SCOURGE OF THE SEAS

The northern scup—here on Long Island, we just call them “porgies”—isn’t a big fish. 

The International Game Fish Association, which keeps track of the biggest fish caught by anglers, recognizes a 4-pound, 9-ounce scup as the all-tackle world record, and it’s unlikely that they get too much larger than that.

Scup have a pretty small mouth, and no teeth to speak of, but to hear some folks tell it, they’re the scourge of the seas.

That became pretty obvious a week or so ago, when the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council released the summary of the most recentSummer Flounder, Scup and Black Sea Bass Advisory Panel meeting, where Marc Hoffman, a recreational fisherman from New York said

“All those scup are eating lobster roe, small crabs, shellfish, and baby flounder…When one species grows so much, it’s going to wipe out some other species…”

Hoffman made similar comments about black sea bass, a somewhat larger species often caught along with scup, that on rare occasions can grow to nine pounds or so.  In that case, he said that

“They’re wiping out other species.  If we don’t act soon, you’re going to lose the lobster fishery throughout the northeast.  We need an emergency opening of both the commercial and recreational black sea bass fishery…”

And he made the impassioned plea

“Sea bass and scup are growing enormously and need to be contained to a reasonable amount.  You can’t allow one species to devour everything else.”

His last sentence may have even had value if, when he said “one species” he had Homo sapiens in mind…

But it’s pretty likely that Hoffman wasn’t thinking that way when he said what he did, but rather envisioned some maritime Armageddon that saw a horde of fish perhaps the size of your foot running rampant and scouring life from the seas.  

The sort of event that might give rise to a movie such as “Scupnado:  This time, it’s even harder to believe…”

Still, Hoffman’s comments weren’t all that unusual when folks are trying to stave off conservation efforts or even increase their kill.  At the Advisory Panel meeting, Michael Ireland, a North Carolina commercial fisherman, said that

“Sea bass are eating scallops, lobster, everything,”

and reported that

“I recently had a huge tow of scup and some of them got damaged while we were bringing them aboard.  We discovered they were eating small scallops.  There were 10-12 scallops in each fish.  When you think about how many scup are out there, that’s a big impact on other species…”

Yep, maybe even “Scupnado II:  The Sixth Extinction.”

But, no, our kind already has that one well underway.

And you have to wonder about how scallops ever survived for a few million years before we came along to “protect” them…

Yet the “Scupnado” scenario is just the lastest in a long series of claims that fish have to be killed off lest they somehow unbalance the ecosystem.

Spiny dogfish are a perennial whipping boy for anglers who want to blame predators—rather than fishing mortality—for the decline of various species, including summer flounder.  

A recent article in The Fisherman magazine claimed

“…one might reasonably assume that stringent preservation of other predatory species like spiny dogfish and black sea bass—an imbalanced effort to create preservation and abundance—could significantly impact the amount of young fluke.  While local commercial fishermen are once again allowed to harvest spiny dogs, the environmentalists’ [sic] who forced the closure of this fishery a decade ago ultimately destroyed that market, creating an overabundance of fluke-hungry sea wolves.”

Last October, as the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission was debating a reduction in striped bass landings, the same argument was made in a different form, with one member of its Striped Bass Management Board, Russell Dize, legislative proxy from Maryland, arguing that increasingthe abundance of striped bass wasn’t necessary because

“I’ve been a commercial fishermen for 55 years in Maryland.  I’ve watched the striped bass come and go.  At this time, we’ve probably got more striped bass in the bay than I’ve ever seen in my life.  We’ve got so many striped bass that it has affected our crab-catching industry.  We are probably down to a low ebb last summer on crabs.

“One of the predators is rockfish, striped bass.  When the charterboats catch the striped bass and they clean them, you can count anywhere from ten to forty small crabs in the belly of a rockfish…”

Of course, such arguments aren’t limited to the East Coast.  They occur anywhere and everywhere people want to kill more fish than the law will allow. 

Down in the Gulf of Mexico, where red snapper are about halfway through a long rebuilding effort, we’re told by Alabama charter boatcaptain Dale Woodruff that

“[T]here’s way too many Red Snapper out there, we’ve got to go thin the heard [sic] out.”

That follows comments by anglers and charter boat captains that red snapper are, well, snapping up everything on the reef, driving down the population of everything from beeliners to gray triggerfish.

But the most outrageous case of blaming one fish for the decline in other fish stocks probably came in the form of comments made by a major industrial fish catcher/processer opposing proposed  language that would provide greater protection for forage fish in the National Standard One guidelines.

The National Standards are provisions of the Magnuson-Stevens Act that establish the framework for how the law should be applied, and the guidelines applied to such National Standards are intended to inform regional fishery management councils that must prepare fishery management plans that conform to the law.

It was proposed that forage fish be managed more conservatively than species at higher trophic levels, to better assure that their role in the food web, as well as their mere sustainability, could be maintained.

