FISHERIES CONSERVATION: WALKING THE WALK

 

While I usually focus on saltwater fisheries issues, I'm also generally aware of what's going on in the lakes and streams.  In that regard, I’m particularly concerned with heritage strains of our native brook trout, which have been adapting themselves to the conditions in local watersheds since the retreat of the last glaciers.

Thus, I joined a group called the Native Fish Coalition when it was formed a few years ago.  While the Coalition is concerned with preserving all native fish in their native waters, brook trout are high on its agenda.  This morning, I read something on the Coalition’s website caught my attention. 

Bob Mallard, the Coalition's executive director, had written a blog describing how some anglers were asking a state to stock non-native trout—primarily brown trout—into warm-water bass streams, in order to provide some trout fishing in the cooler months, even though the streams weren’t really suitable trout waters.  He asked why some anglers felt it was necessary to plant non-native trout everywhere, without thought to the consequences or even whether such stocking was biologically appropriate, and why organizations that emphasize trout conservation would support it.

He ended his essay by observing

“This is not meant as a declaration of war against brown trout, stocking, fishing, or anything else.  It’s simply meant to challenge the selling of recreation as conservation, while pointing out the mixed messages and bad science coming out of the trout fishing and advocacy community these days.

“If folks want to promote and improve ‘fishing,’ do it through the fishing clubs, not conservation organizations.  Mixing recreation and conservation confuses the masses, and makes the latter that much harder to sell...  [emphasis added]”

That advice doesn’t just apply to trout; it has broad application in many fisheries, including those that take place in salt water. 

Far too often, organizations that have a primarily recreational, or even a recreational industry, focus try gain greater credibility by cloaking their efforts in the mantle of conservation, even when the policies that they promote have no, or even negative, conservation implications.

I was thinking about that a few days ago after perusing the magazine of one of the nation’s bigger anglers’ rights groups.  I used to be an active member of the orgainization in question, serving as a member of its national Executive Board and as Vice Chair of its Government Relations Committee.  I resigned from those positions when they decided to change their focus from conservation to a “more fish for us” anglers’ rights agenda, but as I had already become a Life Member, I still get the magazine.

Usually, when the magazine comes in the mail, the first thing that I do is turn to its back pages, where there are brief reports on some of the efforts and objectives of both the national organization and its state chapters.  At one time, I would have described them as “conservation efforts,” and the group still has “Conservation” as a part of its name, but conservation isn’t a big part of what they're pushing these days.

The current issue describes the organization’s affiliation with other outdoor recreation and industry groups, which have staked out a position on the so-called “30x30” initiative, which is an ambitious goal, set by some conservation advocates and endorsed by some legislators, to protect 30 percent of the Earth’s lands and waters by the year 2030.

On the ocean, that means marine protected areas, a topic which has always raised some concerns in my mind, and which I wrote about a few weeks ago.  The magazine makes the usual claims that

“Marine conservation began with recreational anglers,”

and that

“Sportsmen and women continue to lead on conservation in the United States,”

But when one looks at some of the principles espoused by the coalition of recreation and industry groups that have banded together on 30x30, you find statements like

“Recognizing the positive roles that hunting and fishing play in conservation,”

and

“Protected area definitions that allow for well-managed and sustainable wildlife-dependent activities.”

Although I don't disagree with either of those basic principles, they go to the core of the recent Native Fish Coalition blog, as they are primarily concerned with promoting and maintaining recreational opportunity, with conservation being, at best, a secondary consideration.

However, the magazine does describe a legitimate conservation effort, to manage Atlantic menhaden as a forage fish rather than merely as an industrial feedstock, in a smaller article on a subsequent page.

State chapter activities saw the same kind of mixed-message split, with descriptions of three real conservation efforts—tagging Gulf tarpon in Alabama, trying to protect Gulf menhaden in Louisiana, and a suing North Carolina in an effort to improve its fisheries management policies—sandwiched between four articles promoting fish hatcheries for various speces, and two others heralding kill tournaments, including one that targeted badly overfished Pacific bluefin tuna.

Again, in promoting hatcheries and tournaments, promoting recreation is confused with conservation, even though the activities described are not at all consistent with legitimate conservation effports.  

Hatcheries, as a general rule, evidence conservation failures; if fish were properly managed, and harvest levels maintained at sustainable levels, natural reproduction would be sufficient to maintain stock health.  The very purpose of hatcheries is to maintain excessive and otherwise unsustainable harvest levels, to support recreational and, in some instances, commercial fisheries. 

If conservation was the primary concern, the first step would be to reduce fishing mortality—to zero if necessary—not to pump a legion of man-made fish into various rivers, bays, and the sea.

And the notion of an organization that professes to support conservation promoting a kill tournament for Pacific bluefin tuna, an overfished stock, pretty well speaks for itself.

Having said that, I’m not attempting to single out this particular organization for criticism.  It just happens to be large enough, and spans enough of the coast, to provide a good range of examples showing how efforts to promote recreational fishing activity are wrongly conflated with conservation, and how organizations often mislead the public into believing that they're looking out for the best interests of the fish, when they’re really looking out for fishermen and the fishing industry's bottom line.

Thus, Jeff Angers, President of the Center for Sportfishing Policy, a coalition of industry and anglers’ rights organizations, was clearly promoting recreation, and the recreational fishing and boating industries' interests, when he attacked the federal fishery management system 

“eliminates opportunities for Americans to share in share in America’s public resources,”

by imposing restrictive—but scientifically necessary—seasons and bag limits, and complained that

“Thousands of businesses—from bait and tackle shops along the coast to retailers and manufacturers across the nation—suffer the consequences of the government’s folly.  With their time on the water choked by regulation, boaters and anglers are far less likely to purchase goods and services related to fishing.  This has an impact on business.”

Yet he also couched his attack on Magnuson-Stevens, and his effort to weaken federal fisheries management, as a pro-conservation measure, because

“A considerable portion of the overall funding for the nation’s conservation efforts is in fact generated by recreational fishing licenses and excise taxes.”

In other words, the government ought to allow anglers to overfish, because by doing so, they will generate the revenues that they need to combat overfishing.

It’s a clearly nonsensical argument, but just another example of what can happen when people attempt to appear virtuous by talking about conservation, when they’re actually promoting a recreational, and not a conservation, agenda.

Contrast that language with the language used by Stripers Forever, an organization dedicated to striped bass conservation on the East Coast.  

