July 2, 2013 — The spin-doctors are trying to mitigate the obvious move to thwart the conservation process. They promise to watch this situation carefully but watching won’t do any good. We know that DNR gave away an additional 5M pounds with this bycatch fiasco. No one believes the catch reports so we won’t know when the basic TAC is caught. Then, we won’t know when the bycatch allowance is exceeded. I’m not sure how we watch what we can’t see.
After decades of mis-management, hundreds of stakeholders descended on the special ASMFC menhaden meeting last December to witness ASMFC finally doing something to save “the most important fish in the sea” from certain destruction at the hands of Coast-wide commercial reduction and bait fishermen. Based on reported historic landings (a huge joke in itself), MD ended up with an annual total allowable catch (TAC) of 5,158,675 pounds of menhaden – just 1.37% of the Coast-wide TAC. Some were disappointed that the cuts weren’t more than 20% of the Coast-wide historical numbers but everyone agreed it was a step in the right direction. Like sheep being led to slaughter, they didn’t see it coming when the loophole crowd got started with amendments.
MD made the motion for a 6,000 pound per trip bycatch allowance to apply after the specified TAC was met and the rest of the ASMFC jumped on it like wolves devouring a hamstrung fawn. For MD, that meant that the 90+ pound-netters with striped bass permits could LEGALLY catch the menhaden TAC again every 9.1 days. Shouldn’t someone at ASMFC have caught this?
MD DNR has declared their commercial striped bass fishery to be unsustainable based on fraudulent catch under-reporting. If we don’t know how many targeted fish come out of the pound-nets when each fish is supposed to have a tag that is tracked and reported, then how can we even imagine that we know how much bycatch of un-targeted, untagged species like menhaden are caught? We can’t. So the entire notion of a managed cut in menhaden catch is flawed from the start and, in MD, even if the pound-netters stayed within the TAC and bycatch limits, the legal catch of menhaden could bring the reduction down to just 10%.
It gets worse and I bet you didn’t see that coming either – I know I didn’t. At the May ASMFC meeting (I was on vacation and missed this one), the bycatch limit after the TAC is met was raised for 2013 to 12,000 pounds per trip. Now, it could take only 4.6 days to catch the TAC again. MD seconded the motion.
More bad news. I just obtained the Commercial Striped Bass Sustainability Certification Report describing MD’s poor monitoring of bycatch in poundnets. Needless to say, the Certification Team confirmed that DNR’s monitoring of and accountability for bycatch doesn’t pass muster. This was the choke point for the certification process and DNR claims they aren’t going to spend the money needed to correct these deficiencies so the certification process is dead for now and bycatch quotas, like TACs, will be impossible to enforce.
There must be plenty of menhaden after all – DNR estimated that the TAC would be caught and closed the fishery effective June 29 when bycatch limits went into effect not just for striped bass fishermen but for other pound-net fishermen who only get 1,500 pounds per day. Since this additional 1,500 pounds wasn’t part of the ASMFC motion, I assume this is all on MD and that makes perfect sense since we don’t have a clue how many pound nets are actually in service. It will only take these guys 32 days to catch the TAC as bycatch on their own. So many ways to beat the system and so few fish.
Read the full opinion piece at Tidal Fish