But the catcher/processer in question challenged that assumption arguing, among other things, that an abundance of forage fish, intended to provide food for predator species such as cod and haddock, could actually cause a decline in such species by eating their larvae and eggs.

Such argument isn’t without some support; in the North Sea, where cod and other groundfish have been overfished for many years, there is data suggesting that an abundance of herring can inhibit the groundfishes’ recovery. 

However, that problem only arose because groundfish populations had been so badly overfished that they were vulnerable to the forage fish’s predation.  Had groundfish been properly managed, an abundance of herring would only be a boon, not a potential obstruction, to their sustainability.

It was a perfect example of blaming the fish for a problem that fishermen first engendered.

So it is with all of the claims that the abundance of one stock of fish can only harm the health of another.  Fish of all species thrived at unfished levels of abundance for untold thousands—often millions—of years without causing harm to one another.

It was only after unregulated harvest threw the ecosystem out of whack that some problems seemed to appear.

Thus, we must realize that the answer to any such problems isn’t to fish all species down to some level of scarcity.  

Rather, it is to increase the abundance of depleted stocks, through restrictions on harvest when needed, to restore the balance once more.

http://www.thefisherman.com/index.cfm?currentpage=2&fuseaction=feature.display&feature_ID=1172&ParentCat=2&start=4982#sthash.FCZryzBM.dpbs

http://www.asmfc.org/uploads/file/5522c757AtlStripedBassProceedings_Oct2014.pdf

http://www.fox10tv.com/story/27809365/charter-boat-captain-on-opening-day-theres-too-many-red-snapper-out-there

A FOOLISH INCONSISTENCY

About 175 years ago, in an essay entitled “Self-Reliance”, Ralph Waldo Emerson noted that

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”

Maybe that’s so.

But anyone involved with fisheries management issues in the Mid-Atlantic region, where statesmen, philosophers and divines are not easily found,  might instead note that a foolish inconsistency is a hobgoblin of some other folks' minds, minds belonging mostly to folks trying to undercut the fisheries management process.

Yet the fact that their statements are not only inconsistent, but actually contradictory, seems completely lost on the speakers, even though they’re dealing with species included in the same fisheries management plan.

One of the species is black sea bass, a stock that’s considered fully restored.  Here in the northeast, sea bass seem to be pretty abundant, and anglers are taking plenty of them home—so many, in fact, that this year’s recreational landings in thestates between New Jersey and Massachusetts had to be cut by about one-third, when compared to last year’s, in order to keep them below what biologists believe to be prudent and sustainable levels.

That didn’t go over very well with many representatives of the commercial and recreational fishing industries, who emphasized the species’ apparent abundance and argued that harvest should be increased.  The summary of the Mid-Atlantic FisheryManagement Council’s Advisory Panel conference call of July 29, 2015 pretty much tells the story.

Commercial fisherman James Lovegren of New Jersey noted that

“I’ve been fishing for over 40 years and this is the healthiest I’ve ever seen the sea bass fishery…I think the quota should be at 7.5 or 8 million pounds…”

Others argued that the black sea bass population was growing so large that it had to be thinned to protect other species.

Marc Hoffman, a recreational advisor from New York, advanced that dubious premise, saying

“The biomass for sea bass is so much higher than what we have recorded.  They’re wiping out other species.  If we don’t act soon you’re going to lose the lobster fishery throughout the northeast.  We need an emergency opening of both the commercial and recreational black sea bass fishery.  We need to allow 100 pounds of black sea bass bycatch per day…”

His views were echoed by Michael Ireland, a commercial fisherman from North Carolina, who argued that

“Sea bass are eating scallops, lobsters, everything…”

So, OK, we get it.  

There seems to be a lot of black sea bass before out there, so many that, in the views of some folks (who have no scientific training at all), they are becoming a scourge to the ecosystem that must be eliminated before they start snatching small children from the shallows at coastal beaches and earn their own series of movies on the SyFy Channel…

And even if there aren’t quite that many around, their apparent abundance justifies a little larger harvest.

Fair enough. 

Fisheries biologists may not agree, for various reasons, but the basic premise is logical.  When there are more fish around, limits could be a little more generous.

But now, let’s consider summer flounder.

They’re managed under the same management plan as black sea bass.  They have the same set of advisors.  And biologists have solid evidence that recruitment was well below average for for consecutive years, from 2010 through 2013.

Even Marc Hoffman, one of the advisors warning us all to arm, gird our loins and wade out to do battle against the black sea bass “soon” lest great environmental damage be done, recognizes that some year classes are largely missing from the summer flounder population, noting that

“All the party boats I’m talking to are seeing plenty of fish, but not a lot of keepers.  There are plenty of fish just under 18 inches..”

And that’s just about what the science is reporting.  