While I’ve criticized the group in the past for exactly what I’m writing about today, promoting recreational fishing in the guise of conservation, that criticism is no longer valid.  Today, Stripers Forever advocates that, in addition to ending the commercial fishery,

“To further reduce striper mortality, the coastal recreational harvest would be carefully regulated to protect the population of large breeder fish and to promote and enforce the use of angling gear and techniques that do not unnecessarily damage stripers that are caught and then released.

“The allowable catch of wild striped bass should always be subordinated to conservation measures necessary to maintain a healthy population.  [emphasis added]”

And that is what real conservation advocacy sounds like:  Putting the needs of the fish ahead of wants of the fishermen, because in the end, if we want healthy fisheries—recreational or commercial—the fish must always come first.

No weasel words about killing more fish to provide more money for management.  No injections of factory-spawned hatchery fish to maintain unsustainable harvest.  No effort to remove the conservation burden from their own shoulders, and leave it for others to bear.

Cynics might say that, by advocating for a commercial closure, Stripers Forever is still promoting recreational fishing.  While there might be a grain of truth in such an assertion, it still amounts to little more than a squabble over allocation and the appropriate management measures, rather than an impeachment of Stripers’ Forever’s goals.

Because the core truth of its argument, that “The allowable catch of wild striped bass should always be subordinated to conservation measures necessary to maintain a healthy population” holds true whether or not there is a commercial fishery.

A commercial fishery might lead to slightly more restrictive recreational measures, but whether both fisheries were governed by regulations that constrained harvest to sustainable levels, or whether the commercial fishery is ended—something that’s been done with billfish offshore and a number of species inside state waters, and most fish in fresh waters, and so can’t really be viewed as extreme—leaving only anglers to fish at sustainable levels, the impact on striped bass would be the same.

They would thrive.

That's what fisheries conservation is about--keeping fish stocks healthy and abundant.  It’s not, in the first instance, about maintaining recreational (or commercial) landings, or promoting the fishing industry, or touting economic gains.

It’s about stewardship.  Putting the fish first.

Because if our stocks of fish thrive, our fisheries will do the same.

 

 

 

 

 

 

SALTWATER FISHERIES: AS A NEW YEAR BEGINS

 

Ever since I began writing this blog, I started each new year with an overview of the fisheries issues that will likely arise in the next twelve months.  As I look at the prospects for 2021, the list may be longer than ever.

Highly Migratory Species

Over the course of the year, I fish for just about everything from blowfish to bluefin.  But from June through October, whenever the wind doesn’t blow, I do my best to get offshore.

There’s something about fighting big fish—the sort that can cause you real pain over the course of an hours-long battle, and force you to pit both your strength and your skill against their wild power—that appeals to me more than any other kind of angling.  While trolling for tuna or billfish is, in my eyes, the ultimate expression of the offshore angler’s craft, recent years have found me spending more and more time pursuing sharks--which is also how I cut my offshore teeth--largely because I’ve been helping some researchers at Stony Brook University gather data on various species, something that allows me to give just a little bit back to an ocean that has provided me with so much joy for so long.

We’ve had some notable firsts on those trips.  Last June, we caught, sampled and tagged the first white shark that has ever been hooked from one of my boats.  About a month later, we placed an acoustic tag in a blacktip; one of the researchers said that, when we released that fish, it represented the northernmost deployment of an acoustic tag in that species.

I’m not sure whether that is true or not, but tagging a blacktip off central Long Island still felt pretty good.

But one thing that hasn’t felt good is the disheartening decline in the number of shortfin mako sharks that we’re seeing. 

We fish in a few different spots.  One, near the wreck of the tanker Coimbra, a little more than 25 miles south of New York’s Shinnecock Inlet, has reliably produced makos for me since 1984.  Yet I haven’t had a mako there in the past two years.  I usually abandon the Coimbra in mid-July, and move inshore to some 20-fathom structure off Fire Island.  It, too, was a historically productive mako spot, producing many multi-mako days—we had 6 in one day just a few years ago—but in recent seasons, that productivity has fallen off sharply, with most trips producing no makos at all.

I’d like to think that was just a product of changing conditions, but that isn't true.  Scientists at the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (which, despite the name, also addresses the harvest of sharks and billfish) have found that the North Atlantic stock of shortfin makos is badly overfished and suffering from overfishing, and that total catch, including dead discards in the longline fishery—the fishery accounting for most of the overall fishing mortality—might have to be reduced to somewhere between 0 and 100 metric tons to provide even a 50 percent probability that the stock can be rebuilt in the next 50 years.

Most of the ICCAT member nations are willing to make the sacrifices needed to begin such rebuilding.  Led by Senegal and Canada, they have proposed banning all shortfin mako harvest in order to best assure that such rebuilding will, in fact, occur.  Unfortunately, in 2019 and again in 2020, their efforts have been undermined by the European Union and, somewhat surprisingly, the United States, which have successfully managed to keep dead shortfin makos flowing into their ports.

Changing minds in the European Union is beyond our power (although it should be noted that, as Brexit neared, the United Kingdom broke away from the EU's position on makos and now supports banning all harvest), but with a new and, hopefully, more conservation-oriented administration entering the White House on January 20, there is at least reason to hope that the United States will belatedly jump onto the mako conservation bandwagon.  

Perhaps, if that happens, it will be enough to convince ICCAT to go along.

Greater protections for western stock bluefin tuna management may also be needed.

A lot of fishermen will argue that bluefin represent a success story, with more fish being seen and caught off the northeastern United States than have been taken in many years.  While there has certainly been an uptick in bluefin numbers, current abundance still doesn't match what we saw in the 1970s--and yes, I was there, and can say that first hand.  Also, most scientists currently believe that many of the bluefin we catch off the East Coast were spawned in the Mediterranean Sea, and not in the Gulf of Mexico, so the observed abundance may not represent the true condition of the so-called “western stock”—the Gulf of Mexico-spawned—fish.

There is reason to believe that the western stock quota has been set too high.  Sylvie Lapointe, Canada’s deputy minister of fisheries and harbour management has said that

“The science advice this year was pretty clear, that if we were to simply roll over the existing total allowable catch, which is 2,350 metric tons in 2021, we would have a 94 per cent chance of overfishing next year.”

Thus, western stock bluefin may well experience overfishing in 2021.  The good news is that a new stock assessment, that should be released next year, will either demonstrate that the 2021 quota was not reasonable, or provide a solid scientific foundation for reducing the western stock quota for 2022 and beyond.

