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“We can’t just sit idly by and wait for fisheries regulators to intervene and ‘save us from ourselves.’ We all need to think hard about what we do next, and prepare to take an unprecedented lead on striper conservation right now.”
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A t the risk of beating one very dead horse, I can’t shake the feeling that we’re standing on the threshold of dark days for our striped bass resource. I wrote a bit about this in last month’s column, too, and I decided when I wrote that entry that I’d leave the subject alone for a bit. Trouble is, with each passing week, I’ve spoken to new people representing—in sum—quite a significant geographic fishing range, and an interesting cross-section of the striper-fishing world.
On one hand, I think many anglers have begun to understand the overarching issues feeding the widespread recent concern over the health of striped bass stocks. On the other hand, given the sheer number of people with whom I’ve discussed the issue—and the range of specific interests these people represent—I’m alarmed that we seem so far from any real consensus about either the state of the resource, or the challenges ahead.
Over the summer, I spent a ridiculous number of hours working with a Montauk striperman named Jeff Nichols on a book he’d written. It’s a memoir of sorts, with a particular emphasis on Nichols’ own involvement in black market striper sales to various restaurants on Long Island and in New York City. It also addresses the obsessive, borderline-self-destructive nature of his own quest to catch monster bass.
Nichols, like so many of us who came into the striped bass fishery with the explosive rebound of the mid- to late-1990s, post-Moratorium, is deeply concerned about what he sees as a dramatic and undeniable downturn in the stock (and its long-term prospects) since the fishery’s high-water mark sometime between 2003 and 2006.
For nearly five months, Nichols and I weighed out and debated just about every conceivable aspect of the past, present, and immediate future of the resource. We eventually hit a point of total overload, and decided the best way to attack the various problems without miring his story down in the endless bureaucratic minutia of 25 years’ striper management would be to separate out the regulatory stuff and address that as an afterward. In the end, I tackled the chore, trying the put together a reasonable snapshot of where were are, how we got here, and what might come next relative to the most economically important game fish in the Northeast.
I thought that I’d gotten most of the important stuff in there, but have since had a number of conversations that identified whole new areas of concern, and generated some interesting ideas about how we ought to move ahead.
At the moment, we are all fishing in limbo—no way around it—as we await formal recommendations from the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, whose Striped Bass Board has been digesting the new Benchmark Stock Assessment that came out of peer review in late July.
The problem is what—in the most general, basic terms—the Assessment says (I have obviously taken some liberties): It looks like we’re going to be in deep you-know-what, and it’s probable that will happen sooner than later, but at this moment, the data says the stock hasn’t yet crossed the tipping point into a new collapse. [So don’t bet on us doing much at this point.]
Actually, there’s no way of knowing what the Commission might do with this new scientific guidance. But given the realities of the last five-plus years of regulatory assault on so many other fisheries, the striped bass fishery has never been more “load-bearing” within the economics of the sport fishing industry. As much talk as there’s been about eerie parallels between recent events and the events that preceded the crash and subsequent moratorium, what seems at least as important is taking a quick look at the many ways our immediate situation differs from the state of the fishing industry leading into the last crash.
For one thing, we are more efficient as anglers than we were then—by a wide margin. The speed of our boats, the incredible power and capabilities of modern-day marine electronics (navigational, communications, and fish-finding), the quality and sensitivity of our gear—never mind improvements in marine forecasting—have put the striped bass fleet light-years ahead of where it was when it fished the resource down damned near to the biological point of no return. Bottom line is that if we are indeed teetering on the brink, we now have the capability to sprint across the finish line at a rate we could barely have comprehended in 1981.
The striped bass fishery then was dominated by commercial activity—net fisheries, hook-and-line, and also a huge amount of recreationally-caught “crossover” fish going to market in an era when selling bass required no permits. The last crash was more clearly a commercial problem, but also, decisions were made then on commercial data (there was no “MRFSS” data then, nor were there requirements that any management decisions be based on catch data from both sides—even when recreational catch stats are notoriously slippery). This time through, well over 80 percent of allocated stripers go to the recreational side of the fishery—even if we’re catching nowhere near that percentage of overall fish. Ironically enough, the modern-day fixation on science may serve only to complicate the process of tightening up regulations in timely fashion. Many problems we’re watching are purely “anecdotal,” and thus have no place in current management. (Many have said, for example, that striped bass stocks are using offshore routes during migration periods, and spending more time than ever before way outside, yet there is not even a mechanism in place to account for fish outside three miles in the EEZ.)
Perhaps the worst problem is the lack of other vibrant recreational fisheries we had at our disposal when the moratorium went through to help the party and charter boat fleet stay alive while stripers recovered. If we crash this thing a second time, there will be no Block Island pollock, no winter flounder, no unlimited codfish or blackfish or bluefin tuna to bail us out. There will be fluke, a handful of sea bass per man, and porgies for those who care about them. Even bluefish that were so popular during the last decline of bass have, in the second coming of stripers, been pushed off into the annoyance category by many charter boats. We are woefully striper-dependent: Those currently making the vast majority of their chartering revenues on bass will be in a very tight political corner when the time comes to renegotiate what stripers they’re currently allowed.
The most worrisome differences with this recent downturn are the total unknowns. Mycobacteriosis is a huge one—particularly if the recent suggestions that the condition now affects 70 percent of the Chesapeake Bay stock. A variable like that, with potential to create serious “natural” (i.e. non-fishing) mortality over which regulations will have no control is almost reason enough to think hard about slashing effort immediately. In light of the generalized failure in recruitment over the last eight or so years, the survival rate of what fish do reach reproductive maturity has never been more critical. There’s also the issue that retroactive analysis of climatic variables during the last Moratorium suggest the fish got a major boost from Mother Nature in the form of almost a decade of ideal spawning/ recruitment conditions we may well not see in the event of another crash.
Bottom line is that, where no one could afford a stock crash the first time stripers tanked, the looming threat of a new striped bass disaster has potential to do massive and permanent damage to a wide swath of business interests that have put their entire fortunes on the future of that single stock. Worse, we can’t just sit idly by and wait for fisheries regulators to intervene and “save us from ourselves.” We all need to think hard about what we do next, and prepare to take an unprecedented lead on striper conservation right now.
For further reading on the larger forces at work in the current bass situation, look for Jeff Nichols’ new book, Caught, on Amazon in the very near future.
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