Stripers Forever - following this message we have pasted in a letter that SF recently sent to the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) . The letter was in response to the ASMFC reply to our letter requesting that the estimated 2 to 4 million pound bycatch of striped bass in the trawl fishery off New England be subtracted directly from the commercial quotas in 2004. As a reminder, the ASMFC is a compact of states along the Eastern seaboard empowered by federal legislation to enact legally binding fishery management plans, and they manage striped bass. The ASMFC reply was polite, but reflected the same pro-commercial,
anti-recreational fishery slant that has characterized its positions right along. We think you'll get the gist of it from our letter but you can find more information on the website in the Articles and Research section (EEZ Commercial Bycatch Revealed). Please contact us through the web site if you have any questions.
You'll also note an attached newspaper piece from VA that shows that the illegal striped bass fishery is alive and well. We encourage you to go to your state on the SF website. E-mail and/or write your state commissioner and tell him that you are fed up with commercial fishing excesses. The commercial quota should be reduced by the amount of the NE trawl bycatch estimate, and the ASMFC should withdraw its request to NMFS to reopen the EEZ. And for those of you that haven't already done it, please send your congressperson an e-mail and a letter, and ask them to support HR 1286, the federal bill to make striped bass a gamefish. Just go to How To Take Action on the website. Brad Burns
P.S. Do your fishing friends belong to SF? Please forward them this e-mail and ask them to go to our website www.stripersforever.org and join today.
It's Free!
4/6/2004
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John V. O’Shea Executive Director
Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission
1444 Eye St. N.W. Sixth Floor
Washington D.C. 20005
Dear Mr. O’Shea:
Thank you for your response to the concerns Stripers Forever expressed in our letter dated March 24, 2004. Time will tell how well the striped bass resource is holding up to the pressures that it now faces. We will look forward to future stock assessment work.
We also expect that we will hear more about the estimates of striped bass bycatch made by Oceana’s scientists. We’ve included below some comments received from them that reinforce their estimates regarding the size of the commercial bycatch of striped bass. We are very firm in our conviction that this bycatch is not natural background mortality, and that, when verified, it should be subtracted from commercial quotas. In their correspondence with us, Oceana has not addressed your assertion that only 35% of trawling discards die. However, it hardly seems possible that 65% of the fish hauled from the ocean in dragger nets, sorted out on deck, and then pushed back into the water some time later, could live. If there has been some scientific research that documents the
35% mortality of trawl discards, we would be very interested to see it.
Here are some of the comments from Oceana:
In 2003 Oceana filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the National Marine Fisheries Service for data from observers in the groundfish fishery in New England.~ At that point we were heavily involved in groundfish management with a focus on rebuilding as well as the habitat and bycatch issues.~ In 2003 we were provided with a substantial amount of information from the observer program and, among other things, the data showed that on the trawl boats across the whole time period, 43,000 pounds of striped bass were caught and discarded.~ We then used a simple straight extrapolation using assumptions of observer coverage levels to arrive at the range of discards that we submitted to the Fisheries Service as a supplemental comment letter for groundfish Amendment 13.~
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We fully recognize that the estimates were based on a small sample size, but feel quite confident that the method used for calculating the discards is valid and if anything tends to underestimate the true number of discards.~ Due to the small sample size, the data will never be bullet proof however, and we make no claims to that effect.
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To briefly address Megan Gamble’s criticism of our estimates--- Yes the bycatch of striped bass did occur over a short seasonal time period.~ This fact may skew the data to the high side if by some chance observers were on the only boats to catch striped bass as bycatch.~ But, more than likely, modeling scientists tell us that for infrequent bycatch events, a small coverage level (<10%) will~ not capture the true scale of infrequent events and lead to an underestimate of bycatch and that a 50% coverage level is necessary to capture the true nature of discarding where species are infrequent.
We will not take up your time in a point-by-point debate of all the issues of striped bass management. But we feel the ASMFC has failed to grasp the importance that recreational fishing for stripers has for our society, both socially and economically. The anecdotal information from our surveys last fall tells us that, in many parts of the striper’s range, fishing has deteriorated significantly. A majority of the guides that we heard from, up and down the coast, were less willing than in the past to make new investments in boats or equipment, and a majority of anglers were less likely than in the past to take a guided trip for stripers.
The commercial fishery for stripers is a poor and terribly outdated social policy. A comparative handful of individuals receive privilege from the system to pay for their fishing by selling what they catch while many inshore coastal anglers fish all year without catching a single fish large enough to take home to eat. It is truly the privatization of a public resource. Meanwhile simply allowing commercial fishing for stripers encourages illegal fishing and selling outside of the measured quotas. Please see the very recent attached story from a Virginia newspaper. We have a large file of these. It is a corrupting influence in more ways than one. For instance, you mention ways to reduce recreational discard mortality. We all know that the use of circle hooks
would do wonders, and we are all for it. But how could you mandate the use of circle hooks when you allow someone else to trap and kill the same fish in a monofilament gillnet?
We do not wish to unreasonably impact the very few commercial fishermen who truly depend on this fish for a measurable part of their livelihood. There are probably not many over one thousand of these people, and the small cost of reimbursing them for their quota would be gained back financially many times each year by the expansion of the guiding and fishing tourism businesses that would result from having more large fish in the population. In fact, a study by researchers from the University of Maryland and the College of William and Mary stated that the recreational fishery for stripers provided 7 1/2 times as many jobs as the commercial striper fishery, and that maximum social benefits and potential sales, income and employment were associated with a 100% allocation of the 1998 total
allowable catch to the recreational sector.
Our final point, Mr.O’Shea is that we feel the ASMFC should also revisit its request of NMFS to reopen the EEZ. Considering the new population and mortality statistics we discussed in our last letter as well as this bycatch information, we ask that the request to reopen fishing in the EEZ be withdrawn.
Sincerely;
Brad Burns, President
Stripers Forever
Kirkley, McConnell & Ryan,”Economic Aspects of Allocating Striped Bass Among Competing User Groups in Virginia”, Virginia Marine Resources Report No 2000-05, April 2000.
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