Ó Ed Mitchell 2002
The management of striped bass along the Atlantic has been a long and difficult struggle, one with all the elements of an epic. It’s a story of soaring hopes and heroic feats, as well as the times of the deepest and darkest despair. It involves passionately held beliefs and heated debates, echoing from barrooms to the halls of Congress. It entails scientific research and changing social values - from our belief that wildlife was an endlessly renewal resource ready to sustain a civilization, to our growing awareness that we were inflicting great and even irreparable harm. And at each twist and turn it has held a mirror up to who we are as a people and a nation. It’s you and me, the guy in the next boat and the person next door.
This is the first of a two installments covering that story. Even so don’t expect to hear all the pieces. For one thing, the restrictions of the printed page preclude the listing of every part and every player. For another, the story itself is so immense that no one - myself included - knows the entire tale. Rather we will hit the high points, as I see them, starting with the ebbing days of the 19th century. So if you’re ready, let’s begin.
While the record books of the late 19th century tout striped bass of a hundred pounds or more, these monsters were -in truth- the end of a dynasty. For as the century came to a close, striped bass were vanishing from view. Why they vanished no one is sure. Still we can speculate that the industrialization of our estuaries including the damming of coastal river, along with unregulated commercial fishing, and perhaps even weather patterns unfavorable to spawning success, all took a toll.
Around 1930 there was a glimmer of hope; stripers slowly began to reappear. Then, like a bolt out of the blue, Chesapeake Bay received a bounty from nature; in 1934 a huge year class was born. This enormous school of living silver was not to last, however. For Maryland’s commercial fishermen would soon rush to greet them in record number. It was the middle of the Great Depression, after all. And, although Maryland did have a 12 inch minimum and a 15 pound maximum size as well as some restrictions on nets, this was not enough to stop the makings of a gold rush. A publication of the Maryland Board of Natural Resources written ten years after the fact would describe the harvest this way.
“ Their (stripers) tremendous numbers attracted wide notice, and before long, many men throughout tidewater who ordinarily followed other professions, began setting nets for rocks (stripers). Storekeepers, barbers, clergymen, blacksmiths, bankers, and even doctors bought or shared fishing gear, and soon glutted the market with barely marketable half-pound fish. As a result, in 1937, the big run was seriously depleted, and in 1938 almost all the brood stock had been caught.”
Still the
short live of the 1934 year class would not be in vain, for they were destined
to spark the birth of striped bass management as we have come to know it. Some
of the 1934 year-class avoided the nets by heading up the coast in the spring of
1936, where their appearance was a sight for sore eyes. To understand the
excitement they caused, you must remember stripers had not been seen in numbers
for nearly half a century.
At this point in time, the idea that striped bass migrated in and out of Chesapeake Bay was highly controversial. Certainly there was not a stitch of scientific information to prove it. Still the Connecticut State Board of Fisheries and Game was convinced that not only were stripers migratory, that fishing pressures in the Bay could doom any coastal wide recovery. And if the recovery failed, there was no telling when stripers would bounce back again -- if ever. The Board used these prophetic words:
"Under the circumstances, it is obvious to the Board that the greatest need was for information regarding the life history and habits of striped bass which might lead to uniform restrictive laws and possibly to some constructive measures to be adopted by all of the Atlantic coast states."
Five years back the Board had passed a 12-inch size limit on stripers in Connecticut's inland waters, and restricted bass fishing there to rod and reel. But it now plotted a more ambitious course - to obtain the science needed for coast-wide management. With no money available until the next budget cycle, the Board organized a volunteer committee of striped bass anglers with a single mission -- raise three months worth of seed money pronto. With the help of some tackle manufactures, the committee did just that. Records indicate that the committee amassed $316.13 -- by today's standards a trivial amount -- yet from that small contribution the Atlantic coast was about to reap a huge scientific and social reward.
Using the seed money, in April of 1936 the Board hired a Yale graduate student by the name of Daniel Merriman to study striped bass. Merriman quickly started a tagging program that showed irrefutably that striped bass migrated in large numbers and over long distances; he then went on to amass the first definitive life history of striped bass. Suddenly it was undeniably clear that striped bass could only be successfully managed by the coordinated effort of ten states. Armed with Merriman’s research, in the late 1930’s U.S. Fish and Wildlife tried to coax the coastal states into a uniform 16” fork length limit. Some states acted. New Jersey passed, for example, a minimum total length of 18 inch in 1938, and New York followed with a 16-inch fork length the following year. Still the response was far from overwhelming.