The 2010 year class was the smallest in recent years, 2011 was only a little better, and those are the year classes that would be providing us with most of our just-legal fish this season.  Recruitment improved steadily after that, with the 2014 year class of roughly average size, which explains why there are quite a few “shorts,” including a bunch that measure in the 12- to 14-inch range that were spawned in 2014.

So one would think that Hoffman, who was certainly gung-ho to raise the black sea bass kill due to a seeming abundance of fish, would embrace the science that reflects his own observations, and readily agree to cuts in the summer flounder harvest.

But it didn’t work that way.  Instead, Hoffman opposed the proposed cuts, saying

“I think this is a very drastic action.  It’s too drastic based on what we’re seeing.”

Does anyone else notice the inconsistency here?

Although, to be fair, Hoffman wasn’t alone.

Michael Ireland, the commercial fisherman from North Carolina, declared

“I think we’re going at this way too fast.  I think we may have gotten an inaccurate assessment, and we need another assessment as soon as possible.”

Even Jim Lovegren, who I know as a reasonable and level-headed fishermen from the days when we both sat on the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council, was very critical of the science, and said

“They need to take this whole thing back to the drawing board.  These cuts will have enormous impacts.  We have a failure of management.”

Thus, we seem to be confronted with an inconsistency.

When a stock is at a high level of abundance, as black sea bass appears to be, the Advisory Panel--and we can assume many fisherman as well--want to see harvests increased.

That seems to make sense.

So when a stock declines in abundance, as is the case with summer flounder—an observation confirmed by at least some of the Advisory Panel members—one would expect the Advisory Panel and fishermen as a whole to follow the same logic, and call for landings reductions.

But that’s not the case.  

In the face of four years of documented sub-par recruitment—and a stock assessment model that, if anything, makes recruitment appear higher than it actually was—the Advisory Panel and those whom the panel represents are adamantly opposed to landings reductions.

That’s inconsistent.

But it’s foolish as well, for if too many summer flounder are harvested now, when fewer fish are being recruited into the population, managers will be forced to make even greater cuts in the future, just to repair the damage.

Wisdom would dictate that fishermen accept a painful cut today, to avoid even greater and more painful cuts tomorrow,

But wisdom can be all too rare when fish are involved.

RETHINKING BLUEFISH MANAGEMENT

A new benchmark stock assessment for bluefish has just been completed.  The assessment is so new that the entire document is not yet available, although a summary has been posted onthe Northeast Fisheries Science Center’s website.

However, even the summary confirms something that anglers and fisheries managers have both known for years.

“Bluefish are predominantly a recreationally caught species, with recreational harvest making up approximately 80% of total removals in recent years.  [emphasis added]”

It also describes a trend that anglers are certainly aware of, saying

“Recreational data are available from 1981 onward.  Recreational harvest has…declined over this time period, from a peak in 1983 at 24.8 million fish to a low of 3.7 million fish in 1999.  Recreational harvest has increased slightly since then, with the most recent 5-year average equal to 5.6 million fish.  Both total numbers and the proportion of fish released alive by anglers have increased over this time period:  18% were released alive from 1981-1985 (an average of 5.0 million fish) while 62% were released alive from 2010-2014 (an average of 9.2 million fish)…  [emphasis added]”

A primarily recreational fishery, in which anglers choose to release rather than retain most of their catch, should be managed very differently than a commercial fishery, in which the goal is efficiently landing something close to maximum sustainable yield every year.  It should also be managed differently than the recreational fishery for scup or summer flounder, where putting fish in the cooler is a primary goal.

Such a predominantly recreational, primarily catch-and-release fishery should be managed for fish in the water, to provide anglers with the maximum number of hookups—and probably releases—rather than merely yield.

Unfortunately, fishery managers haven’t gotten that message, and are still trying maximize the number of dead bluefish hauled back to the dock.

According to the new assessment, the bluefish stock is not overfished and overfishing isn’t occurring.  The current spawning stock biomass is estimated at 86,534 metric tons, below the target of 111,229 mt, but still comfortably above the biomass threshold.  There is good news, in that last year’s recruitment was slightly above average, and in that the stock has shown

“an increasing trend in recent years.”

Still, the new assessment includes some changes.

The previous assessment recommended reference points based on fishing mortality; such reference points depend on biologists having a good idea of how recruitment—young fish coming into the population—impacts the size of the overall stock.  With bluefish, some of the stock-recruitment data is pretty shaky, because there is little information on recruitment during periods when the stock size is small.

Because of such information gaps, the biologists who produced the latest stock assessment decided that it would be better to manage bluefish based on “spawning potential ratio,” which is basically the spawning potential of the current stock compared to the spawning potential of an unfished population.  Having made that decision, they went on to conclude that the bluefish population would be sustainable if its spawning potential was at least 40% of that of an unfished stock.