Assuming, of course, that ICCAT follows the science.  That's does not always happen, as the mako's plight shows.

Federally-managed fisheries

The biggest news in federally managed fisheries is that the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation andManagement Act, which governs all fishing in federal waters, is up for reauthorization in the 117^th Congress.  While there is no guarantee that such reauthorization will ultimately occur, Congressman Jared Huffman (D-CA), who chairs the House Natural Resources Water, Oceans, and Wildlife Subcommittee, along with Rep. Ed Case (D-HI), have released a so-called “discussion draft” of a proposed Magnuson-Stevens reauthorization bill.

On balance, the discussion draft represents a very solid first step in the reauthorization process.  It not only maintains, but strengthens, Magnuson-Stevens’ strong commitment to prevent overfishing and rebuilding overfished stocks, and generally enhances the bill by adding a number of sections, including sections that would require fishery managers to give greater protection to forage fish stocks and to consider the impacts of climate change on the stocks that they manage.  

Like any major piece of legislation, it has a few warts, but they’re relatively minor ones, which will hopefully be pared down as the process moves forward. 

If the final Magnuson-Stevens reauthorization bill doesn’t contain a forage fish section—although I think that it will—the issue of forage fish conservation will almost certainly be addressed in stand-alone legislation.  Both fishery managers and the public at large are coming to the realization that, if we are to have healthy populations of predator species, we need equally healthy populations of prey.  So expect to see forage fish legislation, in some form, introduced fairly early in the 117^th Congress.

Regulatory issues will also emerge in the regional fishery management councils.  Of three that will probably generate substantial attention—and there will undoubtedly be others—during 2021, two will emerge from the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council.

The first of those will be bluefish rebuilding.  An amendment to do that is already well underway, and must be finalized ahead of the 2022 season.  The Mid-Atlantic Council, working in partnership with the ASMFC, is expected to complete a draft amendment in February, and release it for public comment shortly thereafter.  Given the importance of bluefish to anglers on the East Coast—and we ought to remember that bluefish is primarily a recreational, and primarily a release-oriented fishery, and ought to be kept that way—anglers should be ready to comment on the amendment when the time comes.

The other Mid-Atlantic issue that we expect to see is the so-called “recreational reform initiative,” which has been in progress for the last two years.  The reform initiative includes some very worthwhile efforts, particularly with respect to the way it proposes to deal with uncertain, inadequate, or anomalous data.  However, anglers need to be cautious, because the recreational fishing industry, both on the tackle and on the for-hire side, is pushing to add some provisions that would, if adopted, both undercut the current annual catch limits and accountability measures applicable to the recreational sector (and so probably would be illegal), and perhaps introduce “sector separation” into some fisheries, which would reserve a portion of the recreational landings for the for-hire sector.  This is an issue that anglers should be watching closely.

The final contentious issue likely to emerge at the council level will, once again, be recreational red snapper harvest in the Gulf of Mexico.  As I mentioned a few months ago, the so-called “Great Red Snapper Count” has revealed that the red snapper biomass in the Gulf is larger than scientists could previously demonstrate.  In response, the usual suspects in the anglers’ rights, tackle and boating industries are pushing the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council to adopt a knee-jerk liberalization of recreational red snapper regulations, instead of taking the time to integrate the Red Snapper Count data into the stock assessment and arrive at a reasoned decision as to how that data should influence the management regime.

Closely connected to that issue is the issue of “calibrating” the state estimates of recreational red snapper landings into data that can be integrated into and used as a part of the Marine Recreational Information Program.  Fisheries managers have been working on such calibration since 2018, but the same organizations that are trying to rush the Gulf Council into increasing recreational red snapper limits are also pushing for increases based on the uncalibrated state data.  The two issues, combined, are likely to ignite a new round of controversy down there.

At the ASMFC

For many East Coast anglers, not only the most important fisheries issue, but the only fisheries issue, that the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission will look at this year is the proposed Amendment 7 to the striped bass management plan. 

My own view is that such an amendment isn’t needed.  The currentAmendment 6 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Striped Bass sets out a reasonable and balanced approach to striped bass management, that recognizes the need for larger, older females and a diversity of ages and sizes of fish in the spawning stock, while also providing for viable recreational and commercial fisheries.

However, the ASMFC’s Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board feels otherwise, apparently believing that the nearly two decade old amendment doesn’t adequately account for new information about the striped bass stock.  

A number of Management Board members have pointed to the stock’s currently overfished status, and it’s decade-long decline, as evidence that Amendment 6 isn’t working, although a closer look at the facts clearly demonstrates that what really isn’t working is the Management Board itself, which twice, in 2014 and again last year, ignored Amendment 6’s clear injunction to begin a 10-year striped bass rebuilding plan, and has often delayed needed management actions, that might have averted more serious problems, until the bass stock falls into real peril.

Currently, the Management Board seems to fall into two camps, one of which, centered in the northeast, appears to be seeking a more conservative management regime, and another, centered in the Mid-Atlantic, seeking to relax regulations, increase harvest, and permanently reduce striped bass abundance, while increasing the long-term risk to the stock.

At the moment, the latter group seems to be in the ascendance, as a Work Group report, cobbled together to guide the amendment drafting process, has gone so far as to deem striped bass management a “success” despite the fact that the stock is now overfished, and is seeking management measures that emphasize “regulatory consistency” and “flexibility” rather than a fully-rebuilt stock managed for long-term sustainability. 

If they get their way, the Management Board, already known for its delayed and ineffective action, will be officially granted permission to respond to problems even more slowly, and to be even less effective when it finally acts.

The good news is that the amendment process is still in its early stages, and that when the initial Public Information Document—similar to the scoping documents used by the regional fishery management councils—is released for public comment, something that will probably happen in February, striped bass anglers will have an opportunity to provide their views on how the stock ought to be managed, and will thus have a good chance to change the course of the amendment, and give the more conservation-oriented managers in the northeast a chance to prevail. 

But that won’t happen unless everyone concerned with the long-term health of the striped bass resource is willing to stand up and be counted. 

And yes, I recognize that anglers’ views were largely discounted when the Management Board drafted Addendum VI to Amendment 6 to the Interstate Management Plan for Atlantic Striped Bass, but that was largely a provisional document.  Addendums typically have only a short-term impact, while amendments can last for decades.  