Meanwhile back in the Bay, Maryland’s Board of Natural Resources had recognized that the harvest of the 1934 year class was wasteful and moreover detrimental to the future of striped bass. So the Board of Natural Resources set out to create some form of management. After much work it arrived in 1940 as the Maryland Fisheries Management Plan. The Plan sought to help striped bass by placing a moratorium on new commercial licenses in order to control effort. It also restricted the season, and net lengths. By today’s standards these measures may seem timid, but in its time this Plan was a bold and unprecedented move.
At the ASMFC’s first annual meeting in September of 1942, William Neville from US Fish & Wildlife spoke to gathering and renewed the call for a coast wide size limit on bass. USFW’s original attempt had been only partial successful, and it was an omen of things to come. For in the years ahead, one of the largest obstacles to striped management would prove to be difficulty of getting states to agree. Each state had its own management viewpoint, and its own regulatory process. As the ASFMC would soon learn, seeking interstate cooperation was a lot like herding cats.
“However, it has been shown that Chesapeake Bay, more particularly in Maryland waters, is the most important area for the production of striped bass along the Atlantic Coast. Probably of even greater concern to you here in New England is that practically all the striped bass caught here in Massachusetts are hatched in Maryland and migrate out of the Bay when the majority of fish there are less than the Maryland legal limit of eleven inches. Even though this run of fish is of great interest and importance to you, the quantity of fish actually migrating out of the Bay is not in excess of ten percent of the total population, and is not caught to any great extent by Maryland fishermen.”
Beyond the wrangle over size limits, striped bass management could not hope to be effective without solid scientific data, and to that end the ASFMC began encouraging its member states to study striped bass in their region. Over all the idea was not successful, but in 1954 Maryland began an annual seine survey to gauge the abundance of juvenile striped bass in its waters. The survey consists of a sampling 22 different sites over a three-month period with a total of 132 hauls of a net. The result would then be expressed as the average number of young bass per haul. It became know as the Maryland Juvenile Striped Bass Index or simple the Maryland YOY. Given the Bay’s critical importance as a spawning ground, this survey was to become an essential tool for the ASFMC in assessing striped bass reproductive success, and a fair predictor of future striped bass fishing everywhere along the Atlantic.
Best of all, management efforts clearly seem to be paying off. The Maryland Striped Bass Juvenile Index reported large year classes in 1956, 1958, 1961, and 1962, with indices ranged from 12 to 19. In 1964 the index jumped to a record 23.5, and then in 1970 it sky rockets even high to 30.4. By 1973 it’s cigar all-around. The commercial harvest in the Bay hits an all time record of 15 million pound. Recreational anglers, whose ranks have grown like wild fire, are also pulling in bass big time. Some do it for sport and some for food, but many of them have market fever and are swapping their catch for cash.
By all measures, striper management is now successful beyond our wildest dream. Still trouble is abrewing. In five year’s time Bay landing would collapse by 75 percent. Even more concerning, alongside the plummet in landings, striped bass showed a severe drop in reproductive success. By 1979 the Maryland Juvenile indices dipped down to 4, and the following year fell to 2. With the writing on the wall, the State of Maryland, in conjunction with the National Marine Fisheries Service, scrambled to organize a Striped Bass Management Workshop in 1977. The outcome was a growing consensus to develop some kind of coordinated state and federal response. And so all eyes turned to the ASFMC.
Ó Ed Mitchell
In
the last issue
we looked at the early days of striped bass management, ending with the crash in
the late 1970’s. This time around we’re going to cover the whirlwind
of activity that has transpired since.
But before we shove
off, let me correct something. In part one I told you that Maryland had few if
any striper regulations on the books in 1934. Not so. By 1928 Maryland had
increased the minimum size in the net fishery from 10 to 12 inches and reduced
the maximum allowable fish from 25 pounds down to 15 pounds. Then between 1929
and 1932 Maryland added additional restrictions on nets, including measures on
net length and mesh sizes.
The crash of the 1970’s sparked an explosion of legislation, scientific research, and fisheries’ management the likes of which had never happened before. Although it largely sprung from our love for striped bass, there was another side to it as well. As luck would have it, the crash came at a fortuitous moment in our nation’s history, a time when we were undergoing a remarkable shift in our attitude toward the environment. And this shift would play a pivot role.