Such decision had a minor impact on the fishing mortality threshold, dropping F_msy from 0.190 to 0.170.  It had a bigger impact on the spawning stock biomass target, reducing it from 147,052 metric tons to the previously mentioned 111,229.  That’s a little more significant number, for under the previous biomass reference points, the bluefish stock was a lot closer to being overfished.

The stock assessment cited relatively few grounds for uncertainty, and thus recommended an Overfishing Limit that contained little allowance for such unknowns.  However, the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council’s Science and Statistical Committeehas the right to adjust that perceived level of uncertainty upward, and thisyear, as in other years, it has decided to take such action with bluefish.

So it’s clear that biologists are willing to change the way that they assess the stock, in order to adapt to the best available data.

And it’s clear that the SSC is willing to change, decreasing the Overfishing Limit from the assessment to address data problems that they perceive.

But it appears that the folks who advise the Council on management measures are stuck in a rut, unwilling to consider managing bluefish in accord with the way the resource is used.

The problem dates back to 1998, when Amendment 1 to the Bluefish Fishery Management Plan was adopted.  That plan allocated 83% of landings to the recreational sector, but included the provision that

“If the commercial quota was less than 10.5 million lbs. the quota could be increased up to 10.5 million lbs. if the recreational fishery was not anticipated to land their entire allocation for the upcoming year.”

That’s a provision that has always contained the potential for a lot of mischief.

As noted before, recreational fishermen are releasing more and more of the bluefish that they catch.  Anglers release fish for a number of reasons; sometimes they’re compelled to by law, sometimes they don’t like to eat them and often because they want to keep an abundance of fish in the ocean for their and other folks’ use.

Unfortunately, the transfer provision largely frustrates the latter objective.  While anglers may release bluefish today so that there are more in the water for them to catch tomorrow, the transfer of “unused” recreational quota to the commercial sector effectively sends anglers the message that such conservation efforts are pointless.  Bluefish that they choose to release aren’t destined to improve the quality of recreational angling; instead, they just go toward an increased commercial quota and are killed all the same.

In addition, predicting recreational landings is very hard to do.  The July 27 Summary ofthe Bluefish Monitoring Committee notes that

“For the 2010-2014 period, recreational landings have ranged from 10.52 M lb (4,774 mt) in 2014 to 16.48 M lb (7,477 mt) in 2013.  Recreational landings for the 2016-2018 period are difficult to estimate.”

Yet, no matter how difficult it is to make, such estimate is very important, as it determines how much bluefish may be transferred from the recreational to the commercial sector.

A July 23 memo from Mid-Atlantic Council staff recommended that recreational landings should be pegged at the 2014 low point, which would maximize the number of fish transferred to the commercial sector. 

The Monitoring Committee disagreed with that approach, and suggested using a three-year average (which would include landings from the superstorm Sandy-attenuated 2012 season); that approach would provide a recreational catch estimate of 12.95 million pounds (5,875 mt)—still slightly below estimated 2015 landings—and assume that, despite an increasing biomass, recreational landings would not increase at all through 2018.

The Monitoring Committee approach would permit only a small quota transfer—200,000 pounds—in 2016, but that would quickly increase more than tenfold, to 2.16 millon pounds, by 2018—while the recreational quota would not increase at all.

It’s a strange way to manage a fishery that is supposedly “predominantly” recreational, and largely self-managed by anglers to emphasize catch and release.

It’s also strange to give the commercial sector more fish given how large landings of bluefish depress the commercial market. 

Here in New York, May always sees high commercial landings as the fish first move inshore.  

In 2013, the last year for which catch information is available, May saw 260,962 pounds of bluefish sold for the princely sum of $122,902—about 47 cents per pound, although I heard rumors that the price dropped as low as 20 cents per pound for a part of that time.

In North Carolina, the price situation was even worse, with a total of 1,159,596 pounds of bluefish selling for an aggregate of $564,349—less than 49 cents per pound.  And if it wasn’t for strong prices in March, which brought up the average, things would have looked far worse, with monthly prices in the other eleven months averaging between 39 cents and less than 46 cents per pound, with most months seeing an average price in the 40-41 cent range.

It’s hard to believe that such fish wouldn’t have had greater value—and provided a greater benefit to the nation—if no inter-sector transfers were made, and the bluefish were available to anglers to catch again and again, while using up bait, losing lures and burning gas—and providing more than a 47-cents-per-pound benefit along the way.

Even commercial fishermen probably would have benefited, as a lower quota and, hopefully, lower trip limits would have kept prices higher, allowing them to make the same money without working as long or as hard.

Thus, it’s more than past time to rethink bluefish management, and to adopt a management program that recognizes that “bluefish are predominantly a recreationally caught species” and, moreover, that anglers who fish for bluefish release most of their catch.

It is time for managers to stop maximizing folks’ opportunities to put dead bluefish on the dock, and to start maximizing folks’ opportunities to encounter live bluefish in the water, where they can best be enjoyed.

