"FULL BOAT LIMITS" AND OTHER THINGS THAT AREN'T EXACTLY TRUE

 

Part of my day-to-day routine involves keeping abreast of the fisheries issues that are spurring debate along the United States coast. So I was routinely perusing a piece on party boat fishing for black sea bass somewhere off the Delaware coast when I came across the following line:

“…I was busy cranking in black sea bass on every drop but one.  On three drops, I had doubleheader keepers…I ended the day with 20 keepers, of which five were distributed by the mates to anglers who did not fill their limits.  It was a wonderful day.”

Someone might casually read those words, and see nothing particularly remarkable—except, perhaps, that the writer had a particularly enjoyable day.

The problem is, Delaware’s daily bag limit for black sea bass is just 15 fish, so it appears that the author of the piece didn’t only have “a wonderful day,” but that he admitted keeping five fish over the legal limit. 

In this case, that might not matter, because federal fisheries law would probably condone what he did, so long as everyone on the boat stayed within their aggregate limit, and the applicable Delaware regulation reads,

“It shall be unlawful for any recreational fisherman to have in possession more than 15 black sea bass at or between the place where said black sea bass were caught and said recreational fishermen’s personal abode or temporary or transient place of lodging during the period of May 15 through September 30 and October 10 through December 31,  [emphasis added]”

so by the time the boat returned to Delaware waters, where Delaware regulations apply, the angler would only have had 15 fish in his possession.

There might be some point that I’m missing that would change the analysis, because I’m not an expert on Delaware law, but it appears that the angler in question probably acted within the law.

But the same behavior would be clearly illegal here in New York, where the relevant regulation reads,

“It is unlawful for any person to take or possess on the waters of the marine and coastal district…fish…in excess of the possession limit or trip limit specified for such species…  [emphasis added]”

While the Delaware regulation focuses on possession, the use of the phrase “take or possess” in the New York rule makes it clear that an angler cannot escape a bag limit violation simply by giving over-limit fish away; once an angler has “taken” a fish, that fish counts against the angler’s daily limit, whether the angler keeps it or gives it to someone else.

Yet the same practice described in the Delaware piece—giving away over-limit fish to less successful anglers—is common practice on New York party boats, too, regardless of what the regulations might say.  New York regularly advertise

“keeping a full boat limit”

of striped bass or some other species, and there is a very real difference between saying that a vessel kept “a full boat limit” and saying that every angler on board managed to catch and keep a legal bass.

Perhaps the biggest difference is that in New York, and in a number of other states, the latter is legal, while the former is not.

It’s not just party boats anglers who fall into the “boat limit” trap; charter boat and private boat anglers also typically pool their landings, taking care only that they don’t exceed the aggregate bag limit of all the people on board.  That’s not how bag limits generally work, although are some exceptions; the original bluefish management plan provided that

“On vessels with several passengers, the number of bluefish contained on the vessel may not exceed ten (or the adjusted limit) times the number of people aboard the vessel.”

But absent such specific provisions, bag limits are personal, not collective, even though many people believe that sharing “boat limits” is perfectly fine.

In truth, although it’s more likely that an angler will be ticketed and fined for boat limit issues than it is that he’ll win the top Powerball prize, neither event is very likely to occur.  As a practical matter, even if law enforcement agents board the boat, so long as no one possesses more fish than the law allows, no one is going to suffer any legal consequences.

It thus comes down to a matter of ethics, and as Aldo Leopold once observed,

“Ethical behavior is doing the right thing when no one is watching, even when doing the wrong thing is legal.”

Of course, in the case of boat limits, doing the wrong thing often isn’t legal, but given the lack of enforcement, it might as well be. 

In the end, does it matter?  The answer is probably yes, if only because the number of fish that anglers keep in any given season is considered when the regulations for future seasons are being devised.

That’s because fishery managers have only three tools that they can use to control recreational landings and keep them at sustainable levels: bag limits, size limits, and seasons.  To calculate an effective set of management measures, managers review the past performance of the fishery to determine how each factor affected overall landings.  That review includes a determination of the number of fish caught on an average recreational trip.

Anglers don’t limit out every time that they go fishing, so the average number of fish caught per trip is always below—often far below—the bag limit.  That means that when harvest reductions are needed, bag limits often have to be slashed, sometimes more than 50 percent, to achieve a needed reduction in fishing mortality.  Such fact is exemplified in a staff memorandum sent to the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council in advance of its December 2021 meeting, when the Council was confronting a potential 56% reduction in recreational scup landings.  The memo advised that

“Major changes in the bag limit would be needed to notably reduce coastwide harvest because most anglers do not take the full bag limit of 30 to 50 fish.  For example, changing the bag limit from 50 to 25 fish in state and federal waters would result in an estimated 3% decrease in total harvest.  Changing the bag limit from 50 fish to 7 fish in state and federal waters would result in an estimated 51% decrease in total harvest.”

Managers determine the number of fish harvested on an average trip by taking the data collected during in-person dockside interviews, which provide interviewers an opportunity to count and measure interviewed anglers’ fish, and then applying that data to the entire universe of anglers.  Because a very small number of interviews can be used to estimate the total landings from millions of recreational trips, any irregularities in the data collected can bias the final results.    

Thus, boat limits can skew landings estimates, for if interviewers encounter someone who contributed excess fish toward a boat limit, they would not count all of the fish that such angler kept, while if interviewers encounter someone who took home fish that they didn’t catch, they would overcount such angler’s landings.  The precise impacts of such miscounts are difficult to predict, but they could conceivably lead managers to adopt regulations that were either more restrictive than necessary, or not restrictive enough to keep landings at a sustainable level.