The seeds of the environmental movement go way back in this country, but during the 60’s and 70’s it suddenly found its stride. Rachel Carlson’s book Silent Springs kicked it off in 1960, yet some of the most enduring environmental lessons of these years arrived in our living room via the TV screen. We saw a river burn, as Cleveland’s heavily polluted Cuyahoga River erupted into fifty-foot flames. We witnessed the sufferings of a small community that became know worldwide as Love Canal. We winced as the super tanker Amoco Cadiz spilled nearly 70 million gallons of oil on the French coast. And then in 1979 we were scared out of our seats when Three Mile Island Nuclear Plant experienced a partial meltdown.
Congress was watching too,
and more importantly it was stepping to the plate with needed environmental
legislation including: The Clean Water Act, The Clean Air Act, The Wilderness
Act, The Coastal Zone Management Act, The Ocean Dumping Act, The Endangered
Species Act, The National Environmental Policy Act, and the “Superfund”.
So when the call came in that stripers were hanging by their fingernails,
Congress was primed to pick up the pen. The result would be two bills that
perhaps more than anything else saved striped bass from going the way of the
Great Auk. Those bills were The Emergency Striped Bass Study of 1979 and the
Atlantic Striped Bass Conservation Act of 1984.
The Emergency Striped Bass Study started an investigation into why reproduction was failing in Chesapeake Bay. So what did it find? It is believed that the crash was caused of by three factors working in concert: Health problems with the stock including starvation and disease; Habitat degradation, including acid rain and dissolved metals, especially aluminum; and overfishing. Of the three, the principal cause was likely overfishing, and the worse of it was overfishing by commercial interests in Maryland waters.
In 1981, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASFMC) rushed to develop an interstate Fisheries Management Plan (FMP) for striped bass. At the time it was only the second FMP the ASFMC had ever created, the first coming earlier in that same year for Atlantic Menhaden. The striped bass FMP’s main provision was a minimum legal size of 14 inches total length in the spawning areas, and 24 inches in total length on the coast, but the plan had a huge Achilles heel. The ASFMC had no authority to force states to adopt it; it was a simply a suggestion. If you remember the USFW had tried the recommendation route forty years prior and gotten nowhere fast.
By 1983 things were so bleak that two Maryland charter captains filed a petition to list striped bass under the Endangered Species Act. It was a radical move, but it started a chain reaction. The following year Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources- much to its credit – declared stripers a Threatened Species, and announced that Maryland would close its striper fishery on the first day of 1985. Delaware closed theirs too, and within three years Connecticut, New York and Rhode Island would follow suit.
Meanwhile, between 1981-1985 the ASFMC scrambled to improve their striper plan. In 1984 they passed Amendments One and Two, seeking an across the board 55 percent reduction in striped bass harvest. But unlike the original plan, this time around the ASFMC had some clout. Congress had written into law The Atlantic Striped Bass Conservation Act. The Act declared that any ASFMC member state that failed to comply with the striped bass FMP could well have its fishery closed by the feds. Striper management was suddenly a brand new ball game.
In an effort to build on Maryland’s closure, the ASFMC amended their plan again in June of 1985. Amendment Three’s primary objective was to protect the 1982-year class, the only decent size year class still alive. More specifically it sought to prevent fishing mortality until 95 percent of the 1982 females had a chance to spawn. To do that the ASMFC imposed a series of annual length limits increases, gradually raising the legal size to 36 inches. Given the scarcity of big fish, these length limits produced what amounted to a hook & release fishery on the coast.
If
the Atlantic Striped Bass Conservation Act supplied the legal leverage to
recover striped bass, Amendment Three proved to be the management vehicle that
took us there. So effective was it that many anglers, this one included, see it
as the single most successful piece of striper management ever to come down the
pike. Slowly but steadily striped bass returned. Moreover the success of the
regulation was destined to transform recreational anglers in the process.
Practically overnight ardent striper anglers became fanatic supporters of hook
and release. You could literally watch fishermen handling bass as if they were
their own children. It was a profound change of heart that is still with us
today.
Amendment Three also contained a trigger by which the fishery could be reopened. This trigger required the Maryland Juvenile Index reach a three-year running average of 8. While no one assumed this can happened anytime soon, suddenly in 1989 the index recorded a whopping 25, tripping the trigger. The huge number proved extremely controversial, however. Nearly half the juveniles found in the entire survey came from a single site know as Hambrooks Bar. This location had recently undergone a major physical change, forcing the survey nets to be used differently than in the past. Because of that many knowledgeable people argued that numbers from Hambrooks were skewed and should not have been used. The ASFMC disagreed, voting in October of 1989 to reopen the fishery under Amendment Four.