Doing so would represent a paradigm shift in marine fisheries management, but it is a shift that is long overdue.

THE NUMBERS' STORY

It’s one of the truisms of fisheries management.

Any time that managers make a decision that someone doesn’t like, before the ink is dry on the press release, someone will pop up to cry “The numbers are bad.”

It doesn’t really matter which species in involved, or how good the science that supports managers’ decisions might be.  Someone is going to challenge the numbers.

Consider the recent debate at the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission over striped bass conservation.  It occurred after a benchmark stock assessment determined that the population would almost certainly become overfished by 2015, after anglers from Maine to North Carolina were reporting declining numbers of fish and demanding that something be done.  Even so, some members of ASMFC’s Striped Bass Management Board denied the existence of any problem, and sought to cast doubt upon the stock assessment.  Tom Fote, thegovernor’s appointee from New Jersey, was typical of such folks, saying

“It seems I’ve been here over the years doing the same thing.  We have been looking at some figures for a period of time and then decided we’re going to do a drastic cut.  Two years later they’re finding out that we didn’t need the drastic cuts and had to change the regulations in New Jersey again…

“In my estimation, we’ve been where the sky is falling, and a whole bunch of people yammering…Whether fish come inshore or not depends on water temperature and with the bait inshore a lot of times, and that is what it affects especially when we keep the [Exclusive Economic Zone] closed…

“…People have been pushing for closing this or doing something.  The people that basically send the e-mails are the people that want to do that.  The people that are out fishing a lot of times, which is a majority of the fishermen I go around and talk to, they’re not ready to jump through this type of hoop…”

All of the data in the stock assessment, supported by what the “people yammering” note about the striped bass population were, to their eyes, invalid.  Conservation measures weren’t required, they told us, because “two years later” the water temperatures would improve, or forage fish would move inshore, and all would be well with the world.

Of course, if they had gotten their way, and things were worse a couple years down the road, they’d find other reasons to protest…

But “flawed data” or, as some like to exclaim, “fatally flawed data,” is still the typical response to conservation efforts.

Back in the fall of 2009, the Recreational Fishing Alliance announced a lawsuit brought against federal fisheries managers claiming—you guessed it—“fatally flawed data” that constrained harvest in the recreational black sea bass fishery.  In that pressrelease, the RFA warned anglers

“What’s worse is that there seems to be no end in sight to the [Marine Recreational Fishing Statistics Survey’s] assault.  Today it’s the complete shutdown [after the recreational allocation had allegedly been landed] of a healthy sea bass fishery.  Next, we can expect an impact on the summer flounder limits for 2010, and scup soon after that.  Could striped bass be next?  How about [tautog]?  If “fatally flawed” data has not impacted your favorite fishery, rest assured that it will happen soon enough if we don’t take a stand today.  Where does it end if we allow the federal government to continue to use a broken system to deny recreational anglers access to healthy fisheries?”

While just about everyone will admit that the MRFSS data used to close the black sea bass fishery in 2009 was far from perfect, the judge hearing the case noted that federal regulators were improving their data-gathering process, and decided that plaintiffs’ claim that data problems would cause fishery closures to recur wouldn’t fly, saying that

“Plaintiffs provide no support for [a]…reasonable expectation that an emergency closure will recur.”

But still, folks like to criticize the data, largely because they don’t understand how it works.

Anyone wanting to really understand the system must first accept the fact that every number used in a stock assessment, harvest assessment or other management calculation includes some degree of error. 

In some cases, such as commercial landings estimates, the error levels are pretty small, because vessel trip reports can be cross-checked against fish house weighout slips.  But even that sort of ground-truthed process isn’t perfect, as was recently demonstrated when commercial fishermen and fish houses here in New Yorkcolluded to misreport hundreds of thousands of pounds of summer flounder landed pursuant to the Research Set-Aside program.

In other cases, such as when data from the late and unlamented MRFSS program was applied to a seldom-caught species in a single state, the data could be so imprecise as to be unusable, and it was such situations that were often used by critics to impeach the MRFSS data.  Yet when MRFSS was applied on a coastwide basis to often-encountered species, the estimates really were pretty good.

At any rate, the number represented by such calculations—whether an estimate of biomass, recreational landings or the level of harvest that will produce optimum yield—doesn’t mean that, for example, exactly 1,342,906 striped bass were caught in a given state in any particular year.   Instead, that number represents what is called a “point estimate;” the actual number of fish caught is almost certainly higher or lower—perhaps much higher or lower, depending on the quality of the data—than the point estimate itself.

And that’s the first thing that the “faulty data” folks don’t understand.  Because when they scream “Bad numbers!!!” they might really be right, but even if the point estimate is well off the mark, there is no way of knowing where the error lies. 