While some argue that fishery managers need to devise a better way to estimate recreational harvest, no one has yet devised an approach that provides more accurate data, while remaining economically and operationally feasible.

Which brings us to vessel trip reports, better known as VTRs.

All party and charter boats that hold permits to catch species managed by the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council have, since 2018, been required to submit electronic VTRs to the National Marine Fisheries Service within 48 hours after completing a trip.  In theory, VTRs provide a census of for-hire fishing activity which, because it’s being recorded first-hand by every for-hire boat in the fleet, provides far more accurate data than that afforded by estimates based on a relative handful of interviews of shore-based and private boat anglers.

For-hire vessels frequently argue that, because of such presumably superior data, they should be granted special privileges, in the form of unique size limits, bag limits, and/or seasons not enjoyed by the greater angling community.

But while the VTR data provided by for-hire vessels is theoretically better than that provided by angler interviews, it’s not completely clear whether the reality reflects such superiority, or whether VTR data is clouded by both intentional efforts to skew the numbers and by for-hire captains’ inability to accurately account for the number of fish caught and released from their vessels.

With respect to the latter issue, comments made by for-hire captains suggest that they don’t have any real idea of the number of fish that their customers are catching.  For example, after a well-known New Jersey party boat was boarded by state law enforcement personnel, who confiscated 819 illegal, out-of-season black sea bass, the captain commented,

“I didn’t think it was that many.  And I’m not getting paid by the State of New Jersey to take fish out of people’s buckets.”

So it’s a legitimate question to ask, if the same situation recurred today, would all of those 819 illegal fish show up on the boat’s VTR?  After all, while the captain “didn’t think it was that many,” he knew that some fish were taken.  What number would he have used?

At it’s March 2018 meeting, New York’s Marine Resources Advisory Council addressed the issue of for-hire compliance, and a for-hire vessel’s responsibility for customers’ over-limit fish.  The bulletin summarizing the discussion notes that one for-hire captain commented that

“It is simply not possible to count every fish that comes on board [because] the crew has other responsibilities,”

while another stated that passengers might object, perhaps violently, to a crew member’s efforts to look inside their coolers.  A law enforcement officer informed the Council that customers who exceeded the bag limit often abandoned their coolers when the boat was approached by enforcement agents, and that such abandoned coolers have contained up to 130 fish (when the bag limit was no more than 8).

If for-hire crew is too busy to count the number of fish that passengers keep, they certainly can’t keep track of how many additional fish such passengers released; if crew is unwilling to count the fish in passengers’ coolers, and if some of those coolers might hold one hundred or more illegal fish, are the boats’ VTRs really as accurate as the for-hire captains claim them to be?

And could the uncertainty in the VTRs’ data be compounded by intentional efforts to conceal certain information?

While it would be foolish to intentionally misrepresent the number of fish that customers keep, because such information can be easily checked should a boat be boarded, it’s just about impossible for fisheries managers to know whether the number of fish released is underreported. 

I’ve been told on good authority—by folks who themselves operate for-hire boats—that some vessel operators chronically underreport releases in the hope that, by doing so, they can reduce the estimates of release mortality, and so increase the number of fish that their customers might be allowed to keep.

Such intentional underreporting was seemingly evidenced in some VTR data that I had a chance to see, which was obtained through a freedom of information request.  It listed the striped bass retained and released by one state’s for-hire fleet over the course of a year.  There were some striking anomalies.

For most boats, the number of bass killed was close to the number of bass released, although for a few, the proportion of releases was significantly higher.  That’s the sort of thing that one might expect for a year when the 28-inch minimum size was still in place, and fish both under and over the minimum were available to anglers.

But there were some boats that really stood out, because while they kept good numbers of bass, they didn’t report releasing even one, single fish.

One boat made 18 trips, carrying nearly 100 passengers, and managed to harvest 130 bass without catching a single short, for it reported no release.  Other boats found a way to keep 106, 115, 119, 132, 154, even 334 legal bass, without encountering a single fish that they had to release.

Those just aren’t credible numbers.

While it might, in theory, be possible for seven boats to, collectively, land nearly 1,100 bass without catching even one fish that had to be returned to the water, in the real world, that’s just not going to happen.  No one familiar with the fishery is going to believe that it’s possible for such boats to make 177 trips without encountering a single undersized bass, although that’s what the data shows.

It's a lot easier to believe that some of the boats just failed to report the fish that they released although, with no way to ground-truth the VTR data, it’s impossible to know for sure.

But maybe that VTR data isn’t quite as accurate as folks claim it to be.

And that matters.

Last Tuesday, the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council, meeting jointly with the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Summer Flounder, Scup, and Black Sea Bass Management Board, recommended eliminating the federal closed season for scup, and allowing fishing to continue throughout the year.  Eliminating the closures would permit boats to fish during the first four months of the year, a time when most private boats are laid up on land, and the for-hires dominate the fishery.

On its face, that would seem a good thing, because the impacts of the open season would largely be documented on VTRs.

However, one of the only arguments against eliminating the closure was that it might lead to a substantial bycatch, and substantial dead discards, of black sea bass, which can be found on many of the same wrecks where scup are caught. 

It would be nice to believe that, if the early scup season is eventually opened, fishery managers will receive good, reliable data on the number of black sea bass that were incidentally caught, and very possibly killed, while anglers racked up boat limits of scup.

But then, it would be nice to believe in many things that, in reality, probably are not true.

 

 

A DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE ON FISHERIES ISSUES

 

Sometimes, the best way to understand an issue standing immediately before you is to lift up your head and look somewhere else.  It’s far too easy to get wrapped up in local problems, focusing so closely on the details that you miss bigger themes that repeatedly recur, not only close to home, but across the nation.

