This is my fourth year as an advisor to the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council (MAFMC) for fluke. I serve in this voluntary position to try to do some good for our fisheries. I have had some luck. I try to present arguments based on good science. So far we have had success getting the Delaware Bay a lower size limit (probably too late) and getting New Jersey out of the region with New York and Connecticut, so we can have regulations more fitting New Jersey.
Today we had another advisory panel meeting, and I pushed again a concept that I think we are totally missing in our management process. It is quite clear to me that our fluke fishery in south Jersey is nowhere near what it used to be. Why is that so? Let me give you some background first.
Fluke are an E/W (east/west) migrating fishery, coming inshore in the spring and swimming offshore in the fall to overwinter and spawn. Because of this migration pattern, if the southern portion of the stock is overfished, the southern range of the stock will diminish.
Environmentalists like to blame the shift of the epicenter of the stock hundreds of miles to the north on oceanic warming. In fact though, the ocean is only warming a tenth a degree per decade and that small change is well within the temperature preference of this species.
Others argue about shift in the NAO (North Atlantic oscillator), slowing of the Gulf Stream, ocean acidification (negligible in the deep ocean waters), and other factors. A paper written in 2016 concluded that environmental factors account for 40 percent or less of the reason the stock has shifted north. Data from NOAA in 2014, in fact, stated that the main reason for the shift north is due to fishing pressure!
I talked about this at our advisory panel meeting. For sure South Jersey has a massive recreational fishing fleet and I have no doubt we have hit the stock rather hard. But I argued that commercial pressure is probably the biggest factor. North Carolina and Virginia have 49 percent of the commercial fishery. They were given such a large percent of the quota because they historically caught so many fish in their nearby waters. Over time as the nearby fish were depleted, they have fished further and further north and now concentrate their efforts offshore of northern New Jersey. Even worse is that much of this effort occurs in the late fall and winter when the fluke are in the process of spawning.
It is clear to me that as the fish closer to home were depleted from over concentrated fishing, that they had to move north, eventually depleting the southern portion of the stock. With this segment of the stock depleting, there are fewer and fewer fish that migrate inshore in the spring, thus causing relative depletions in the southern range of the stock.
The Magnuson Act, which regulates our federal fisheries, requires that all segments be given equitable access to our fisheries. By allowing regional depletions of stocks, in an E/W migrating species, we in fact deny the recreational segment of states and/or segments of states fair and equitable access to a resource!
A frequent contributor to The Fisherman, Capt Harv Yenkinson runs Vetcraft Sportfishing charters out of Cape May, NJ. Capt. Harv submitted the above editorial on November 10, 2018 following a fluke advisory meeting of the MAFMC.