People trying to fight conservation measures consistently try to argue that, because the data is imprecise, managers should assume that harvest estimates are too high, biomass estimates are too low and the number of fish that can be safely removed from a population is higher than the stock assessment suggests.  In fact, a proposalto increase black sea bass landings, introduced at last May’s meeting of theMid-Atlantic Fisheries Management Council, actually included all three of those assumptions.

Unfortunately for such people, it is as likely as not that the opposite is true, and that harvest was underestimated, the biomass is smaller than believed and sustainable harvest requires that fewer fish be taken out of the population.  

Thus, if the data really is bad (and black sea bass are recognized as a “data-poor species”) the prudent course isn’t to assume that the stock can sustain higher harvests, but rather to exercise a greater degree of caution and set harvest levels well below what the point estimate suggests, to avoid accidentally crashing the stock.

Of course, that’s exactly the opposite of what the “Flawed data!!” folks are trying to do.

The numbers are telling their story, but it’s not one that such folks want to hear.

THE "R" WORD

A while ago, I was browsing the message board on a popular Internet site when I came across a discussion on keeping striped bass.  There was the predictable gamut of comments, with some folks saying that they keep their fish, and many others promoting catch and release.

But one comment really stood out.

An angler stated that it was his right to keep as many fish as the law allowed, and that it was no one’s business whether he ate them, gave them away or used them to fertilize his tomatoes.  Another person quickly chimed in, agreeing that a person had a right to keep every fish permitted by law, and to use them—or not—in any manner they wished.

Throughout the debate, the word “right” was frequently used.

The word “responsibility,” however, was notable only for its absence.

That pretty well describes the current fisheries debate.

We see the Recreational Fishing Alliance state declare that, among other purposes, it exists to “To safeguard the rights of saltwater anglers.”  A statement on its webpage notes that

“RFA was the first national, grassroots political action organization established to represent the rights of recreational fishermen and the recreational fishing industry as a whole on marine fisheries issues,”

which is probably true, although a now-defunct (I think) outfit down in New Jersey that never grew legs, called the National Fishing Association, might have contested the “first” claim if it was still around.

But the funny thing is, if you read that RFA page, there is no talk about anglers “obligations,” “responsibilities” or “duties.”  

Only multiple references to “rights.”

And RFA isn’t alone.

There is the Fishing Rights Alliance, a group primarily focused on fighting conservation measures for various southern reef fish, that assures members and potential members that it is

“Fighting for YOUR FISHING RIGHTS.”

George Poveromo, an outdoor media personality who has apparently been named the Coastal Conservation Association’s “Offshore Spokesperson” notes that

“They are fighting for the rights of recreational anglers to fish,”

while a Facebook post on the page of the controversial ProfessionalTarpon Tournament Series thanked CCA

“for standing up for the rights of recreational anglers”

after CCA’s Florida chapter opposed a state effort to outlaw a type of fishing lure used to intentionally foul-hook tarpon in Boca Grande Pass.

To be fair, CCA was once a very effective voice for marine conservation (I became a life member and was an active volunteer back in those heady days), and a few of the state chapters are still outstanding advocates for enlightened conservation measures.  But at the national level, while it still talks the conservation talk, it now walks a very different path, dedicating much of its resources and advocacy efforts to weakeningfederal fisheries laws and even undermining federal managers’ ability to managevarious stocks of fish, particularly in the Gulf of Mexico and, to a lesser degree, the South Atlantic.

The bottom line is that whether you’re talking about RFA, CCA, FRA or any of other organizations with similar messages and objectives, there is a lot of talk about “rights,” and not a lot of talk about the “responsibilities” that go along with those rights.

And that’s a pretty striking violation of the social contract that should bind all of us together, for in modern society, the only folks who are exempt from having responsibilities accompany their rights are children and the mentally deficient—both of whom are only granted qualified and limited rights, as well.

So for the nation’s salt water angling organizations to argue that they have rights without accepting the full plate of responsibility that goes with them can reasonably be deemed childish, or at least not completely rational, behavior.

For as anglers, we all have a very clear and, if we’ve been brought up right in the sport, a very well-defined set of responsibilities.

First and foremost, there is our responsibility to the resource.  

As people who depend on living marine resources for our sport and, in many cases, for some portion of our food, we have an obligation to treat those resources with respect and to accept our role as their stewards.

In the simplest terms, that means that we should not abuse them.  If we decide to take home a few fish for dinner, we shouldn’t take more than we know we can use, and we shouldn’t kill anything—say a big shark or marlin—just to show it off at the dock (and maybe collect a tournament check) and then toss it into a dumpster.

As stewards of the resource, it is our responsibility to not only obey the law, but at times to go beyond the law when regulations don’t adequately protect fish stocks.  The recent trend in the northeastern striped bass fishery, that sees anglers releasing the largest and most fecund females and keeping a smaller fish for dinner, in order to maintain the stock’s spawning potential, is a good case in point.