A bad addendum can usually be corrected in a few years, and its damage limited.  A bad amendment could, at worst, result in a crash of the stock, and a recovery that won’t be completed within the lifetimes of many anglers who are fishing today—if such recovery happens at all.

So those who see striped bass as the most important issue of 2021 have good reason for their opinions.

There are other, important but perhaps not as immediately critical issues fulminating at every level of management, including a possible reallocation of summer flounder, scup and black sea bass at the Mid-Atlantic Council, offshore aquaculture legislation in Congress, a new effort to create marine protected areas which may or may not permit recreational fishing, offshore wind farms, and the perennial fights over red snapper and other reef fish in the South Atlantic. 

Up in Alaska, the threat posed to Bristol Bay’s salmon by the Pebble Mine has receded somewhat, but has not gone away.  A number of internationally managed tuna stocks, on both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, are not doing too well.  Many salt water “pan fish,” which don’t generate headlines but are nonetheless pursued, and valued, by anglers, are given no protection at all.  Everywhere, the science and data used to manage recreational fisheries is under attack by industry efforts to increase landings and short-term profits, at the expense of long-term sustainability.

Thus, if you’re interested in fisheries issues, and want to get involved in the management debate, I can promise you one thing for certain.

In 2021, you won’t be bored.

THE STAGE IS SET FOR FEDERAL FORAGE FISH LEGISLATION

 

All fish are not created equal.

Some are large, swift pelagic predators, that traverse entire ocean basins over the course of their lives.  Others, smaller but still of substantial size, hunt the cloudy and fertile waters of estuaries and barrier lagoons, or the clear seas that wash over coral reefs and run in the channels between tropical flats.  Still other, smaller fish, the marine equivalent of foxes and martens and weasels, seek their prey in the shallows, the surf, and in open water, some using stealth, some using speed to hunt down their food.

And then there are other fish that overwhelm all the others in sheer abundance, small fish that move through the water in vast shimmering shoals, feeding on plankton and tiny free-swimming creatures, and fed upon, in turn, by everything else that lives in the sea.  They are the forage fish, the small fish that, by dint of their numbers, weave the sea’s food web into a coherent whole.

Forage fishes’ importance to ocean ecosystems was long ignored by fisheries managers.  Those that also supported important commercial fisheries, such as Atlantic herring, Atlantic mackerel, northern anchovy, Pacific sardine and, more recently, Atlantic menhaden, have been subject to fishery management plans, but such plans generally addressed forage fish only in a single-species, single-fishery context.  That is, the management plans attempted to keep landings at or below maximum sustainable yield, so that the stock could remain healthy enough to maintain landings levels over the long term.

However, such management plans were always focused on harvest, and on leaving just enough forage fish in the sea to maintain a sustainable harvest.  They took no account of forage fishes’ roles in the ecosystem, nor of the needs of a host of marine predators that might range in size from smaller Spanish mackerel to humpback whales.  And for those forage species that didn’t support significant commercial fisheries, there was generally no protections offered at all.

Slowly, that began to change.  Just a few years ago, both the Pacific Fishery Management Council and the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council adopted fishery management measures designed to protect previously unmanaged stocks of forage fish.

 Just last August, the Atlantic Marine Fisheries Commission’s Atlantic Menhaden Management Board, in a unanimous vote, decided to adopt ecosystem reference points that, for the first time, would limit menhaden landings to a level that would leave enough fish in the water to support the needs of coastal ecosystems, and not just enough to support the long-term profits of the menhaden industry.  And if the ASMFC, just two months later, walked back that decision a bit by setting 2021/22 harvest at levels likely to exceed the ecosystem-based fishing mortality target, they’ve still moved the ball forward a bit, reducing landings by 10 percent, which is a better than average performance for the ASMFC.

But now, the stars may finally be aligning in a way that will see federal forage fish legislation passed in the 117^th Congress.

Some such legislation has already been introduced in the 116^th.

On April 10, 2019, Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-MI) introduced H.R. 2236, the Forage Fish Conservation Act.  That bill would have, among other things, required the Scientific and Statistical Committee of each regional fishery management council to provide such council with ongoing scientific advice on

“maintaining a sufficient abundance, diversity, and localized distribution of forage fish populations to support their role in marine ecosystems.”

H.R. 2236 would also have required each regional fishery management council to

“develop a list of unmanaged forage fish occurring in the area under its authority and prohibit the development of any new directed forage fish fishery until the Council has considered the best scientific information available and evaluated the potential impacts of forage fish harvest on existing fisheries, fishing communities, and the marine ecosystem; determined whether conservation and management of the forage fish fishery is needed; if a determination is made that conservation and management is needed, prepared and submitted to the Secretary [of Commerce] a fishery management plan or amendment…; and received final, approved regulations from the Secretary…  [internal numbering deleted]”

On December 17, 2020, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) introduced a Senate version of the Forage Fish Conservation Act, which is substantially similar to H.R. 2236.

With the 116^th Congress effectively over, neither bill is going anywhere this year.  But the fact that Sen. Blumenthal elected to introduce a forage fish bill so late in the session is a clear indication that he intends to champion forage fishes’ cause in the 117^th Congress, meaning that forage fish legislation will almost certainly get a thorough hearing, and may well achieve passage within the next two years.

An even better sign that forage fish will be on the next Congress’ agenda is the inclusion of a forage fish section, that reads very similarly to H.R. 2236, in Rep. Jared Huffman’s (D-CA) recently-released discussion draft for reauthorization of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act.  When the Chair of the relevant House subcommittee includes forage fish language in his Magnuson-Stevens reauthorization bill, it’s pretty certain that such language is being seriously considered.

But passing forage fish legislation will not be a slam dunk.

One of the biggest issues will be defining just what a forage fish is.  As everyone knows, big fish eat smaller fish, and even fairly good-sized fish will probably be eaten by something larger.  To a mako shark, bluefish and skipjack tuna are forage.  Blue marlin view yellowfin tuna the same way.  And anyone who has spent enough time fishing for bluefish tuna in the northeast knows that white sharks hang around the bluefin schools, and think nothing of grabbing a 200- or 300-pound tuna attached to an angler’s line.

Both H.R. 2236 and Sen. Blumenthal’s bill try to bring some rationality to the discussion by noting that

“While most species function as prey of others at some life stage, especially when small and young, forage fish maintain this important trophic role throughout their life.”

