Is the Science Perfect? No, But Without It, We Got Noth’n’

Hey, man… I’m gonna admit here that sometimes I have a real hard time understanding the science behind fisheries management decisions. What I mean really is not just the nuts and bolts on how fisheries scientists get to the numbers that they do, but rationalizing it all with what I and, of course, other folks actually see on the water.

Before getting into all this, I should be clear that I spend most of my life underway, looking for fish. I’ve been in the charter business for over two decades now, but about a decade ago, I kinda decided that I didn’t want to spend my life behind a computer screen, and that I was going to direct my focus on hunting fish, or really, having other people pay me to find fish for them.

Seems like a kinda silly way to make a living if you look at it objectively, but so far it’s working out for me (knocking on wood because every darn year there are unforeseen hurdles that threaten to end it all). Right now, there’s rarely a day from May through November that I’m not underway, assuming the weather is doable.

Of course, to be successful at this game, particularly the offshore part of it, you’ve got to have a pretty large network of other dudes who are out there a lot to share intel with, so yeah, I know a lot of real salty guys all along the coast.

The point is that I’d like to think that I have a pretty good handle on what’s going on any given week. Not just through my experience, but through the network of guys I regularly exchange information with.

But the Science, Man?

Let’s be honest, the general perception amongst anglers is that the data collection part isn’t great, particularly on the recreational side. Because it’s mostly done by sampling a relatively small portion of fishermen via dockside intercepts and mail-in surveys. That limited sampling gets extrapolated across the estimated number of anglers and, if you look at it on a yearly or even wave-by-wave level, the outliers are often, well, out there.

How NOAA’s rec survey works

So yeah, for a lot of folks it’s sometimes hard to believe those intercepts are representative of the entire angling community.

In general, the whole idea of counting fish in the water? Well, I’ve heard from more than one angler say, “How can that sort of thing possibly be accurate?”

And the fisheries independent surveys? To fishermen, they seem precarious also, because fish swim, right? They just aren’t going to be in the same places research vessels survey year after year.

That’s just the data side of things. All that stuff gets plugged into “models” that spit out fishing mortality, biomass estimates, etc. And certainly folks question whether those models operate like they are supposed to.

I suppose I’m simplifying things here. And I’m the first one to admit that I don’t have a full understanding of the process, the data verification, etc. Because when you get into details like that, well, my usual reaction is for my eyes to glaze over and to start thinking about more pleasant things like catching fish rather than counting them.

But yeah, man, my point is that, for watermen, it’s pretty easy to lose faith in the data, the science and, subsequently, the entire fishery management process. Especially when you’re seeing a ton of fish when the science says they are badly overfished. Or vice versa.

Honestly, it’s hard to blame people for that.

But here’s the truth.

We see what we see… Sometimes/most of the time, we see ONLY what we see.

Striped Bass (Again)

Yeah, it’s probably getting tiresome, but I’m going to use striped bass as an example here, because I touched on this recently, and, well, the reaction is kinda why I’m writing this.

Yes, I’m seeing a TON of fish. And so are most of my colleagues (not all of them). But… 100%, striped bass are overfished. What “overfished” means in this case is that the “spawning stock biomass” is below a threshold used to establish whether or not a stock is healthy. How is that level determined? Well, it differs for each species. But with striped bass, it’s based on one year (1995) when the commission concluded that the stock was no longer overfished after more than a decade of severe depletion. If I understand correctly, it’s an “empirical reference point.”

Regardless, it’s pretty clear at this point that the Chesapeake Bay, the largest producer area on the coast, just isn’t producing the fish it has been or should be. And that’s really concerning considering estimates are that it produces somewhere between 60-80% of the coastal stock. So, we better damn well tread carefully if we want to have a fishery several years from now.

Getting back on point, that “overfished” designation may be hard for some to believe given that we’ve have some extraordinary aggregations of fish moving along the coast. But once you start to dig a little deeper, it’s notable and very significant that there are historically relevant places where the fish simply haven’t been.

Overall, though? There most certainly has been an increase. Are there more fish around than there were prior to 2019? Absolutely. And the science is clear on that point. But are we at a place where we can say that striped bass are “rebuilt”? Nope, not yet. But we are indeed getting there, and we kinda have to by 2029.

Of course, after that we’ll need to deal with recruitment issues, but that’s a topic for another time.

The Science Works Both Ways

Here’s the problem, though.

There are and always have been those folks who insist that the science is just wrong, because they may see a lot of fish around. They don’t believe constraining regulations are necessary when their understanding of the stock is that it certainly appears to be abundant, at least in their neck of the woods. And I can, for sure, understand that perspective, because full disclosure, I often find myself thinking the same thing when I’m smack in the middle of the largest striped bass blitz I’ve ever seen, even though in the end, I understand that my limited perspective is just that… limited, ahem, and anecdotal.

On the other side of that pole, however, are the folks who can’t seem to grasp that things might actually be getting better, because maybe they don’t see any fish, or at least not the amount of fish they feel that they should see… Even when the science indicates that the stock is on the rise. Or they have simply prided themselves as “conservation advocates” for so long that they simply can’t bear to admit that the stock might actually be doing better.

