In November of last year, I wrote an article called “Who Will Help The Striped Marlin.” Stripeys are overfished, depleted and continue to experience overfishing in the North Central Pacific. More than 95% of them are caught by fishing vessels that put out miles of line and thousands of hook per set. Hawaii has a sizable fleet of long liners but not as sizable as Taiwan and Japan.
However, the Hawaii boats accounted for 21.8% of all the stripeys caught in the years between 2013 and 2017, so the Hawaii catch is not insubstantial. In 2019, the Hawaii fleet caught 571 mt, more than their “soft quota” of 457 metric tons allowed, even when it was known the stock was depleted and overfished.
571 metric tons equals 1,279,375 pounds. With an average weight in the North Pacific of less than 100 pounds, that is more than 12,795 striped marlin landed — each year — just by the Hawaii fleet. In recent years, the percentage of total landings by the Hawaii fleet has risen against falling Asian landings.
The USA is a member of a multinational commission which “manages” pelagic fish that roam the open oceans. As a member, the USA has to develop measures to rebuild the stock, in accordance with the scientific thresholds outlined by the commission.
So, the good news is that the federal government is formulating a plan to rebuild the stock of striped marlin. The bad news is that the federal government is formulating a plan, as Rodney Dangerfield might say. This document is currently 103 pages of light reading, something any-one can enjoy over coffee, if anyone has a PhD in speed reading.
There are a number of items in this document that will make you scratch your head and ask, “How is that gonna work?” One is that the authors rejected the idea that they could rebuild the striped marlin stock by simply letting them all go free. Instead, the offered up four other alter-natives and indeed, the make you say, “How does that work?”
Under the “Alternatives Rejected” section, the authors write, “Live releases alone do not reach stock rebuilding targets and would require 100% compliance to achieve WCPFC rebuilding targets.” However, there is no science provided to support this. They did include a fun picture of two boxes with a blue line down the middle and a curved green line in the top right corner.
The authors state that “48% of striped marlin are alive at haul back” but again don’t offer any science to support this claim. This in and of itself is noteworthy because the stuff they did not reject is presented with mathematical formulas that an MIT grad might stumble on.
Layman math says this means that 52 out of every 100 stripeys caught on ling lines arrive at the boat dead. If 48 out of every 100 stripes arrive alive and are killed and boated, it is guaranteed that 100 out of 100 will not rebuild the stock. One might deduce that there is simply a problem with the sustainability of this type of fishing before you even get to their Alternatives 1 through 4.
Alternative One is to do nothing at all, as far as reducing catch limits. Authors claim that if they transition from wire leaders to monofilament leaders their catches will be reduced 45% just by instilling this gear change. The authors cite a specific scientific report to support this notion, hoping, it would seem, that no reasonable person would seek out such a report to verify this claim. Of course, I did scour this report and it makes no such claim verbally.
Statistically this report showed that mono leaders caught 132 billfish and wire leaders caught 114. If you only look at the stripeys in this report, the total sample size is only 30 fish. Although wire caught 19 and mono caught 11 the sample size is too small to present the idea that a 45% reduction is reasonable. I don’t know many pro fishermen who would agree that wire leaders will catch more small marlin than mono in this application.
Alternative No. 2 and 3 proffer to reduce their quota catch by 13.4% and 34.4%. When the fleet gets close to catching 95% of that quota they would then release all of the striped marlin that came to the boat.
The fourth Alternative takes the highest annual catch of 571 metric tons (way over the current soft quota) and reduce 571 mt to 80%, which gives them an allowable catch of 457mt — right back where they started! They have exceeded the 457 mt quota only once since the stock was depleted. Therefore, it is entirely possible that not one single fish would be released and every single fish would be harvested. How does this rebuild a stock?
In addition, if any of the alternative quotas are reached, the fleet can keep fishing for tuna, but they will then “cease retention” of striped marlin. IF (and this is a big if) 48% of stripeys actually arrive alive, this means they will dump the dead ones (52%) and release the live ones (48%). At least 15% of those released alive will also die. This means that for every 100 marlin of “ceased retention,” 60 will die and 40 will live. If you kill and dump 60 out of every 100 that you catch — after killing 10,000 first — some serious calculus must be needed to model this process to re-build the stock.
How does that work?
A simple alternative that was not considered is mandatory harvest of all striped marlin that arrive at the boat dead and mandatory release of all the fish that arrive alive. If backed up by a sensible quota, reduced in phases as NMFS mentions, this could be a sound alternative.
Of course, reliable observer coverage would be needed to enforce this, or all the fish would “arrive dead.”
The simplest alternative of them all is for the fleet to simply be tied to the dock once it reaches quota. That’s what happens when they reach big eye tuna quota. One would think that if this was the policy, the long line fleet would figure out ways to avoid catching any striped marlin at all.
After all, there are other fishermen, stake holders and user groups who need a healthy striped marlin stock — much higher than MSY. These folks and their needs are not represented any-where in this draft “plan.”
