By Charles Witek
[dropcap]B[/dropcap]y now, most of the folks on the striper coast have heard something about what happened at last month’s ASMFC meeting. Unfortunately, the news coming out of the meeting was a little confused, and if you weren’t paying really close attention, you might not have completely understood what happened and what may—or may not—happen in the future.
There was good news. The majority of the commissioners on the Striped Bass Management Board clearly recognized that there are problems with the stock, believe that harvest levels have to be reduced and have begun the process of making that happen.
There was also bad news. The Management Board, in a decisive vote, decided to do nothing to prevent overfishing from occurring next season, some commissioners made it clear that they had no intention of supporting the harvest reductions that biologists believe are needed, and there is plenty of time between now and next August, when new regulations would probably be finalized, for those dissenting commissioners to derail the current process.
To understand where we’re going, we should probably take a quick look at where we’ve been. According to the best available data, the striped bass female spawning stock biomass—the abundance of mature female fish—peaked in 2004, then began a steady and at times steep decline. Striped bass anglers up and down the coast noticed the decline, which seemed particularly severe in northern New England; by 2007 or 2008, calls for additional restrictions on striped bass harvest began to be heard at ASMFC’s Striped Bass Management Board. In March 2011, after a motion made by Paul Diodati of Massachusetts and seconded by Gene Kray of Pennsylvania, ASMFC began to move forward with an addendum that would respond to the decline in abundance by reducing coastwide harvest. That addendum would have been released to the public after the August 2011 meeting; however, a motion by A.C. Carpenter of the Potomac River Fisheries Commission, which was seconded by Pat Augustine of New York, postponed such release until November, when a stock update would be available to the management board. However, when the November meeting rolled around, Pat Augustine of New York moved to take no action on such pro-conservation addendum until after the benchmark stock assessment was released in the second half of 2012. Mike Johnson of North Carolina seconded Augustine’s motion and, on a 9-6 vote, the motion to delay any harvest reduction was adopted by the management board.
The benchmark assessment was released to the management board in August 2012. That assessment confirmed what so many striped bass anglers feared, that the population was truly in a serious decline. Female spawning stock biomass had already fallen below the biomass target, and there was a good chance that it would also fall below the biomass threshold—meaning that the stock would, by definition, be “overfished”– by 2015 or 2016, unless managers adopted meaningful restrictions on harvest. The assessment also confirmed what many of us had been arguing since the stock was declared “recovered” in 1995: The current fishing mortality reference points were too high, and the current 2 fish bag limit and 28” minimum size imposed on the coastal fishery by ASMFC allowed too many fish to be killed. Under the current fishery management plan for striped bass, the fishing mortality target, F=0.30, allows the removal of about 26% of the adult population each year, while the fishing mortality threshold, F=0.34, defines “overfishing” as removing more than about 29% of that population. The latest stock assessment determined that the fishing mortality target should be reduced to F=0.180, about a 40% reduction in the allowable kill, which would result in roughly 16% of the adults being harvested in any year, and that the overfishing threshold be set at F=0.219, equivalent to the removal of about 19% of the adult population—well below what had previously been the target mortality level. Further, the assessment predicted that, unless current harvest levels were reduced significantly, it is a virtual certainty that the striped bass stock will be overfished in 2014.
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