The bills then define “forage fish” as

“any fish that, throughout its life cycle, is at a low trophic level; contributes significantly to the diets of other fish, marine mammals or birds; and serves as a conduit for energy transfer to a higher trophic level; or any other fish specified as a forage fish for purposes of this paragraph in a fishery management plan or amendment that is transmitted by a Council and approved by the Secretary…”

Even though that definition provides some limits on what may be deemed to be a forage fish, and even though the bills further define “low trophic level” by saying

“The term ‘low trophic level’ means a position in the marine food web in which the fish generally consume plankton,”

the idea of forage fish management makes some fishermen nervous, particularly in the Pacific Northwest, where pollock is considered an important forage species for the endangered Steller sea lion (even though some researchers argue that pollock provide so little nutrition that eating large quantities of them will do the sea lions more harm than good), but also supports the largest commercial fishery, gauged by the weight and value of the processed product, in the United States.

That being the case, it’s easy to understand why fishermen wouldn’t want Pacific pollock to be deemed a “forage fish” and managed on the basis of how many can be eaten by Steller sea lions, and rather than how many can be turned into pre-frozen fish sandwiches, fish sticks and such.

The bills try to get around the issue by saying that

“Forage fish are generally small to intermediate-sized species, occurring in schools or dense aggregations, and function as a main pathway for energy to flow from phyto- and zooplankton to higher trophic level predators such as tuna, Alaska pollock, and other wildlife, in marine ecosystems, [emphasis added]”

thus making it clear that Alaska pollock feed on forage fish, and are not forage fish themselves.

Whether such language will be enough to make the pollock fishermen happy remains to be seen.

And pollock fishermen are only one of the industries likely to oppose any forage fish bill.  

On the East Coast, there are companies that have invested millions of dollars in the boats and gear needed to engage in high-volume, low value fisheries for species such as Atlantic herring, which saw over 100 million pounds landed in 2017, at a price of roughly 25 cents per pound.  It’s not likely that participants in that fishery, or in fisheries for other high volume/low value species such as Atlantic mackerel (roughly 15 million pounds at about the same price) will stand by quietly while a portion of what had been their catch is allocated away from the commercial fishery and instead used to support populations of bluefin tuna, striped bass, and humpback whales.

Similar pushback will undoubtedly come from the Pacific coast, where sardines, anchovies, herring, and mackerel support other large-scale fisheries.

Forage fish legislation won’t be passed without a fight.  

Yet it is a fight worth having, for if forage fish—the animals that pass energy between the highest and lowest trophic level species, and so knit the food web together—are managed only for harvest, and not for their ecosystem values as well, the resultant risk to large predators, and the fisheries that depend upon them, could be very real.

 

THE FEAST OF THE SEVEN (MOSTLY DEPLETED) FISHES

People who aren’t fishermen or divers often spend little time thinking about declining fish populations.  

They might get concerned about the fate of sharks, swordfish or tuna—the sort of “charismatic megafauna” that gets some attention in the mainstream news and often sits front and center in the glossy brochures that accompany conservation groups’ fundraising letters—but outside of that, too many people feel completely disconnected from the ocean, and are unaware of how the health of fish stocks impact their daily lives.

Yet, in one way or another, our lives remain connected to the health of the sea.  So on this Christmas Eve, I thought that it might be appropriate to look at how the fate of fish populations affect people’s lives by looking at how it impacts a holiday tradition:  the Feast of the Seven Fishes.

I come from a Polish Catholic family, and while we always adhered to the traditional injunction against eating meat on Christmas Eve, our fish consumption on that night was limited to creamed, pickled herring to kick off the meal, and only one entrée, which was usually flounder and was always fried (although given the collapse of our badly mismanaged winter flounder stocks, this year’s entrée will be some of the lake trout that my wife and I caught in upstate New York last October).

But for my Italian-American friends, Christmas Eve was a time for a seafood feast.  Some of them stuck to the semi-traditional seven kinds of fish, served in different ways.  Some went far beyond that, buying a dozen or more different kinds, ranging from the same spearing (more properly, “tidewater silversides”) that we used as bait, dipped whole in batter and fried, to sea scallops and lobster.

But there were a few seafood items were served by just about every family that I knew:  Whiting, eels, clams, calamari (squid), baccala (cod), scungilli (whelks), and smelt.  

Half a century later, most of those fish and mollusks are not doing well.

Squid are an exception.  

On the East Coast, the stock of longfin squid, also referred to as “Loligo” (although they’ve now been reclassified as part of the genus Doryteuthis) or “winter” squid, seems to be doing OK.  It’s not overfished, although scientists lack the data they need to determine whether overfishing might be taking place.  The fate of shortfin squid, also known as “Ilex” or “summer” squid, is less certain; while fishery managers don’t believe that overfishing is occurring, they don’t have enough information about the size of the stock to know whether it might be overfished.

Still, no one should feel any guilt about enjoying their calamari.

And maybe no one should be feeling guilt about eating clams, either, because the littlenecks (quahogs, or Mercenaria mercenaria) used in the Clams Casino and Zuppa di Pesce were probably farmed, or at least artificially seeded, although some still come from natural populations.  But in most places, marketable natural populations of quahogs were fished down long ago. 

As a rule, current abundance is inversely related to water quality.  Waters, or bay sediments, that contain too many pollutants for the clams to be safely consumed by people often host large populations of clams; quahogs frequently abound near sewer plant outflows and in murky urban bays.  Some are harvested from such places, and either used to produce “seed clams” that can then be stocked in cleaner waters, others are moved to unpolluted bottom leased by a shellfish company, which will then give the clams time to flush the sewage or other contaminants out of their bodies before selling them as food.

But as far as natural populations go, we’ve gone a long way downhill since the 1970s, when more than half the clams eaten in the United States came from my local waters in Long Island’s Great South Bay.  

The bay’s overall clam population remains depressed, and hopes for restoration lie in the creation of private sanctuaries, such as one created by The Nature Conservancy, where clamming is prohibited and clams spawned there can, in time, reseed the bay bottom.  Yet even those efforts are hampered by the harmful algae bloom known as “brown tide,” which can kill clam spat as well as adult clams, and other water quality issues.

The same sort of declines have been seen in many other historically productive clamming grounds, but the artificial seeding and aquaculture operations have at least kept some clams alive in the bays.

Many fish are having a much harder time.

Although my family didn’t celebrate the Feast of the Seven Fishes, I did spend some time helping friends to gather the fish that they needed.  I still remember one morning when I accompanied one of them to New York’s Fulton Fish Market to buy some eels and whiting.

