“The large print giveth, the small print taketh away.”
Looking over pages of penciled notes collected during fisheries meetings and workshops over the course of a cold, miserable first quarter of 2026, those words of gravelly-voiced musical poet Tom Waits – best known for his lyrical embellishments from the underbelly of society – seemed oddly appropriate.
Shuffling through canary yellow sheets of paper on my desk, I found a late December news brief I wrote titled 20% Increase in ‘26 Black Sea Bass, Fluke & Porgy Stay the Same. The headline came from a joint meeting of the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council (MAFMC) and Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) before Christmas, the two management bodies approving a 20% coastwide increase in black sea bass harvest.
That “20% Increase” of course was the large print; the small print was delivered in February when the deliberative management bodies announced that New Jersey would not get the 20% increase after all. A month later, one of New Jersey’s proposed options to increase recreational harvest by roughly 20.4% was summarily dismissed by our friends to the north for being less than one-half of one percentage point over their gift to us. One size does not fit all; even as New York and Mass secured increases of roughly 30% or more, New Jersey anglers were forced to savor the scraps.
No worries; we ended up with a full season of access from May 15 through the end of the year, the first time in eons. Or did we? I sat through another joint meeting in April and learned that someone at the federal level apparently forgot to post the recreational management measures to the Federal Register for final approval. As I sit and write this on April 10th, there are 24 days left until the fluke season kickoff, 35 days before black sea bass opens, and yet there’s still no posted Federal Register notice with its requisite 30-day public comment period.
Let that timing discrepancy sink in for a moment; it’s entirely possible that whatever we think the regulations are for fluke and sea bass on opening day, even the federal government doesn’t know for sure, neither what they are, nor what they should be.
I have another pile of chicken scratch from various New Jersey Marine Fisheries Council meetings. The Southern New England cod stock is in horrendous shape, so much so that the federal government – and this time they remembered – closed the fishery outside of 3 miles. That’s right, Atlantic cod fishing is prohibited in federal waters! And on May 7th at the Stafford Township Firehouse, the New Jersey Marine Fisheries Council may be forced to follow suit in state waters.
I hate to play doomsayer, but I doubt we’ll ever see an Atlantic cod fishery in New Jersey again; at least, that’s what I wrote down in my notes. Then again, I used to think the same thing of mako sharks, right up until my 10th and final three-hour Rutgers University IFISSH class when a leading researcher spoke of a paradigm shift in biological understanding of the shortfin mako. Apparently, recent science indicates that makos become sexually mature at age 10, not at age 30 as currently codified by management belief. Theoretically speaking, that means there are more spawning age makos in the ocean than previously thought. “We’ll know more this summer and fall,” the respected scientist noted. More small print to come no doubt.
To paraphrase Waits, it’s new, it’s improved, it’s old fashioned – heck, it’s fisheries management, and we’re all just spectators compiling notes on tiny scraps of paper.
My apologies by the way to Dr. Zemeckis and his team; when you spend as much time as I do scratching away at the underbelly of fisheries management, it’s hard not being an unruly student whenever scientists, statisticians and gubment staffers step right up to the chalkboard.
