Last month, this column dealt with North Carolina’s recreational flounder fishing closure and presented a way to help alleviate the pain brought on by that closure. I couldn’t get the issue off my mind. The constant barrage of things I see on social media and hear locally about the injustice that’s been done to fishermen hasn’t slackened. The question I keep coming to is, how did we get here?
You can really catch three distinct species of flounder in North Carolina: Summer, Southern, and Gulf. For the purposes of this debate, Summer Flounder and Southern Flounder are relevant. Both species have directed commercial fisheries for them, but have different management structures.
Summer Flounder are managed jointly by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) and the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council, while Southern Flounder in North Carolina are managed by North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries, an agency that operates under the umbrella of the NC Dept. of Environmental Quality.
It’s confusing
The ASMFC believes that the Summer Flounder stock is relatively healthy, thus commercial landings haven’t really changed over recent years.
NCDMF, on the other hand, is telling us that our Southern Flounder stocks are in peril, hence the reduction of commercial quotas and the reduction of the recreational season, which is now at a point where it can’t open at all. In their words, the stock “is overfished,” and “overfishing is occurring.”
By their framework, we have 2 years to end overfishing, and 10 years to rebuild the stock. All this is based on a stock assessment for Southern Flounder that took place in 2017. By the way, the commercial sector has different allocations for Summer, Southern, and “Other” flounder, whereas they are treated as a single species on the recreational side. Certainly, this has ruffled a few feathers with recreational anglers along the way, but more than that, it’s just confusing.
I caught up with Mike Waine at the American Sportfishing Association, who was nice enough to take a break from his duties at ICAST to talk about the state of Southern flounder in North Carolina, and whether he feels these closures are warranted.
Waine was quick to point out the issue with using stock assessment results from 2017 to set a Total Allowable Catch (TAC) for 2024. None of the fish from the 2017 stock assessment are in the Southern Flounder population today, because Southern Flounder simply don’t live that long. A different stock assessment for Southern Flounder was completed with data through 2022, but the results have yet to be certified or published, and thus is not being used for management.
Flawed data
Since the flounder season was first shortened in 2020, an optimistic thought is that the 2022 stock assessment might show an improvement to the Southern Flounder population and allow NCDMF to adopt less restrictive measures. So far, no progress there. Not only is this newer data not being used, but (at the time of this writing) NCDMF still has not posted their 2023 catch data for either the commercial or recreational sector on their website. Yet the recreational season has been reduced from 14 days last year to 0 this year.
The bigger elephant in the room is the knowledge that whatever NCDMF reports for the recreational catch data, an extremely high amount of uncertainty comes along with it, because it is a survey and not a census. That survey, called the Marine Recreational Information Program (MRIP) is intended to be used to estimate catch over longer time periods and geographic regions.
Over the past few years, the NC recreational flounder season had been reduced to a two-week fishery, and measuring the recreational catch over such a short period of time is not what MRIP was designed to do.
Instead of acknowledging these facts and adjusting management to accommodate for the uncertainty in catch estimates, NCDMF pushed the use of precise catch limits with the knowledge that the agency would not have the precise catch data to meet those requirements.
To quote Waine directly, “NCDMF knows better than to use MRIP data the way they are using it for Southern Flounder. The economic impacts are clearly severe, trust is at an all-time low, and North Carolina’s anglers and recreational fishing businesses deserve better.”
The delayed stock assessments demonstrate NCDMF does not have enough stock assessment biologists, and that particular job calls for a pretty unique skill set. Also, for Southern Flounder, the assessment includes data from North Carolina through Florida, so they are reliant on collecting information from southern neighbors to get the assessment completed. Although the stock assessment is regional, management is not, and that has different ramifications for North Carolina than it does for South Carolina, which makes NCDMF’s role even trickier.
In NC, you must account for the theoretical dead discards from the gill net fishery, pound net fishery, and inland shrimp trawling. Those fisheries simply don’t exist in SC, so the recreational fishery has more of their own catch limit to work with. That being said, when they make decisions to shut down fisheries with an incomplete data set, especially when the public is very aware that another, more recent set of data isn’t even being used, they simply aren’t doing what they were put in place to do.
We deserve better
These problems can be fixed, or at least improved a great deal. Waine and I had a long talk about how this can happen, and we came to a solid agreement in two areas. First, more effort must be put into getting good stock assessments, and more of them. This is where the process begins. We need more good stock assessors and better data. Talk has been going on for years (really since it started) about improving MRIP methods. It’s past time to see an improvement in that arena.
Second, when we know the data are bad, like right now, we need to implement management that accounts for that. “We think there are less flounder” and “We think that you caught too many last year” should not necessarily equal “We know you are not going to be able to catch any flounder for yourself this year,” and “We know that your local charter fleet, marinas, restaurants, and hotels are going to feel the pain.”
NCDMF should not be able to claim “best available science” when too much evidence to the contrary is out there. I’d say it’s high time for them to get to work improving catch estimates and using different management approaches that are available to them. They need to use the additional data that exists, or at the very least, be transparent and give a valid reason why it’s not being used. It’s not an easy task, but the ramifications of shutting down vital fisheries deserve more than the attention it has previously been given.
Reason for distrust:
The bottom line for NCDMF is that they are using old and flawed data that does not accurately represent recent catch rates among recreational anglers, even when newer data, however flawed it may also be, is available, but not being used.
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