The morning of the vote, before the day’s meeting officially began, members and staff of the Western Pacific Fishery Management Council huddled with staff from the National Marine Fisheries Service’s Pacific Islands Regional Office. Wespac executive director Kitty Simonds, NMFS PIRO administrator Mike Tosatto, and Fred Tucher, regional counsel for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, did most of the talking, while the others leaned in to listen.
Audience members speculated over what they were discussing so intently. Most likely they were all searching for a way to set a legal, justifiable annual catch limit (ACL) that would avoid not just a lawsuit but also any significant harm to Hawai`i’s commercial bottomfish industry, which generates nearly $2 million in revenues a year.
Whether they succeeded remains to be seen. Later that day, October 23, the council chose to stick to its June recommendation that, based on a 2011 federal stock assessment, NMFS should set this year’s Main Hawaiian Islands bottomfish catch limit at 346,000 pounds. This despite repeated warnings from NMFS that such a level poses too great a risk of overfishing.
As of press time, NMFS had not adopted the council’s recommendation, leaving commercial bottomfish fishermen operating without a catch limit for a season that began in September.
‘Superior’ Science
In June, Annie Yau, a research biologist with the NMFS’s Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center (PIFSC), presented the council and its Scientific and Statistical Committee (SSC) with draft results of a new stock assessment for the fishery. Unlike the 2011 assessment, the new one included individual fishers’ skill in standardizing the catch-per-unit-effort (CPUE) between 1994 and 2013. This change explained more than 50 percent of the variability in observed CPUE, Yau said.
To the chagrin of fishermen as well as the SSC, the “improvement” also resulted in Yau’s finding that the 346,000-pound ACL that’s been in place for the past few years would have to be reduced by more than 80,000 pounds for the 2014-2015 season to stay below a 50 percent risk of overfishing.
Given the potentially large impact on the fishery, which last year caught about 309,000 pounds, the council voted at its June meeting to keep the ACL at 346,000 pounds, with the expectation that it would revisit the issue at its October meeting and that in the meantime the SSC would confer with NMFS scientists on its concerns over the new assessment.
On August 28, then-PIFSC director Sam Pooley wrote a letter to Tosatto advising him that the center maintained that the 2014 draft stock assessment was superior to the 2011 stock assessment upon which Wespac had based its June decision.
A day later, PIFSC backed up its position in writing in its response to the SSC’s numerous proposed changes to the draft stock assessment. Point by point, the center explained how the SSC’s various technical suggestions would result in bias or weak data, how they lacked any basis in published literature, how they were already accounted for, or how they simply didn’t make any sense.
In one instance, PIFSC pointed out that one of the considerations the SSC proposed for inclusion was something it asked to be omitted years ago. Specifically, the SSC proposed reincorporating the effect of technological improvements in fishing gear into the 2014 stock assessment model. However, PIFSC pointed out that in the 2011, after a CPUE standardization workshop held at the SSC’s request, the committee supported leaving technological improvement out of the 2011 model.
“This current suggestion by the SSC contradicts previous SSC comments and support, and the extensive work previously done to address those comments,” PIFSC wrote. It also asked the committee for “additional justification to revisit this issue since no additional information has been available since the 2011 assessment, when an extensive exploration of this topic occurred that included discussions with fishers.”
Peer review of the stock assessment is expected to be completed this month.
A Warning
Also on August 29, NMFS’s Tosatto sent a letter to Wespac chair Arnold Palacios stating that the council’s decision to retain the 346,000-pound ACL contradicted National Standards 1 and 2 of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation Act.
National Standard 1 requires conservation and management measures to prevent overfishing while maintaining a long-term optimum yield, and Standard 2 requires that those measures be based on the best scientific information available, Tosatto wrote.
Tosatto noted that under the 2014 assessment, the ACL posed a greater than 50 percent risk of overfishing. Under the 2011 assessment, it had only posed a 41 percent risk.
“Because the council’s recommendation does not have at least a 50 percent chance of preventing overfishing in 2014-15, it is inconsistent with National Standard 1,” Tosatto wrote.
He added that although the 2014 assessment was still a draft when the council made its ACL recommendation, his agency considers it superior to the 2011 assessment. And because the council had not yet received PIFSC’s written responses to the SSC’s concerns when it made its June recommendation, “the council could not adequately consider information in the 2014 stock assessment that indicated that its ACL recommendation would not prevent overfishing,” he wrote.
“Because the Council’s recommendation did not consider all of the available scientific information … it is inconsistent with National Standard 2,” he wrote.
He closed his letter by advising Wespac to revise its ACL recommendation in October to be consistent with national standards. Failure to do so would force NMFS to take secretarial action to carry out the Hawai`i Fishery Ecosystem Plan, he wrote.
Options
At the October meeting, Wespac staffer Marlowe Sabater presented several alternatives. The council could stick to its preferred ACL of 346,000 pounds, which would result in $2 million in overall revenue and no closure or fleet loss. It would, however, pose a 55 percent risk of overfishing under the 2014 stock assessment, he said.
