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Commercial Fisheries News
Volume 35 Number 4
December 2007
Hogarth: Fluke TAL cuts don’t go far enough
WASHINGTON, DC – Last year’s action by Congress to extend the stock rebuilding period for summer flounder by three years bought commercial and recreational fishermen a year’s reprieve from drastic quota cuts in 2007.
However, the latest stock assessment update has federal regulators putting fishery managers and industry on notice that overfishing is still going on and significant steps must be taken in 2008 if the stock is to be rebuilt on time.
During its August meeting, the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council’s summer flounder monitoring committee recommended a total allowable landing (TAL) level of between 11.64 million pounds and 12.9 million pounds for the coastwide 2008 fishery, a significant reduction from the 2007 coastwide TAL of 17.11 million pounds.
Deciding on a more modest cut, the council recommended to the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) a 2008 coastwide TAL of 15.77 million pounds, which, not factoring in all the data, has a 75% chance of meeting stock rebuilding goals in five years. The coastwide TAL is split 60:40 between the commercial and recreational fisheries.
However, on Oct. 29, NMFS Director Bill Hogarth sent a letter to council Chairman Pete Jensen urging the council to consider “more precautionary approaches” for managing the 2008 recreational summer flounder fishery to keep fishing mortality at or below the target rate.
“This is of paramount importance, for if the 2008 mortality target is again exceeded, it is likely that very restrictive measures may be necessary for 2009 and possibly all of the remaining years of the rebuilding period to ensure that the stock is rebuilt on the schedule required by the Magnuson-Stevens Act,” Hogarth warned.
“Flexibility” legislation
A week later, on Nov. 7, US Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC) introduced HR 4087 into the House of Representatives.
Titled “The Flexibility in Rebuilding American Fisheries Act of 2007,” the bill would amend the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (MSA) “to allow the 10-year time period for rebuilding fisheries to be extended under certain common-sense circumstances,” according to Jones’ office.
“I do not understand why this government would require rebuilding of a fish stock in 10 years – even when that causes widespread economic dislocation – when, if given a few more years, the fish stock could be rebuilt with minimal economic hardship for the fishermen,” Jones said.
The Garden State Seafood Association (GSSA), which represents commercial fishermen and support industries in New Jersey, immediately came out in support of the bill.
“Jones’ legislation provides a responsible process whereby we can ensure long-term viability of fishing-dependent communities and still make it possible to provide the American consumer with quality US seafood harvested from rebuilding/rebuilt fish stocks,” said GSSA.
Congress included the one-time, three-year extension specifically for summer flounder in the MSA reauthorization bill it passed in December 2006.
Jones’ bill isn’t specific to any particular species. It would allow rebuilding extensions if any of a number of factors came into play, such as if the biology of the fish or an international agreement impeded stock rebuilding.
It also would allow an extension if a “substantial change is made to the biomass rebuilding target” after a rebuilding plan was already in effect or if “it is necessary to provide for the sustained participation of fishing communities or to minimize impacts on such communities, provided there is evidence that the stock is on a positive rebuilding trajectory.”
How we got here
Summer flounder, commonly known as fluke, would almost certainly qualify under Jones’ criteria. The species is key to commercial fisheries from Massachusetts to North Carolina and to recreational and charter boat fisheries, particularly in Southern New England and the Mid-Atlantic.
The Mid-Atlantic council and the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission both manage summer flounder. While the commercial fishery is strictly regulated by hard state-by-state quotas, the recreational fishery generally is controlled by the states through minimum sizes, bag limits, and seasonal restrictions.
Back in 2002, NMFS was calling the species “a fisheries management success story.” By 2005, the coastwide TAL was nearly 30 million pounds.
But by 2006, assessment scientists concluded that the stock wasn’t in as good a shape as everyone thought and that a big TAL cut, rather than an anticipated increase, was needed if regulators were to have a prayer of meeting the MSA’s 10-year-stock rebuilding requirement by 2010.
And last year, the scientists advised a shocking 5.2 million-pound coastwide TAL for the 2007 fishery to meet the 2010 timeframe. After intense lobbying, especially by influential recreational groups, Congress included a provision in the MSA that extended the summer flounder rebuilding period to 2013.
Overfishing problem
According to Jessica Coakley of the Mid-Atlantic council, the problem with summer flounder is that, despite managers’ best efforts, overfishing has occurred every year from 1982 to 2006.
The current fishing mortality rate “threshold,” which is used to determine if overfishing is happening, is 0.28. The fishing mortality rate in 2006 was 0.35. While that’s a big improvement compared to levels as high as 2.2 seen in the late 1980s, it’s still too high for the spawning stock biomass to fully rebuild to 197 million pounds by 2013.
And the reason this overfishing continues – and continues to be such a surprise – is that it only shows up in the assessment after the fact, creating what assessment scientists call a “retrospective pattern.”
“When we set the TAL, we set it at the threshold or less,” Coakley explained. “But when we look back, we find that we were in fact overfishing.”
A lot of things can cause this problem – unreported catches, underestimates of discards, overestimates of natural mortality, or errors in survey sampling data for example.
Regardless of what’s causing the problem, Hogarth in his letter stressed the need to end overfishing.
“While there have been improvements in the stock, it is not yet rebuilt,” he wrote. “In the remaining years of the rebuilding period, commercial and recreational measures must be sufficient to end overfishing to ensure that the stock rebuilds to the biomass target.”
Lorelei Stevens
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