Wes Wolfe
Fishing permits carry with them a process for data collection, and good data is key for any wildlife management. The South Atlantic Fishery Management Council (SAFMC) is working on creating a private recreational permit for use in federal waters from North Carolina’s Outer Banks to the Florida Keys in order to get better data on the controversial snapper-grouper fishery.
Notably, red snapper discards are what’s driving federal regulators to consider that species overfished and undergoing overfishing. Better data, and management based on it, raises the possibility of opening up the red snapper fishery beyond the two- or three-day derbies in the South Atlantic the past few years.
As put in the Council’s vision statement, “A permit for the private recreational sector of the South Atlantic snapper-grouper fishery will facilitate the collection, validation and analysis of harvest and discard data to improve the catch and effort estimates used for fisheries science and management decision-making.”
Council members eliminated the reporting aspect in their December meeting because members said they would rather have the policy known as Amendment 46 implemented sooner than later and better identify the universe of private recreational anglers or vessels targeting snapper-grouper species.
The idea on reporting is to enhance the ability to collect that information through existing programs like the Marine Recreational Information Program (MRIP).
“It’s a work in progress, so it’s being put together, but you will see this again, likely later on this year, when it’s a little bit more polished and in a little bit more of a final state,” said John Hadley, SAFMC fishery management plan coordinator and fishery economist, in remarks to the SAFMC Snapper-Grouper Recreational Permitting and Reporting Technical Advisory Panel (AP).
The idea, AP Chair Luiz Barbieri said, is to include as much activity as possible while narrowing the focus to create the most useful data.
Three actions are before the Council in order to narrow the focus of the amendment. For the first action, members are considering whether to require permits by vessel or by angler, or a bit of both. They can decide to have the permit apply to any vessel in the fishery, any angler in the fishery, any angler on a vessel in the fishery, or at least one angler per vessel.
Guidance from the August meeting of the advisory panel favored a permit per vessel since it would reduce the universe of the number of permits issued.
“If a permit were vessel-based, it would be, I think, less error-prone or more straightforward to determine if vessels being intercepted … if those vessels were permitted, it would be a bit more efficient to single vessel versus potentially all of the anglers on the boat,” said John Foster, Branch Chief of Recreational Statistics for NOAA Fisheries’ Office of Science and Technology.
The options are to do nothing, or, for those privately participating in the fishery, to permit any vessel, any private angler on a vessel, at least one angler on a vessel, or any private angler regardless of whether they’re on a vessel.
“Are we not concerned about people who might be fishing in the snapper-grouper fishery that don’t use vessels?” asked Brandi Salmon of the North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries. “Like, if they fish off of piers and catch snapper-grouper species, are we really just not that concerned about it because that doesn’t happen as often?”
Going with an angler-based permit would allow researchers to capture fishing effort on all modes of fishing, she added.
Either way, some big issues won’t be addressed.
“It’s likely that discards will still be largely self-reported, depending on the (reporting) design, whether it’s a logbook style, mandatory reporting, all trips, all of that,” Foster said. “Or, it’s a permit that supports a survey design of some kind. I think we will still be wrestling with discard issues in one form or another.”
It’s also unknown whether shore-based fishing data is needed because the Council has yet to decide which species the permit would apply to specifically. Further, there’s some debate about whether it would be necessary considering the data coming from MRIP.
“It seems most likely we’ll have to integrate this with existing surveys and existing licensing systems to make this practically workable, and then it seems to me that probably an angler-based permit would make that easier,” said Kai Lorenzen, Assistant Director of Integrative Fisheries Science at the University of Florida.
Foster said that’s not necessarily the case, saying that it’s as easy, if not easier, to deal with vessel-based permits. Salmon said North Carolina has had problems with the differences and necessity of a survey-based permit versus a census-based permit. In this case, a vessel permit would be the survey style, while an angler permit would be the census style.
“Vessel-based doesn’t necessarily capture everybody on the vessel and everybody that would be fishing for that species, so I don’t know if that’s really a good train of thought, but it just came to mind because we tend to struggle with that,” Salmon said.
Regarding species, the Council is looking at options that include any species in the snapper-grouper fishery, any assessed species for which recreational harvest is allowed, any species covered by the Florida State Reef Fish Survey, any species in the deepwater complex, or any species in the shallow water grouper complex.
“I agree with earlier comments (that) it’s hard to give recommendations here other than laying out the trade-offs to what decisions might be made,” Foster said.
There are some lessons to take from the State Reef Fish Survey since it expanded to the Atlantic Coast.
“When you limit the number of species that are included in your permit, that potentially means you’re going to miss some of the people in the universe that you want in your universe,” said Bev Sauls of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC).
“For example, someone who is grunt fishing wouldn’t necessarily need the permit if you only went with assessed species. Then you interview them in the field and they’re like, ‘Oh yeah, but I did release some undersized red snapper on that trip,’ and automatically that gets included in your undercoverage. We are seeing larger undercoverage on our Atlantic Coast survey, I think because of things like that.”
The third part of the decision-making process is deciding whether the permit should apply to only federal waters or both state and federal waters.
More review and discussion is on tap, with preferred actions selected by September, public hearings during the fall, and possible approval of a final draft in March.