It was the late 1970s.  The market was still located at the end of Fulton Street in Manhattan, and it was still what federal attorneys referred to as a “Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization.”  When we arrived, we parked our car on the street right outside the market, and gave $5 to the guy who came right over to collect it (yes, it was a public street, not a private lot, but if you paid the $5 the folks who sold you the fish could stack it up next to your vehicle and no one would touch it, while if you didn’t pay, the fish would likely be gone, along with your tires and wheels and probably your windshield).  Then we went into the market to buy some nice whiting, along with some eels that were kept, alive, in a truck-mounted tank.  Our mission completed, we purchased a couple of egg sandwiches at a run-down bar/greasy spoon (fried by someone wearing a slightly grimy, sleeveless T-shirt that did nothing to hide the .45 that rode in a shoulder holster beneath his left arm), got into the car, and arrived back in Connecticut—and a very different world—by sunrise.

Whiting and eels were cheap and abundant in those days.  

During the winter, party boats sailed for whiting 24/7, and anglers caught them from piers that lined the New York and New Jersey shorelines.  Eels were everywhere, too.  In the warmer months—say, from mid-April through early December—it was often hard not to catch them while fishing in the bays and marshes for flounder and other fish.  Once the bays froze over, fishermen ventured out on the ice and probed the bay bottoms with “winter spears” that squeezed eels between their tines and snagged them on U-shaped points as the spears were pulled out of the sediment.

These days, things have changed.  The Feds went after the Fulton market, which later moved to The Bronx, and eels are in trouble.  

The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission lists eels as “depleted,” and notes that commercial landings have fallen from anywhere between 2.5 and 3.6 million pounds in the 1970s and early 1980s to about 780,000 pounds in 2018.  It also notes that

“The stock is at or near historically low levels due to a combination of historical overfishing, habitat loss, food web alterations, predation, [dam] turbine mortality, environmental changes, toxins and contaminants, and disease,”

and that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service performed a status review to determine whether the American eel should be listed under the Endangered Species Act, before finally deciding that a listing was not needed yet.

Even though no listing was justified, eels are certainly one of the Seven Fishes that is not doing well.

Whiting (correctly called “silver hake”), on the other hand, are neither overfished nor subject to overfishing.  However, the fish have retreated from inshore waters; not only is it impossible to catch one from shore, but the swarms of fish that once supported an outstanding party boat fishery in New York Bight have disappeared.  

In 1981, the first year for which even semi-reliable data is available, anglers in the Mid-Atlantic region (New York through North Carolina) caught a little under 750,000 whiting—and the fishery was already in decline.  By 2019, that catch had fallen to a supposed 500 or so fish, but so few were caught, and encountered by National Marine Fisheries Service surveyors, that such estimate has no statistical validity; given the margin of error, one whiting or one thousand—which nonetheless indicates a shocking decline—are equally valid estimates.

So yes, the whiting stock might still be able to produce maximum sustainable yield on a continuing basis, but it’s not nearly what it was four decades ago.

After whiting, it’s all bad news.

Cod is the whiting’s larger, better known, and far more valuable cousin.  It is in deep trouble in the Northeast.  

For centuries, New England’s waters fed much of the western world, with vessels sailing from Spain, France, England and other European nations to fish there, and carry vast quantities of dried, salted cod--baccala--back to the Old World.  In time, France and England spawned colonies on the North American shore, largely to harvest the cod and other natural resources of what was, despite more than 10,000 years of native occupation, a largely unexploited land.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that cod played a large role in the founding of New England.  A wooden “sacred cod” still hangs in the Massachusetts State House to memorialize the fishery’s importance.  New England still enjoyed large and lucrative cod fisheries into the latter half of the 20^th Century, but those fisheries began collapsing by century’s end. 

Now, they're just about gone.  A recent operational stock assessment shows the Gulf of Maine stock of cod to be both overfished and subject to overfishing, although biomass seems to be increasing as new fish recruit into the population.  The other cod stock, Georges Bank, is also in bad condition, although the current stock assessment model has not established biological reference points that can be used to make a formal declaration of its condition.  Nonetheless, the operational assessment says that such stock is

“recommended to be overfished due to poor stock condition, while recommended overfishing status is unknown.”

Thus, anyone serving cod as one of their Seven Fishes this year probably isn’t providing their guests with the traditional New England staple.  Instead, they’re either serving  Atlantic cod imported from Iceland, where the fish remains abundant and, historically, has been much better managed, or the closely related but far less valued Pacific cod, a fish that does not seem to be experiencing population problems.

But at least Atlantic cod are managed, if not particularly well.  Here in New York, harvest of scungilli—that is, channeled and knobbed whelks, a large marine snail—is subject to almost no regulation.  And the whelk population is suffering as a result.

For many years, such whelks didn’t represent a major fishery.  Lobstermen and crabbers and oystermen took some as bycatch, and there were other fishermen who targeted them when fishing for other species was slow.  But both demand and prices tended to be low for most of the year.  Zuppa di Pesce, whether served at a local seafood restaurant or prepared at home, was generally their higher and best use.  

That changed in recent years, as growing demand—and increasing prices—in the Asian export market, combined with a decline in the availability of other species, such as lobster, have caused whelk landings to spike.

Spiking landings and lax regulation create problems for an animal that is easy to catch and doesn’t mature until it is 9 or 10 years old.  Regional whelk populations have become depleted.  In response, a number of states, including Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia, have adopted minimum size regulations intended to allow at least 50 percent of the females to reach maturity before they can be retained.  New York is attempting to adopt similar regulations, and has been trying to do so since 2013, but has not yet overcome the strong resistance of its commercial fishermen, who are focusing on such regulations’ short-term impacts, and ignoring their long-term benefits for the fishery.

Unless that changes, and whelk are managed for long-term abundance, New Yorkers, at least, who celebrate the Feast of the Seven Fishes may soon be importing their scungilli from elsewhere.

Which brings us, finally, to the small and generally unappreciated rainbow smelt.  When I was a boy, they swarmed into Connecticut estuaries beginning in mid-October, stuck around all winter, and ascended coastal streams to spawn in early spring.  They supported a very quirky, and very enjoyable, recreational fishery back then, but in the late 1960s, they disappeared.

That disappearance inspired the very first essay that I wrote for this blog, “When Fisheries Die,” nearly seven years ago, in January 2014. 