I was reminded of that just the other day by something that I read about, of all things, bowfishing in Oklahoma.

Oklahoma bowfishermen may currently shoot and kill an unlimited number of what have historically been deemed “rough fish” or “trash fish,” derogatory terms for what might better be called “native non-game species.”  The designation includes various types of gar, drum, and buffalo, which have been a part of the local ecosystem for millennia, but are neither popular with anglers nor widely sought for food, and thus are considered by many to be more or less worthless.

A report originally published in the Oklahoma Ecology Project on November 29 discusses bowfishermen intentionally targeting aggregations of spawning gar, often in a tournament context where killing large numbers of fish is the goal.  It describes an incident

“in the summer of 2021 when a group posted to Facebook a video as they tallied over 1,000 dead gars killed in one night at the Red River.  Ultimately, the bowfishers were fined not for the excessive take but for improper disposal of the carcasses.”

The carcasses were disposed of, after all, because the gar were considered fit only to be living targets, and not to be used as food.

The Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation has decided that killing unlimited numbers of fish, which contribute to the proper functioning of Oklahoma’s native ecosystems, should be halted, and has proposed imposing a 10-fish daily bag limit for bowfishermen.  It turns out that the supposed “trash fish” are both more valuable and more vulnerable than many people believe.

Research published by the United States Forest Service indicates that freshwater mussels are seriously imperiled, with 71.7% of those found in North America listed as either endangered, threatened, or of special concern.  It notes that

“The high numbers of imperiled freshwater mussels in the United States and Canada…portend a trajectory toward an extinction crisis that, if unchecked, will severely impoverish one of the richest components of aquatic biodiversity.”

It turns out that the freshwater drum, a regular target of Oklahoma bowfishermen, serves as a host to 24 different species of freshwater mussel during one point in their lives, and thus makes a significant contribution to successful mussel reproduction (the larvae of most freshwater mussels, which are called “glochidia,” must spend a brief portion of their lives as parasites in various freshwater fish species; without a suitable host, the larvae will die).

Thus, the drum play a key role in the survival of mussel species, some of which are already badly depleted. 

In the case of the fish known, collectively, as “buffalo,” which represent the largest members of the sucker family, the issue is not the vulnerability of freshwater mussels, but of the fish themselves.  A study of three species, the bigmouth, smallmouth, and black buffaloes, conducted at the University of Minnesota found that such fish regularly live for more than 100 years.  The Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation observed that

“bigmouth buffalo exhibit what is called ‘episodic’ or irregular recruitment, and that it is related to environmental conditions.  The fish have occasional years of spawning success separated by periods of poor reproduction for a decade or more…As a large-bodied and long-lived species with few natural predators, this slow-paced life history strategy is considered a suitable one.”

However, add aggressive unnatural predators, in the form of bowfishermen that are unconstrained by bag limits and, in at least in the case of some, any sense of responsibility toward the resource, and a life history dependent upon producing a cohort of juvenile fish every ten years or more can suddenly look like a very iffy proposition.  It has been noted that the buffalo’s long lifespan, extremely episodic recruitment, and late maturity, among other aspects of its life history, are

“all characteristics that make this species extremely vulnerable to overfishing…bigmouth buffalo are declining in Canada, and have been in steep decline in contiguous areas of the U.S., temporarily associated with the rise of modern bowfishing in the 21^st century.”

It’s only reasonable that Oklahoma is now hoping to provide some protection to such historically unprotected fish.

But the bowfishing industry is pushing back.

Although Oklahoma bowfishermen admittedly practice something called “shoot-and-release” for historically unmanaged native fish species, and despite the fact that Oklahoma fisheries managers have determined that over half of the fish “released” after being shot in “non-vital” areas, and about 96 percent of the fish that weren’t immediately killed after being shot in the guts, spine, or head, nonetheless died within five days, Kyle Mather, a spokesmen for Oklahoma’s bowfishing community could somehow still argue, with a straight face, that his constituents were not engaged in wanton killing.

In fact, he argued that bowhunters actually

“provide a service by removing what he says he believes is a small portion of more-than-plentiful native fish populations that have few natural predators.”

Just why such fish need to be removed from the ecosystem, and just why such removal constitutes a service rather than harm, Mather failed to say.

Of course, those were not the bowfishermen's’s only avenues of attack.  Mather reportedly also argued that

“customized lighted boats and other equipment are expensive, and people won’t want to go to that expense to shoot just a few fish per outing.  The rules would put guides out of business.”

Another spokesmen for the bowfishermen, Pete Gregoire, president of the Bowfishing Association of America, objects to the 10-fish bag limit because

“They still don’t have any real data, any good science to back this up…These populations are not in jeopardy, and the limit they came up with is purely arbitrary.  They need to put good studies in place and figure things out.  Then, if there is a defined need for restrictions, we will listen.”

And that’s where perspective comes in.

Anyone who attended the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s New York hearing on Draft Addendum II to Amendment 7 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Striped Bass last Monday night heard representatives of the party and charter boat industry make arguments that sounded very similar to the arguments made by the bowfishing industry representatives who oppose protections for Oklahoma’s native fish. 

At the striped bass hearing, speaker after speaker came to the microphone to declare that the science used by the ASMFC to prepare Addendum II was somehow “bad,” even though it was derived from a peer-reviewed stock assessment based on what is arguably one of the richest data sets used to manage any Atlantic Coast species. 

