, and damage the striped bass management process—and the health and abundance of the striped bass stock—for at least the next five years, if not beyond.

So have a nice holiday season, and be ready to speak up for the striper when the New Year begins.

Because it might be a new year soon, but the same old fight is still going on.

SOUTH ATLANTIC RED SNAPPER--WHAT'S THE "EMERGENCY"

This month, bottom fishermen along the South Atlantic coast are going to be able to do something that they haven’t been able to do for a few years—legally harvest red snapper.

Back in 2008, managers determined that South Atlantic red snapper were both overfished and subject to overfishing.  That determination gave rise to a series of red snapper management measures that culminated in a closure of the commercial and recreational fisheries.

The management measures appear to have worked.  While the stock remains overfished, fishery-independent surveys, in the form of traps placed on the reef to sample the fish that are present, have shown “a steep upward trend” in the relative abundance of red snapper, with sampling done in 2016 showing the greatest abundance.

Roy Crabtree, the regional administrator at the National Marine Fisheries Service’s Southeast Regional Office, reportedly said that

“When I look at the…data and see the upward trajectory, yeah, I have a hard time continuing justifying the closure.  I would view it that the management has been working over the last seven to eight years.  I know fishermen have sacrificed.”

So far, that’s all fine.  Based on the increasing abundance, it makes perfect sense that NMFS would begin moving toward reopening the South Atlantic red snapper fishery.

The problem is, there’s a lot of important data that they still don’t have a firm grasp on.  According to NMFS,

“The [South Atlantic Fishery Management Council’s Science and Statistical Committee] indicated that the most significant sources of uncertainty include: the stock-recruitment relationship, natural mortality at age, the age structure of the unfished population, the composition and magnitude of recreational discards (where dead discards vastly outnumbered the landings during 2012-2014), potential changes in catch per unit effort catchability, and the selectivities for the various fisheries fleets.”

That’s a lot of things—a lot of important things, from a manager’s perspective—to be uncertain about, and provides plenty of reason for red snapper managers to move ahead cautiously as they move to reopen a red snapper season.

They seem to be doing that with respect to future years, drafting a proposed Amendment 43 to address the issue.  Such Amendment 43 will move through the rulemaking process in an orderly fashion, with input from the public, from fishery managers and from the South Atlantic Council’s Science and Statistical Committee, who will advise on the data.  If all is in order, it should be adopted in time to permit a red snapper fishing season in 2018.

Unfortunately, it seems that there are a lot of folks in the South Atlantic region who don’t want to wait that long, and who have prevailed upon the South Atlantic Council to support an “emergency” opening of the red snapper season in 2017, despite the many uncertainties. 

NMFS has a limited ability to amend fishery regulations on an emergency basis.  Section 305(c) of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act provides

“If the Secretary [of Commerce] finds that an emergency or overfishing exists or that interim measures are needed to reduce overfishing in any fishery, he may promulgate emergency regulations or interim measures necessary to address the emergency or overfishing, without regard to whether a fishery management plan exists for such fishery.”

NMFS found that such section authorized the opening of a 2017 red snapper season in the South Atlantic; however, in looking at the agency’s justifications, the argument appears to be a bit of a stretch.  NMFS’ own standards, published in the Federal Register back in 1997, only justify taking emergency action when

“(1)  Results from recent, unforeseen events or recently discovered circumstances;

 (2)  Presents serious conservation or management problems in the fishery; and

 (3)  Can be addressed through emergency regulations for which the immediate benefits outweigh the value of advance notice, public comment, and deliberative consideration of the impacts on participants to the same extent as would be expected under the normal rulemaking process.”

NMFS claims that

“The new red snapper abundance and [catch per unit effort] information collected through the [Southeast Reef Fish Survey] program and [Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission’s] study constitutes recently discovered circumstances, since it was presented to the Council at its June 2017 and September 2017 meetings.  In addition, the continued harvest prohibition of South Atlantic red snapper poses significant management problems to NMFS and the Council.  Fishery closures result in the limited collection of fishery-dependent data, and that negatively impacts the stock assessment process.  Additionally, the harvest prohibition of red snapper results in adverse socio-economic effects to fishermen and fishing communities through lost opportunities among the commercial and recreational sectors to fish for and possess red snapper during the fishing year…”

But even assuming that all that is true, it’s not clear why the red snapper situation is so different from any other fishery management issue that it justifies emergency regulations.

Whatever the species being managed, regional fishery management councils are frequently provided with new information.  It might come in the form of a new or updated stock assessment, new landings data or something similar.  But if the same standard that NMFS seems to be applying in the case of South Atlantic red snapper is applied elsewhere, then any such new information creates “recently discovered circumstances” that might justify emergency action when first presented to a council.

That would make the emergency criteria meaningless, and just doesn’t make sense.

And yes, the provision of fishery-dependent data would probably help the stock assessment process, but is such data so critical to the assessment of the stock that it justifies taking regulatory action without public comment and due deliberation?  Would obtaining such data in late 2017, rather than sometime next year, have a meaningful impact on the quality of the assessment?  Or is obtaining data merely a weak justification for harvesting some fish in 2017?

The parallels to the justification for Japan’s “scientific” whale harvest are impossible to ignore...

Finally, allowing fishermen to harvest some red snapper would certainly provide some immediate socio-economic advantages (or, to use NMFS language, would alleviate some “adverse socio-economic effects to fishermen”).  But there is no discussion of whether allowing some snapper—or, perhaps, too many snapper—to be harvested this year might lead to more “adverse socio-economic effects to fishermen” in the seasons to come.

And that may very well be because NMFS doesn’t know, which is exactly the problem.

It’s very possible—it is probably even likely—that the harvest of a few red snapper won’t prevent the timely recovery of the South Atlantic population.  But what, exactly, is “a few?”

And, more importantly, what is “too many?”

NMFS can’t answer those questions.

It admits that the emergency action

“might result in negative biological effects over the status quo since it is not known how the stock might be impacted and whether such levels of harvest could result in overfishing.  [emphasis added]”

Given that lack of knowledge, given that Magnuson-Stevens’ National Standard One requires that

“Conservation and management measures shall prevent overfishing…”

and given that the federal courts have determined that any fishery management measure must have no less than a 50-50 chance of succeeding in that goal, it’s not clear how the emergency opening of the South Atlantic red snapper season meets even the most basic legal standards for a fishery management action, much less justifies NMFS declararing an emergency and bypassing of normal rulemaking procedures.

It’s very possible that the biologists on the South Atlantic Council’s Science and Statistical Committee could have provided guidance on the regulations needed to safely harvest South Atlantic red snapper, but the emergency action was never passed by them for review.

As noted by a writer for the Pew Charitable Trusts,

“In explaining their vote to reopen fishing, council members said they believe red snapper’s numbers are increasing and cited concerns from fishermen about the continued moratorium.  But they fast-traced the reopening without consulting their scientific advisers—a risky move that undermines legal requirements to let science guide decisions about fish and fishing.”

That’s really the crux of the matter.

The most important issue isn’t the fact that the South Atlantic red snapper season is going to be opened.  That may be a good thing, which lets people catch and eat a few fish without harming the stock.

The key issue is that the reopening is being rushed through by a fishery management council and a federal agency that isn’t giving due consideration to the scientific issues involved, and is failing to obtain the needed input from their science advisers.

2017 is almost over.  No one fished for South Atlantic red snapper in 2015 or 2016, and no serious harm will be done if no one fishes for them again until sometime next year, after any proposed opening receives the best possible scientific review.

For right now, there is no real emergency. 

But if NMFS foregoes caution, it could always create one.