“Everyone, commercial and sport fishermen, should have to follow the same rules. Why do we have bag limits and size rules?”
I stumbled upon that social media comment recently and considered responding, but felt it best to share my response here. Unlike those who get their answers exclusively from Facebook and Instagram, The Fisherman readers are a pretty savvy bunch; still, it’s a pretty good question with a relatively simple answer.
In theory, commercial fishermen offload all of their catch at the dock where pounds get tallied and the payments are tracked (think tax purposes). I say “in theory” because there’s certainly a small percentage of unreported landings, but that’s supposed to be tallied, in part, through the annual quota allowance. So, if the commercial fishing industry gets 10-million pounds of allowable harvest, as soon as the ten-millionth pound of fish is tallied dockside by government bean counters, a call goes out to close the fishery. Essentially, commercial fishermen operate on a pound-for-pound basis, and no matter the size of each fish kept, every pound and ounce counts.
On the recreational side, private anglers don’t report harvest at day’s end, and there’s no common port where we offload our catch for bean counting. Consider that some boats are kept in private marinas or behind waterfront homes, others trailered, while surfcasters may harvest a fish at any point along 130 miles of shoreline (nearly twice that if fishing behind New Jersey’s barrier islands and peninsulas). And that’s the reason for the random sampling known as the Marine Recreational Information Program or MRIP. Since there’s no pound-for-pound tally, MRIP numbers are used to analyze angler effort and harvest.
And so, recreational limits are designed to keep us restricted to, at, or below an annual catch limit, even as fluctuations in MRIP from one year to the next create issues with government forecasts and accounting. For simplicity sake, let’s assume the recreational community gets that same 10-million-pound annual harvest as the commercials, those pounds are then converted to numbers of fish. For example, if the average size of the fish harvested in this scenario is 2 pounds, then we’re allowed to harvest 5-million fish. Using that 5-million fish estimate and assuming there are 100,000 saltwater anglers in this example, each angler would statistically be allowed to keep 50 fish for the season. Fisheries managers then have to develop scenarios by way of models to restrict harvest accordingly.
Basically, our “size and bag” is a function of keeping anglers from retaining too many fish, same as with the establishment of “seasons” or days of fishing each year. If a statistician determines that a July, August and September season with three fish bag limit and 16-inch minimum size will constrain harvest to under 5-million fish, yet anglers would prefer a 15-inch size limit instead, that means we have to either (A) reduce the number of days we can fish in-season, or (B) reduce the bag limit in order to maintain the 5-million fish cap.
Another variable in the recreational measures setting is bycatch; if there’s a 10% recreational mortality rate for a given fishery, then one of every ten fish released is assumed to be dead. That too has to go into the equation; thus, if you set a size limit too high it’s possible that the mortality rate on released fish could actually equal harvest (this is why New Jersey has refused to go above 18 inches in the fluke fishery, as analysis shows that a 19-inch or better size limit on summer flounder could actually result in mortality nearing actual harvest).
The recreational fishing community can’t be managed on a pound-for-pound basis like the commercial folks, and NOAA Fisheries has no tools to do so; even if our federal fisheries law is a little vague about the concept as well.
Questions? Email me at jhutchinson@thefisherman.com.