They all talked about a healthy fish stock undergoing some sort of “change” in migration patterns, spawning grounds, etc., even though neither they nor anyone else could provide any documentation of what such “change” might be.  There was a sort of consensus that warming water—but not necessarily climate change, although how they separated the two was unclear—was causing the bass to abandon their Chesapeake Bay spawning grounds for rivers farther north, including the Hudson, Housatonic, and Connecticut.

The fact that the juvenile abundance surveys for the Hudson River show no increase in recruitment, that Housatonic River dams block access to just about all suitable spawning habitat, and that the Connecticut River, in all likelihood, produces only small numbers of fish did not deter them from arguing that such new “northern” spawning grounds can and have replaced the 70 to 90 percent of all Atlantic Coast bass traditionally spawned in the Chesapeake Bay.

Nonetheless, they insisted that it was the ASMFC’s science that was, somehow, “bad.”

And like the claim that no one would go out on an a boat to shoot “only” ten fish per person, and that such a bag limit would put Oklahoma bowfishing guides out of business, the for-hire operators speaking at Monday night’s hearing argued that they needed a slot limit broader than the 28- to 31-inch slot in effect today, because if their clients only caught fish that they had to release, and could not take one home, they would not charter boats and the for-hire operators would also go out of business.

And such claims might even be true, but that doesn't explain why the health of a handful of businesses (in the case of striped bass,the for-hire fleet is only responsible for about 1.5% of all directed trips) ought to take precedence over the long-term health of a public resource.

Finally, the claim that the bowfishermen were “provid[ing] a service” by removing some proportion of the “more-than-plentiful” buffalo, drum, and gar sounded almost like the claims made by some of the for-hires that striped bass were “over-abundant,” becoming cannibalistic, etc. and, if anything, needed to be thinned out a bit, and not protected,

When we look at one fishery in a vacuum, whether that fishery is striped bass,  gar, buffalo, and drum, or something completely different, it’s easy to hear the arguments of those who oppose good, science-based fishery management, and wonder whether they might, in fact, have a valid point or two.

But when you look at the bigger picture, and see representatives of the fishing tackle industry complain that the science behind managing red snapper in the Gulf of Mexico is no good, hear the same people whine that there are too many sharks stealing the fish off their lines (and perhaps hope that someone would perform the service of removing a few from the ocean in order to improve anglers’ lives), and see needed summer flounder regulations opposed because

“Restaurants, hotels, gift shops and a wide range of other businesses would be harmed if recreational anglers see no point in making the trip if they feel that their prospects for keeping a few fish to take home were not good,”

a common theme begins to emerge.

Regardless of species, which can be as different as striped bass in New York or bigmouth buffalo in Oklahoma, those who stand to profit, at least in the short term, by killing more fish use the same arguments to oppose the regulations needed to conserve and/or rebuild fish stocks.  The arguments rarely, if ever, are rooted in fact or hard data.  Instead, they repeat the same unsupported allegations again and again:  The science is bad.  We’ll go out of business.  There are too many fish, and they need to be thinned.

Seen in that context, it becomes clear that such arguments are merely a ploy, used to defeat regulations intended to support healthy and sustainable fisheries and enhance short-term gain.

It becomes clear that such arguments should be ignored.

 

 

 

“

 

 

 

 

IS THERE HOPE FOR NEW ENGLAND COD?

 

I grew up fishing for New England cod, venturing out for the first time when I was just six years old, excited by my first trip on a half-day party boat out of Provincetown, Massachusetts.  Once I could drive, and had my own car, I became a semi-regular on the party boat Super Squirrel out of Galilee, Rhode Island, sleeping in the parking lot at the town dock so that I could be one of the first aboard in the morning.

They were productive trips, with quality fish.  Throughout all of the time that I fished out of Galilee, a period that spanned the 1970s, and extended a little into the decades on either end, the pool fish—the largest fish on the boat, which won the successful angler a cash prize paid out of the pooled fund of entry fees in the daily contest—was never less than 35 pounds, and not infrequently was in the low 50s. 

Usually, I’d go home with a sack of fish—back then, maybe 40 years before anyone would hear of a Yeti cooler, the boat provided each customer with a burlap bag to hold their fish, which was tied to the rail for convenient access—but even when numbers were low, the quality was generally high.  I can still recall one October trip in ’75, when I introduced some college friends to the joys of fishing for cod; the ocean wasn’t kind, but while fishing was fishing was slow, I managed to snag a 26 and a 31, which engendered a substantial commotion when I started filleting them in a very public part of the college dorm.

The point is, although the fish were being hit very hard by foreign factory trawlers, and cod populations were in decline, the fishing was still pretty good, within just a couple hours’ ride from the dock.

I moved out of New England in ’83, ending up on New York’s Long Island.  There was winter cod fishing out of Long Island ports, but it wasn’t particularly good.  During the warm months, boats still ran out of Long Island’s East End to fish the same grounds I used to fish out of Rhode Island, but the quality of the catch was on the decline.  The best opportunities were provided by a Montauk party boat, the Viking Starship, which offered multi-day, long-range trips to the fabled grounds off New England.  Around 1990, I joined a few friends for what the boat called a “whale cod” trip to Georges Bank, a 13-hour sail from Montauk, where quality codfishing could, I was told, still be found.

The boat’s captain did all he could to put us on fish, although a hard-running tide complicated his job.  Our first drop was in 320 feet of water, on a wreck that supposedly had never been fished before; I think I could have eaten a sandwich and maybe a few fries by the time my 40 ounces of sinker—actually, two 20-ounce weights taped together—found the bottom, and I waited for my first bite.

Eventually the bite came, and over the next couple of days we all put some cod in our coolers, but neither the numbers nor the quality of fish that we had expected from a virgin wreck lying on such supposedly productive grounds.  As I carried my cooler off the boat, I couldn’t help but think that I’d carried much heavier loads, which included bigger fish, off the Super Squirrel after much shorter trips taken less than two decades before.

