WTF ASMFC! SB FMP PRT

Feature Photo: Captain Ben Whalley and his clients release a beautiful bass at water level.

ABC 123? Let’s face it: fisheries management conversations need more acronyms.

At the August 6th ASMFC Summer Meeting, the Striped Bass Plan Review Team (PRT) presented the Fishery Management Plan (FMP) review and state compliance report to the management board.  First, we should note that 2026 is a strange year for striped bass management.  Any other year we would already have preliminary 2026 MRIP numbers.  This year, NOAA has its hands full, fixing their survey error and revising the entire MRIP time series. While we wait on that updated data, it’s worth taking a look at the FMP data and bias within the report that is currently driving management conversations.

Striped bass fishing in 2025 was the worst since the mid-90s, and the review confirms it. Compared to 2000s peaks:

• Total trips fell to 16.5 million, down 43% from 2010
• Harvest fell to 1.4 million fish, down 75% from 2010
• Releases fell to 13 million fish, and catch per trip dropped to .8 fish per trip, down 78% and 62% from 2006
• The number of trips decreased, but the catch declined almost twice as much

Instead of acknowledging the collapse of the striped bass fishery, the PRT highlights short term “anecdotal information” to explain recent recreational trends.  They blame “bad weather and high winds”, and the obvious: “slot size fish (28” to 31”) were not available during the peak fishing season”. In reality, fewer fish are being caught because fewer fish exist. The stock remains overfished. All four juvenile abundance indices tripped the recruitment failure trigger again.  The PRT could’ve stated the facts: the last 7 years of recruitment-failure are the lowest on record, worse than the years preceding the moratorium.  Instead, they provide an optimistic take: “estimates of age-1 striped bass were below the long-term average for 7 of the last 10 years”.  But an F on a report card is not just below average.

Read the review closely and the pattern becomes obvious. It’s a habit.  When recreational numbers fall, the review explains why: bad weather, high winds, fish outside the slot limit, no strong year classes to harvest, but in the same year, ocean for-hire harvest rose 55% on a 12% rise in trips. That gets stated once, not explained. Similarly, in 2025, the share of commercial harvest was 18.4%— almost doubling in 3 years—not because commercial killed more fish, but because recreational removals nosedived. The PRT provides a different explanation for the stability in commercial harvest:

“The PRT notes there are several factors that contribute to changes in commercial harvest levels from year-to-year aside from changes to the quota level. Year-class availability could be a factor, particularly in the ocean. If stock abundance is increasing overall, that could also contribute to more fish being available.” 

Within a few pages, in the same year, recreational harvest crashed because the weather was bad and the fish were not there, but commercial harvest did not because abundance and availability might be increasing? Both of those cannot be true. 

A footnote on commercial discards highlights this asymmetric scrutiny best. Recreational release mortality gets its own section in the FMP review while the Stock Assessment Subcommittee looks for excuses not to adopt the best available science for recreational release mortality.  Commercial releases mortality gets a convoluted guestimate in the stock assessment. Just like recreational, commercial release mortality is a product of the number of fish released and the release mortality rate.  For commercials, nobody counts the number of fish released. Nobody ever has. They arrive at their guesstimate through following equations (bare with us for a little classroom session):

CD = RD × (CT / RT)

CD: unadjusted estimate of the number of fish discarded by commercial fishery

RD: number of fish discarded by recreational fishery, estimates provided by the NOAA Marine Recreational Fisheries Survey/Marine Recreational Information Program (MRFSS/MRIP)

CT: number of USFWS tags returned from discarded fish by commercial fishermen

RT: number of USFWS tags returned from discarded fish by recreational fishermen (NEFSC 2019 p. 499)

Then, because commercial fisherman don’t return USFWS tags at the same rate, the assessment added a correction factor (CF)

CF = LR / KT

CD = RD × (CT / RT) × CF

LR:  ratio of commercial to recreational harvest

KT:  ratio of commercially-harvested to recreationally-harvested tag returns

Then, because tag returns swing wildly year to year, the 2013 assessment smoothed the correction factor over three years. The 2019 assessment threw that out and replaced it with a generalized additive model fitted to the tag counts themselves. Then, because assessment scientists deemed “the proportion discarded unreasonably high”, they scale the estimates for Chesapeake Bay and Delaware Bay (NEFSC 2019 p. 502). 

To sum up this assessment gymnastics, the Chesapeake Bay commercial dead discard series is a tag-ratio estimate, judged implausible by the assessment team, rescaled by a factor derived from a different estuary, a single gear type, and surveys of two spring seasons more than twenty years ago, then applied across all gear types and all years of the Chesapeake series. 

So, why does this matter? Roughly 80% of commercially harvested fish come from the Chesapeake Bay, and one additional USFWS tag return from a commercial fisherman could raise the commercial discard estimate by 17-25%. In 1998 commercials discarded 359,876 dead fish, 30% as a share of commercial landings; in 2025 they discarded 15,402 dead fish, 2.83% as a share of commercial landings. In 1990 they return 687 USFWS tags; in the terminal year of the last benchmark assessment, the entire coastwide commercial discard estimate was based on 10 tag returns.  No wonder commercial tag returns are down 99% and discards are down 96%.

More importantly this is not an outsider critique. The 2019 benchmark’s own highest-priority research recommendations include, verbatim:

“Develop studies to provide information on gear specific (including recreational fishery) discard morality rates and to determine the magnitude of bycatch mortality.”

“Conduct study to directly estimate commercial discards in the Chesapeake Bay.”

We’ve handed them world-class recreational mortality studies. When that science says recreational anglers kill fewer fish than they assumed, they pick it apart looking for reasons not to upset commercial anglers.  When the commercial discard number falls 96 percent in a generation based on ten tag returns, it gets a footnote in an FMP review and buried in 1175-page technical document.

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Source: 

NFSC 2019. Northeast Fisheries Science Center 66th Northeast Regional Stock Assessment Workshop (66th SAW) Assessment Report. NEFSC Ref Doc 19-08. Section B, Atlantic Striped Bass:  Appendix B6 including Tables B6.4–B6.21. B4.31 (p. 556), B4.12 Commercial Discards (pp. 497–503), TOR B7 research recommendations (pp. 568–569), https://repository.library.noaa.gov/view/noaa/23031