Taking this a little bit farther, there seems to be a large group of anglers who simply don’t believe that they could possibly be part of any overfishing problem because they use a rod and reel instead of nets, or, maybe just because they don’t sell fish. And I can understand that perspective also, because when you see piles of dead fish on a gillnetter or draggers deck, or piled high to the gunnels on a pinhooker’s boat, then it sure looks like they are killing them all.

And going even farther down the rabbit hole, there seems to be a ton of catch-and-release anglers who feel they are the stock’s messiahs because they release everything. When the truth is that discard mortality accounts for a whopping 50% of all fishing-related mortality. And I can get that also, because it just seems counterintuitive that such a number would be so high. But, if you look at the science, it does makes sense pretty quickly. Because, well, there are a ton of anglers targeting them. And that number does nothing but continue to grow. There’s an assumed release mortality rate of 9%, meaning that one in eleven fish don’t survive the release. Apply that across the massive striped bass angling community and you can begin to understand that it’s significant, and the 50% number starts to makes sense.

Even so, there are still plenty of folks who question the science and say it just can’t be so, without much to back it up.

Moving on, there are those folks who also don’t believe that the 9% assumed discard mortality rate is accurate, arguing that it’s probably something much smaller, because, well, in their VERY limited experience they didn’t really see any floaters when they were fishing. I suspect that sort of disposition also has to do with the fact that it’s just uncomfortable to believe that catch and release mortality is so significant, and that conservation-minded anglers are indeed part of the problem. Frankly I have a hard time believing in that 9% number as well. Yet, just given my time on the water taking people out to catch striped bass, seeing other boats, etc., I think it’s actually higher! But that’s neither here nor there, because while I wouldn’t say I’m a huge fan of the best available science, I’m a supporter.

Lastly, there are plenty of folks who just don’t believe in the minimal charter/party contribution to striped bass mortality. Again, this is understandable when you see social media posts with a bunch of dead fish on the deck of a party boat. Is that sorta thing ugly? Yeah, sometimes it is. But it doesn’t mean that those folks aren’t a fraction of the striped bass angling community.

Buy hey, man, if all these things don’t fit into your world view, well then, it seems like ya just won’t believe ’em, and we’ll hear the refrain that the science is bad. It’s really no different than those folks who might witness extraordinary aggregation of striped bass and say that the science ain’t right, cause clearly there’s a ton of fish around.

But let’s be very clear about something right here, right now. No, it’s not the commercial folks who are responsible for the overfishing, and it ain’t the charter/party fleet either. It’s anglers. And the science is very clear on that.

If you chose NOT to believe that, well, then you chose not to believe that the stock is overfished. Because a small commercial fleet certainly didn’t overfish anything. They are managed by a hard quota, and get shut down when they get close to it. And should they exceed it? Well, then they’ve got to pay it back the following season. Yes, there’s poaching, and I don’t want to call it insignificant, but it’s not near as significant as recreational discard mortality.

In the End

Everyone has their own perspectives, but listen, man, we all gotta understand that they are extraordinarily limited. And this goes both ways. And that is exactly why we have to base management decisions on the science, not simply on what you might think you know. Because guess what… You really don’t know as much about the striped bass resource as you think you do, just because you saw some things.

The science? Naha man. It’s not perfect… in fact common sense would tell ya that there are inherent problems with it… but the narrative that it’s completely useless isn’t true either.

When you look at such science over longer periods and on a larger geographic scale, it does indeed seem to reflect trends in the fishery. Yeah, sometimes managers find out that it’s not entirely right, and make adjustments, and they should. But I would argue most of the time it is kinda right. And, most of the time, if there’s any error, it’s toward the conservation side rather than the overharvest one. That’s the way the system is set up, and, well, sure some folks would argue that it hasn’t worked, but in my experience it has.

Can it be improved upon? Of course, and there are and have been much smarter people than me, working to do that. But hey, man, it’s definitely not the random useless system some folks make it out to be. And in the end, well, it’s the best we’ve got.

There are certainly plenty of people bashing it, but I don’t see any real solutions, other than the usual, “we should listen to watermen more.” Yet, the process offers abundant levels of stakeholder engagement. For sure managers know and understand fishermen’s concerns as a result. But come on, man… Does anyone really believe that we should make management decisions based on fishermen’s anecdotal, geographically-limited observations, rather than science, which by definition is objective?

To some extent, we’ve been down that road. There was massive overfishing all the way up to 2000 when NRDC sued the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council. And prior to revisions to the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act in 2006, which required that science and statistical committees set upper catch limits, with some really constraining uncertainty buffers, well, managers had a lot of flexibility to disregard the best available science. And that didn’t work out so well. Species like cod, winter flounder, pollock, etc., still haven’t come back from the damage done.

While it seems like the science might really be screwing fishermen over sometimes, in the end, I do believe it actually helps us. Because, come on, man. You actually have to have a few fish in the water to catch them. If you don’t have that, what’s the point?

We can’t just believe in the science that might suit our own world views. Because for better or worse, we all seem to have different ones. We’ve got to get behind all the science, not just the science you might like. Because you really can’t say that striped bass are overfished without first admitting that anglers are the ones responsible for it.

Just because that’s an uncomfortable fact doesn’t mean you can disregard and point the finger elsewhere. Because, with striped bass, and everything else, it all fits together.

I mean, yeah, I get it… You might not like the science because it doesn’t fit into what you see. But I’m afraid that doesn’t make it untrue…

And that’s just how it is.