It’s not clear why the collapse happened.  Pollution may have played a role.  Their upstream spawning grounds may have been degraded.  Climate change could have made waters too warm, or maybe smelt, like so many other anadromous fish, fell victims to dams that blocked their paths upstream, and prevented them from spawning at all.  Whatever the reason, smelt disappeared from southern New England, and seem to be declining up north as well.  Maine managed to host decent runs for years, but just this morning, I was reading an Internet forum where one Maine poster asked

“[D]oes anyone have any info on this year’s smelt run.  Last couple of years were sure a disappointment as far as numb[ers]…”

He received no positive answers, so maybe Maine isn’t seeing many smelt any more, either.  It’s been a while since I’ve seen smelt in a store, so I’m not even sure that it’s possible to serve them at a Feast of the Seven Fishes anymore.

And that’s too bad.  It’s unfortunate that not just smelt, but so many of the other fish that have been a traditional part of Christmas Even dinners are in decline.  

Certainly, they can be replaced by other things, but somehow a Feast made up of imported tilapia, farmed Arctic char, farmed shrimp, farmed branzino and some of the infamous Vietnamese catfish, perhaps accompanied by some honest local squid and an aquacultured shellfish or two, doesn’t sound anywhere near as appealing as the Christmas Eve dinners that my friends talked about years ago.

Traditions matter, and if people care enough, they don’t have to settle for a Christmas Eve marred by the antibiotic- and hormone-laced products of coastal fish farms. 

If they demand that all United States fisheries, and not just those governed by the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, are sustainably managed, that overfishing of all species ends, and that all overfished stocks are promptly rebuilt, then they might be able to enjoy a Feast of the Seven (Wild and Well-managed) Fishes once again.

 

 

 

RECREATIONAL FISHERIES MANAGEMENT: THE (INTENTIONALLY?) FORGOTTEN TOOL

 

Saltwater fisheries are never easy to manage. 

Even in the case of the most studied species, there are always some questions about the size of the population, the number of new fish being recruited into the population to replace those that are removed, the magnitude and duration of typical, temporary swings in abundance and the longer-term impacts of a changing climate on the marine environment. 

Most of those issues fall under the general category of “scientific uncertainty,” being matters that are generally connected to the biology of the fish and the productivity of marine habitats.  Although fisheries scientists may not be able to quantify them exactly, they recognize that such uncertainties exist, and try to quantify and account for them when they set the acceptable biological catch (ABC) and annual catch limit (ACL) for each managed species.

Out of all saltwater fisheries, recreational fisheries are particularly hard to manage because they are affected by a different set of unknowns.  While commercial landings are reported in near real time, and largely ground-truthed by the records of the fish docks and wholesalers that purchase the fishermen’s product, recreational landings can only be estimated through the Marine Recreational Information Program (MRIP) which, although reasonably accurate when estimates are used on a regional or coastwide basis, is prone to provide less precise results when data is restricted to a limited time or area, or relates to a species of fish that is only infrequently caught by anglers.

Since the effectiveness of recreational fishing regulations depends on the accuracy of the data that they’re based on, MRIP’s estimates add a degree of uncertainty to recreational fisheries management that doesn’t arise in commercial fisheries. 

Even more uncertainty is added because such regulations assume that future angler behavior will be similar to what it was in the past.  That is a very dubious assumption.  Weather, the relative availability of the regulated species compared to other fish, fuel prices, and even COVID-19, can and do impact how many people go fishing each season, how many trips those anglers make, and what they choose to fish for.

Add to that the unknown number of recreational fishermen who don’t abide by the regulations, and instead take home undersized, over-limit, or out-of-season fish, and even illegally sell their supposedly “recreationally-caught” striped bass, bluefin tuna, etc. to unethical shops and restaurants, and uncertainty grows again.

All of those things fall under the category of “management uncertainty,” which is supposedly one of the things that fisheries managers are supposed to consider when drafting each year’s regulations.  However, unlike scientific uncertainty, management uncertainty is rarely part of the conversation when such rules are established.

That doesn’t appear to be what the National Marine Fisheries Service intended when it published Guidelines for regulations that would comply with National Standard 1, which requires managers to prevent overfishing and constrain harvest to optimum yield, in the Federal Register.

Those Guidelines note that

“Management uncertainty refers to uncertainty in the ability of managers to constrain catch so that the ACL is not exceeded, and the uncertainty in quantifying the true catch amounts (i.e., estimation errors).  The sources of management uncertainty could include:  Late catch reporting; misreporting; underreporting of catches; lack of sufficient inseason management, including inseason closure authority; or other factors.”

The Guidelines then go on to say that

“[Annual catch targets], or the functional equivalent, are recommended in the system of [accountability measures] so that the ACL is not exceeded.  An [annual catch target] is an amount of annual catch of a stock or stock complex that is the management target of a fishery, and accounts for management uncertainty in controlling the catch at or below the ACL.”

They then note that, when setting annual catch limits,

“If an Annual Catch Target (ACT), or functional equivalent, is not used [to account for management uncertainty], management uncertainty should be accounted for in the ACL.”

It all sounds good and logical in theory, and would seemingly make a lot of things simpler in practice. 

For example, the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council is now looking at what it calls a “recreational reform” initiative, which is intended to reduce or eliminate some chronic issues in recreational fishery management, including how to address the known imprecision (“percent standard error’) in MRIP estimates, how to deal with “outlier” estimates in the recreational data which almost certainly are inaccurate reflections of catch and landings, whether and how to best project annual landings from preliminary estimates, and other, similar issues related to recreational fisheries data and resulting regulations. 

They’re important issues.  When catch and landings data shifts from year to year, even if those shifts are within the known margin for error of such data, regulations often change in response, becoming more restrictive in some years, less restrictive in others, with no apparent pattern and based on no change in resource abundance that can be clearly noted by anglers.  Such constantly changing rules can whipsaw anglers and angling-related businesses, making it difficult or impossible to plan for the future, sometimes causing hardship, and often creating distrust in the management system.

However, as all of those issues constitute some sort of management uncertainty, it’s not clear why a multi-year reform initiative should be needed to address the problem, when the desired regulatory stability, along with adequate protections for managed fish stocks, may be achieved much more simply by accounting for such uncertainty in an annual catch target.

Yet the Mid-Atlantic Council’s recreational reform initiative is, in the overall scheme of things, a relatively minor example of ignoring the benefits of an annual catch target.