On the other hand, the weasel words used by those named organizations, whoclaim that they only seek “reasonable access” to a fishery, when what they truly desire is the freedom to overfish various stocks in clear contravention of current science and law, present a good case of folks shirking their obligations.

Second, anglers have a responsibility to the public, which includes other anglers.  

Neither anglers nor angling-related businesses own the fish.  Fish, like all wildlife, are a publicresource, held in trust by the state and federal governments for the benefit ofall citizens, with use governed by the exercise of the state’s police powers. 

When an angler takes a fish, or merely tries to catch one, he or she is exercising a privilege (yes, a privilege, not a “right”) granted by the state as part of its duties as trustee of such resources.  Removing fish from a population reduces the number that remain available to the public for recreation, food or merely passive appreciation (all of which, viewed objectively, are equally valid uses), and such removals must not be capricious. 

It’s clear that unsustainable rates of removal can do long-lasting harm to a fish population, but even removals that fall within sustainable limits can lead to local and temporary reductions in availability, which can diminish other anglers’ enjoyment of the shared fishery.  So while there’s nothing wrong with taking, say, two or three bluefish home, killing a full limit just because it’s legal, and then trying to give away, or even dumping, the fish is not ethically defensible.

Finally, there is anglers’ responsibility to future generations. 

Back in 1971, conservationist Wendell Barry published a bookcalled The Unforeseen Wilderness:  An Essay on Kentucky’s Red River Gorge, in which he noted that

“I am speaking of the life of a man who knows that that world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children.”

Hunters and anglers must all be such men.  The fact that they aren’t is puzzling, as in the course of our lives, we have all seen what irresponsible stewardship brings.

In my own case, it was what caused me to become an advocate for fisheries conservation.  Some fish are more available now than they were in my youth—and I caught my very first fish fifty-nine years ago—others have all but disappeared.

So while I enjoy the scup and black sea bass that abound on local wrecks, in numbers I did not see over the course of nearly six previous decades, I mourn for the cod and the pollock, winter flounder and tautog, rainbow smelt and bluefin tuna that I once caught in their abundance and now see in much diminished numbers—if I see them at all.

As someone who grew up on the northeast coast, I find it indescribably sad that the current generation of children will not enjoy the simple pleasure of meeting up with their friends to catch a few flounder off a local dock when school’s not in session or, when they’re a bit older, to join their father and this friends on a party boat cod trip, a simple coming-of-age rite that I enjoyed when young.

Current efforts to gut federal fisheries laws in the name of “reasonable access” and “diminish[ing] socioeconomic impacts” may, on their face, appeal to many.  But we must always understand that such things are not without price, and that price is the diminishment of the world that only children yet unborn will know.

And that, perhaps, is the greatest irresponsibility of all:  Not paying the debt that is owed to the future.

WRONG LESSONS LEARNED

Recently, Representative Garrett Graves, Republican ofLouisiana, introduced legislation that would change the way red snapper aremanaged.  He calls the bill the Gulf States Red Snapper Management Authority Act.  If passed, it would take authority to manage red snapper away from the National Marine Fisheries Service and hand it over to the five states bordering the Gulf of Mexico.

Graves makes a number of claims in defense of his actions, including the claim that

“State-based management of federal fisheries has been successfully implemented on the East Coast as well as in Alaska over the past decades.”

I can’t speak for Alaska, having spent little time there, but I live on the East Coast, and when it comes to our local fisheries, it’s pretty clear that Graves has overstated his case.

There are three different tiers in East Coast fisheries management.  There are the federal fishery management councils, which operate regionally in federal waters, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, an interstate compact that imposes more-or-less uniform management measures on fishermen operating in state waters (and in federal waters if the councils do not elect to manage a particular species) and state managers who may impose state-specific rules in their particular jurisdictions.

Under that system, a given stock or species might be managed only federally, by federal managers and by ASMFC, by federal managers and individual states, by ASMFC alone, by individual states or by no one.  It is an intricate web of management authority, and each layer has demonstrated a different degree of success.

When folks along the Gulf of Mexico refer to the "success" of East Coast management, they’re generally thinking about ASMFC, so in order to see whether Rep. Graves’ statement is true, it’s probably best to take a look at ASMFC’s management successes and failures.

That’s pretty easy to do, because ASMFC provides a StockStatus Overview that summarizes the health of all of its managed stocks in just three pages.  

The Overview breaks ASMFC’s ’s 29 managed stocks into five categories:  Rebuilt/Sustainable, Rebuilding, Stable/Unchanged [at an unspecified level], Depleted and Unknown. 

Currently, ASMFC lists 12 managed stocks—about 40% of the total—as “Rebuilt/Sustainable”, none as “Rebuilding”, 2 as “Stable/Unchanged”, 8 as “Depleted” and 7 as “Unknown”.  So less than half of the stocks managed by ASMFC are either “Rebuilt/Sustainable” or “Rebuilding,” although those categories, combined, encompass more stocks than any other.