The vast majority of recreational anglers reacted with bitter disappointment to news, and in a flash the growing confidence anglers had in the ASFMC was shattered. By the early 1990’s game fish status for striped bass had been achieved in several states, but the reopening fostered a push to get federal game fish status for striped bass. Many in the management community dismiss the game fish notion as an allocation issue, a blatant attempt by recreational anglers to steal the entire pie. While some recreational anglers do feel that there are not enough striped bass to support both a recreational and a commercial fishery, in large measure the motives behind game fish status are far more complex.
In part it is fueled by a growing concern that overall saltwater fisheries management was failing and moreover could not be trusted. From the original 2 FMP’s written in 1981, by the mid 1990s the ASFMC was juggling fifteen or more, including bluefish, croaker, lobster, red drum, river herring, scup, sea bass, spotted seatrout, spots, shad, Spanish mackerel, summer flounder, surgeon, tautog, and winter flounder. All along the Atlantic coastal fisheries were imploding. And as they did increasingly anglers recognized that the ASFMC was understaffed, under funded and often overwhelmed.
More
significantly in my view, since its earliest origins the drive for game fish
status has been an increasing call by citizenry for our nation to redefine its
relationship with striped bass, a fish that many people see as the bald eagle of
the coast. And the desire of many anglers to release every most every striper is
an offshoot of it. To fully
appreciate the importance of this call for change, one must recognize that
wildlife management is more than just periodic bouts of regulatory action.
Rather it is an attempt by civilization to better understand nature and our
connection to it. And so at its core, wildlife management is driven by the
philosophy and ethics of a society. And if that management is to remain vital it
must change to meet changing social needs.
Since the reopening of the fishery a number of things had taken place. There have been strong year classes in the Bay in 1993, 1996 and 2001. The ASFMC has gone on to write Amendment Five to the Striped bass FMP. Commercial landings and recreational catches have climbed such that by 1997 the total coast-wide catch was estimated at 4 million fish and nearly 26 million pounds. And unfortunately, by the late nineties, fishing mortality has slowly gotten out of hand. This fact is particularly vexing since several states had voluntarily elected to fish at lower rates than allowed by Amendment Five. In addition there is a growing concern over the perceived lack of larger bass in the population and the fact that the stock is shrinking in total abundance. And all these concerns have prompted the ASFMC to prepare Amendment Six.
In closing, let me share a few personal thoughts. Over the year we have learned a lot about striped bass, but don’t think for a moment that we are immune from another crash. Health problem, habitat problems and overfishing are still very much with us. In recent year sick and lean striped bass have shown up, particularly in Chesapeake Bay. Frankly I doubt we can get a handle this issue until the ASFMC makes a fundamental change. Wildlife managers recognized long ago that you can’t properly manage a predator species without taking into account its relationship to essential prey. Unfortunately the ASFMC has yet to embrace that concept. For instance, there is great irony in the fact that back in 1981 both striper bass and menhaden were in trouble simultaneously. Nature seems to have linked this two species at the hip and in my opinion striped bass will always be prone to starvation and disease unless there is an abundant population of menhaden. Therefore it’s high time for the ASFMC to coordinate the management of striped bass and Atlantic menhaden.
Habitat
protection and restoration needs more attention too. Amendment Five has a
provision concerning the need to protect what is called Essential Fish Habitat
(EFH), a concept defined by the Sustainable Fisheries Act of 1996. EFH is a
laudable idea, yet it remains a toothless tiger. It is imperative that the ASFMC
and its member states forcefully seek a way to empower EFH. This will not be
easy, but without the proper habitat especially in the spawning areas we can
never expect striped bass to thrive. I strongly suggest that the ASFMC, the
National Marine Fisheries Service, US Fish and Wildlife seek a partnership with
the EPA to create the necessary legal mechanism so that EFH becomes a reality.
Clearly
we must also get a better grip on overfishing, and you can expect Amendment Six
to make an effort in that regard. But overfishing can never be controlled unless
states fully comply with the ASFMC. In recent years, however, a few states have
appeared to play fast and loose with the requirements of various FMPs, but the
ASMFC has been extremely reluctant to do anything meaningful about it. That’s
dangerous. Compliance lies at the heart of all interstate management efforts. On
the striper front for example, it is now alleged that since 1997 Virginia
harvested approximately 180,000 big bass of 20 to 30 pounds each, in a way that
does not meet the full intent of Amendment Five. If this proves to be true, then
it is imperative that the ASFMC ask Virginia to repay these big fish from future
harvests. To do otherwise greatly undermines the entire system.
The End