Not too many years ago, in the Gulf of Mexico’s recreational red snapper fishery, anglers chronically overfished their ACL, but the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council repeatedly failed to account for the management uncertainty that led to such overharvest.  Eventually, things became so intolerable for the commercial fishing sector, which was being hurt by the recreational overages, that some fishermen sued. 

The result was the 2014 court decision in Guindon v. Pritzker, which saw the United States District Court for the District of Columbia find that regulations recommended by the Gulf Council and adopted by NMFS

“were arbitrary and capricious and not in accordance with the [Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act].  Under the MSA, NMFS has a statutory duty to:  prohibit the retention of fish after quotas are reached in the Gulf of Mexico red snapper fishery; use the best scientific information available when making management decisions; require whatever accountability measures are necessary to constrain catch to the quota; avoid decisions that directly conflict with the ‘fishery management plan’s] allocation of catch; and, where sectors are managed separately, avoid penalizing one sector for overages that occur in another.  [emphasis added]”

The District Court didn’t specify what sort of accountability measures were needed to address recreational overfishing, but the chastened Gulf Council ultimately decided on an annual catch target that reduced the recreational ACL by 20 percent to account for management uncertainty.

Unfortunately, that court decision only applied to recreational red snapper in the Gulf of Mexico, and does not govern the actions of other regional fishery management councils nor the management of other fisheries.  Thus, in December 2019, when the Mid-Atlantic Council addressed chronic recreational overharvest in the black sea bass fishery, the reasoning in Guindon v. Pritzker was completely ignored.

Although the Council’s Summer Flounder, Scup and Black Sea Bass Monitoring Committee acknowledged that it was

“Hard to constrain [recreational] catch under high availability [of black sea bass],”

the same situation that the Gulf Council faced with red snapper in the Guindon v. Pritzker scenario, the Monitoring Committee recommended that the recreational harvest limit for black sea bass be

“Set equal to the ACL, no deduction for management uncertainty,”

even though such recommendation was likely to result in 2020 recreational black sea bass landings that exceeded the recreational harvest limit by 26 percent, exceeded the recreational ACL by 23 percent, and could have caused total black sea bass landings to exceed the ABC by 12 percent. 

When the Mid-Atlantic Council decided to go along with such recommendation—a decision that was ultimately also adopted by NMFS—it not only ignored existing management uncertainty, but it also ignored the Guidelines’ advice on how such uncertainty should be addressed, as well as other language in the Guidelines stating that

“ACL cannot exceed the ABC.”

Still, with respect to the Mid-Atlantic Council’s failure to recognize management uncertainty, the worst was yet to come.

Most people will acknowledge that the onset of COVID-19 made 2020 a very bad year.  It was a particularly bad year for the people trying to manage recreational fisheries as, due to COVID-19, both fisheries-dependent data, such as MRIP catch and landings estimates, and fisheries-independent data, including information about stock abundance and recent recruitment, is largely unavailable.

Both scientific uncertainty and management uncertainty abounded, with management uncertainty levels being particularly high.

Yet the Mid-Atlantic Council decided to ignore management uncertainty once again.

In the case of four recreationally-important species, summer flounder, scup, black sea bass, and bluefish, the Mid-Atlantic Council's relevant monitoring committees acknowledged that

“The Monitoring Committee (MC) discussed the impact of Covid-19 on recreational data collection and the ability to generate catch estimates for 2020.  As discussed in the staff memos, due to a lapse in angler intercept sampling due to Covid-19 restrictions, 2020 catch estimates from the Marine Recreational Information Program (MRIP) will not be available until the end of 2020.”

The monitoring committees went on to discuss the issue in further detail, making it very clear that managers were lacking most of the data needed to calculate recreational catch and landings, and so to craft the regulations needed to prevent overfishing.

If there was ever an example of management uncertainty on steroids, that called out for the use of an annual catch target to keep recreational landings under control, this was it.

But instead of considering management uncertainty, the Mid-Atlantic Council merely decided to leave things unchanged, and carry 2020 regulations over into 2021.

That might work out for summer flounder, as an increase in recreational landings was scheduled for next year, and for scup, as commercial landings are typically well below the recreational quota.  It might even work out for black sea bass, despite the fears that the ABC might be exceeded, as COVID-19 resulted in lower than expected commercial landings, which may very well have offset any recreational overage.

But in the case of bluefish, it’s hard to believe that it was OK.

The bluefish stock is overfished, and there are good reasons to believe that overfishing may have occurred in 2020.  Reading between the lines, it almost seemed that although the Bluefish Monitoring Committee recommended status quo recreational rules, it was calling for Council action when it wrote

“To predict recreational landings, the MC typically uses the most recent 3-year average of landings.  The 2017-2019 average landings (20.30 M lbs.) with the same 28.56% reduction that was projected to be achieved under the 2020 management measures yields a 2021 landings projection of 14.50 M lbs.  This landings methodology indicates a potential 73.86% overage of the 2021 [recreational harvest limit] of 8.34 M lbs.  While the MC still recommends status quo recreational measures for 2021, these analyses indicate a potential range of 2021 landings projection estimates that should be reviewed by the Council and Board…  [emphasis added]”

Yet, despite that advice, the Council and [the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Bluefish Management] Board did not carry out any discussion or review of potential 2021 landings projections at all.  Instead, both management bodies blithely ignored the uncertainty surrounding the 2021 recreational harvest limit and approved status quo rules, despite the extremely high level of management uncertainty and the substantial likelihood that overfishing will, in fact, occur.

Even in normal years, when there is no COVID-19 pandemic to add to fisheries managers’ woes, management uncertainty is present, to a greater or lesser degree, in every recreational fishery.  Yet even a cursory look at the rulemaking process will reveal that regional fishery management councils are very reluctant to acknowledge such uncertainty by adopting annual catch targets or, in the absence of such targets, explicitly accounting for management uncertainty when they set ACLs, despite the published Guidelines.

The reason for that is clear.  

By establishing annual catch targets, the regional fishery management councils would be reducing the amount of fish available to anglers.  And in a management system that, largely due to constant pressure exerted by the recreational fishing industry, places undue emphasis on maximizing the amount of fish available for harvest, rather than reducing landings in order to create a buffer against the unknown, lowering harvest limits when not legally required to do so can be viewed as anathema.

That’s particularly true when the majority of the council members are members of the recreational and commercial fishing industries, and would be personally impacted by harvest reductions.

But management uncertainty is real.  It is something that fisheries managers ignore at their peril.

And at our fisheries’ peril as well.