Yet that doesn’t tell the whole story.

ASMFC deems the Atlantic striped bass stock to be “Rebuilt/Sustainable”, despite the fact that the most recent benchmark stockassessment, completed in late 2013, noted that

“If the current fully-recruited [fishing mortality] (F=0.200) is retained during 2013-2017, the probability of being below the [spawning stock biomass] reference point increases to 0.86 by 2015…”

Since a stock is deemed to be “overfished” when spawning stock biomass falls beneath the reference point, there is at least an 86% probability that the striped bass stock will be overfished this year.  Even so, ASMFC still classifies that stock as “Rebuilt/Sustainable”, which makes you wonder how bad things have to get before ASMFC finally admits that a stock is “Depleted”.

Nevertheless, out of the 12 stocks that ASMFC designates as “Rebuilt/Sustainable”, seven (Atlantic herring, black sea bass, bluefish, scup, Spanish mackerel, spiny dogfish and summer flounder) are jointly managed with the National Marine Fisheries Service pursuant to the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act.  The five “Rebuilt/Sustainable” stocks that are managed solely by ASMFC include two stocks of American lobster, Atlantic menhaden, black drum and the dubiously-designated Atlantic striped bass.

On the other hand, of the eight “Depleted” species, seven (American eel, one stock of American lobster, American shad, northern shrimp, river herring, tautog and weakfish) are managed solely by ASMFC, while only one, the southern New England/mid-Atlantic stock of winter flounder is also managed by NMFS, and that species falls under the jurisdiction of the New England Fishery Management Council, which usually gets management wrong.

And once again, folks must remember that not one single stock managed by ASMFC is thought to be “Rebuilding”.  That’s in accordance with ASMFC’s judgment, and not just my own.

Taking a look at those numbers casts a lot of doubt on Rep. Graves’ premise that “[s]tate-based management of federal fisheries has been successfully implemented on the East Coast.” 

In fact, when one realizes that the majority of ASMFC’s “Rebuilt/Sustainable” stocks are federally managed in conformity with Magnuson-Stevens, and that nearly 90% of the “Depleted” stocks are managed by ASMFC alone—and no ASMFC-managed stock is “Rebuilding”—it's clear that just the opposite is true.  Federally managed stocks are doing pretty well, while stocks that are solely state managed are, in large part, doing pretty badly and not getting much better.

Probing a little deeper discloses more holes in Rep. Graves' understanding of East Coast fisheries management, and in the premise underlying his snapper bill.  

For on the East Coast, and particularly with respect to the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council, which is responsible for most of the jointly managed species, federal and state managers work together.

In the Gulf red snapper fishery, there is little or no cooperation between state and federal fisheries managers, despite the fact that the fisheries managers of all five Gulf states hold permanent seats on the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council.  

In the Gulf, instead of trying to harmonize state and federal management plans, state and federal managers work at cross-purposes; in the most extreme example, the State of Texas has adopted a year-round red snapper season, along with a smaller minimum size and a bag limit twice that adopted by federal managers. 

Such non-cooperation on the part of the states assures that, in the Gulf, federal management plans will create problems for one or more user groups.  Unfortunately, legislators such as Rep. Graves, urged on by constituents seeking to further their own agendas, blame federal managers for every perceived shortcoming, and seek to perpetuate the real problem by giving even more power to the uncooperative states.

The successful rebuilding and long-term sustainability of some East Coast stocks can be attributed to state managers taking a completely different approach that promotes cooperation.  

In the mid-Atlantic, for example, the federal fishery management council and representatives of ASMFC meet in joint session.  Identical management measures are considered by both state and federal managers, and if either the Council or ASMFC fails to approve any such measure, protocol requires that deliberations continue until measures agreeable to everyone are adopted.

Since the Council’s doesn’t have the ability to approve measures that aren’t in accord with Magnuson-Stevens, that means that the more conservative federal measures, which are intended to prevent overfishing and rebuild overfished stocks within a relatively short period of time, are the ones put in place.

That, and not the mere fact of state regulation, is why some of the most important East Coast sport and food fish stocks have been rebuilt.

Thus, Rep. Graves has learned exactly the wrong lessons from East Coast fisheries managers.  

He has “learned” that when East Coast managers have been successful, it is because the states have managed the stocks involved.

But that is not true.

East Coast fisheries managers have been successful when the federal fisheries management councils take the lead, applying the Magnuson-Stevens Act mandates to promptly end overfishing and rebuild overfished stocks.  They have been successful becasuse the states cooperate with federal managers, remaining in compliance with the federal management plans and working together with NMFS to rebuild fish stocks.

In short, East Coast fisheries managers have been successful because they don’t do what Rep. Graves wants to do with red snapper.

And that’s a lesson that Rep. Graves needs to learn quickly, before he does some real harm.