A reduction to 307,960 pounds would reduce the risk of overfishing under the 2014 assessment to 49 percent, but would generate only $1.79 million in overall revenue and result in a four-day closure. (The estimated closure length was based on the 2013-2014 catch of 309,000 pounds.) Under the 2011 stock assessment, a catch limit of 307,960 pounds entails a 32 percent risk of overfishing.
If the council wanted to reduce the risk of overfishing under the 2014 assessment to 41 percent — the standard used since 2011 — it would have to reduce the limit to 265,000 pounds. This would result in overall revenues of $1.54 million and a 154-day closure, Sabater said.
When asked by council member Ed Ebisui how best to proceed, Tosatto suggested that if the council insists that the 2011 stock assessment is the best available science, it could decide that a 32 percent chance of overfishing, rather than 41 percent, is appropriate.
The resulting ACL of 307,960 pounds would be consistent with national standards, Tosatto said. Because that would result in a 49 percent risk of overfishing under the 2014 assessment, “we both get our way,” he said.
Even though the 2014 assessment wasn’t expected to complete peer review until December, Tosatto said his agency felt it would be supported.
The SSC and the council members were unswayed, sticking to their belief that the 2011 stock assessment represented the best available information because it had completed peer review.
NOAA general counsel Tucher, however, advised them that failure to account for superior information (such as the 2014 draft assessment) could be deemed arbitrary and capricious.
When NMFS ultimately sets the ACL, it must account for new information, he continued. “When it’s own science center says it’s superior, that’s going to be very persuasive,” Tucher said.
Tosatto could not say whether his agency could legally approve an ACL of 346,000 pounds.
“We’re not making a decision about a stock that is over, over healthy, but it’s not in trouble, either. … I don’t want to close the fishery, but I want to be as productive as we can,” he said.
‘Loss of Faith’
For the commercial bottomfish fishermen, any ACL reduction based on the 2014 draft stock assessment would lead to a widespread loss of faith in the federal process across the industry, said Ed Watamura, head of Wespac’s advisory panel.
“Imagine if I would spread the word that no matter what the fishermen say, they’ll do whatever they want,” he said during public testimony. Watamura said he would stop participating in the council process if it reduced the ACL, explaining that he would “no longer believe that my valuable time is worth sacrificing.” He encouraged the council to “do the right thing here and fight for it all the way to the top.”
Fisherman and former council chair Roy Morioka was just as, if not more, passionate.
“This is a travesty, a perversion and a mockery of the Magnuson-Stevens Act,” he said, especially because all involved agencies had failed to include fishermen in the stock assessment process, despite being assured they would be included.
“How would you respond if your capacity to earn was reduced by 25 percent … by bureaucratic failures?” he asked.
He promised that if the MHI bottomfishers suffered any ACL reduction, he would no longer participate in fish-tagging, research cruises, any council or federal advisory bodies, and all federal meetings.
“We have been relegated to a status lower than corals, seabirds, marine mammal, and all other protected species,” he said. “I have been a long and staunch advocate of the council process, but this matter has shaken my belief to the core.”
Commercial bottomfish fisherman Ed Ebisui III, son of Wespac council member Ebisui, contended that MHI bottomfish stocks were doing just fine. And for a new stock assessment to suggest that overfishing might occur if takes aren’t drastically reduced made no sense to him.
“With all due respect, Annie, thank you for all the hard work you do [but] your model, when you put in a number and it defies what all of us fishermen are seeing, it blows my mind. … It’s like a weatherman sitting in a concrete box saying there’s a 100 percent chance of sunshine and doesn’t look outside and see it’s pouring,” he said.
“We’re seeing big fish. Lots of them,” he said. “I wish I had a boat big enough to take all of you and show you what’s really going on.”
The Final Vote
In the end, the council, except for Tosatto, not only stuck to its June decision on the ACL and the best available science, but also endorsed the suggestions that had been made to improve the stock assessment. Those included incorporating additional types of data, exploring ways to further divide the Deep 7 species complex into smaller groupings or individual species for further stock assessment, consulting with members of the fishing community before the independent review of the draft stock assessment, and considering technological efficiency changes and the potential bottomfish biomass in the state’s bottomfish restricted fishing areas in future stock assessments.
For Further Reading
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“Council Maintains Bottomfish Catch Limit, Despite New Evidence It May Be Too High,” August 2014;
“Council Adopts New Limits on Hawai`i Bottomfish Catches,” July 2011;
“Council Once More Increases Quotas for Bottomfish in Main Hawaiian Islands,” September 2009;
“Bottomfish Restrictions May Do Little for Stocks in Main Hawaiian Islands,” August 2007;
“Council Plan for Bottomfish Takes Little Heed of State Efforts,” April 2007.
Volume 25, Number 6 December 2014