Cape Cod Times Op-Ed By Dean Clark (SF Board Member)
WHEN A KEEPER IS NOT A KEEPER
Originally Printed in the Cape Cod Times – April 20, 2015
By Dean Clark
The much anticipated arrival of striped bass is only a few weeks away however this year fishing for them will be different. Because of the documented downturn in the number of large breeding females in the striper population, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission has regulated a 25% reduction in the striped bass harvest. To achieve this goal recreational fishermen in MA will only be allowed to keep one fish over 28 inches instead of two and the commercial harvest is being reduced 25%.
NOAA claims that the recreational striper fishery in MA has recently been off by more than 65%. This has troubling and far-reaching economic consequences. Our recreational striped bass fishery on the Cape once drove a multi-million dollar tourist industry that folks depended on. Without stripers to catch, jobs have been and will continue to be lost and our economy suffers. We need to bring these bass back not be killing them off conscience free.
Recent changes governing the commercial striper fishery have extended the season, reduced the number of casual permit participants and helped to stabilize market prices which are all good but not enough. In MA commercial striper fishermen are still required to only harvest fish over 34 inches. This guarantees that every striper brought to market is a large breeding female: the very fish that should be protected if the striped bass population is to recover.
Killing breeding females is counter intuitive and self-defeating. If stripers were fresh water bass, commercial fishing for them would not be allowed in the first place. Even more telling is the fact that recreational anglers catching a large or smallmouth bass will release them unharmed 99% of the time not because it is the law but because it makes selfish and ethical sense.
Killing every “keeper” striper makes no sense at all on any level. Pictures of large, dead stripers grotesquely laid out on a dock or being held high with blood coming from their gills once were proof of bragging rights but no longer. Macho driven ego trips are a thing of the past and behaving with such disrespect for these valuable fish is quickly becoming a mark of shame. The real heroes are those that brag about the “keepers” they caught and then released not the “keepers” they selfishly killed.
Striped bass belong to all of us. Let’s value and treat them with the respect and importance they deserve. Sure, take a fish home for dinner once in a while but release most of the females (fish over 34 inches) and know you are doing the right thing for the economy, each other and the recovery of these valuable fish.
Towards that end, Stripers Forever, an all-volunteer conservation organization, has created the Release a Breeder Club which recognizes and is even giving out prizes to individuals that have caught and released a large breeding female striper. More information can be found on their web site stripersforever.org.
Dean Clark
Co-Chair, Stripers Forever MA
Bear’s Den 17th Annual Fly Fishing Expo
The Bear’s Den in Taunton continues to be a great supporter of striped bass conservation. Their annual expo is coming up next Saturday the 21st 11am-6PM. Stripers Forever will have a booth there, so stop by, say hello and pick up a new hat. This show features some of the top names in fly fishing. Chris Owens of Geobass headlines the 2015 show! For full information check out the Bear’s Den website.
“Conservation” Equivalency or “Exploitation” Equivalency?
“Conservation” Equivalency or “Exploitation” Equivalency?
ASMFC Striped Bass Management Board Meeting on 2-5-15
By Ken Hastings, ASMFC Policy Coordinator of Maryland
Since the decision has been made by the Board to cut the coast-wide catch of striped bass (SB) by 25%, the member jurisdictions got a chance to propose the details of how they were each going to meet the new limits. In ASMFC terms, this is referred to “conservation equivalency.” In theory, it means that the states don’t have to follow the ASMFC guidelines for bag limits, sizes and seasons if they can come up with other ways to meet the same goals. Under this “give and take” arrangement between the governing Board and its members, less conservative approaches would not [knowingly] be approved.
The devil really is in the details as evidenced by the vast array of options presented by the members at the meeting on Feb. 5 in Alexandria, VA. Each member had multiple approaches to be considered and one had nine approaches to managing just the commercial quota. Altogether, there were over 50 recreational options and almost 20 commercial ones.
It is important to remember that the initial objective of the recent addendum was to reach a specific spawning stock biomass (SSB) goal by 2016. The 25% reduction predicted to reach the goal was based on data and assumptions threatened by massive uncertainties to the extent that the probability of reaching the 2016 goal was only 50% to start with. So, after years of debate and research, the probability of success for this “science-based” outcome was the same as the probability of getting a “heads” result from the toss of an unbiased coin before the Feb. 5 meeting. If conservation had been the true objective, one might expect that a higher percentage would have been selected to help swing the odds toward a successful outcome but it wasn’t.
Most of the meeting was spent lamenting the complexity of the options and the associated new uncertainties that would pile on top of the uncertainties plaguing the 25% decision in the first place. It was agreed that simple approaches would be easier for the fishermen to understand and for the police to enforce. The advantages of regional approaches with consistent rules for adjacent jurisdictions were generally accepted. Ease of enforcement (according to the enforcement committee) is better for bag and size limits than for slot limits. Having consistent rules for adjacent tributaries in the same jurisdiction is better than having multiple different sets of rules depending on where the fish are caught.