The moon tides and the currents they caused played a role, but it was impossible not to note that the Georges Bank  cod stock was already headed downhill.  Biologists soon determined that cod had become overfished.  

Since then, things have only gotten worse.  A research track stock assessment released last July found that all four stocks of Atlantic cod found off the United States—the Eastern Gulf of Maine, Western Gulf of Maine, Georges Bank, and Southern New England—were overfished.

The declines in cod abundance are striking.

The 2023 stock assessment noted that the Eastern Gulf of Maine spawning stock biomass declined by 97% between 1981 and 1997, although there has been “a modest increase in…spawner biomass” since then.  

In the case of the Western Gulf of Maine stock,

“Population abundance has generally declined over time, with the most recent estimates being at or near all-time lows.  The age-structure of the population is currently truncated, with age-1 and age-2 accounting for over 70% of abundance in 2021.  [internal references omitted]”

When so much of a stock is composed of such young, little fish, that stock is in serious trouble.

In the case of the Georges Bank stock,

“estimated spawning stock biomass remained high through the early 1990s before rapidly declining…Spawning stock biomass was relatively stable from the mid-1990s onward with only a small decline.”

It remains at a low level of abundance.

But the assessment’s findings for the Southern New England stock of cod, the stock that fueled my cod fishing trips out of Rhode Island, and the stock that swims off Long Island today, may be the most dismal of all.

“Estimates of stock size suggest severe depletion and high fishing mortality throughout the assessment time series…Estimates of age-1 abundance followed the general trend of stock depletion with extremely low recent recruitment.  Estimates of recent selectivity suggest that a considerable portion of the catch are juveniles.”

When the stock is already severely depleted, there are very few young fish entering the population, and a “considerable portion” of the catch are juveniles, that stock’s future is nothing if not bleak.

The question is, is there any hope that cod stocks might recover?

It may depend on where you look for your answers.

Off Newfoundland, the cod stock followed a similar trajectory to those of the stocks off the United States’ coast.  If anything, the Newfoundland cod’s decline was even worse, leading Canada to declare a harvest moratorium in 1992.  For many years after that, the population continued to languish, but it is now, slowly, beginning to increase.

Canadian biologists believe that the cod stock has, for the first time since the moratorium was established, moved out of the “critical zone” that defines a badly overfished stock, and might be able to support modest harvest.

Could the same thing happen off the New England coast?

The best answer might be a qualified “maybe.”

The first thing to remember is that New England cod are still being exploited, and have never enjoyed a harvest moratorium.  In fact, even though they have been overfished for many years, fishery managers have so far been unable to halt overfishing on the Western Gulf of Maine and the Southern New England stocks.  

Although Canadian authorities lifted the complete moratorium a while ago, and have permitted a very small commercial harvest, the fishing mortality rate on the Newfoundland cod has probably been far less than what New England cod stocks still experience.

The other very likely obstacle to a recovery of New England’s cod is a steadily warming ocean.

Cod are a cold-water fish, and in the ocean off Newfoundland, they can still enjoy low water temperatures.  But the Gulf of Maine is warming more quickly than most of the world’s salt waters, and scientists believe that warming seas have contributed to the cod stocks’ collapse.

As long ago as October 2015, an article appeared in the publication Science which tied a warming Gulf of Maine to the cod’s current troubles.  It reported that

“Cod spawning and survival have been hampered by rapid, extraordinary ocean warming in the Gulf of Maine, where sea surface temperatures rose faster than anywhere else on the planet between 2003 and 2014.”

The article described a study in which

“Using recent Gulf of Maine cod stock assessments, the researchers…tested a number of models for predicting the factors that affected cod reproduction.  Warming was the best predictor, they reported:  When summer temperatures went up, the number of fish reaching maturity went down.  ‘The number of new cod for each year that appear in the population is strongly related to temperature…And that’s ultimately what you need to rebuild a population and sustain a fishery:  new fish coming in.’”

Information coming out of Europe seems to confirm the threat that warming oceans pose to cod populations.

The sea surrounding the Faroe Islands, a Danish territory that lies about halfway between Norway and Iceland, hosts a unique stock of cod, that is reportedly “known for its large size and fleshiness.”  Twenty years ago, the Faroe Islands cod stock was so abundant that ICES, the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea, believed that it could support an annual harvest of 32,000 metric tons—that is, roughly 70 million pounds of cod removed from the sea each year.  But the stock has now dwindled to the point where, in 2023, ICES recommended that all harvest be suspended for two years.

Rising water temperatures are being blamed for the decline.

Cod require water cooler than 9.6 degrees Celsius (49 degrees Fahrenheit) to spawn successfully, although spawning success begins to decline somewhere below that point.  Cod stocks elsewhere in Europe, where water temperatures are warming, but remain below that critical point, are already demonstrating lower productivity.  The only two seemingly healthy cod stocks in the North Atlantic appear to be the Icelandic and Barents Sea stocks, and even the latter has been showing reduced productivity since 2013.

Petur Steingrund, head of the demersal department at the Faroe Marine Research Institute, has observed that under prevailing conditions of declining recruitment,

“You could have a big stock but only be able to preserve it if you take a small number of fish from it each year.”

It would follow that, if you have a depleted stock, you can only preserve it if you remove an even smaller number of fish—perhaps no fish at all.

Such an approach might prove successful, for it’s reported that

“after decades of practically no fishing, the Faroe Bank cod…has recently shown signs of recovery.”

Maybe “decades of practically no fishing” might be just what we need to put New England cod stocks on their own roads to recovery.

