By Bo Petersen
The (Charleston) Post and Courier
The future for anyone wanting to venture offshore to fish might be an ocean run like a national wilderness area.
Angling could become more like what deer hunting is today – a niche business or pastime governed by harvest tags as well as licenses, seasons and catch restrictions now in place.
No one knows what the specific rules will be yet, and nobody expects any wholesale shifts in current rules anytime soon. But the change is happening, right in front of your eyes. It’s called ecosystem-based management.
The new rules would be applied to habitats, or the “sweet spots” for catching fish, rather than individual species. Sweet spots would be opened and closed according to season and fish crops, in a chart of shifting territories, something like inland wildlife management areas are now.
The territories will be networks of “special management zones,” “marine protected areas” and the like, managed to keep the habitats productive.
The idea is to make the rules more flexible, to keep people fishing where and when there are enough fish to catch, rather than shutting down an entire fishery for years at a time, the way red snapper is now.
Even skeptical anglers hold out hope that it will be better than the smothering rules now in place.
‘Revolutionary’
The South Atlantic Fisheries Management Council met this week in Key West, Fla. The council is the stakeholders group that sets federal fishing rules for a four-state stretch of ocean, including off South Carolina.
Hot topics included a proposal to cut the bag limit for cobia. At the bottom of the agenda was a series of rule changes governing HAPCs, or habitats of particular concern. Not so coincidentally, the Ecosystem-Based Management Committee was in charge of the changes.
A few years back, the South Atlantic council designated as its first real HAPC an area of more than 20,000 square miles of coral spires and mounds lying in the ocean beyond the continental shelf off the South Carolina coast.
The corals are home to rare and untold species of fish, a habitat potentially invaluable for everything from medicine to the ocean food chain to the health of the ocean itself.
The designation was “revolutionary,” said Anna Martin, a council fisheries biologist. For the council, it was a giant first step toward ecosystem management, along with establishing a series of marine protected areas such as the Charleston Bump along reefs that are big-time fish nurseries.
The revolution was only a few years ahead of its time.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had been edging toward ecosystem-based management when President Obama in 2010 signed an executive order establishing it as national policy.
Now it will become the regional council’s priority, just as soon as the mandated, controversy-sparking rules are in place to stop overfishing of individual species.
Michael Fogarty, an NOAA fisheries staff member specializing in ecosystem management, compares it to running a farm.
A tract of ocean is managed for how species, including humans, fit into the big picture of keeping the tract productive. The example he likes is predator-prey – both species have to be managed as a unit rather than individually to get the best production.
‘Same hard decisions’
For as sweeping a change in ocean policy as ecosystem management is, it won’t be too dramatic for many anglers. But there ought to be some stark differences.
“At the end of the day the same hard decisions have to be made,” Fogarty said. “You’re using the same [regulatory] tools, but probably putting different weights on them.”
Species’ catch limits could be loosened after good spawn years, restricted after bad ones. For example, regulators could sample plankton for the bio-mass of larval grouper to determine how strong the stock will be a few years down the stream.
Dick Brame, Atlantic States fisheries director for the Coastal Conservation Association, a recreational angler group, said he’s not sure that an entire ocean region can be managed as one ecosystem.
In fact, no one has come up with a definition yet, he said. Ecosystem management means different things to different people.
“I just don’t see that happening in my lifetime,” he said.
But Brame does see new rules and restrictions coming “in a series of small steps,” with councils moving to multi-species managements, including predator-prey relationships.
That might bode well, or at least better, for anglers. Restrictions currently are set one species at a time to meet the federal stop-overfishing mandate.
One by one, the tightening restrictions have been choking off catches for the commercial fleet in South Carolina and a $600 million per year recreational industry that brings thousands of boats on millions of trips offshore per year.
Anglers have been pushing for more flexible rules.
“Hopefully [multi-species rules] will be a good management tool,” Brame said.
There will be fewer commercial anglers, but they should be able to keep working year-round, said Bob Mahood, the South Atlantic fishery council director. For the recreational angler, harvest tags might go along with seasonal territories.
Instead of having to throw back catches of closed-off species like red snapper, the anglers out there should be able to keep a lot more of what they reel in.
“Bringing up a 20-pound red snapper, discarding it and watching it float off dead – that doesn’t sit well with me at all, and I know it doesn’t sit well with other fishermen,” Mahood said.