In some cases, the Technical Committee (TC) wasn’t able to predict variables like fishermen behavior. In the case of recreational poaching, for example, there is some prior year MRIP data regarding how many people kept too many fish or fished outside the size limits. While it is universally recognized that human nature probably precludes perfect compliance with any rule or law, and in spite of the 2013 MRIP data validating this premise for fishing, the TC assumed universal perfect compliance in evaluating the proposals for conservation equivalence. Most sources of compliance uncertainty were eliminated – intentional poaching, unintentional infractions based on ignorance of the rules, and law enforcement miscues over jurisdictional limits and conflicts for examples. A standard 9% was used for dead discards but it isn’t clear that a one-fish limit won’t encourage high-grading from the ice chest in order to maximize the size of that one fish. In the end, the TC admitted that they couldn’t scale the uncertainties because their magnitudes were too uncertain.
Since all of the proposals had been submitted to the TC in advance and were judged to result in at least the same conservation levels as the initial TC guidance, it appeared that all that discussion about uncertainty was just for show and everyone was going to get their choice of options from the laundry list they submitted. However, MD wasn’t completely happy with that approach and needed to squeeze just a little more out of their trophy season conservation equivalency by proposing a bag limit of one fish either between 28” and 36” OR one fish over 40.” Note that this is almost the same as one fish over 28” except for the four inches left out of the slot limit. Given all the uncertainties leading up to the 25% decision doomed to a coin toss success future, compounded by the uncertainties associated with the myriad of proposals, it seems unlikely that anyone understands SB population dynamics well enough to debate the four-inch part of the slot limit. The friendly amendment to change MD’s proposal seemed to be favorably received so the Potomac River Fisheries Commission threw their name into the pot as well.
It was like an hour plus of discussions about uncertainty and how to minimize it never happened. The motion, prepared before the meeting was called to order, was flashed on the screen, plus the MD/PRFC changes, and universally approved by the Board.
Of course, it isn’t quite over yet. The TC requested that the members get back to them with the options they finally select so the actual reductions can be validated. Since the options had already been validated, it isn’t clear what the TC plans to do with them after they are made into local rules and laws. They certainly can’t expect to influence the cascading uncertainties or to improve the probability of meeting the 2016 SSB goals that by now must be much worse than the unbiased coin toss outcomes.
Also, the Chesapeake Bay’s role as the primary producer area for coastal SB gives MD, VA and PRFC other Conservation Equivalency options since their resident stocks are smaller and allegedly dominated by male fish. They have always had their own reference points derived from local annual stock assessments but they lost that option with the new addendum. The TC has agreed to develop new reference points guidance for the Bay. Not to be left out of a chance to increase exploitation of SB, other places that may have some producer history (DE, Hudson River in NY, and NJ) want a piece of this action as well. Even NC may qualify so a subsequent addendum may be in the works after the May ASMFC meeting.
Perhaps the term “Conservation Equivalency” should be changed to “Exploitation Equivalency” because there seems to be precious little conservation embedded in this process.
2014 Annual Angler Survey Results
In 2014 we received 830 responses to our annual survey. 752, or 84% of the respondents, have fished for stripers for more than 10 years. This is a very experienced sample of the angling population, many of them fished for stripers throughout the good years of the 1990s and early 2000s then the subsequent decline. This year’s survey has again produced a good representative sampling of sentiments from fishers all along the striper’s migratory range, and as usual MA and NJ vied for the greatest contributions with 206 and 199 completed surveys respectively.
2014 was another year of declining sentiment. 88% of fishers reported catching fewer fish compared to just 2% reporting catching more. Also, 71% said they were catching smaller fish compared to only 15% claiming they were larger. It seems evident that most of the older, larger fish from the great year classes of the 1990s and early 2000s have been removed from the population leaving us with smaller fish and many less fish from the poor year classes that have generally characterized the fishery since 2003.
The survey shows that our members continue to believe we should not be harvesting large, breeding stripers, that they want to set aside a high percentage of the current commercial catch for conservation – and not harvest it themselves – and that they are willing to buy a stamp to finance the buyout of the commercial fishery.
We had survey results from 77 guides, which is down from 89 last year. Without a doubt the decline in striper fishing is hurting this valuable industry as well as the related fishing tourism and tackle businesses. The guides know how to fish their areas, though, and can usually produce the best results possible from their home waters. If you are thinking about a guided trip please check out the guides and tackle shops listed on the Stripers Forever website.
We will send this information to the press and to fishery policy makers everywhere. We hope that you will use this information personally to help us advocate for the goal of coast-wide striped bass game fish. Please share the results with your local fishing club, home town newspaper, and elected officials that you may know.
The complete 20 page PDF of the 2014 Annual Angler Survey is available below. You will also find both the questions and the responses listed by state. Comments we received from both anglers and guides are included; as usual there were some very good ones, and they have not been edited.
Another PDF document entitled Key Comparisons is also found below. Key Comparisons graphs out the answers to some particularly important questions. The questions that we use have been the same for the ten years we have been doing the survey.
Key Comparisons 2003 through 2014
If you have any questions about the survey please don’t hesitate to e-mail us at: stripers@stripersforever.org