Doubtless New England fishermen, whether commercial or recreational, would strongly object, and there would certainly be complaints from the for-hire fleet.

But before they complain too loudly, such fishermen ought to ask themselves just one thing:  Would they prefer “practically no fishing” for just a few decades, if it allows someone—if not themselves, then at least their descendants—to enjoy cod once again, or would they prefer stocks to dwindle to the point that there will be not only practically no fishing, but also practically no cod, for the foreseeable future, and possibly until the end of time?

The answer to that question will tell us a lot, not only about the cod’s ultimate fate, but also about the character of those who answered the question.

 

 

 

 

 

WHITHER THE STRIPED BASS?

 

I was still in school the last time the striped bass stock collapsed.

The crash began slowly, while I was still in college and had a summer job in a local tackle shop that let me be on the water just about every day. There were a lot of big fish around at the time; in July 1974, I put a 51-pound bass on the scales, and got to strut around the shop for maybe three days, before my fish was eclipsed by someone else’s 63.

But down in the Maryland section of Chesapeake Bay, the single most important spawning ground for striped bass, biologists were noting a decline in the number of juvenile fish.

 

Each year since the mid-1950s, Maryland biologists have been conducting a juvenile abundance survey, in which they sample designated areas in the spawning rivers during July, August, and September, collecting 132 samples in all, and then calculate a juvenile abundance index (JAI) that reflects the survey’s results. In 1970, the Maryland JAI was 30.52, the highest recorded up to that time, and nearly twice the 10.55 average for the 13 preceding years.

 

The decline in juvenile abundance began slowly, but 1975’s JAI of 6.69 initiated a 14-year series of single-digit values that averaged a mere 4.35, with individual years’ JAIs falling as low as 1.27. By the time I was graduated from law school in 1979, anglers rarely caught a striped bass weighing less than four or five pounds.

The average angler didn’t care, because larger bass were still being caught, particularly during the coastal migrations that took place each spring and fall.

But some people were paying attention.

I had noticed a decline in the number of smaller bass but didn’t think much about it until a stocky white-haired man, about my father’s age, walked into the shop where I worked. He introduced himself as Bob Pond. I immediately recognized the name, as he was famous all along the striper coast for creating the “Atom” line of fishing lures, which just about all of us used.

 

But he didn’t come to the shop just to sell Atom plugs.

 

Instead, he walked in with a cardboard box filled with jars under his arm. We spent some time talking about the poor Maryland spawns, and what they meant for the striped bass. Then he got down to the purpose of his visit, asking us to convince our customers to provide milt and roe sacs from the striped bass that they caught. He hoped to obtain samples from male and female bass ranging, in five-pound intervals, from 5 to 50 pounds, so he could have them tested for contaminants which might be causing the stripers’ problems.

That was one of the theories back then, that PCBs, or the insecticide kepone, or some other, unidentified chemical was causing the spawning failure. Other people blamed sunspots, as sunspot activity was at one of its periodic highs at the time. Overfishing was a less popular theory. What no one considered, but what may have been the primary cause, was that conditions in the spawning rivers weren’t conducive to spawning success.

 

Today, biologists know that cold winters and cool, wet springs tend to lead to good spawns, while warm winters and low water flows lead to low juvenile abundance. The size of the spawning stock has relatively little impact on spawning success; a small spawning stock can, and has, produced large juvenile year classes, while a big spawning stock can, and has, produced some very small ones.

 

But back then, fishery managers were largely in the dark about what was going on. Many didn’t even believe that there was a problem; they expected that, after a few bad years, good spawns would resume on their own. And back then, all striped bass management was done on the state level; the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) still lacked the authority to craft and enforce coastwide management measures. That made even those fishery managers who believed that the bass was in trouble reluctant to take any action. They were afraid of the political fallout that might occur if they placed restrictions on fishermen in their own state, of the criticism that such measures hurt local fishermen, but did nothing to help the bass, which would only be killed as soon as they swam into the waters of a neighboring jurisdiction, where more relaxed regulations still prevailed.

It was not easy being a striped bass fisherman during the early 1980s. I still remember a morning when my father and I were fishing for bass on the Connecticut side of Long Island Sound. The water was glass-calm. Only one other boat was fishing anywhere near us. Neither my father nor I had caught a bass in close to a week, but that morning, as I worked my lure around current-swept rockpiles, I finally got one to strike. I fought the fish quickly, slipped it back into the water, and just as I stood, I heard the haunting sound of applause carrying across the water from the other boat. Whether the angler clapped because I released the bass, or merely because I managed to find one, I’ll never know. Still, that memory describes, better than anything else I could write, how scarce the bass had become.

The stock remained in decline. Finally, Congress passed the Atlantic Striped Bass Conservation Act (Act) in 1984. The Act gave the ASMFC the power to not only craft a coastwide management plan, but to compel every state to adopt it; those that refused would have their striped bass fisheries completely shut down. After that grant of authority, the ASMFC adopted Amendment 3 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Striped Bass in 1985, which finally turned things around and began rebuilding the spawning stock.

It took ten years, but the striped bass stock recovered, and the population continued to grow until 2003. After that, spawning began to decline, and spawning stock biomass began to decline as well. Maryland produced strong year classes in 2011 and 2015, although an unusually large number of the 2011s failed to survive their first year. But Maryland also produced the two worst years ever recorded in the history of the state’s juvenile abundance survey, a JAI of just 0.89 in 2012, and a just slightly higher JAI of 1.02 in 2023.

 

The Maryland JAIs for the years 2019-2023 averaged a mere 2.74, the worst five-year average ever recorded. Even during the last stock collapse, no five-year average never fell below 3.45.

Having lived through the last stock collapse, what’s happening now is giving me a bad case of déjà vu.

 

In 2023, anglers fishing off New York and New Jersey have enjoyed some of the best striped bass fishing of their lives. Good numbers of big bass, almost certainly spawned in Maryland during 2001 or 2003 and in the Hudson River during 2007, have joined swarms of smaller fish from Maryland’s big 2011 and 2015 year classes to provide what have often been days of non-stop action. Many of those anglers find it hard to believe that the striped bass stock is facing a troubled future.

 

But they’re not paying attention to the spawning problems in the Chesapeake Bay, just as fishermen paid no attention to the poor spawns in the late ‘70s, as the stock began to collapse.

If striped bass reproduction doesn’t improve, we could see the stock collapse again.

At the same time, striped bass management is a lot better than it was 45 years ago.

In the 1970s and early 1980s, there were few regulations protecting the bass. Most coastal states maintained a 16-inch size limit for both commercial and recreational fishermen, while in the Chesapeake Bay, fishermen could retain “pan rock” that were just a foot long. Few states imposed bag limits on anglers, and commercial quotas did not yet exist. In fact, there was a very hazy gray line dividing the commercial and recreational sectors, for successful anglers often sold their excess striped bass, and few, if any, jurisdictions required commercial fishermen to be licensed.

 

A few states had outlawed commercial striped bass fishing, but the ban was largely ignored. Connecticut, where I lived at the time, was probably the first so-called “gamefish state,” but most of the successful anglers nonetheless sold their fish through the back doors of restaurants, markets, and country clubs, while a marina in a neighboring town went so far as to box its customers’ illegally marketed bass and ship them to the Fulton Fish Market, where illegal activities were hardly unknown.

 

Striped bass management was still the domain of individual states; while the ASMFC existed, it served as little more than a toothless debating society, with no ability to adopt and impose management measures. The science was still rudimentary. There was little real understanding of what a sustainable striped bass stock might look like.

Today, bass enjoy a far better management environment. Thanks to the Act, the ASMFC coordinates striped bass management between Maine and North Carolina. There are uniform recreational size and bag limits in every coastal state, while the Chesapeake Bay jurisdictions’ regulations, although varied, must adhere to set conservation standards. Hard quotas limit commercial fishermen’s landings; if exceeded, the overage must be paid back, in the form of reduced quota, in the following year. Striped bass stock assessments, reviewed by a panel of internationally recognized experts, are produced on a regular basis, with less detailed assessment updates performed every two or three years. The information provided allows managers to adapt to changes in the health of the stock.

While fishery managers still can’t control environmental conditions in spawning rivers, they can reduce fishing mortality in response to a less productive striped bass stock. Thus, on October 16, 2023 the ASMFC’s Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board (Management Board) approved Draft Addendum II to Amendment 7 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Striped Bass (Addendum II), and released it for public comment.

Comments will be accepted through December 22.

 

Addendum II will not solve all of the striped bass’ problems, but by maintaining the current size and bag limits in the recreational ocean fishery, placing additional restrictions on the recreational fishery in the Chesapeake Bay, and reducing the commercial quota, it will reduce the likelihood that the stock will collapse, and could even help the Management Board rebuild that stock by 2029, the deadline set in the ASMFC’s management plan. It will also allow the Management Board to react more quickly to updated stock assessments that call for additional management measures.

 

Even with additional protections in place, the striped bass stock might still collapse if conditions in the spawning rivers fail to improve sometime in the next few years. But Addendum II, by reducing the number of bass removed from the stock, will nonetheless leave the stock in better condition to take advantage of good conditions, should they eventually recur.

In the end, that’s the most that the Management Board can do: Leave the striped bass in the best possible condition to produce a successful spawn when environmental conditions allow it. The rest is in nature’s hands.

We can only hope that if the Management Board fulfills its responsibilities, nature will come through as well.

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This essay first appeared in “From the Waterfront,” the blog of the Marine Fish Conservation Network, which can be found at http://conservefish.org/blog/

STRIPED BASS SECTOR SEPARATION: AN EXERCISE IN FUTILITY

 

At this point, anyone at all familiar with the Atlantic striped bass, except perhaps for a select group of science-deniers, knows that the stock is not doing well.  The stock is overfished, fishing mortality exceeds the target, and poor recruitment in three of the four major spawning areas bodes ill for the future.

The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board is setting the stage for remedial measures, although whether such measures will be strong enough, or put in place soon enough, to prevent a severe decline in abundance is something that we cannot yet know.

If spawning conditions in the natal rivers, particularly those draining into the Maryland portion of Chesapeake Bay, remain unfavorably for a few more seasons, it is possible that nothing the Management Board can do will prevent a collapse of the stock.

It’s clear that everyone engaging in the striped bass fishery, whether on the commercial or recreational side of the ledger, is going to have to make some sacrifices to prevent the current situation from getting much worse.  Thus, the Management Board has released Draft Addendum II to Amendment 7 to the Interstate Management Plan for Atlantic Striped Bass out for public comment.

Addendum II, if adopted in its most restrictive form, would perpetuate the current 28- to 31-inch slot limit in the ocean recreational fishery, impose meaningful reductions in landings and fishing mortality in the Chesapeake Bay recreational fishery, and cut commercial quotas by 14.5%.  If it accomplishes all those things, Addendum II might, just barely, have a 50-50 chance of reducing fishing mortality to the target level and rebuilding the striped bass stock by 2029.

Unfortunately, Addendum II won’t necessarily require sacrifice from everyone.  Although commercial fishermen, and recreational fishermen who fish from their own boats or from shore, will be required to pitch in to aid the striper’s recovery, some of the options contained in the Draft Addendum would actually let one group—those fishing from for-hire vessels—to not only escape any sacrifice, but kill more striped bass than they did in 2022.

Among the five options proposed for the ocean recreational fishery, the two designated as Options C and E would expand the current 28- to 31-inch slot limit that applies to all ocean anglers to 28 to 33 inches—but only for those who fish from for-hire boats.

Supposedly, the owners and operators of for-hire vessels need such a slot to attract enough customers to keep their businesses alive.

I’ve written about the issue before.

I’ve argued that such special treatment discriminates not only against the great majority of anglers who, even though not guided by knowledgeable and experienced captains, will have to try to find a fish that fits within the narrower slot if they desire to take a bass home.  I’ve argued that such a “sector separation” provision also discriminates against businesses such as tackle shops, fuel docks, marinas, and such which, no less than the for-hires, are at risk of losing business if anglers find it too hard to take a bass home.  And I have argued that it is just bad public policy to prop up any business that refuses to modify its operations to adapt to changing times.

But there is another, and perhaps a far better, reason to reject sector separation:  Any effort to maintain higher for-hire landings is doomed to fail, because given the poor recruitment over the past five years, recruitment that may or may not improve in the near future, by 2026 or 2027, there will be few slot-size bass left to catch, even if the Management Board decides to adopt a 28- to 33-inch slot for the for-hire fleet.

Right now, the catch-and-keep fishery in the ocean is being driven by the 2015 year class, even though such fish currently average about 31 ½ inches in length, and so will soon grow out of even the proposed 28- to 33-inch slot.

The 2017 and 2018 year classes, although only half the size of the 2015 (and the 2017s didn’t show strong recruitment at Age 1), will provide some half-decent fishing for a couple of years.  The first 2017s will have crossed the 28-inch mark this season; in 2024, most will fit within the slot, whether that slot is 28 to 31 inches or 28 to 33, so anglers, including those on the for-hire boats, will still be able to take some fish home, even though the 2015s will have largely grown too large.  But, assuming that the bass of the 2017 and 2018 year classes grow at the same rate as the 2015s, the majority of the 2018s will be over 33 inches long, and so out of even the proposed 28- to 33-inch for-hire slot, by 2027.

Beginning in 2027, and continuing through at least 2031—and perhaps much longer, depending on when, and if, another strong year class emerges—the supply of slot-sized fish will dry up, and landings, including for-hire landings, will crash.

The crash is inevitable, because we know that striped bass recruitment for the years 2019 through 2023 was dismal, and it’s impossible to land bass that have never been spawned.

Many anglers probably don’t understand just how bad recent recruitment has been.

Somewhere between 70% and 90% of all of the migratory striped bass population on the Atlantic coast is spawned in the Chesapeake Bay, and about two-thirds of the Chesapeake production comes from the Maryland portion of the Bay.  The Maryland juvenile abundance index is considered the best single indicator of future striped bass abundance.

The long-term average of the Maryland juvenile abundance index is 11.1.  Even during the depths of the stock collapse in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the lowest five-year average of the Maryland JAI was 3.45.

The average for the five years between 2019 and 2023 was 2.74, more than 20% worse than any five-year average ever recorded.  So in a few years, we’re going to see a very real shortage of striped bass that fit into the slot, and there is absolutely nothing that the Management Board can do about it, for that die has already been cast.

Which brings us back to sector separation.

The Management Board could adopt sector separation when it finalizes Addendum II, and if it does, it will buy a few of years of higher landings for the for-hire fleet.  But if they do so, they are only delaying the inevitable, because in just a few years, there will be very few bass available that fall into even the proposed 28- to 33-inch for-hire slot limit.

In fact, there will be fewer bass of that size available than there were in 1980, or ’81, or ’84, and if you were living and fishing for striped bass back then, you already know just how bad things were in those years. 

If you’re a little younger, and didn’t experience the collapse, trust me when I say that it’s the sort of experience that you should do your best to avoid.

Which means that managers are going to have to make a hard choice to do one of two things.

If they’re set and determined to keep for-hire landings high, they can create a special, moving for-hire slot that tracks the growth of the last healthy year classes of bass, allowing the for-hire anglers to keep chipping away at the remains of the spawning stock while the great majority of recreational fishermen languish in a striped bass desert defined by some smaller slot.

Or, they can finally admit that there are limits to their ability to prop up an industry determined to remain dependent upon killing fish, let for-hire landings fall to wherever the absence of suitably-sized bass might take them, and leave the industry to try to figure out how to survive.

If they take the former course, they might make the for-hire fleet, and for-hire anglers, fairly happy, but they will certainly alienate the shore and private boat anglers who, in 2022, accounted for more than 98% of all striped bass trips.  That would seem like a politically difficult thing to do.

But if they take the latter course, and ultimately leave the for-hire fleet to figure out how to run a business that doesn’t depend upon bringing home limits of dead fish, there is no reason why they would need to adopt sector separation at all, and by doing so, hold out the false hope that current landings levels might be sustained, when they know that recent poor recruitment will eventually make that impossible.

For in the end, reality will prevail, and the reality is that there is no way to both protect the remaining large year classes of striped bass while also maintaining current landings levels, whether for the for-hires or for everyone else. 

The bass drought is coming.  It is going to last for at least five years.  It is inevitable.

Sector separation won’t save the for-hires from its effects.

That being the case, the Management Board would be well advised to admit the truth now, and reject sector separation when the finalize Addendum II.

The alternative is to provide false hope, that will only lead to greater disappointment, and greater disillusionment for those affected, when reality finally sets in.